Truly

by Carmel Rhodes

  “No.” I shake my head.

  “Come on, Tru, I want to see how you get yourself off.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You’ve never been shy with me before.”

  “That’s when I trusted you.”

  He flinches as if I hit him. I guess in a way I did, but that doesn’t make it any less true. “I’m here in your room, about to fuck you without a condom. You’ve got to trust me a little bit,” he says climbing back onto the bed between my outstretched legs.

  “I’m drunk and horny and despite my best efforts, still in love with you.”

  “Then why aren’t we together?”

  “Because I can’t keep letting you hurt me,” I say.

  He lifts my leg, bending it, then repeats the same steps on the other side. “I know I don’t deserve you,” he says, pressing the head of the toy to my clit. “But I’m not going anywhere, Truly. And if we do this tonight, then I can’t promise to keep my distance anymore.”

  “Sex won’t fix what’s broken.”

  “I know, but maybe if I can get her on my side,” he presses the on button and the toy buzzes to life, “then I’ll have a better chance of winning her.” He drops his other hand over my heart.

  I shake my head in protest, but Noah slides inside me, keeping the vibrator in place, and all words of protest die on my tongue.

  Sunlight streams through the cheap dorm room curtains. My head throbs. So does the space between my legs. I turn right into a hard wall of muscle and blink up at Noah’s sleeping form. Memories from last night wash over me like a bucket of ice water. The SkyZone. the frat party. Stumbling home drunk to find Noah waiting for me. The sex. Oh God, the sex. It was mind-blowing. Sex with Noah always is, but I can’t believe I just let him fuck me.

  We hate him, remember! My brain reprimands.

  No, we miss him! My heart sasses right back.

  It’s been three months since I’ve been this close to him. That time did him well. His body is more defined. My eyes drop to the faith tattoo on his chest. I trace the letters, wondering where we go from here. I’m not ready for more, but I don’t know if I want to go back to never seeing him either. But can I be just friends with Noah? If last night is any indication, the answer is a resounding no. Does he even want to try to be friends? Do I? He’s done so much messed up stuff to me, I’m crazy for even considering it. A sane person would wake him up right now and tell him to be on his merry way. A sane person would have told him that last night.

  I slap a palm over my forehead. “Get it together, Tru,” I whisper to myself. I may not know where we go from here, but I do know that Noah needs to go. I can’t risk Tracy finding him here, or anyone on my floor, for that matter.

  “Are you watching me sleep like a creeper?”

  “I’m trying to figure out the best way to get you out of here before my roommate comes back and fangirls over you.”

  He cracks an eyelid open and the corner of his mouth tips up. “She a basketball fan?”

  “Nope, but the guy she’s crushing over is. We were at the SkyZone last night watching the game because she overheard he’d be there. He wasn’t, so we ate our weight in chicken wings and beer.”

  “Hence the drunken stumble back alone.” Noah turns on his side, crooks his arm and rests his head on his palm. I ignore the way his bicep bulges and focus on his words instead. I can excuse one drunken slip up, but there’s no way I can have sober sex with Noah.

  Nope.

  Not going to happen.

  “I wasn’t that drunk,” I argue, deciding not to mention the drunken stumble was from frat row, not the SkyZone. Probably not my smartest move, but apparently, yesterday was Truly makes terrible decisions day.

  “You were plastered.” He pulls me backwards against his chest and snuggles into my neck. “I’m not complaining. I know that’s the only reason you let me in your room and your pussy.”

  A content sigh slips past my lips. I don’t mean to sound so comfortable, but he’s doing that thing with his tongue that renders me temporarily insane.

  He keeps hurting you, Tru. Don’t fall for it again, dumbass.

  “If I remember correctly, you pushed your way inside. On both accounts. Also, you need to leave...like now.”

  He chuckles and rolls over me, hopping out of bed. “Fine, I won’t out you to your roommate, but we still need to have that talk.” Once he’s dressed, he presses a kiss to my lips. “Have dinner with me?”

