by Julie Kriss
Oh God, he was looking at the pile of my underwear. “Jason, you can’t just do this. You can’t just walk in here and go through my things.”
“No,” he said. “I can just walk in here and fuck you, and that’s all.”
I was silent.
“These,” he said, pulling the one thong I’d brought out of the pile. “Definitely wear these. I left your jeans out, too.” He dropped the thong on top of the jeans, which were lying on the bed. “And this shirt.” He picked up my dark green t-shirt that said EAT SLEEP CHESS REPEAT on the front and dropped it on the pile. “That’s what you’re wearing. Everything else gets packed. You have fifteen minutes.”
“This is insane!” I said. “It’s rude to leave.”
He came toward me, and in one move he gripped my hips through my dress and tossed me back on the bed. Then he grabbed one of my ankles, hoisted it upward, and undid the buckle on my vintage high heel shoe.
“Listen,” he said. “These people make you feel like shit. They’re not making you feel like family, they’re making you doubt yourself. They don’t know you or what you’ve been through, what you’re still going through, and they don’t seem to fucking care. They just judge you. You tried, Megan. You really did. But it pays to know when to cut your losses.”
“And you know when that is?” My voice was high, distressed.
“Yes. It wouldn’t matter that these people are assholes, except that it’s getting to you, and it pisses me off to see it. So we’re leaving.”
I stared up at him. “This is because you’re mad at me.”
“I get it,” he said, tossing the first shoe into the suitcase, then letting my ankle go and grabbing the other, starting the process again. His jaw was grim and set. He could probably see straight up my dress from this angle, but he wasn’t looking. “I was too nice. That isn’t what you want. You want a wedding date and some sex—fine. No problem. I agreed. I overstepped—it won’t happen again. But I didn’t sign on to sit around and watch people treat you like you don’t matter, just because you’re not a lawyer or some stupid shit. So we’re leaving.” He dropped the second shoe into the suitcase, picked up my flip-flops, and dropped them on the pile. He looked me up and down. “I’d take that dress off you, too, but I have a feeling I’d get a kick in the nuts for it.”
“Yes, you would,” I snapped.
“Fine,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Thirteen minutes. If you’re not in the car, you can walk back to Michigan.” He walked to the door, then turned back. “By the way, your ex is a fucking douchebag. And don’t wear that ratty bra.”
Then he was gone.
I stared after him. It was outrageous. It was rude. The speeches were happening even now, and those two seats were empty, with our names neatly printed on expensive name tags. A big banner that may as well read Megan and Jason have bailed on this wedding.
He was being a jackass. It made me angry, but what made me even more angry was that deep down he was right and I really, really wanted to fucking leave.
He knew everything before I did. It made me insane. It also made me horribly, almost painfully turned on.
Shit. Shit.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
I was too nice. It won’t happen again.
Kyle. Stephanie. Aunt Janice. The speeches, the orchestra.
He’d drive off without me. I knew he would.
Jason fucking Carsleigh.
My panties were wet.
I got up and unzipped the dress.
Twenty-Six
Megan
No one saw us leave. It was as easy as Jason had said it would be: we walked out, dropped our luggage in the car, and drove away as applause sounded in the reception hall behind us.
I went as far as wearing the outfit he’d picked out, even down to the thong beneath my jeans. I let my hair down and tied it back with a silk scarf. He’d told me not to wear the ratty bra, so I didn’t. I didn’t wear any bra at all.
Take that, Jason Carsleigh.
But he didn’t look, not once. The air was thick between us, the silence intense. Jason drove without needing any navigation; he remembered the route we’d taken to get here. I didn’t even put the map on my lap. I just stared out the window, trying to get myself together.
I was a soup of emotions. I was angry—at him, at myself. At everyone who had made me feel less than at that stupid wedding. The further we drove away from it, the clearer I could see it.
I was disappointed that my family blamed me, didn’t want me. I was a little humiliated. I was relieved to be out of there, to have had the decision taken out of my hands. I was overwhelmingly aware of the six-foot-four mass of unbelievably gorgeous male flesh sitting a few feet away from me, saying nothing because I’d pissed him off and hurt his feelings. And, as always, I was afraid.
I was too nice. I overstepped. It won’t happen again.
If I was too much trouble, and he didn’t want me anymore, I only had myself to blame.
I glanced over at him. He didn’t look furious; just intent. But there was a new seriousness behind his eyes, a thoughtfulness. The easy, cocky expression had disappeared, along with the appreciative, sex-god way he looked at me. He wasn’t looking at me at all. Not my hair, my mouth, my hips in my jeans, my nipples beneath my shirt. I hadn’t realized how much I liked to have Jason looking at me until he stopped.
I’d hated him; that was familiar. I’d been in lust with him; that was familiar, too. Now we were on new terrain again, and I didn’t know how to navigate it, which way to turn. We’d gone from incredible sex to dangerous emotions to a blow-out fight that still had my blood humming with an illicit kind of angry excitement. Part of me had liked fighting with him, the raw honesty of it. The problem was that I didn’t know how to stop wanting him. I’d never known how to stop wanting him.
