Page 16 of Tutor With Benefits

“You need to lose your virginity.”

SIX

CORY

“Ijust don’t understand how you can be so stupid sometimes,” I say to Zach as we skate around the rink.

“I’mstupid?” Zach asks. “How the fuck am I stupid?”

“How are you not?” I ask.

He flips around and skates backward as I’m skating toward him, maintaining the conversation without missing a beat.

“For starters, pretty sure all three of us went through with the idea, not just me,” he tells me. “So aren’t you and Tay just as stupid?”

“Taylor didn’t tell the shyest girl in school she has to have sex with him!” I snap. “God, I don’t think you could have been any more tacky about it if you had fucking tried! The only thing I can think of that would be worse than what you did is walking up to her and smacking her in the face with your dick.”

“Come on, it’s not that bad,” Zach argues. “Besides, I was getting sick of talking about how her roommate is moving and she’s going to be so sad and lonely and blah blah blah. We were there to make a deal with her, not have a therapy session, and with the way you two were carrying on, I was sure you were going to join hands and start singing some camp song or some shit.”

“Fuck you,” I say. “I was trying to show her I was supportive of the shit she’s going through. You know, starting off with asking her if she was okay after what happened to her last night? Not just walking up to her and acting like it’s no big deal to tell her we want to learn chemistry from her, oh, and also have sex while we’re at it!”

“I don’t get what you’re so pissed off at me about.” Zach shrugs. “This whole thing was Taylor’s idea in the first place. If you’re having second thoughts about shit, you should be pissed off at him and maybe yourself for joining in on this plan in the first place.”

“I’m not pissed off with the plan, and I’m not pissed with Taylor,” I say, taking a breath. “What pisses me off is the fact that we have like one shot with this, and you go in there and basically tell her we’re having an orgy. I don’t know about you guys, but if I was in her position, I would head for the hills.”

“You are way overthinking this,” Zach tells me.

He’s still skating as casually as ever, but I don’t know how he can be so chill about this. I felt going into that conversation that our entire future on the team rested on how things went with Tori. And from my perspective, I couldn’t think of a worse way for it to have gone than for Zach to be, well, himself.

“Do you ever care about anything in your life?” I ask him. “If she says no, we’re fucked. There’s no other way around it. She’s our ticket out of this mess and staying on the team, and I just don’t think you could have fucked up the delivery worse than you did this afternoon.”

“Come on, if you have some way to tell someone they’re going to have to grow a pair and have sex, that’s better than the way I told Tori, I’m all ears. Because I certainly didn’t hear you say a word back there about it, or put it into your romantic way of saying things or whatever,” Zach replies.

“Taylor, back me up here,” I call over my shoulder. “Zach didn’t have to drop the bomb on her like that, did he?”

“I mean, I think Zach’s got a point here,” Taylor says. “I don’t know how else you want to tell someone that they’re going to get sex tutoring other than the way he did.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say with a shake of my head.

“I can’t imagine sugarcoating it to the point that she has no idea what she’s getting into. Then what? We get to the point of doing the deed, and she freaks out, saying that’s not what she signed up for? The girl probably has never even been kissed, so I wanted her to know from the beginning what it is we’re offering,” Zach says.

I don’t have an answer for that one.

He does have a point on that front. It’s not much of a point, but I can’t really argue, either.

It would be pretty bad to get her into the room and start making a move on her just to have her feel like she was tricked into things. That’s the last thing that would get her to be able to open up to the guy she likes. But still, given how shy she is—like, I see her as the kind of girl who can’t even talk about sex without blushing—I don’t see how telling her we’re going to have to have sex with her is going to be received well.

“Besides,” Taylor says, “I think telling her to not give us an answer right away helped the situation.”

“You think?” I ask, incredulous.

“I do,” he confirms. “Because if we were being creepy or whatever, it would be like we would want to have an answer right then. Like we’re telling her that we want to have sex with her and she better tell us yes, or that’s the end. I feel like telling her that this was something she ought to take the time to think about was a smart move. It puts the ball back in her court, and it gives her the chance to really weigh the pros and cons of the situation before she gets back to us.”

“Ever the analytical one,” Zach says.

He skates over to the cooler to grab a water, and I follow.

“I’m just saying there’s a lot of women out there who don’t like to be given a question and told to answer right away. Now with her being the wallflower she is, she’s got the time to go back to her dorm or whatever she said she was going to do and think about what she’s getting out of this. Which could very well be Johnny,” Taylor says.

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