Ricochet (Addicted #1.5)(43)

I try to take in her words before she asks another question.

“And after that, did anyone else touch you?”

I shake my head. “No, I touched myself a lot. And then, I had sex.”

“With Lo?”

I sink in the seat. “No, not with Lo.” I knew I was going to talk about the loss of my virginity—as though it solidified the rest of my nefarious acts for the future. The buried memory has already surfaced these past couple of days as I mentally tried to prepare for this discussion. “I was thirteen.”

“Was he older?”

“Not much. He was a fifteen-year-old kid, the son of my mother’s friend. I was at his house for his father’s surprise birthday party. It was during the day, and everyone mostly stayed outside by the pool. Lo was supposed to be there.”

“Why wasn’t he?”

The memory hurts a little because if Lo’s plans had changed, I know, without a doubt, that I wouldn’t have lost my virginity that day. But I believe I still would have gone down this road. Even if my first wasn’t mind-blowing, I still loved the sex. The way it exploded my nerves and rocked my body to an ultimate high. Once I felt a glimmer of it for the first time, I was sold.

“He didn’t want to go to the party. He wanted to find booze and hang out by the lake. But Rose begged me to go. She didn’t want our mother to be focused on her the whole evening, so I went to keep Rose company. And in the end, I left her to go hook up with some guy that paid me a little bit of attention. We went to his room, and what’s done was done.” My stomach hurts as I admit the rest. “Rose forgave me. She always does, but I can’t really ever forgive myself, you know? I’m a horrible person, and I convinced myself that it was better if I wasn’t involved in anyone’s lives. If I just stayed away, then they wouldn’t be hurt by me and I could do what I wanted.” I nod to myself. “Yeah, so that’s how it went afterwards. But Rose doesn’t take lightly to being ignored. She never allowed me to push her away completely.” I rub my eyes quickly.

“And Lo?” Dr. Banning asks, not missing a beat. “What happened to him that night?”

“I snuck from my house to his. We lived down the street from each other, so it wasn’t so hard. And I climbed through his window. I found him passed out on his bed. So I shut away all of his bottles before his father found them, and I tucked him under the covers.” I nod again, as though accepting the memory for what is. A painful reminder of our fucked up relationship. “The next day, we just acted like nothing happened.”

She stares at me with dark eyes, a sort of worry that I think therapists are not supposed to possess. It flickers away before she scares me more, but I realize that she’s beginning to understand just how deep our tangled, messy, destructive relationship actually goes.

“After you lost your virginity, how did your relationship with Lo change?”

I squirm a little in my chair before I say, “I mean…we’ve always been friends.” I’m about to say nothing changed. But I can’t muster the lie. After I started having sex, everything changed.

“So take me through your sexual experiences between the day you became sexually active and now. How did things progress? Especially with Lo.”

My mind spins as I think about eighth grade and feeling like utter trash for losing my virginity so young. I didn’t tell anyone for months, and even though I was hooked to the feeling—I refused to do it again for a while. Too scared of the obliterating guilt that haunted me like a shadow. The second time happened at a graduation party. A public school kid threw it. Lo and I barely knew them, so it had the right requisites to attend. We both liked the anonymity. As years passed in prep school, people often grouped us together because of our friendship and status. We were Fizzle and Hale Co., and the more they wiped our identities away, the more we clung to each other.

The party was like any other, except for bedrooms upstairs. They were open and available, and so was the fifteen-year-old soccer player I met. It felt better than the first time, and I devised this theory that it would just keep getting better and better the more I tried.

I remember leaving the party with Lo braced on my shoulder. We couldn’t hide the fact that he’d been drinking from Nola, but she kept her opinions to herself and dropped me off at the Hale house. It was that night, with Lo sprawled half-asleep in his bed, that I asked him if he was a virgin.

I wanted him to tell me no. To ease my shame.

“I’m waiting,” he mumbled sleepily.

My eyebrows furrowed. “For marriage?” But he fell asleep before he could answer, but I think I knew it anyway.

He was waiting for me.

I began having sex every few months, nothing serious. Mostly I spent my time with porn and self-love. The day Lo found out I lost my virginity wasn’t even a monumental one. We were reading comics together during a rainy afternoon, and I complained that Havok and Polaris needed to just fuck and get it over with. Their sexual tension was killing me.

Lo looked up at me, and out of nowhere asked, “Have you had sex?”

It was like someone vacuumed the air right from my lungs. “What?” I squeaked.

He pulled his knees up and shrugged, like it was nothing. Maybe he was just trying to make me comfortable. “When we go to parties, you disappear. And when we leave, you’re always a little different.”