"You need to get out of here," Donna warned me, and I cocked an eyebrow at her. I was playing confident, even though I felt like my knees were on the brink of trembling out right from underneath me.
"Oh, yeah? And what are you going to tell everyone?” I asked her. "You going to tell them you kicked me out because your boyfriend couldn’t keep his hands off me?”
"I’m going to tell them," she replied, taking a step toward me and running her tongue over her lips, "that I kicked you out because you’re a slut. And I don’t want a slut living under my roof."
I knew there was no room for debate in her voice. I knew there was no chance of me convincing her to see me any other way. That was who I was to her now--that was the name she had given me, her voice pulsing around and around inside my head until I couldn’t hear anything else. Slut, slut, slut, slut.
And it was with that word beating in my ears that I turned on my heel to head to my room and pack up my stuff. I had to get out of here. Once and for all. I felt the tears prick my eyes, but I wouldn’t let her or anyone else see them. I had to be strong. Even though it felt like the words she had just spoken to me had pierced vicious holes in my very being.
Chapter 11
Pick yourself up
I lay back on the hotel bed and stared at the ceiling blankly. I would have closed my eyes and tried to catch some rest, but the truth was, every time I tried to switch my brain off, I found the words Donna had dripped in my ear filling my head once more. I couldn’t focus on anything or anyone else.
She had called me a slut. And maybe, if I hadn’t been caught in the process of trying to fuck her boyfriend, that wouldn’t have bothered me quite so much. Perhaps I could have brushed it off and acted like I didn’t care one little bit. But her words had cut me down to my very core. I didn’t know that I could brush them off just like that.
That word still had such power over me. Such control. It laid its hands around my neck and choked me, filling me until that’s all that I was. I knew Donna hadn’t meant those words to wound me the way they had--she had been angry, and rightly so, lashing out after catching me in the act--but I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Thinking about the fact that I thought she probably had a point.
I hated that I was letting myself get to this point in my head once more. I had been doing so well putting distance between myself and those words, between myself and the useless power they had over me. I had done so much in the last few weeks, discovering so much about myself. I felt like I was in the very process of reeling back on the lot of it even as I lay there. All because of that one word. Slut, slut, slut.
I peeled myself off the bed to root through the minibar again. I’d already had a good go at it earlier in the day, but the tiny bottles were hardly enough to get me tipsy. Nothing was taking the edge off the way I was feeling, and being stuck in this shitty hotel room wasn’t exactly helping.
My mom had given me an emergency credit card for when I needed it, and I had used what little was on it to get somewhere to stay after Donna had kicked me out. As I made my way around the house, I had waited for her to back down and tell me she was only kidding and that, of course, she wasn’t about to kick me to the curb--whether I had fooled around with her boyfriend or not. But she stood there, watching me pack up my stuff, her mouth set into a hard line following me this way and that to make sure I was really getting out.
Mark didn’t say a word, the coward, even though he must have known this was more his doing than it was mine. Donna just didn’t have the nerve to kick him out.
To say that I had been going through some kind of crisis since then would have been something of an understatement. I felt totally and utterly lost. I thought I had been in control of all of this, keeping a tight grip on what mattered. The truth was, I hadn’t been able to keep my head in the game. Now I was paying for it. I had done something stupid, really stupid, and I didn’t have the skills like Donna did to keep things from getting out of hand. And, to top it all off, I hadn’t even lost my virginity to a guy the way I wanted.
I felt like I was losing my mind. How could I be so far removed from the person I had been just a couple of months ago? A mere matter of weeks had passed since I’d been dressed in long skirts and keeping my eyes on the ground when men came into the room for fear of giving them the wrong idea. That’s just how I thought I would always be. How could I let go of that? It was the way I was built, the woman I had been and always would be, at least until I met the man I was going to marry.
But now I was a slut. A bisexual slut who had spent a few days fucking a woman. Who had tried to tempt a man into cheating on his girlfriend. Who would have succeeded if I’d had just a little more time. I didn’t know myself anymore. I was so distant from the person I had believed I was.
Sometimes, when I found myself particularly lonely, hurt by everyone I had driven away from me, I wondered if it would have been better if I had gotten that clitoris numbing surgery. The one my mother had sent me here to reconsider. None of this would have happened if I had just found someone who could give it to me. I wouldn’t have hurt Donna, I wouldn’t have come down here, Donna wouldn’t have had the chance to hook up with my stepfather. Everything would have stayed just as it had been before, the way it was meant to be.
I couldn’t help but blame my sexuality for all of this. I hated that it had lived inside me all this time and I had just allowed it to hang out there, not bothering to get it in hand or shut it down or take care of it. If I hadn’t bottled it up for so long, maybe I would have been able to unleash it in a way that didn’t destroy everything around me. But as it was, the sheer power of all of this had been … well, it had been way too much. Now I had nobody to blame but myself for how lonely and hopeless I felt.
I could have gone home, but I knew then that I would have had to explain myself and why I had ended up alone. I didn’t even know if my family realized I had been kicked out of the house. I doubted Thom would be in any hurry to let them know, especially after what the two of us had very nearly done together. Goodness only knew what Donna would make of it if she found out her boyfriend hadn’t been the first man in her life I’d gone after.
I had headed down to the hotel bar a couple of times in the hopes of flirting my way out of the hole I was in, but every time a man showed me any kind of interest, I found myself feeling dirty again. I couldn’t believe that I just let this happen. I had allowed the pure physical pleasure to take control of me, and it landed me here--all alone, with nothing to my name but this room and a past studded with different partners and yet frustratingly sparse on them all at the same time. When I flirted with these cheesy guys at the bar, it was because I thought I should, not because I wanted to. I thought I needed to keep my sexuality ticking over or else it would go away again, but it didn’t feel the same as it had before. It didn’t feel good.
And it was sitting there, going through the minibar in my hotel room, when it hit me. It was because I was doing it out of obligation. I wasn’t letting the zing of attraction draw me to the men I truly wanted. I was taking any man; any man who would even glance at me, and hoping he could make me feel the way I had before. That he could make me feel alive like I had done before I had been kicked out.