Chapter Ten Kami #2
I had just enough time to splash some water on my face before my alarm went off.
I had completely forgotten that Taylor and I had made plans to go to the library together.
I told Mom I was headed out to study and walked outside to meet Taylor in front of his house.
Imagine my surprise when I found not him there but Maggie. With Thiago.
“Hey, Kami,” she said cheerfully before I could turn back without making a spectacle.
Who the hell was she to call me Kami? Were we supposed to be friends or something?
As far as I remembered, we hadn’t parted on the best of terms after our little meeting to discuss how the other kids were beating up on my brother.
I forced a smile as I watched Thiago and his…
girlfriend? Hearing my name, he froze, his expression half-surprised, half-frightened.
I mean, shit, it hadn’t even been twelve hours since I’d had his dick in my mouth.
“Hey there, neighbor,” he said distantly.
I had to give it to him: he had a talent for acting like there was nothing going on.
To make matters worse, he grabbed Maggie around the waist and kissed her so hard it turned my stomach. I thought I was going to vomit.
“Is Taylor home?” I asked, wishing I could sink into the ground and vanish.
Thiago scowled. “He’s busy cleaning up all the shit his friends left behind after the party. Why, are you here to help him?”
Fuck. I’d forgotten all about that. “Yeah,” I said abruptly. “Can I go in?”
“Mi casa es tu casa,” he said, throwing an arm over Maggie’s shoulders.
I walked straight past them, wishing I could shove him on the way. In the living room, I opened my eyes wide with horror. “Jeeeesus…”
I saw Taylor in the kitchen doorway with an enormous plastic bag. “Hey, love,” he said, looking stressed.
“Taylor, this house is a wreck.”
“My mom’s going to kill me.” He came over to give me a kiss.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“I’d be deeply grateful.”
We started picking up as Thiago came back in and plopped down on the sofa with Maggie.
They put on a movie and started making out while we cleaned up.
They couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, touching each other as if we didn’t even exist. Watching Thiago nibble her ear, kiss her neck, stick his tongue in her mouth, and glance over at me to see if I was watching… I couldn’t handle it.
“You know, you could help us out,” I hissed, frowning at him until he pulled away from his girlfriend.
“Excuse me?” he said, and in a perverse way, I could tell he was enjoying this. “I could do what now?” He raised his hand to his ear as if he were hard of hearing.
“You were at the party too.”
“No, dear. I was in the house where the party took place. That’s totally different.”
“You were drinking,” I added. I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t care if I was right or wrong, I just couldn’t stand seeing him with her. Not after what we had done the night before. Not after that orgasm, after him touching me, him kissing me…
“Yeah, I drank one beer, in my own home, at a party I didn’t organize. So no, I don’t plan on lifting a finger, get it?”
“You’re a jerk,” I murmured, turning around and continuing sweeping.
“I’m a what?” he said, getting up and walking toward me.
“You heard me, jerk.”
We faced each other, both clenching our teeth, until he finally thought better of it.
“Taylor, someone here seems to need you!” he shouted. Then he asked me in a voice so soft no one else could hear it, “Something bothering you, little princess?”
“Just forget you ever knew me.”
“You sure you want me to do that?” He stared straight into my eyes, and without warning my stomach filled with wild butterflies.
“What is it now?” Taylor asked, hurrying down the stairs.
“Nothing,” Thiago said, sitting back down beside Maggie.
“We could help out a little,” she offered, looking at me with false sympathy. “I don’t mind.”
“We’re fine, thanks,” I responded.
I left the broom to help Taylor with the last couple of trash bags, and we went outside to leave them on the curb.
“I’ll grab a quick shower and we can bounce, OK?” he said as we walked back up the stairs.
“Great,” I said, falling back on his bed, where I should have wound up the night before. Where his lips should have kissed me passionately. Where his hands should have gripped me.
Why did I have to fuck everything up?
I took out my phone and looked at my Instagram again.
Now that people could no longer comment on the photo with Kate that I’d deleted, they were insulting me through DMs. It was weird to me that Taylor hadn’t brought it up.
So I told him the whole story when he came out, a towel wrapped around his waist.
“Someone really hacked your account?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said as he sat down beside me. “Someone is trying to mess with me, and I have no idea who it is. First the lockers, now this…”
“People are crazy. I’ll tell you one thing, though. If I find out who’s doing this, they won’t try anything like it again. I swear.”
