“You’re right. I don’t know the answer to everything, and as much as you think you do, neither do you. But the answer for now is more me and less you. So I’d like you to leave now, and I don’t need one ounce of perspective on that.”
There wasn’t anything left to do here. Not right now, and not like this.
Conversation only really accomplishes something when both people are willing to move it forward. And neither one of us was there yet.
Lola because she couldn’t see inside my fucked-up mind, and me because I couldn’t figure out how to let her.
Still, I paused at the door and tucked a loose piece of hair behind her ear. “I’m a liar, and a fuck-up, and every sort of troublemaker.”
I put my finger to her lips when she started to agree.
“But one thing I know I’m not is worthy of you. I hope you’ll talk to me soon, Lo.” My lips grazed her cheek quickly before I forced myself to go.
“Oh, yeah.” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the column that would never print.
“Here. It’s never going to get used, but it seemed like it should go to you.”
She looked down and froze, and I knew she’d just read the title. Sex Really Does Say.
She needed time to read, and I needed time to figure out who the fuck Reed Luca needed to be. Because only one thing seemed important anymore, and she was standing numbly in front of me.
“Take care, Lo.”
Don’t do it, Lola, I told myself and glanced at the clock on the stove.
12:15 p.m.
Shit. I had somewhere to be at one o’clock, and if I wanted to actually be on time, I had about ten minutes to get my ass out of my apartment. Clad in only underwear and a bra, I stood in my kitchen with my coffee mug in one hand and Reed’s column in the other. It was safe to say, the possibility of tardiness was growing rapidly in percentage.
But despite the multiple mental pep talks, I still found myself setting the paper down on the counter and…
Reed This: Sex Really Does Say
Either Lola Sexton is getting smarter, or I really am in love with her. The smart approach she took to intimacy with her readers buttered me up, and her wise words on welcoming life changes and embracing your natural strengths sealed my fate.
Our battle of wits led to frustration and fuming—on Lola’s part—and a whole lot of amusement on my own, but I didn’t understand how much it’d taught me until now.
Goddammit, Lola. I groaned out loud once realization set in that I was, in fact, reading his column. Again.
Seriously? How many times are you going to read this?
Lola Sexton and I are opposites in almost every sense of human nature. She’s feisty to my calm, judgmental in the face of my lack thereof, and colorful while I’m gray. And her opinion almost always lies on the complete opposite end of the line from my own.
Apparently, a lot. No matter how many times I told myself to just toss it in the trash or set it on fire or tear it to shreds or sell it on eBay—because, I honestly think I could get some money for this unpublished piece—I couldn’t find the strength to actually follow through. Instead, I read.
And read.
And, take right now for instance, I kept on reading.
But something started to change as I got to know her, something that reshaped me from a person who believed in one thing to a person who believed in another. At first, I didn’t understand how it could be possible, how I could be at one end of the line at the same time as being at the other.
But memories of experiences with her reminded me that facts are flexible, just like that line of opinion I used as a measuring stick. Maybe the line was a curve, and as the magnetism between Lola and me built, so did its intensity.
All I have to do to know I’m right about this is look at Lola.
Reed This: Sometimes people can be at two ends of a line and end up next to one another. Because intimacy and love—they’re powerful enough to curve that line into a circle.
It’d been three days since Reed had stopped by my apartment and dropped a bomb in the form of his written words. And I’d probably now read that stupid column that would never actually be a column a good fifty times. I’d read and scrutinized and desperately searched for the paragraph, the sentence, even one single word that stuck out like a sore thumb and told me it was all a bunch of lies.
But I might as well have been searching for a needle in a haystack.
I could only find sincerity and truth. It sounded like the way he would explain things to me, and it felt like the way his eyes melted when they met mine. It was everything I’d thought I’d known about our relationship before the bomb exploded, tied up in one neat little bow.