Cassie
“You look like you’re on Cloud Mystery Man.”
Erin’s voice jars me from where I’m working on separating and stapling the packets for this week’s Panhellenic meeting, and I pause, eyes meeting hers. My brows pull inward as I try to decipher what she means.
“What?”
Erin smirks, tucking her dark blonde hair behind one ear. She’s typing away on her laptop, working on her agenda for the meeting, but her eyes hold mine for a moment before they return to the screen.
“You’ve got that look. That one that says there’s a boy.”
My eyes pop open wider, and Erin doesn’t even look at me when she chuckles at the response.
“Don’t worry,” she says quickly. “I’m not going to press you on telling me who it is.
I’m just saying, you had your heart broken by Grayson at semi-formal, and you popped back so quickly.
” One of her neatly manicured eyebrows lifts.
“That doesn’t happen unless there’s someone else helping speed the healing process. ”
Heat sparks on my neck, crawling up to my cheeks as I let my eyes fall back to the packet I’m assembling.
Flashes of Adam hit me hard, my stomach fluttering at the memory of his hands on me last night.
We’re in Erin’s room now, but I know that just down the hall, the long board Adam made me sits propped beside my bed.
She’s right.
I am on a cloud, floating high and free, intoxicated by what it feels like to be with Adam.
He touched me last night like no one ever has — patiently, adoringly, like all he’d ever wanted in his life was to have that pleasure, and now that he was experiencing it, he would take his time memorizing every minute, every second.
My eyes flutter close, a soft smile spreading on my lips as I remember how he looked staring up at me, his mouth on the most sensitive part of me.
I wanted to return the favor. I wanted to taste him so badly it hurt, like the lady version of blue balls.
But, Adam’s taking his time with me. He’s moving slow, and not with the same, false intentions that Grayson had said he wanted to move slow with. He’d been getting some on the side.
No, Adam is mine, even if we aren’t official yet.
… right?
I swallow at the possibility that he might be fooling around with someone else, though I know in my heart that it couldn’t be true. Still, if he is only faithful to me… then why can’t we just be together?
I’ve asked myself that a hundred times.
I believe him when he says he wants to move slow, when he wants me to focus on me, but then he goes and makes me a personalized long board. He holds my hand, he calls me every single night and texts me all through the day.
He’s my boyfriend by all accounts… except the public admission.
“I think I just saw every single possible girly emotion cross over your face in a span of twenty seconds.”
I snap my head toward Erin, forgetting she was even in the room until the moment she speaks.
She smirks, shaking her head. “If you want to talk about it, I’m here.”
I let out a breath, returning her smile.
Erin and I haven’t hung out in a long time — not like this.
I was surprised when she texted me this morning — or rather, very late last night — asking me if I had some time to help her prepare for the meeting this week.
She wanted to catch up, she said, and I was excited to get some time alone with my Grand Big.
Still, what can I even say? If I tell her about me and Adam, she’ll be the first one. And she’s Skyler’s Big. Will she understand, will she question when Adam and I started to feel this way? He never cheated on Skyler with me… but then again, he did kiss me less than a week after they broke up.
My stomach turns.
“Have you ever been in love?” I ask Erin instead of divulging my situation.
She pauses, her fingers hovering over her keys for a moment before she starts typing again.
“Once.”
“Kip?”
Erin nods, her eyes softer now, tinged with a hint of sorrow.
“He was the first boy I ever loved… the only one. But, I messed it up.”
I watch her with a sympathetic gaze, though I can’t say I agree with her plan to get him back.
Tangling Skyler up in her mess doesn’t seem fair to me.
But, Skyler is a big girl, and she agreed to it on her own free will.
I keep telling her I’m here if she wants to talk about it, encouraging her to call it off if she needs to.
That’s all I can do — be there. I can’t make the decision for her.
And watching Erin now, noting the sadness in her features, I know she must feel like this is the only way. I try to put myself in her shoes. If Adam slipped out of my grasp, would I ever do something as crazy to try to get him back?
I know that answer without even asking the question aloud. I would. In a heartbeat.
I’d do whatever it took.
“Do you think your plan will work?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I hope, of course. I think it will. But it’s hard to say. Until I have him alone, until I see what it feels like to be with him, I can’t be sure.”
“What do you mean?”
Erin presses her lips together, thinking. “Well, if there’s anything I’ve learned in my dating experience, it’s that if a guy wants to be with you — really wants to be with you — then he will be. So, if after Skyler pulls this off, Kip doesn’t show interest? Well, then I’ll know.”
Though I hear what Erin says about Kip, I can’t help but think about Adam.
He says he wants to be with me, that I mean everything to him… but he also says we should wait. He says I need to focus on myself.
Is that really what he means?
Or is it that he doesn’t want to be with me at all?
I swallow, mind racing.
What if he just doesn’t want to hurt me?
The thought grows from nothing, but sprouts to life like Jack’s magic bean stalk, flying high into the sky and past the clouds with its realness.