“Don’t worry about it, babe,” I said, stroking his stubbly chin. “It’s probably just some bored loser.”
I didn’t say anything about the weird account, @omv_ovamat, or the message from it.
I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want to admit aloud how much people hated me.
I was already ashamed enough, without having to add on all this extra bullshit.
I saw Momo again in my mind, and I wished I could forget that creepy face and everything related to it.
Once Taylor had gotten dressed, we walked downstairs and drove straight to the library. I tried not to notice that Maggie’s car was still there even though she and Thiago had disappeared together.
Of course, as luck would have it, half the student body was at the library that day.
Midterms were coming up, and a lot of projects were due.
It wasn’t easy to get through my readings on female sexuality with Taylor right there next to me.
He kept cracking jokes, but still, I found the information interesting.
Did you know a large number of men still think the clitoris is an invention?
Or that a lot more lesbians achieve orgasm than heterosexual women?
Or that 68 percent of women have admitted to faking an orgasm at least once?
The more I read, the more fascinated I became, especially about the gaps in our understanding of female sexuality and sexuality in general. There were so many myths and so much prejudice about women’s pleasure that I wanted to share all the statistics I’d discovered with everyone under the sun.
“Wait, so the clit is inside the body too?”
We were looking at a drawing describing how the clitoris is an organ that measures four inches long and has more than 8,000 nerve endings.
“I guess,” I said in a low voice, looking at the drawing.
“Look at this: It says, ‘It wasn’t until 1998 that Australia’s first female urologist depicted the anatomy of the clitoris in its entirety.
It is the only human organ designed exclusively for pleasure. ’”
“And for reproduction, though, right?” Taylor said, reading along.
“No,” I said. I had finished the paragraph before him.
“That’s the thing. For thousands of years, they’ve told women that the vagina only exists for reproduction.
Nobody wanted to admit that the organ that gave us pleasure wasn’t actually the vagina!
Because, after all, women’s sole purpose was to make babies, right? ”
“Hey, don’t get mad at me,” he said, surprised by my tone.
“You can see why it bothers me though, right? That no one gave a shit about studying women’s pleasure until 1998!”
“That’s just the year one woman discovered one thing, it doesn’t mean that…”
“You don’t get it! Our pleasure was stolen! And you know why? Because men wanted us to think vaginal orgasms were the only kind so we’d believe we needed them to give us pleasure.”
“C’mon, girls these days touch themselves more than we do.”
“Yeah, good for us,” I answered, still looking at the screen. “Look! The clitoris wasn’t even included as a body part in high school textbooks until 2017!”
“Yeah, it’s scandalous,” Tay said.
I scowled at him. “This is serious!”
“It’s interesting too. When people hear all this in class, they’re going to flip out.”
“That’s my hope…”
I remembered my first time with Danny. What a dickhead. He didn’t bother touching me where he should have; he never asked if I liked it or if I’d had an orgasm. Nothing! Once he had come, the whole thing was over.
“Listen, I promise I’ll give your clitoris all the attention it needs once you decide to let me get near it,” he whispered, causing my cheeks to turn an intense red.
“It’ll happen,” I said, smiling.
“I guess that’ll have to do,” he said, shutting his laptop and yawning. “Man, I’m exhausted.”
I was too. Studying the day after a party was the absolute worst. I put my things in my backpack and got ready to walk out, and just then, I saw Kate enter with Amanda and Lisa in tow. They all glared at me before walking off toward a table by the fireplace.
“They can’t stand me,” I said, wondering how things had gotten so out of hand.
“Forget them, babe,” Taylor replied.
“I’m more worried about who’s behind all this,” I said, glaring at Danny, who’d been sitting at the next table over, ignoring us the entire time.
“You know who I saw him making out with yesterday, right?” Taylor asked.
“Yeah, Ellie.”
“You got it.” He slipped his laptop into its case and looked at me more seriously. “Does that bother you?”
“It bothers me that she hid it from me, but mostly I can’t believe that she could feel attracted to him, knowing how he treated me.”
“Maybe he’s nice to her?”
I had been about to gather my books, but I stopped. “What? Are you saying it was my fault he’s such an asshole to me?”
“Jesus, Kami, I didn’t say anything like that. You’re touchy as hell.”