He grunted and without a single word, he pivoted me and bent me over the back of the couch. Before I could take another breath, he yanked the thong aside, and entered me from behind.
“Jesus, Nate—“ It’s not that he’d never taken me from behind before, and I still liked it rough. But something was off. I felt like a stranger was fucking me, and it wasn’t right. “Wait, Nate, slow down… Nate, stop…NATE! STOP! Get off me…!”
That must have gotten through to him, because he froze.
“What? What’s your problem, Keira?” I could feel his cock shrinking. I put my foot on his thigh and pushed. He backed up and pulled out of me. I spun around and glared at him.
“What’s my problem? Are you fucking kidding me, Nate? You are not going to stand there and tell me I’m the one with the problem here. You’ve been tense all semester, and I get that. You have an incredible amount of pressure on you this year. But something’s happened within the last week. I don’t know what’s going on, but you’ve been moody and distant. And all I’ve tried to be is helpful, accommodating, affectionate— hell, even loving. And you’re going to just grab me and start fucking me like some kind of whore? My god, I wondered for a minute if you were even going to stop!”
“Well, isn’t that what you want? I thought you liked it that way, Keira. Now all of a sudden you’re miss prim and proper?”
“No, that’s not—“
“You pulled your pants down and showed me your ass, Keira. What did you expect to happen?”
I had to take a minute to try and gather my thoughts. I took a breath and answered him.
“What I thought would happen is that we would engage in a mutually satisfactory act of sex. But Nate… it was like being manhandled by a complete stranger. You weren’t there with me. It was like I could have been anyone—and you know it.”
The look he gave me then let me know he agreed with me, but I guess his pride wouldn’t let him say it out loud.
“Right,” he said, stuffing his cock back into his pants. I realized then that it was a good thing we hadn’t finished, because he hadn’t put a condom on. “Look, I just need some air or something. Why don’t we call it a night, and I’ll meet up with you after the pep rally tomorrow night? It’s probably gonna go extra late, they’ve invited the press and everything…”
The way his voice trailed off, it was almost like he didn’t want me there. But I told myself he was actually giving me an out because he knew I hated crowds. I rarely went to the rallies, and he’d always come to get me afterward either to pick me up for a date, or to just hang out.
“Sure. I have a big paper due this weekend, so I was going to be studying anyway. I’ll be in my room. If you come, you come, if you don’t, you don’t.”
A sadness I’d never seen, not even when his uncle died, swept across Nate’s face.
“I’ll be there, Keira. I’d never do that to you; say I’d show up and then not.”
“I know, I just… didn’t want you to feel any more pressure about anything than you already do.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that,” he said quietly. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.”
“Actually, I’d rather you didn’t. Not tonight. Like you, I need to get some air—alone.”
He nodded at me, and I gathered my things and walked out. I wondered how long he stayed there in the Crow’s Nest and if he was able to get any schoolwork done. I knew I wasn’t. It was still relatively early, so I walked to the Starbucks where he’d taken me that first day for breakfast and ordered a chai. I sipped it all the way home and tossed the empty cup in a trash can on the path leading up to the dorm. Gwen was still out when I came in, and I crawled into bed and fell into a fitful sleep.
In a surprising turn of events, Gwen had actually broken up with DJ the previous spring and had started dating Tank just before the end of the school year. They’d gotten serious in a heartbeat, so much so that they’d decided to rent an apartment together for the summer and stay in East Lansing. Gwen’s parents weren’t too crazy about the idea, but she was nineteen, and didn’t give them much of a chance to talk her out of it. Nate and I came to see them a couple of times during the summer, and they seemed happy to the point of being disgusting. And when we all came back, Tank having moved back onto campus early for football camp, nothing had changed for them. They were like two peas in a pod.
Of course Gwen was concerned for the distance that had seemed to creep up between me and Nate. The night of the pep rally, I had my head in an advanced calculus book and was pouring over a chapter on differential equations, or at least pretending to, when she put on her jacket to go to the pep rally.
“Sure you don’t want to go? It’s not just a bonfire in the middle of the quad. I bet the gym’ll be packed, the news is going to be there and everything.”
“So I heard,” I said without looking up. I loved Gwen, but her cheery state of being head over heels in love with Tank was becoming annoying. “You know I hate those things anyway. Nate’ll be over afterwards anyway.”
She came over and stood by my desk, so I finally looked up at her.
“Keira, you know I’m the last person to try to tell you what to do.”
“Said the woman who told me I need to dress better,” I reminded her.
“Um, it worked, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I admitted.
“Look, even though things have been… tense… between you and Nate, I bet he would love it if you surprised him and went to the pep rally. I think he’d just love to look out and see your face in the crowd.”
“I’ll think about it, I promise,” I said.
I still had no intention of going to the damn rally, but I started to think more about what Gwen said. What if he really did want me there, if it really would help bring him out of this funk he’d been in?
I still didn’t want to stay there for the whole thing, so I waited until I thought it was at least halfway over before I made my way over to the gym. I miscalculated, and as I approached, people were starting to come out. The rally was over. At least I’d be there when Nate came out, and maybe we could go for burgers with Tank and Gwen, or better yet, go back to my room while they went out for burgers, so we could find our happy again.
When Nate came out, he was wearing Tracy Abbott like a second sleeve.
Chapter 11
Nate
I should have known I wouldn’t be able to fool Keira, to hide that something was seriously off with me. I didn’t really want to hide anything from her—I just didn’t know how to tell her about the hopeless situation I’d found myself in overnight. So, I did what most cowards do, I hid behind pride and weak excuses. It was eating me from the inside out.
I wanted to find a way to put her off of studying together, especially of tutoring me anymore. I’d have to find a way to tell her I didn’t need her help in that way anymore, as part of McDaniels’s fucked up plans for me. In the meantime, every day I spent around Keira, and trying to pretend that everything was okay, that everything was normal, just made it worse. Once again, I was a pressure cooker waiting to explode. The night before the pep rally, she insisted on coming over to the Crow’s Nest to study together. She wasn’t tutoring me that night, we were just going to try to get our homework done in each other’s company.