  A million thoughts flit through my mind. All the words I’ve wanted to say for the last three months, but I sit there mute. Agreeing to a post-coital dinner with Noah would end with me giving in and getting back together with the jerk, and I need time to process what happened last night.

  “I can see you overthinking. I know we have a lot of shit to work on, and I know I haven’t deserved you in the past, but I’m gonna get you back, Little One. And when I do, I’m never letting you go again.” He tucks a wayward curl behind my ear and bops me on the nose before sauntering out the door.

  As soon as he’s gone, I grab my phone and Facetime Becca. She answers on the first ring.

  “God, I’m so hungover,” she groans. Her blonde hair is all over the place, as she rolls to her back on her bed.

  “Me too,” I lament.. “Also—no big deal or anything—but I had sex last night.”

  “Excuse me, what?” Her mouth drops open and she lifts up on her elbows, swiping the hair from her eyes.

  “With Noah.”

  The phone falls from her hand, and the screen goes black for a few seconds. “Holy fucking shit, Truly,” she chides, once she’s back on the screen.

  “I know. I know.” I press my eyelids closed and rub my temple. I can feel the edges of a hangover headache forming. “I’ve been doing so good.”

  Becca cocks a tawny brow and although she doesn’t tell me she loves me, I know a harsh truth is coming my way. “Have you been doing good or is this the first time you’ve seen him?”

  “I—No, I mean I see him in the dining hall sometimes.”

  “Three times, and all three times you ran like a little bitch.” That’s my best friend. The girl wouldn’t know how to sugarcoat something in a chocolate factory. New York has only seemed to make her even more blunt. It’s nice when I’m asking for wardrobe advice, not so nice when I drunkenly hook up with my deceitful, manipulative, ex.

  “Can you at least pretend to be empathetic?”

  “Right.” She nods. “Tell me everything.”

  I launch into the story about how he was waiting when I got home and how I was drunk and lonely. To Becca’s credit, she oohs and ahhs and gasps at the appropriate times, which has to be hard because I know she just wants to shake me. Hell, I want to shake myself. How could I have hooked up with Noah without so much as a conversation?

  “So, what now?” she asks once I’m done.

  “I’m not sure.” It’s the truth. Noah and I have a mountain of unresolved issues. Issues that can’t be fixed with a sex Band-Aid. I’m still so mad at him for lying, for fucking everything up, but when push came to shove, I let him in. That’s on me. I must be stronger when it comes to him.

  “In a perfect world, what would you want?”

  I answer without hesitation. “To be happy.”

  “So, you’ve got to decide if happiness includes Noah.”

  “That part,” I groan.

  “That part,” she agrees. We chat for a little while longer, and I promise to keep her updated.

  By the time Tracy strolls in about an hour later, I’ve showered, seltzer-tabbed away the hangover, and I’m starving.

  “We can still catch breakfast,” she offers, not bothering to change or explain where she’s been for the last twelve hours. I don’t push the issue because my stomach is making sounds that should only be heard in the wild. Swiping my lanyard off my desk, I follow her out the door. We make our way to the dining hall, load our trays up, and set up shop at our usual table. A couple of guys walk past wit
h their food, chatting about last night’s buzzer beater. The cafeteria crowd has thinned a bit since breakfast is nearly over, but the overall vibe on campus today is basketball, particularly the freshman starter with the killer jump shot.

  “I hooked up with a Kappa,” Tracy tells me, crunching into a piece of bacon.

  I choke on my orange juice. It dribbles down my chin and lands unceremoniously on my lap. “You’re just now telling me? Why didn’t you lead with that?”

  “Well.” She stabs into her eggs. “I was hungry, so food was the only thing on my mind.”

  Plucking napkins from the holder I ask, “How was it? Who was it?” It still looks like I peed my pants, but I’m choosing to take comfort in the fact that I’m not the only poor decision maker at the table.

  “Some sophomore. Big dick, lazy dick game,” she chuckles. “I wish you would have come. He had some cute friends. Probably could have taken your mind off the dude that has you acting like a nun all Freshman year.”

  “I do not act like a nun,” I mumble around a soggy piece of French toast. I should have gotten a waffle, but I was being lazy.

