White Rabbit(48)

Sebastian’s bedroom was magnificent; a converted attic with sloped ceilings and windows in three directions, it boasted a bed as big as a garbage barge and a private, en suite bathroom. It was up there that he led me that afternoon, as birds were singing and flowers were perfuming the air, and our relationship—though I did not know it yet—was already entering its final throes.

We put something on TV, but it was pretense—background noise to score the hungry look he gave me before he pressed his lips to mine, before he pushed me down into the rolling softness of his plump, white duvet and pinned my body beneath his own. I felt trapped, and it thrilled me—which terrified me, utterly.

It was something I’d been struggling with for weeks, maybe months. Sebastian had opened up a weak spot in me, slipped through my considerable protective barriers to a place where I felt helpless and insecure; but instead of reacting with alarm, I found that I liked it. I liked how vulnerable he made me feel—a fact that both scared and excited me in equal measure.

We’d been kissing for a while, his hips moving against mine until my entire body was sparking and overheated—on the verge of explosion—when he stopped suddenly. With an agonized exhalation, he complained breathily in my ear, “Fuuuck!”

“What?” I asked dizzily. “What’s wrong?”

Sebastian sat up, his face flushed. “We need to stop.”

“Why?”

“Becaaaause…” He blew out some more air, rubbed his scalp, gave me a sly look. “I’m kind of … um. Close? And if we don’t quit right now, it’ll just be … uh, frustrating. If you know what I mean.”

I nodded, because I knew exactly what he meant. In our four months together, we had acted out this very scene several times, and it was getting harder and harder—no pun intended—to say our proper lines at the end. To go back to watching TV, or making a snack, or doing anything that emphatically did not involve our erections. More and more, I had trouble remembering why I was saying no in the first place.

It was my choice; I was the holdout—the virgin. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel ready, exactly, and it certainly wasn’t that I didn’t want to; lying there and looking up at him as the saffron light of the afternoon beat lazily through his dormer windows and swirled seductively in the air around us, every nerve ending in my body was screaming yes. What kept me putting it off was fear.

Fear that it wouldn’t mean the same thing to him that it did to me; fear that he might lose interest when it was over; fear that my protective barriers would break completely apart like autumn leaves if I let him that much closer.

The problem was, I already knew, that it was far too late to protect myself now. The thing I’d been most afraid of had long since happened: My barriers were toast, and my feelings for Sebastian were written indelibly beneath my skin. Gazing up at him, I took a breath, faltered, and then asked, “Do you h-have … a condom?”

“Really?” His eyebrows shot up, a surprised grin lighting his face. Then, almost instantly, his expression became careful, serious. “Are you sure? I mean, I don’t want to make you feel like—”

“I’m sure,” I answered before I could reconsider. I didn’t want to reconsider.

What followed was nothing like it looks online. I was awkward and uncoordinated, my knees and elbows flailing about in places they weren’t supposed to go, and a lot of stuff I’d expected to be sexy and cool was actually sort of hilarious and/or painful. But the experience was also electrifying and powerful and romantic—even when Sebastian had to turn off the TV because he felt like SpongeBob was judging us; and the fact that he was laughing and cringing right along with me made everything perfect.

Afterward, when we were lying together atop his duvet, his heart thumping against my back as a flowery breeze stirred the sweat on our skin, I felt a foreign happiness swelling in my chest. Bright, meaningful Words fluttered in my mouth like hummingbirds, and I had to keep my lips sealed to prevent them from getting out. With a sigh, Sebastian drawled, “That was … actually, that was kind of awesome.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I giggled my agreement. But as he got up and crossed the room, hiding the condom at the bottom of his wastebasket, he paused for just a moment to look out the window into his backyard. The setting sun caught him, bathing him all over in such rich, warm light that it looked as if his body had been dipped in gold dust, and the Words burst from me before I could stop them.

“I love you.”

They soared from my lips, straight up, and hung above my head like the sword of Damocles.

A lifetime of silence passed—shorter than a heartbeat, but long enough for me to see him flinch, long enough to know he’d heard me. And then he turned from the window, heading for the bathroom as if I’d said nothing at all, announcing broadly, “I’m gonna take a shower. Turn the TV back on, if you want.”

The door shut behind him, and the sword plunged down, straight through my heart.

*

My statement feels radioactive in the silence of the Jeep, a spreading hazard that can no longer be avoided.

“You just disappeared. You stopped answering my texts and my calls, you stopped showing up at the Front Line … I had to hear from Ramona fucking Waverley that you’d dumped me.” I swipe the tears from my eyes, but they just keep coming, hot and bitter. “You told the whole school that you were still in love with Lia, that you’d never stopped being in love with her. You should have told me that! You should have at least had the guts to tell me to my face that I was only a … a convenience. That I didn’t even matter. You ass.”