“I suppose. I just didn’t think you’d be a virgin. Don’t people just fuck all the time in Florida?”
She made a confused face, then let out a laugh.
“Is that Florida’s reputation, just fucking all the time?”
“It was voted most randy state by Barschoolsports last year. I’m not making this up.”
“Well, I am a virgin, and I guess some people like to get into the hookup culture, especially in college. I swore off men for a while and poured myself into my theatre major. Acting is a great outlet. After a while, I started dating around again, but I never really felt a great connection with a guy, and thus I never decided to go all the way with them.”
“But you do with me, after less than one week.”
“Shouldn’t you be trying to convince me to sleep with you, not give me reasons to stay away from you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because that’s what guys do. They’ll say whatever they have to say so that they can get into your pants.”
I rolled back in my chair, laughing.
“What? Why is that funny? It’s true,” she added.
I sighed. “Maybe it’s true for guys that can’t get any.”
“Oh, and you don’t have that problem?”
“Look. I feel a connection with you, too. Honestly, I’m enjoying our time together--fucking or no fucking. Did I love the way you moaned and twisted while I went down on you tonight? Yes. Would I do that again? Of course. Do I want to fuck you? Of course I do. You’re absolutely stunning. But I think it’s more fun if we can talk about it a little more and get everything out in the open, don’t you think?”
Her face was starting to redden, and she reached for her glass of water.
“So open all of the sudden.”
I shrugged, but didn’t elaborate.
The truth was, when she was hiding in the shower, an array of horrible thoughts flitted through my mind. I played out a scenario in which Bob and Jared had already done some incredibly stupid shit.
But the mental exercise made me feel loose and relieved when I realized Natalie was okay.
“Do you have a drink?” she asked when I stayed silent. “I could use one right now.”
“There’s not much alcohol in this house,” I reminded her. “There’s only one way to get high tonight.”
She furrowed her brow. “Wait. Are you secretly doing drugs here?”
I chuckled. “No. I meant fucking each others’ brains out, Florida.”
“Oh.”
She brought her cute brown doe eyes back to me, and played with her hair.
“I mean, it’s not like we’re going anywhere tonight, right.”
“Right. So we can sit back and enjoy what’s about to happen.”
She exhaled audibly. “Wow.”
“Wow what?”
“It’s just....this is so different from all the other guys I’ve been with. They just want to jump right into hooking up. Or like…trick me into getting drunk.”
“Let’s go sit on the couch though, since we’re done. I’ll put something on in the background. What’s your favorite Mighty Ducks movie?”
“Pssh. Mighty Ducks II. Is that even a debate?”
I grinned as I got up and connected my tablet to the TV so we could watch. “You know, I think we may actually be soulmates.”
“Fat chance of that,” she said. “We haven’t even, you know.”
“Haven’t even what?”
“Had sex yet. There’s no way we’ll know for sure until after that.”
A pang of guilt crept up inside me as we sat down on the couch, and I started the movie. The snow came down like crazy, and I couldn’t help but think about how it was a blustery night like this when my sister had passed away.
Natalie put her legs on top of my lap and leaned into her corner of the couch. It felt so cozy inside, and I almost didn’t want to ruin the moment. But I also knew that if I didn’t come clean about Jared and Bob and took her virginity, I’d always feel as though I’d seduced her under false pretenses, and I didn’t want that.
She was too good, too pure. Going down on her, for some reason, was different than taking her V card.
“Well, Natalie, I should probably tell you why I’ve been acting this way.”
She sat up. “You’re acting so serious all of the sudden.”
I took a deep breath, glancing at the big window in the living room before I brought my eyes back to her.
“I know. I want you to know, we were young when we decided on this.”
A look of concern spread across her face.
“When you decided what?”
My throat clenched, and I hesitated, but I had to tell her.
“When we decided that we hated you, Natalie, and that we’d get back at you some day.”
Her lip trembled.
“What the hell do you mean, you decided you hated me?” she asked.
I held her eyes. If I wasn’t going to tell the truth, how could I expect the same from her?
“It started in my sophomore year of high school, two years after you left. Hardly anything registered in my life up until then. Looking back it’s because I really did live a charmed life. I had a loving family, good friends, and was a hockey star. Until the day my dad died in a mine accident and everything changed.”
She blinked, holding my eyes as I went on.
“At dinner the last few nights before the accident, my dad had been talking about leaks in the mine shaft. He’d reported them to the higher-ups, but there was a bottleneck in getting anything done about it. He was a union member, so he’d floated the idea of a strike. Not for pay, but for conditions and better safety precautions. Something stopped him from acting, and it was almost like he foresaw his own death. In the summer I was heading into my junior year of high school, he perished along with sixteen other miners when a wall collapsed.”
Her hand drifted to her mouth. “Oh my God.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand why my dad never told me about this.”
I felt myself burst through a wall of emotion as I retold the story. It’d been years since I’d gone into the details.
“After he died, I went into a spiral. Me and my sister both did. We drank and drank, out at parties, late nights. Drugs. My mom, too. We were all beside ourselves. I started taking odd jobs that summer so we wouldn’t have the house foreclosed on. It was a dark time.”
“I don’t get it. What does this have to do with you hating me?”
“I’m getting to that. After a few months, an independent report came out about the mining accident, and, you have to understand--we were all crushed, and irate. But the report found no wrongdoing, and essentially made it impossible for any of us to sue your dad’s company for damages. There was big, national coal money that got put into keeping the story quiet. Meanwhile I was working my ass off, trying to help my family make ends meet as a sixteen year old. But we knew your old man Toft had oodles of money. We didn’t know what he was doing with the profits, though. So me and two of my close buddies--Jared and Bob--we scrounged up some cash and got a lawyer to look into the situation for us. Turned out, he’d been putting all of his profits into a trust for his only daughter--you.”