“Because she remembered everything up until that point. And when she woke up, all her clothes were on, she wasn’t sore anywhere, and she was alone.”
“Let me guess.” I assumed what was coming next. “No one believed her that nothing happened.”
“I did.” She nodded her head. “But I was the only one. The pictures were eventually taken down, but by then, it was too late. Everyone had already seen them. And they had copies or screenshots. It was the ultimate example of how bad social media could be. How it could ruin someone’s life.”
I felt like a lightbulb had switched on inside my head. “And that’s when you discovered your passion for it?”
“That’s definitely where it started, yeah. I wanted people to be accountable for the things they posted online. To realize that everything wasn’t a joke. That sometimes, real people were affected and got hurt. I wanted my fellow students to think about the messages their posts were sending. You have any idea how hard it is to get a teenager to think before they act?” she said with a slight laugh.
“I think most people don’t think before they act. Especially online. It gives them some kind of power trip to be anonymous.”
“I totally agree.”
“So, is that where your rule came in?” I asked, still wanting to know.
“Well, yeah. The shots got me pretty drunk. It felt like all the logical and rational parts of my brain shut off. I didn’t care about anything. They could have told me to jump off the roof and into the pool, and I would have done it without question. If I had stayed, it would have been both of us in those pictures instead of just her.”
“ ‘Alcohol makes you stupid,’ ” I said with a nod of understanding, repeating the words she’d once told me.
“Exactly.”
“Then, why’d you take the shots from Logan?” I found myself getting upset, but I wasn’t sure why exactly.
“I’m older now. I think I can handle my liquor better than when I was in high school,” she said. “But mostly, I did it to get back at you. To show you that you weren’t the boss of me. To be rebellious,” she rattled off the list like it was right there on the tip of her tongue the whole time, just waiting to be set free.
“Took shots with my enemy just to spite me,” I started before she interrupted.
“I didn’t know he was your enemy,” she said seriously, as if trying to convince me of something I’d already known.
“But you do now, right? You know he isn’t a good person. Tell me you see that,” I pressed because I needed to hear her say that she saw through Logan’s false front.
“I do see that. But it doesn’t matter. I’m with you now. Logan’s irrelevant.”
I wanted to agree with her, but I knew Logan better than that. If he wanted to fuck with me more, I’d just given him the ammunition he needed to do it. He was only guessing before that Christina was my weakness, but all I’d done by pursuing her and making her mine was prove him right. This thing with him wasn’t over, and I knew it.
Girlfriend
Christina
We stayed in the parking structure—or “our parking structure,” as Cole had called it—holding each other and talking until the sun started to set. Hours always seemed to fly by whenever we were together, and today had been no different. How had a single day felt more like twenty?
When he walked me to my apartment door, he shocked me for what felt like the hundredth time. “I don’t know if people do this anymore, but I don’t care. Will you be my girlfriend?” he asked, and I forced myself to hesitate instead of blurting out a resounding yes.
I thought I’d waited a little too long because he started shifting on his feet and dug his hands into his pockets.
“Look, I know that one day doesn’t change the past three years. But it’s just the beginning. We don’t have to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend even though I want to,” he said in a tone that left little room for questioning how he felt on the matter, “but I really, really, really don’t want you to date other people.”
“What about you?” I asked because it felt foolish to assume anything without at least asking. We’d been through too much.
“I don’t want to be with anyone else. Only you. But I get that I might be jumping the gun a little here even though it doesn’t feel like it. Like you said, it’s not like we just met.”
It didn’t feel like it was too quick for me either, but there was still a tiny part inside of me that wanted to encourage his suffering.
“Let’s hold off on the titles but definitely yes to the exclusively dating part.” It was my way of offering a compromise. Plus, I knew that I would never in a million years agree to be in this place with him again if there were going to be any other girls in the picture.
“Isn’t that basically the same thing?” he asked with an uncomfortable laugh, and I realized that I was being stubborn purely for the sake of it. Trying to hurt him because a part of me still hurt and hadn’t recovered.
“You’re right; it is,” I relented.
“So, that’s a yes then?”
I tried to stop my smile when he asked the question but failed.
“Don’t say no, Christina. Don’t say no because you want to punish me or make me work harder. I mean, I’ll do it. I’ll jump through all your hoops. But don’t make me if you don’t really want me to.”
He looked exhausted but sounded determined, and I knew that he meant every word. If I continued to keep him at arm’s length just to prove a point, he’d let me do it and probably not complain. But that wouldn’t be fair—to either of us. If I was going to give us a real shot, I had to do exactly what I’d told him we should during brunch—live in the future and not in the past.
“Okay. Yes.”
The smile on his face was enough to tell me that I’d made the right decision. He reached for me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and picked me up into the air, planting kisses all over my face and neck. He was so damn happy. And all because I’d agreed to be his girlfriend.
I am Cole Anders’s freaking girlfriend!
One Week Later
When I’d walked through the front door that night after our first date, Lauren had been eavesdropping—or at least trying to. She said she couldn’t hear a damn thing and insisted I fill her in. To my surprise, she was excited, encouraging, and hopeful. A part of me had thought that she might be more hesitant than I had tried to be, but she wasn’t. It felt good to have my best friend on my side. It reassured me that I wasn’t a complete idiot for giving Cole a real shot after everything we’d been through.
“It’s because of everything you’ve been through that you should give him a shot,” Lauren had said that night. And when I questioned her on what she meant, she finished with, “You two deserve a real chance. He’s never given you one before, and he’s begging for it now. You would have always wondered what if and what could have been if you didn’t get this opportunity. He would have haunted you until you were old and unhappily married one day, thinking back to the hot baseball player you should have ended up with instead of the guy by your side.”