  “I swear there are probably cobwebs on your vag.” Tracy assesses me a moment then nods. “Definitely. There are definitely cobwebs on your vag.”

  I throw a raspberry at her head in defense of me and my vag. “There are not.”

  “Self-love doesn’t count.” Her eyes snap over my head and her mouth drops open. I turn to see what got her attention. Big mistake. Noah is headed straight for our table.

  I turn quickly, hoping in vain that he’ll change direction, but seconds later, a waffle drops in front of me and his hand wraps around my throat. He tilts my head back, sliding his tongue between my lips, crushing me with a soul-searing kiss. In the middle of the dining hall.

  When he finally breaks the kiss, I’m panting. He presses his lips to mine again softly and smirks like the cocky asshole he is, before straightening and heading to his table. A hush descends upon the cafeteria. It’s so quiet, you could hear a pin drop. Then, from across the room, one of the guys on Noah’s team hollers, “Looks like little Tedesco’s balls finally dropped.”

  I’m mortified. Seriously, I want to die. The dining hall may be empty, but I don’t doubt that kiss will end up on Snapchat. How am I supposed to figure out my feelings for Noah when half the campus will end up shipping us, and the other half will pick me apart as not being a suitable enough mate for their king?

  “What the hell was that?” Tracy asks.

  “That.” I rest my forehead on my palm. “Was Noah.”

  “I know who Noah Tedesco is. I’m asking why he just tongued you down in the middle of the dining hall the day after his best game of the season?”

  I suck in a breath. “We kind of hooked up last night.”

  It’s Tracy’s turn to toss a raspberry. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”

  “Because I didn’t expect him to tongue me down in the middle of the dining hall.”

  “Back up, where did you go when you left the party?” she asks.

  “Back to the dorm.”

  “And you just happened to run into Noah Tedesco and y’all had sex?”

  “Remember that ex-boyfriend that broke my heart?” I swallow, knowing I’m going to have to come clean. I’ve told Tracy that I had my heart broken before the semester started, but not by who or any other details of said heartbreak. Now she’s looking at me like I told her I agreed to marry someone after talking to them through a wall for three days.

  “No. Way.” She pushes her food aside and leans forward on her elbows.

  “Way.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “He was waiting in front of our door. Said I was the only person he wanted to celebrate with. Then he knocked the cobwebs out of my vag.”

  “I can’t believe you used to date Noah Tedesco and you didn’t tell me! So, are you guys back together?”

  “No. Absolutely not. It was a one-time thing.”

  “Does he know that?” She points her fork in his direction.

  I glance over at his table. He’s watching me with that Noah Tedesco, I’m about to own your ass, Little One, stare. “I don’t think so.”

  Tracy drops her fork and leans back in her seat. “Well, this semester just got a hell of a lot more interesting.”

  If there was one thing my mother taught me before she died, it was this: life is messy. Humans inherently are so. We are flawed, imperfect beings who do bad things and make mistakes, and turn down the wrong path. My mom used to say, growth didn’t come from avoiding those messy moments, it came from embracing them, learning from them, and knowing better the next time.

  Aside from losing my mother, Noah’s presence in my life has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. I went from loathing him, to fearing him, then miraculously falling in love with him. It all happened so quickly, but I wasn’t blinded by him. Blindsided maybe, but he’d shown me his true colors from the very first day.

  Devin’s revelation shouldn’t have come as a shock to me. Honestly, I should have expected it, and if I’m being honest, their deal didn’t hurt nearly as bad as finding out Noah kept it from me. I was supposed to be the one person who got to know the real him. The pretty shell and the jagged emotional scars that lay beneath the surface of it.

  He was supposed to be mine, fully. I was supposed to be the one person he could be himself with. I wore that distinction like a badge of honor. In a world where everyone wanted to own a piece of the golden boy, I got to gorge myself on the whole thing. Only, I didn’t. He kept things from me too. And though I should have expected it, I wanted to believe that our love was different.

  Oh, of course, Noah deceived me. Of course, he paid his brother to break my heart, only to turn around and break it himself. It’s like the most Noah thing he ever Noah’d.