Everything about me turns you on, he’d said to me once. I felt my throat go dry. It wasn’t just that I found him sexy; to me, in some fundamental way, he was sex. Every other time I’d done it had disappeared from my memory. He was the only definition of sex I knew. The only one I wanted to know.
And now I’d finished it. It’s just a blow job, that’s all. Cowardly words, terrified words. Words that finished things.
We were on the interstate now. I looked at the clock on my phone and realized we’d been driving for an hour and a half in silence.
I took a breath. Of all the things I owed him, there was one thing at least I could do. He’d been looking out for me, in his aggravating way, when he’d made me leave Cape Cod. “Thank you for getting me out of there,” I said.
Surprise crossed his expression for a brief second, then was gone again. “No problem,” he said evenly. “You hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Me too. We’ll stop quickly, though. We can get a long way by midnight.”
We stopped at a roadside place, and when I returned from my trip to the bathroom, I found him sprawled in the driver’s seat of the car, his knee on the gearshift, the map in his lap. His expression was a bit more relaxed.
“Are we lost?” I asked, sliding into the passenger seat.
“No,” he said. “The turnpike is ahead. I’m just figuring out which way I’m going.” He turned the map, frowning, not looking up at me. “This map is no help,” he said. “Can you check on the GPS?”
“I told you, I don’t do GPS.”
“Use mine.” He tapped the passcode on his phone and tossed it to me.
It felt a little weird, holding his phone. Intimate, like I’d felt when he’d packed my underwear. I tried for a tentative joke. “Still no dick pics on here?”
Jason went still, and his gaze rose to mine. He seemed to think it over, and then he said, “Not enough megapixels, man.”
So. A truce, then.
It was kind of a funny line, and his delivery was dead on. I swallowed a smile. If we hadn’t left, we’d be suffering through a meal right now, counting the minutes instead of sitting at a
roadside diner, on our way to wherever we wanted. I hadn’t thanked him enough. I’d said it, but he hadn’t quite bought it. I was trying to think of a way to say it again when his phone buzzed in my hand.
A text. The notification came up in front of me, unasked-for. Charlotte. Where are you?
I stared at it for a long second, my chest tight. There was no way he hadn’t heard the buzz of the phone, so I said, “Um, you have a text.”
“Ignore it,” he said.
“It’s Charlotte.” My voice sounded strangled. “Do you want to know what it says?”
“No.”
I looked up at him. He glanced up from the map and held my eyes. The relationship may not have been good, but he’d spent four years with her. There had been some kind of intimacy, some kind of draw that could still be there. But there was no guilt on his face, no quick startlement, no wish for me not to see. He didn’t care that I knew she was texting him. And he didn’t want to know what she said.
Something knotted in my chest loosened. Jason dropped his gaze back to the map, and the memory of our night together in the hotel came back to me. How he’d told me that he hadn’t been able to do anything right for her, least of all sex. How it had taken him four years to realize the problem wasn’t him.
I fit the pattern. I was another girl who had decided he couldn’t do anything right. A woman who rejected him in bed and out of it. Someone he’d never please.
I’d put up my walls, and he knew what that meant. He’d seen it before, after all. He’d lived with it.
I was too nice. I overstepped. It won’t happen again.
I hadn’t just rejected him. I’d shut him down right after we’d done the most intimate thing possible to him, the thing he thought might mean something. It had meant something. It was just something that made me paralyzed with terror. But he didn’t know that. He knew that Charlotte had shut him down for four years, and that I’d just done the same.
The phone buzzed in my hand again. Another text. Jason, please answer me.
I cleared my throat. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to be a grownup here, instead of just wondering. Why are you getting texts from your ex- fiancée?”
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“So tell me.”
He raised his gaze to mine again and sighed. “I ran into one of her friends at Zoot Bar. She started talking about how Charlotte never went out, how she wasn’t dating anyone. How she thought Charlotte might want to get back together. So I told her I had a girlfriend.”
“Because you knew she’d tell Charlotte,” I said.
“Yes. And she did. But I forgot that it would have the opposite effect.”
“What does that mean?”
“I was always Charlotte’s project,” he said, so flatly I felt nausea in my stomach. “Not a successful project, mind you, but a project. When we broke up, I wasn’t her project anymore. But when she learned I had a girlfriend…”
“She was interested again,” I said.
He shrugged. “She doesn’t want me,” he said. “She likes control. If I’m sitting home alone, she still controls me, even if we’re broken up. Her control disappears if I’m fucking someone.”
The only thing that made me angrier than Jason Carsleigh, I realized with sudden shock, was the idea of someone treating Jason Carsleigh like dirt. Stabby didn’t cover it, but it came close.
The phone buzzed in my hand again. I really think we should talk. Call me?
“This woman has big fucking problems,” I said.
“I’m not answering her,” he said calmly, as if he was used to dealing with this. “Read the texts.”
“I don’t need to snoop through your texts.”
“It isn’t snooping if I tell you to do it. Go ahead.”
I’m only human; I was burning with a toxic curiosity. So I tapped the text icon and looked back through their conversation.
