She wavers before she says, “Fine.” She leans in for a kiss, but I end up planting one on her forehead. I don’t wait to contemplate whether or not I’ve hurt her f**king feelings; I just shut the door behind me and sit on my couch, the computer on my lap.
I Skype Daisy back, waiting for her to answer my call.
She doesn’t.
I dial her again and then take out my phone. I text: Fucking answer me. The reply comes almost immediately.
I’ll call you on the phone. – Daisy
No. I need to see your face.
She rejects my third Skype session, so I’m forced to f**king call her by cell. She answers. “I’m sorry,” she immediately says. “You called me on Skype like three minutes ago. I thought you wanted to talk. I didn’t see much at all, I promise. Just…go back to doing what you were doing—”
“I can’t. We need to f**king talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” she says quickly.
I rub my eyes. “Daisy…” What do I say? I’m sorry for going down on another girl? Daisy isn’t my girlfriend. I also warned her that I would be dating again. If this is the right path, then why the f**k do I feel like I need to explain myself?
The answer is there, I just don’t want to f**king accept it. It can’t be my reality.
“Look, I’m sorry you had to see that. Believe me, this is the last f**king thing I wanted to happen.”
“It’s okay. It’s just the cherry on top of a really, really weird night. So weird, that I think it’s going to take years to scrub it all from my brain.”
I frown, my eyes narrowing at the floor. “No one broke into your room, right…” Fuck, Ryke. I run my hand through my hair. I can’t suggest shit like that. “I didn’t think they would.” I don’t want her to think that someone can get in.
“Not weird like that,” she says, her voice high-pitched. Her paranoia practically ekes through the phone line. Her breathing shallows for a second.
“Hey,” I snap. “Have you taken Ambien tonight?”
She clears her throat to calm down. “I will after I get off the phone.”
“Fucking promise me.”
“I f**king promise you,” she says. I hear the smile in her voice.
There’s a soft knock on the door frame to my bedroom. I look up. Emilia stands there, wearing one of my T-shirts. It barely covers her thighs. “Towels?” she whispers.
I point to the hall closet, and she tiptoes there, my shirt riding up to her waist. I don’t look at her bare ass. Mostly because it feels like I’m cheating on Daisy. The guilt just keeps on coming.
I wait for Emilia to return to my room so she can’t hear my conversation. I’ve been in the media long enough to know that friends can f**k you over quickly. Strangers even faster. Eavesdropping on one of my conversations and selling whatever the f**k I said to a magazine was the easiest paycheck five of my old college friends have ever made.
I don’t necessarily hate them. I just don’t go on snowboarding trips and to birthday f**king parties when I’m invited anymore. Two years ago, when the Calloway girls, my brother and Connor were swept up into this publicity mess, I realized we had to band together to survive. From that moment, I knew it was going to be hard trusting anyone beyond the six of us. How can you when a simple fact like I hate Justin Bieber could be worth a grand to a magazine?
The phone line is quiet.
“You still there?” I ask Daisy.
“Yeah.” She pauses. “I don’t want to ruin your time with your…date. We’ll talk later.”
“Fuck that,” I tell her. I haven’t been able to get Daisy on the phone in days. She won’t even let me look at her face. I have no idea the amount of sleep she’s been actually getting. I just want to make sure she’s okay. “What was weird about tonight?”
“You really don’t want to know.”
“Now I really f**king do.”
She lets out a short breath. “I saw Connor’s penis.”
What? “Excuse me?”
“I was looking at p**n , and I accidentally stumbled upon Rose and Connor’s sex tape. Hence, his penis. To think, I managed to dodge the explicit version for a whole year. I thought I was going to get away without seeing it forever.”
I lean back against my couch and pinch the bridge of my nose in a cringe. Not a lot can make Connor Cobalt f**king uncomfortable, but learning that his girlfriend’s little sister saw him having sex—that may do it. My face has hardened in a wince.
And I have a hard time imagining her seeing anyone’s dick but mine. Nausea barrels through me.
“Are you going to say something?” she asks.
“I haven’t even seen those videos.”
“Jealous?”
“Not in the f**king slightest,” I tell her. The shower turns on, the pipes groaning through the walls. I glance at my closed bedroom door and then back at the floorboards. “Daisy, you weren’t looking at p**n to try and fall asleep, were you?” It’s a f**king path that no one would want her to go down.
“No…” She sounds like she has something else to add, so I wait for her to speak again. I can hear her shifting on her bed. “I had a guy over tonight.”
The temperature drops ten degrees. My head is f**king submerged beneath an ocean again, that gritty salt water sliding down my throat. I see an older guy f**king the hell out of her, and I almost kick the coffee table. I calm down with a deep breath. “Yeah?” I run my hand through my hair a couple times, messing up the already disheveled strands.
“Yeah,” she says, leaving it at that.
“Did you look at p**n together?” I shoot up to my feet and head to the f**king kitchen, the phone to my ear with one hand. I open the fridge, nothing in there but a case of water and a leftover sub from Lucky’s. Don’t punch the f**king wall.
“That would definitely be another weird thing for the night, but no, we didn’t watch it together.”
“Is he still there?” Don’t f**king think about it. I open the freezer to distract me. It’s just as bare as the fridge. A package of freezer-burnt chicken and a tray of ice. In the last four months, I’ve spent almost no time in my apartment. Maybe to grab some clean clothes and my climbing gear. Other than that, I’ve been at Daisy’s place.
I’ve been sleeping in the same bed as her. I’ve been taking care of her. She’s mine. She feels like she belongs to me. I don’t want to share her with any other f**king guy. And I don’t want to be with any other f**king girl.
Anything else feels like a sickening betrayal. How the f**k did we get to this place?
“No,” she says. “He’s gone. I thought maybe I wasn’t doing it right, so I was going to look at p**n .”
“What’s it?” I ask, finding a packet of oatmeal in a drawer. I tear it with my teeth and pour it into a bowl. I uncap the water bottle as she answers.
“Sex. I can’t orgasm. I think it’s a physiological problem,” she states matter-of-factly. I remember a time when she claimed that she orgasmed before. We were in Cancun for Spring Break, and she said she skipped foreplay, just went straight to sex and experienced something more. I should have been happy for her, but I felt more f**king joy when she admitted that she got it wrong. That she thought she cl**axed, but after talking to her sisters, it didn’t seem euphoric enough to be that heightened peak.