It’s something Adam would do — keep me at a distance, do everything he could to be there for me and help me heal.
He cares about me, that much is easy to see… but does he really want to be with me?
If he does, wouldn’t he already be with me?
“Do you really think it’s that simple?” I ask Erin. “I mean, what if you knew Kip cared about you. What if you were hanging out and he was telling you everything you needed to hear, but he wanted to wait a while before making things official. Would you wait?”
Erin scoffs. “Hell no. I mean we’d date, of course.
But once the feelings were there for me?
I’d ask him if he felt the same. And if he did, we’d be together.
It’s that simple. I’m not down to play that what are we bullshit.
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.
” She chuckles, shaking her head. “I’m too grown to play those games. ”
My tongue is thick and sticky in my mouth, impossible to swallow past.
Erin’s eyes flick to me, her brows pinching together when she notes my expression.
“He’s toying with you, isn’t he? Your Mystery Man.”
I don’t respond.
Erin sighs, closing the lid on her laptop to face me completely. “Look. Here’s the truth. You want it?”
I just look at her, still unable to speak.
She dips until her eyes are at the same level as mine, a mixture of sympathy and hard-hitting realness reflected in her gaze.
“The truth is, if you’re not sure what you are to him, then you’re nothing.
A man who wants to be with you will be with you.
Period. He won’t be able to stomach the thought of anyone else being with you, therefore, he’ll make you his.
If it doesn’t make him sick not to call you his girlfriend, if he doesn’t feel some kind of sense of urgency to claim you, to mark you as his own, then he doesn’t really want you.
He’s waiting for someone better to come along.
He’s getting what he can out of you because you’re there, and he knows he can, but in the end?
” She shakes her head. “Men are quite simple to figure out. And trust me when I say if he loved you, or even liked you — you’d know.
There wouldn’t be anything to question.” She sits back, shrugging simply, as if it was all common sense.
“A real man would never make you question what you mean to him.”
Her last sentence hits me like a hot, deadly bullet to the chest. I lose my next breath at the impact of it, simply staring at her without a word to offer in response.
Because she’s right.
It makes sense. Adam wants me to take time to “find myself” again, or whatever. But I can do that with him. I can be his girlfriend and still take time to heal. In fact, why wouldn’t he want to be a bigger part of that?
He has the power to heal me, and yet he’s only using part of it.
It’s not that I don’t see the value in being alone, in taking time to reconnect with myself… but the thing is, I’m not alone. We text all the time, call every night, hang out alone, and do very girlfriend-slash-boyfriend things.
Like stick our tongues down each other’s throats.
And lick places not seen by the sun.
He’s with me, in practically every sense of the word, and I’m not going to let him play this game.
As soon as I realize it, as soon as I make the decision, I’m up off the floor, shaking out my achy legs from sitting crosslegged for so long.
“I need to run an errand real quick,” I say to Erin, casting a quick glance in the mirror at my hair. It’s messy, my cheeks flushed, but I don’t take time to fix it. “You okay for a little bit? I’ll be back.”
Erin smirks, like she knows, and opens her laptop again. “I’ll be here, Grand Little. Just going to stop by Skyler’s room here in a bit and see how her morning with Kip went.”
“Okay,” I say, not even really hearing her over the rushing rapids in my ears. “I’ll be back.”
Then, I’m flying down the stairs, out the door, and down Greek Row.
My eyes are hot on the Alpha Sigma house, the words I’ll say forming in my head so quickly that they disappear before I can practice them and get them on my tongue, ready to throw at Adam.
But it doesn’t matter. No matter how I say it, I will demand answers — and I won’t leave until I get them.
I knock hard on the door, annoyed when it doesn’t just open at the push of my hand. It’s a fraternity house, for God’s sake. They never lock their door. Beating my fist harder, I keep knocking and knocking, still to no avail.
The sun is setting off in the distance, the air growing cooler with its descent as Greek Row is cast in a low, orange light. Walking around to the backyard gate, I peek through one of the slits in the wooden planks, finding no bodies there, either.
Weird.
When I knock directly on his bedroom window without an answer, I give up, huffing as I rip my phone from my pocket.
- Hey. We need to talk. Where are you? -
But he doesn’t answer.
Not that minute, not that night, not even that week.
And with each passing day, with each minute that goes by with him ignoring me, acting like what happened between us Friday night was nothing, I get the answer to my unasked question — louder than I wanted, with a harsher reality than I could have imagined.
He got into my pants, and just like Clay, he disappeared.
Without a word.
Without so much as an I’m sorry, I can’t do this. Without an explanation. Without a care that he would break my heart in the process, just like every boy to touch it before him.
And suddenly, all the bullshit he served me on his shiny, golden platter rolls in my stomach, threatening to come back up.
I thought, when I was ready, I could fall into his arms and trust that he’d be there to catch me. But the truth is much harder to swallow.
The truth is, I fell a long time ago.
And Adam was never really there.