I Was Here(99)

             And then I wake up in the morning, and they’re not, and I’m cold, even though the room, which never cooled down in the night, is starting to get hot again. I sit up. There’s no sign of Ben, though his stuff is in a neat pile in the corner.

             I slip into the shower. There’s an achiness between my legs, my virginity freshly gone. Meg loved that I seemed tough and sexy, and was a virgin. And now I’m not. If she were here, I could tell her about it.

             The shower goes icy, though it has nothing to do with the water temperature. Because I realize I couldn’t tell her. Because I did it with him. With Ben. And he was hers first, even if it was just once.

             I fucked her. That’s what he said.

             But I’m different. He and I, we became friends first.

             The rest of that conversation hurls back to me. Before it all shot to shit, we were friends. And then: When you fuck a friend, it ruins everything.

             No. This is different. “I am different.” I say it out loud in the shower. And then I almost laugh. Because how many other girls have fed themselves this line about Ben McCallister to make themselves feel better in the shower the morning after?

             Faces flash before me: my father’s. The look of hatred for him on that teen girl’s face. Bradford’s look of fury when I said the thing about his son. The various shades of loathing I’ve seen on Ben’s face, which have no doubt been reflected on mine.

             I think of one of the first emails I read from him. The one that got this whole thing started.

             You have to leave me alone.

             Through the cardboard walls, I hear the sound of the door opening and closing. I turn off the taps, now embarrassed to be in the bathroom with all my clothes out in the room. I wrap myself in as many towels as I can find, and tiptoe to my bag.

             “Hey,” Ben says. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see he’s not looking at me, either.

             “Hey,” I say back, eyes lasering in on my heap of clothes.

             He starts to say something, but I interrupt. “Hang on. Let me get dressed.”

             “Yeah, okay.”

             In the bathroom, I throw on my dirty-even-for-me cutoffs and a T-shirt, and spend some time toweling off and trying not to think of how, out there, Ben would not look at me.

             I take a deep breath and open the door. Ben’s busy mixing up some kind of drink. Without looking up, he starts talking superfast. “I was on a mission to find iced coffee. Apparently there are Starbucks here, but they’re all in the casinos, and I didn’t feel like dealing. But nowhere else had iced, not even the actual coffee shop. So in the end I got some fresh-ish hot coffee and my own ice, and I think that’ll work.”

             He’s talking a mile a minute, babbling about iced coffee with the kind of caffeinated specificity I’ve only ever heard from Alice. And he still isn’t looking at me.

             “I got half and half,” he goes on. “For some reason I like my cold coffee with milk. It reminds me of ice cream or something that way.”

             Stop talking about coffee! I want to scream. But I don’t. I just nod.

             “Do you want to hit one of those buffets, power up before we hit the road, or should we put some distance between us?”

             Yesterday Ben said that the difference between him and me was that he learned from his mistakes. He was right. And I’m an idiot.

             “I vote for distance,” I say.