Page 15 of What It Means To Be Found

“Help! Help!” I started flapping my hands like a bird, unable to make a movement with my body that made sense. Anxiety was taking over my muscles.

“With what?” Courtney asked, setting the phone down on the table before she plopped herself down on Josh’s lap. He wrapped both of his arms around her waist before resting his forehead against her shoulder, his own shoulders still shaking with silent laughter.

“How do I explain this?!” I cried, rubbing my palms on my cheeks in stress. Josh lifted his head from Courtney’s shoulder to smirk at me.

“You say, ‘Don’t worry, Logan, I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about this big hunky alien in my book that I masturbated to last night.’” I sarcastically laughed at Josh’s summary of the situation, pulling open a kitchen drawer next to me, and wadding a hand towel into a ball before chucking it at him.

He dodged the ball easily. To be fair, it was a bad throw.

“I can’t say that! Then he’ll know I read alien erotica!” I explained with angst.

“So?” Courtney lifted a shoulder, her smile becoming a little more confused.

“So, I don’t want him to tease me for what I read!” Courtney shook her head at my explanation as if she was struggling to come up with another solution to the problem.

“Well, you could always pretend you’re into him and just allow him to let you down easy.” Courtney quirked her lips to the side. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea. If you pretend you want to sleep with him and he turns you down, he probably won’t make fun of you for anything anymore. He’d be too embarrassed to be anything other than cordial with you.”

“Hold up.” Josh kept his arms around Courtney, but leaned back to get a better look at her. “What makes you think Logan wants to turn her down?”

“He responded with, ‘We should probably talk,’ which never means a good talk.” Courtney lifted her eyebrows at Josh as if her explanation was obvious.

“You don’t know that. You’re assuming a lot, love.” Josh nipped once at Courtney’s ear, making her shoulders scrunch and playfully shove him away.

“You’re telling me you would respond with ‘we should probably talk’ if you were all for what you heard in those voice memos from Lo?” Courtney countered, staring her fiancé down. It was his turn to quirk his lips to the side.

“Courtney,” Josh’s voice dropped, “If you had sent me those voice memos when we were unofficially dating, I would have called you immediately to initiate some sort of phone sex with you.”

“And that,” she tapped her fiancé on the nose with her index finger, “Is exactly my point.”

Josh frowned at this.

So did I.

Was I into Logan? No. I mean, he was physically attractive, but that didn’t mean I wanted to give him a ride of any sort. Even though the mental image Josh had painted for me may have lingered in my mind. Perhaps that mental image was why I started reading the alien erotica in the first place last night, just so I’d stop fantasizing about a panting Logan above me.

I was a warm-blooded woman after all.

However, why the fuck wouldn’t Logan be into me? I was a good-looking woman. I was a fucking underwear model at one point, goddammit.

…Probably for the same mysterious reason he was so rude to you when you first met, my mind answered for me. I frowned a little.

Courtney’s idea made a huge dent in my pride, but she had a point. Which was more embarrassing, getting turned down by Logan, or Logan knowing about my alien erotica and using that as ammunition to tease me for however long he wanted?

“Or,” I responded, coming to a standing position, and retrieving my coffee mug before it cooled off too fast, “I could just ignore him and the messages and pretend none of this happened.”

“That’s the more childish way to go about this, yes,” Susan spoke up with a nod of her head. I nibbled on my bottom lip and shrugged.

“I’ll figure something out, but for now I’m ignoring this whole thing. I can’t handle acknowledging this.” I took my phone back from where Courtney rested it on the kitchen table, turned on the lock screen, and shoved it in my sweatpants pocket.

“You do you, Lo.” Josh encouraged me with a pump of his fist. Courtney just smiled at her fiancé before planting a loud smack of a kiss on his cheek. Soon, they were making googly eyes at each other, and I took that as my cue to retreat back to my new room to finish unpacking.

I was spiraling.

Do I want Logan to make fun of me for my reading material? Or feel pity for me because he has to turn me down? It was a lose-lose situation for me. I hated that I was torn between these two options. For now, I was hoping that maybe he wouldn’t think too much about the messages and would probably move on from the whole thing as well.

Maybe, if I was super lucky, we could both move forward and pretend that I never sent those voice messages in the first place. I leaned into this fantasy of mine as I organized my new closet, determined to get rid of the butterflies wreaking havoc in my stomach through tried-and-true denial.

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