Page 100 of Level Up
“It’s a daily struggle,” he replies, but he’s smiling like it’s a joke. Possibly.
“So which stuff is yours?” I ask, stepping further into the room to look around.
“Basically, just that dresser.” He points at a dresser below the window, right next to the beds. “And the lower bunk. That’s about it.”
“Minimalist,” I say, and he snorts.
“One way of putting it.”
I have to curl my hands into fists to resist the urge to look through all his drawers. I don’t know why; I’m not usually this nosy. And I learned at an early age, snooping around my grandma’s room, not to look in other people’s drawers.
But I want to knoweverything. I want to know if he folds or balls his socks—or worse, tosses them all in the drawer in one scattered pile, like I do. I want to know if he has any t-shirts I haven’t seen him wear yet. I want to know what kind of underwear he wears, since he’s never taken off his pants around me, despite the fact that he has seenallof me already. Not all at once, but a bit here or there. Enough to piece together a pretty good mental image. And meanwhile I have nothing.
Generally speaking, I have no interest in naked people. The shirtless dudes on the covers of books when I’m scrolling the library’s romance ebook collection are just awkward. And seeing Shawn naked did nothing for me. It was, at best, completely uninteresting. I wasn’t even repulsed, I just…did not care. At all.
And yet I’m now wondering…
“What’s that face for?” Damien asks, taking a step closer as he scrutinizes me.
I have no idea what my face is doing. “It’s just my face.”
“You’re thinking something.”
“No, I just—” I huff an exhale, defeated. “Do you evenwantto have sex with me?”
His eyebrows lift. “Now?”
“Yes—No! I mean, in general,” I say, growing more flustered by the second. “Just—Whenever we…do anything…I end up half-naked and you stay fully clothed, and you never even… Is it because you know I’ll be bad at it?”
He drags a hand over his face, nudging his glasses, like he’s embarrassed. “No,” he says; an uncomfortable laugh breaks his voice. “You won’t be bad at it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you already aren’t.”
“But—We’ve only done stuff for me.” I flap an arm in his direction. “What about you? Don’t you want…anything?”
“First of all, it’s notjustfor you. But I—I don’t want anything that will make you uncomfortable, no,” he says, even though this whole conversation is making me uncomfortable.
“And you think that if you—You think it would make me uncomfortable?”
He shrugs, but he seems as flustered as I feel. “I don’t—I don’t want to be like your ex, okay? I don’t want to just use you, not giving a fuck about how you feel about it, or doing things that you don’t enjoy?—”
“You’re not like him!” I assure him. “At all. Ever. In any way.”
“But you’re stillyou, aren’t you?” he says, and it feels like I’m being accused of something.
“What doesthatmean?” I ask, taking a step back.
“You’re the person who had sex with him even though you weren’t into it!” He quickly seems to regret his words, and he covers his face again. “Shit, I don’t mean—I don’t think you’d do that now, I swear, I just—I have this…fear.”
The Pit has relocated to my stomach. “Fear? About me?”
He walks over to his bed and sits at the edge of the mattress with his head in his hands. “I’m afraid that, even if you’re not into it, you won’t tell me to stop because you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”
“I—” I want to say that I would never do that, except he’s absolutely right that it’s what I did with my ex. And I care about Damien’s feelings a million times more than I ever did for Shawn’s. But I don’twantto do that to him. “I promise I’ll tell you.”
“Will you?”
