Page 18 of Don't Love Me
Not that Kaitlin went all the way. She was a virgin and holding onto it for reasons I didn’t get, but she would, at least, give me a hand job, and sometimes if I made her come with my fingers, she would lick my dick a little.
I liked Kaitlin enough. She was cool and funny. We both had the same goals. I think the whole sex thing was more about an irrational fear that, even with a condom, she might get pregnant and trash her whole life plan. She wanted to be a lawyer.
I was cool with it. I’d lost my virginity last year to Allison, who, after it happened, declared herself my forever girlfriend. That didn’t last more than a few months and I’d had to work hard to shake her loose.
Which is why when Kaitlin and I hooked up, I was relieved. She was not going to get clingy, and we were not going to get super serious. Both of us knew we ended the day after graduation.
The truth was, I doubted I had it in me to be super serious about anyone. Not now when everything was a countdown of days to my eighteenth birthday. Was I also fucked up because of my mom? Hell yes, I was.
Since the day the cops had come to remove me from my home, I’d known what it meant to have no control. No power over my mother, over my life. No choice in where I got to live or how I got to live.
The state controlled me.
The state allowed me to live with my uncle.
When I turned eighteen that would legally change. I was going to Princeton. I was going to get a job on Wall Street. I was going to have more money than Arthur Landen ever dreamed of having, and no one was going to take anything from me again.
This was not something I shared with people. For five years, I’d been playing a role as the humble, grateful teenager who had been saved from my addicted mother. Good athlete, good student, Home-fucking-coming King.
The only person who actually knew the truth, who could see right through me with her blue eyes, was the only person I needed to avoid. Which I had for the most part.
“Marc?”
I turned at the sound of my name. Ashleigh. She’d been in the shadows near the water fountain next to the boys’ room. When she stepped out so I could see her, I noticed the dress and the way her hair fell straight around her shoulders.
Shit. She looked good. Not like Kaitlin. Kaitlin was sex on a stick and Ashleigh was still only fifteen. But with the makeup and the dress, it was starting to become obvious she wasn’t a kid anymore.
I had this instinct to tell her she looked nice. That she was growing up.
But I didn’t. I wouldn’t let myself be nice to her. Despite her hero worship of me, the fact that we lived on the same estate, and grew up together. Despite knowing she came to every one of my soccer games, which I never let on I knew, I treated her like I always treated her.
Mean. Hard. A lesson in reality when princess had only known life in the castle.
Now, however, I was also under orders from her father to make it clear to her there could be no attachment. Because of mychallenging circumstances.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked curtly.
She shrugged. “Wasn’t interested in dancing, I guess.”
“Right. I can’t take you home,” I told her. “I have plans.”
“It’s okay. George is going to pick me up. I guess…your plans… I guess those are with Kaitlin. Is she your girlfriend?”
I winced. I didn’t talk about this kind of stuff with Ash. This world and my world at home had been separate until now. Was this what I’d been dreading? Her seeing these other aspects of my life? It didn’t matter.
“Yes. She’s my girlfriend. What about it?”
“Oh.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I didn’t know.”
“Why would I tell you?” I asked impatiently.
Then I saw it. Her eyes got wide; her lower lip wobbled.
She was hurt. Fuck me. Of course, she was. All that hero worship wasn’t just because she was lonely. She was growing up. Thinking about me, no doubt, in different ways. I wasn’t oblivious to her in a bikini, and now all that parading made sense. Why she was always prancing around me asking me how she looked.
Ashleigh Landen was crushing on me. Hard.
“Are you serious right now? Are you that pathetic?”