  Only, I didn’t expect it. And the pain of it hurt like a bitch. It also woke me up in a lot of ways. Why do I keep picking wrong? Or maybe Noah is my punishment.

  I force my eyes closed and breathe. The therapist I’d been seeing for the last month warned me against that train of thought. I didn’t cause my mother’s death, and the bad things that have happened to me since isn’t God’s way of punishing me. It’s self-sabotage. I welcome pain into my life like a gracious host because I don’t think I deserve to be happy in a world where my mother no longer exists.

  Noah’s love is toxic, no matter how good he makes me feel in the moment. I think I’m supposed to learn from him, right? I mean, I can’t love someone who’s done the things he’s done. No matter how much being away from him hurts.

  I grip my Linear Algebra book tightly against my chest, as I push my way inside the library. Finals are just around the corner and I can’t let Noah’s reappearance in my life distract me. It’s been a week since Noah decided to stick his tongue down my throat in the middle of the dining hall; people who have never even glanced in my direction have stopped me just to say hi. I’ve gotten smiles, head nods—even party invites have been lobbed my way—simply because I made out with the starting point guard.

  I slide into a table near the back, plug my earbuds into my ears, and crack open my book. I’m knee deep in equations when Tracy drops her phone on the table. “You are a liar that lies,” she shrieks. Her hair is burgundy this week, and so long she has to move it out of the way before she sits down.

  Plucking a bud from my ear, I say, “I’m not sure what you’re raging about?”

  She lifts her phone and wiggles it in my face. I snatch it from her and take a peek at the screen. It’s Noah’s Instagram. He posted a Throwback Thursday picture of us. We’re at the tattoo shop in Santa Monica. He’s got his shirt pulled up and my wrist is turned out, revealing our matching tattoos. The caption reads, Faith. It’s one he’s posted before but deleted after we broke up. He scrubbed me from his Instagram shortly before school started. I assumed it was because he didn’t want the new batch of co-eds to think he had a girlfriend.
It stung, so I got drunk with Becca one night and we scrubbed our accounts of both Noah and Ethan.

  “You said he’d get bored and move on,” she huffs, referring to the conversation we had last night. After she plucked yet another daisy from our doorstep with yet another note from Noah asking me to go to dinner. The flowers started showing up the day after the cafeteria incident and have arrived every day since. She thought I should put him out of his misery and have dinner with him. I lied and told her he’d be over it by next week, because telling her the truth would mean admitting all the fucked up reasons he’s giving me to stay away from him forever.

  I blink at the screen several times. “It’s just a picture.”

  “You have matching tattoos.” She lifts my wrist, pushing my shirt sleeve up, and taps the ink on my skin to drive her point home. “That’s not a phase, baby girl, that’s forever.”

  I snatch my hand back and tug my sleeve down. “We broke up, Tracy. So, he posted an old picture of us. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “First,” she shouts, and the stressed-out looking dude at the next table shushes her. She drops her voice. “First, he came and found you after the biggest win of the season, then he claimed you in the dining hall. Now, he’s posting you on IG. I would say it means something to him.” My phone buzzes, a text from Becca. It’s a screenshot of Noah’s post with a four word declaration. Oh, my fucking God??!!!!! I tell her that I’ll call her later and return my attention to Tracy. “He wants that old thang back.”

  I shake my head. “Yeah, well, I want an A in Algebra.” I slip my earbud back in and get to work. Thirty minutes later, the chair next to me slides out and Noah plops down in it. He slides another daisy in front of me, a cocky smirk parked on his kissable lips.

  I shouldn’t be surprised to see him, not after the stunt he pulled in the cafeteria, but it annoys me, nonetheless. And to top it off, he’s wearing my Jameson hoodie. The one he gave me for my birthday, and I left at his house that day. I know it’s all a part of his manipulation, but I can’t help myself. My fingers itch to feel the soft fabric once more. Call it nostalgia, or muscle memory, but I want my damn hoodie back, even if I’m still undecided on the boy who is wearing it.