There was no conversation. Just Charlotte sending text after text, trying every trick in her book of manipulation. Guilt. Fake concern. Accusations. Anything to get him to answer her. There were a series of missed calls, too. I thought about his phone buzzing as we’d sat in our hotel room. When I scrolled back far enough, I saw a single reply from him after the first few texts: There’s nothing to talk about. It’s over.
I looked up to see him watching me. “Jason, this is ridiculous. Is she nuts?”
“She’s used to having me do what she says.” A smile touched the corner of his mouth, but didn’t reach his eyes. “I don’t do that anymore.”
No, you fucking don’t. “Let me help,” I said.
He shook his head. “I don’t need you to help me with my ex-girlfriend. I’ll handle it.”
“I know you don’t need my help.” I held up the phone. “But let me have a little fun with Miss Seven Times.”
He groaned. “Please don’t bring up my shitty sex life ever again.”
“I promise not to if you let me do this.”
“Do whatever you want.”
It was said casually, but underneath, it was anything but casual. He was trusting me. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. The moment held tight for a second, and then I turned to the texting app.
Hey, I wrote. This is Jason’s new gf! He gave me his phone. He is not reading these as we are super busy right now if you know what I mean
I added emojis and kthx, just because.
There was a moment of pained silence, and then she wrote: Who is this?
Actually it’s nice to talk to u, I wrote. Thx for dumping him because he is super HOTTTTTTTTTTTTT and now he’s all mine. XO.
Silence.
“I think this was a bad idea,” Jason said nervously.
I held up a finger. “Hold on, I’m inspired. This is good.” U did me a big favor, I wrote. He is so awesome and his dick is so big and he is amaaaaaaazzzzzzing in bed—
“Megan.”
“Ssh,” I said. “I just said your dick is big.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said, but he was laughing.
—but he is changing his number, I finished, becuz I don’t share. I added a sad face. And then XO again. I handed the phone back to him.
He read the messages. The phone didn’t buzz. Apparently, Charlotte had nothing to say.
He blinked at what I’d written, and then he looked up at me. He cocked one eyebrow, mischief in his gorgeous brown eyes.
“Nice,” he said. “I knew you liked me.”
And just like that, I knew I was in love with him.
It was just that easy.
Twenty-Seven
Jason
“You,” said Edie, “have woman problems.”
It was two weeks after the wedding, and I was at Zoot Bar, leaning against the bar, staring fruitlessly at my phone. My phone with the number that Charlotte no longer had. “I do not have woman problems,” I said.
“Yes, you do.” Edie was pulling glasses from the dishwasher and lining them up. “You’ve been in a mood ever since you got back from that trip.”
I frowned at her. “What mood?”
“A quiet one. Did the cute girl dump you?”
“Not exactly,” I said, before I remembered I wasn’t admitting there was a cute girl. “Things have just been complicated. I think.”
“What does that mean?”
I wished to fuck I knew. Ever since we’d come back from Cape Cod, things had been weird between Megan and me. We’d talked a few times. Texted. Hung out once, when we watched an X-Men movie on her couch. But she’d dialed back, keeping something behind her fences, and so had I. I felt fucked up and a little guarded around her, as if I needed to take things slower. And she seemed to agree.
She didn’t seem to be mad anymore over what had happened at Cape Cod. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about the sex, or the fighting, or the feelings. We didn’t talk about her asshole relatives—none of whom had contacted her since the wedding—or the way we had almost self-destructed. There just didn’t seem any poin
t.
But we did talk. About what happened in our days. About the fact that she was closer to her father than before, because she had a new appreciation of how he’d raised her. About my going back to school. About her health stuff, and the test results she didn’t have yet. About everything and nothing.
It was weird, and yet it wasn’t.
It felt a little bit like we were friends.
Except I’d had female friends before. I liked women and found them easy to talk to—I grew up with a sister and a single mother, after all. I was talking to a female friend right this minute. And as smart and sexy as Edie was, I had no desire to watch her every second we were together, no need to make her laugh and kiss her senseless and pull her clothes off and make her come until she couldn’t breathe, all at the same time.
I felt all of that with Megan. But we weren’t having sex.
So, friends. But not friends.
As usual, Megan and I were doing things backwards. We were now doing the slightly awkward friends-not friends thing after the breakup and the arguing and the sex and the most intense experience I’d ever had with another person, followed by rejection. It was all out of order, and we still didn’t know what we were doing. It was still making me crazy.
Her words from that day still stung. Okay, fine, it had hurt. Maybe more than I’d realized. I felt strangely bruised—not just my ego, but everything. I hadn’t had a plan going into that crazy wedding, but it had seemed for a few short days, at least to me, like something could happen. Something good. Something that could even work.
But maybe, after four years with Charlotte, I didn’t know what that looked like. Or how to navigate it without fucking up. I did know that I didn’t feel like being used for sex anymore. It had been fun, and I’d agreed to it, but after that day in her bedroom it didn’t seem right somehow, no matter how my dick disagreed. I was still trying to figure out the fact that in a dispute between my dick and my brain, my brain had actually won. That had never happened before.
I’d kissed Megan that night on her couch, though, after we watched a movie. My dick still had that much say.
