My palm slaps the cool gold and my brain erupts with a horrifying scream so intense my ears bleed.
Make it stop.
Make it stop.
Pain rips through me as I fly backward, a hooded figure lifting me from the ground and tossing me to the side. I scream again, this time it tears my vocal cords apart as I fall…and fall…
Five
London
I’ve been drunk a lot in my days. And when I say a lot, I mean a—loooottt. So much so that Ben has had to shower me, tits in his face, legs in the air, and then stay up all night to make sure I didn’t die. Around that time was when I realized that he probably was a great friend and I had nothing to worry about. I’ve known him all of my life, and people try to say he has a crush on me, including Trevor, and even though I know deep in my bones he doesn’t, those nights really drove it home for me that this man, after having my bits in places where they shouldn’t be with your best friend, will not ever like me that way.
Sometimes I wonder if he wishes I was more modest, but since he has seen me naked, I find wearing clothes when I don’t have to as an unnecessary evil. I just can’t get behind it, especially when I know he’ll love me either way.
Not that last night resulted in a drunken peep show, but I’m pretty damn sure I was one Solo cup away from living out some stripper fantasies. Again.
Now here I am, forced to function when the light feels like it has a personal vendetta against me.
It doesn’t help that I don’t care much for school. Ben would say that it has to do with the fact that I can’t make up my mind on what I want to major in, but I’m not so sure. I mean, I know that is a big part, sure, but I can’t help but feel like everything is pointless. Like in five years from now, I won’t be using anything I’ve studied.
“So how is your head?” Ben asks, tossing a french fry at my lap from across the table. It’s only mid-day and I’m ready to curl back under my bed covers for the week. My head feels like a balloon and it won’t stop throbbing, and I’m pretty sure the muscles in my legs have seized up . The previous night is a blur. I remember the game. I remember dropping a Molly in the bathroom after Trevor and I had a massive fight.
“That guy you were making out with was hot!” Letty sucks ketchup off her finger. She can’t hide the smirk if she tried, which she doesn’t.
And I remember him.
“He was…” My tongue glides over my teeth when I think about how his felt inside my mouth. With an impulsive decision to piss off Trevor, I grabbed the poor dude for a quick tongue fuck. He was—blue eyes flash in front of me, a single touch against my cheek, the way his mouth curved up in a smirk—Jesus. “Yes. Very hot.”
Ben chuckles at me from across the table. I know that later on, it’s going to call for one thousand questions like always. For a straight guy, he sure as fuck is always interested in the dick I’m sucking. “You and I both know that you should have just walked away from Trevor. You can’t fix that man.”
Guilt wriggles its ugly claws inside of me and he knows he’s hit a nerve. It’s not that I try, or even want, to fix Trevor. It’s that I still feel like I owe him. Ben calls it a trauma bond. I hate the word bond and don’t think Trevor deserves it.
I have no fucking idea why I feel that way. It’s not like I’m the one who cheated, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that I was purely with him out of boredom and my healthy, sadly insatiable appetite for solid playtime.
Trevor , unfortunately, wasn’t what I would call a prime dick option; in fact, I was left to the good graces of my trusting fingers more often than not, but he was fun when he wasn’t a complete fucking annoyance, and he was always down for a quickie in the hidden corners of campus.
Huh, maybe that’s why I can’t get rid of the fucker. He’s pussy-whipped, and when a man gets to that point? It takes some serious measures to cut the cord.
I pout, feeling bad for myself and the fact that my sexual needs match that of a man. We really need to cut the stigma somewhere, because fuck all that. Girls need this shit just as much.
I mean…right?
Bet Mr. I Like to Stare in the Eyes of One While Getting my Dick Sucked by Another would agree.
Wait. That was the Molly talking.
“What’s with the sour face, baby girl?”
Shaking my head, I rub circles along my temple before looking to Ben, and then the clock that glares at me from above him.
A laugh pushes past his lips and he drags himself to his feet, offering me a hand, so I let him haul my ass up with a very obnoxious whine. “But, Daddy, do I have to?” I stick my bottom lip out.
Ben simply rolls his eyes, throwing his arm around my shoulder and lifting the tray of half-eaten food with the other hand. “Yes, you have to attend the classes that you’re required to pass in order to keep your scholarship and keep being my favorite roommate ever.” Letty ignores us both as she rushes off to her next class.
He steers us toward the garbage and then out the double doors of the cafeteria, pressing a quick kiss to the top of my head as he releases me.
“Is this the part where you leave me, and I wait until you’re gone before sneaking back to the dorm and sleeping the rest of the month away?”
He lifts a brow at me, and I flick my gaze to the sky, instantly regretting it as the pounding in my head comes back with a vengeance.
“Did you take more Ibuprofen like I told you to?” he asks, adjusting his backpack on his shoulders.
“I did.” I offer him a small smile, moving in for a hug. “Thank you for taking care of me all the time.”
“Someone’s got to,” he teases, squeezing me back briefly before stepping away. The two of us split, heading in opposite directions to finish out our day.
With a deep sigh, I make my way toward the lecture halls for some stupid history class I’m destined to fail, but I do my best to give my all. E ven if my “all” is a sad C minus, for the sole reason I can’t be separated from my best friend again.
All my life, it was only my uncle Marcus and me…and Ben. I can’t blame Unc for allowing me here when I know damn well I only came for Ben.
I’ve never really been good at making friends. I’ve never really cared to try, to be honest. I’m more of a lone rider, happy to get lost in my imagination for hours on end, but with Ben our friendship is effortless. He’s my soulmate. The kind that I know would never run out on me.
The day he and his grandmother moved in across the street was, and continues to be, the best thing that ever happened to me. My uncle Marcus is great, kind, and attentive and the perfect father figure from what I know. He’s stern when he needs to be and does his best to understand the different stages of teenage rebellion, but being the only person running the household is taxing and time-consuming, so it left me alone a lot. I love him for it, appreciate everything he does for me, but it didn’t exactly help me in the social department to spend so much time alone at such a young age—the reason why I had the imagination of R. L. Stine when I was little, if you ask the mandated therapist my elementary school “recommended” I see after one too many complaints from the teacher that I was too intrigued with the emotions people feel and why they feel them…how to draw certain ones out of them.