Chapter 2
Summer
Leah
A million times a day, I told myself that I was better than a booty call. But a million and one times a day, I told myself that I wasn’t. That was exactly how I’d ended up at Kai Henderson’s door three times in one week.
This was my second summer at Lakeside Green University, and I’d quickly realized last year that summers out here didn’t offer much more than ample time to fool around.
It made sense. Lakeside Green was a small town to begin with, and most of the commotion came from students. It was the opposite of a beach town—summers here were completely dead, and every other time of the year was packed full of students.
In the midst of all of them was Kai, a random student from one of my marketing classes.
Before Kai, there had been Emerson—a girl who’d lived on my floor—which had gone about as well as things seemed to be going with Kai.
And then there were what felt like a million other small things here and there.
One-off dates, dating app ‘talking’ stages that made me want to rip my hair out, the occasional cute girl from a party that fizzled out basically overnight.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew when I was being toyed with.
I was a good time to Kai—the hot, driven girl in her classes, the one who had been on student council and was a cheerleader and did things like volunteer.
Maybe I even had a history of doing beauty pageants through my childhood into my late teens, not that I’d ever talked about that with my college friends.
To someone like Kai, who smoked a lot of weed and had misused more than a few pop psychology terms around me, I was an anomaly. I was something new.
Or maybe I was just a decent lay. Being a dancer for my entire life made me very flexible.
“Fuck,” Kai said as I fell back into the mattress. She ran a hand through her short black hair, showing off heavily tattooed biceps. It’d never been a secret that I was more into the masculine type.
I took a moment to catch my breath, closing my eyes and relishing in how the afterglow would feel good for approximately two more minutes until Kai said something that would bring me back to reality. Despite being ridiculously hot, Kai had a way of ruining the mood in hardly any time at all.
“You finish?” Kai asked, readjusting on the bed so she could grab her vape.
There it was.
“Yeah,” I said, my automatic response whenever anyone asked me that question in bed.
The reality was that my orgasms with partners never felt even half as good as the orgasms I achieved when I was on my own.
If anything, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever actually orgasmed with a partner before.
But that didn’t really feel like the number one priority when I seemed to be addicted to dating the worst kinds of people.
It wasn’t to say anything was wrong with Kai.
She was nice enough, funny enough, cool enough.
She was undeniably hot in that unwashed, disheveled kind of way.
And she was in a band on campus that frequently played gigs at Stephen’s, the local dive bar—and by the I meant the only.
She just wasn’t the kind of person there would ever be a future with, not that something like that ever affected my decision on who to sleep with.
If anything, I wanted them more because there was no future.
Sometimes, I didn’t understand how I’d ended up here—in this small town, on this campus, bed hopping between people who were always just good enough because pickings were so slim.
It was a fine school in terms of academic ranking, and the network I was building was okay, but Colorado hadn’t been my dream.
Cedar Creek, the largest city in the county, definitely wasn’t large enough for me.
But my parents wanted me and my sister to stick together for college, which included me going wherever my sister decided to go for basketball. Story of my fucking life.
I rolled over and traced my hand over Kai’s chest. When she pulled me toward her, so kindly blowing the smoke from her vape in the opposite direction of my face after being asked many times not to do that, I almost felt happy.
It was hard being someone who logically knew I deserved better, while also not actively seeking it.
Kai was a warm body and company. She was also, unfortunately, really good at giving me just enough to keep wanting to come back.
That was the thing about me—I craved acceptance.
I wanted to feel hot, wanted to feel desired. I wanted to leave before being left.
But I never left. I was never the one who ended things.
Instead, I was turned into a pathetic boomerang—getting tossed away, only to come right back. It was a cycle I was hooked on and kept returning to, just with different people.
“You want a hit?” Kai asked, offering me her vape.
“No, thank you,” I said. “So, when’s your next show?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she responded, drawing the words out. “I’ll let you know, though.”
“Yeah, cool,” I responded, as if I wasn’t bursting at the seams to get her to tell me more.
I wanted her to invite me to something, take me somewhere.
We’d matched on a dating app the last week of classes and had been fooling around for weeks now, with nothing to show for it other than going out for drinks a few times.
I knew what that meant. Logically, I was there. I could take a hint. I was prepared for the inevitable—it’s casual, it was never supposed to mean anything, you’re nice, but I don’t want that.
But denial was one hell of a drug.
We lay there a few more beats, my head on her chest. I didn’t like that the human body craved warmth and connection. It would make my life so much easier if I could just swear off dating forever and not be bothered with any of it anymore.
But the reality was that I’d rather take less than the bare minimum than be completely alone. No 4.0 GPA or merit-based scholarship or recognition from the university president could dig me out of this personal hell of my own creation.
There was at least a small part of me that was convinced that this was how it was for everyone.
That no marriage, no relationship, was actually truly happy.
It wasn’t like my parents were happy; they were two people who were only still married because they immersed themselves entirely in work.
They probably saw each other less than Mags and I saw them, and we lived in a different state from them now.
My mind flashed back to GJ, who’d taken up a home in my memory ever since I’d overheard her conversation with my sister a few days ago. Tell her she can always call me if she needs a break from the fuckboys. Just give me a chance, Leah! I’ll change your life.
I was skeptical. Beyond the fact that GJ was possibly one of the worst players of them all—I’d heard more than a few stories—I was hard pressed to believe anyone could actually change my life.
At this point, I was certain that anyone who was going to change my life was doing it in a way that was harmful to my mental well-being.
But still, there was something about her that made me wonder how good it’d feel to be in her arms, how fun going on a date with her would be. At the very least, I was confident the sex with her had to be better than a lot of the sex I’d been having.
Maybe fantasizing about someone I’d heard positive reviews from other girls about wasn’t what I needed, but it was sure as hell better than facing my current reality.
Kai replaced her vape with her phone. “I gotta meet up with the band in a little bit, but this was fun.”
“Right,” I said, knowing my cue. We’d never made it to the point of a sleepover—we’d never really made it to the point of much. Kai seemed hellbent on offering me as little as she possibly could.
And despite knowing that, I seemed to be physically incapable of telling her to fuck off and to never contact me again. If anything, all it made me want to do was dig in my heels, curl up into bed with her a little longer, and continue answering her texts embarrassingly quickly.
After taking a beat—as if I were waiting to see if Kai would change her mind and tell me to stay, probably because I kind of was—I got up and turned around in bed to pull on my clothes.
I got dressed with my back turned to her.
I didn’t have to be turned toward her to know that she wasn’t looking at me, doing her best for a peek at my naked body; I could hear the sound of a video playing on her phone.
God, dating was the fucking worst.
After getting dressed, I grabbed my purse from the floor next to Kai’s bong and a stack of tattered pre-owned paperbacks I would bet a million dollars she’d never read—and ran my fingers through my hair.
She looked up at me, still having not even budged from bed. “I’ll text you.”
“Okay,” I responded, mostly because I didn’t know what else there was to say.
Kai would text me, and I’d go running to her because this was the option I had.
Maybe something better would come along, or maybe I just wasn’t destined to have real romance in my life.
It wasn’t really my business and didn’t feel particularly up to me; I was leaving that one to fate.
I left Kai’s room to the sound of her watching another video, not even bothering to interrupt to say goodbye.
As I walked home alone, I did the math on how much longer it would be until the end of summer, and how many more days I had until graduation.