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 fucking guy. And I don’t want to be with any other fucking girl.
Anything else feels like a sickening betrayal. How the fuck 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 porn.”
“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 fucking joy when she admitted that she got it wrong. That she thought she climaxed, but after talking to her sisters, it didn’t seem euphoric enough to be that heightened peak.
“You can orgasm,” I tell her. “I’ve fucking heard you, sweetheart.”
There’s no answer. I called her sweetheart—I do it unconsciously, and I know every time I say it, her lips rise.
“Daisy?”
“Huh?” She laughs a little. “Can you say that again?”
“No.” I realize I’ve overflowed my fucking oatmeal with half the water bottle. “Shit,” I curse. I have to dump all of it in the trash.
“Sorry,” she says.
“No, it’s not you,” I tell her. After scraping all of the oatmeal out, I toss the bowl too hard in the sink and it cracks. What the fuck is wrong with me today? I shake my head. “I fucking hate talking to you on the phone.”
“Me too.”
I lean against the cupboard and stare at my bedroom door, keeping an eye on whether or not it opens again. I have to be fucking cautious with people I bring over. I had a one-night stand steal a pair of my fucking boxer-briefs a year and a half ago. She sold them for three grand on eBay. “Were you careful with this guy?” I ask her.
“We didn’t have sex,” she says.
I shut my eyes and take a deep breath. Thank fucking God. “Was he a part of your weird fucking night?”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “I just don’t understand why I meet people and they seem so perfect for me, and then I get them in bed, and they’re just…wrong.” She pauses. “I think it’s me.”
“I already hate this fucking guy.” That’s a real understatement.
“You would hate him more if you saw him last night. He thought I was a virgin, and he was happy to deflower me upon a first-time meeting.”
I glare. I want to rewind time and take everything back. I want to tell her to not date a single fucking soul. I wish my brother’s claims hadn’t gotten to me. “Stay away from him.”
“I plan on it.”
The shower cuts off. “Hey, Daisy?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s almost four in the morning where you are. Take a fucking Ambien and go to sleep, okay? Call me when you have time.”
She hesitates. “I have time to talk more now.”
“You need to sleep before you go to work.”
“It’s pointless. I have to be in for hair and makeup at five thirty. Ambien may knock me out for hours, so I might as well just stay up.”
My door swings open, and Emilia stands with a towel wrapped around her chest, her hair dry. “You’re out of soap,” she says. “I couldn’t find any in your cabinets.” She hasn’t even taken a shower yet.
Fuck. I grab my keys off the kitchen bar. “I’ll get you some. Wait here.”
“You don’t have to go buy more,” she says.
“I’m not. There’s some in my friend’s apartment. She lives below me.”
“I’ll come with,” Emilia says. “Hold on a sec.” She disappears back into my room, and I catch her slipping on her blue dress from last night.
I still have the phone pressed to my ear. “Daisy—”
“I’ll go.”
“No,” I suddenly say. I don’t want to stop talking to her, not if she’s just going to spend the next hour paranoid. I can distract her from her fears. Even thousands of miles away, that’s still fucking possible.
“Are you sure?” she asks.