Page 80 of The Rogue

Equally impossible was taking her against the side of the barn where anybody could walk in. Equally impossible was taking her,hisfriend, who’d confided in him that her experience of sex had been lackluster so far, in a way that would satisfy his base lust, and little else.

“Well... that really sucks,” she said.

“What?”

“That this was so... good.”

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“It could’ve been bad.”

He huffed a laugh. “Did you think it would be?”

“I tried not to think about it. Until tonight.”

“Bullshit,” he snorted, “you thought about it before tonight.”

“I did,” she said. “But I didn’t let myself really imagine it until tonight, you know?”

If only he didn’t. “Yeah. I do.”

“I haven’t been keeping this a secret. It’s not like I’ve been secretly waiting to jump you,” she said. “I made a decision. When we were teenagers. Thatthiswasn’t you and me, not when I needed us to beus.”

He nodded slowly, looking straight ahead. “So did I, Rue.”

She looked away, her cheeks turning pink. “We chose the same path.”

“Yeah. We did. And itwasa choice. Because with hormones and everything. I never was as close to another girl as I was you. We could’ve been the Fia Sullivan and Landry King of our grade.”

“And no thank you,” she said.

“A bigno fuckingthankyou. I didn’t want the drama.”

“Me either.”

It wasn’t that simple. He and Rue had never been drama. But they had been sure. Certain. They had been and he hadn’t wanted to do anything to disrupt that. They trusted each other. And introducing anything else into the mix had seemed like a bad bet. Especially then. Especially when they’d been young.

“I wasn’t ready for sex,” she said. “Back then.”

“I probably wasn’t either. But I ran out and had it so that... I didn’t want my hormones fucking with you and me, okay? The minute I started looking at you differently I did something about it.” The words sat uneasy inside him, like they were a lie. But they couldn’t be.

“What?”

“I just thought it was the better choice.”

“You had sex with somebody because you wantedme?”

“It’s not that simple. I had sex with somebody else because I could feel myself beginning to be attracted to you. I wanted to firmly remind myself which camp you were in. Our friendship survived so much already. I didn’t want it to collapse because you were beginning to become a woman and I was becoming a man, and that was changing things. It used to be comfortable for us to sit together in the barn, with our heads together.And then it wasn’t. It used to be comfortable for us to hold each other when it was cold, and then it wasn’t. You know what changed.”

“I got boobs?”

“Yeah, that’s what I would’ve said when I was fifteen, but we know now it’s a little more complicated than that. Our bodies started to recognize how we could fit together. Webothdecided not to take that path, so don’t be wounded about it.”

“I can be wounded about it if I want,” she said, sounding angry.

“You chose something different too. You chose Asher.”

“Yeah. I did.” She was silent for a moment. “I really don’t want to mess us up,” she said. “But I realized earlier tonight that the ship kind of already sailed.”

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