Sex Says(93)

Because I don’t.

I hated those three little words.

They weren’t warm. They were ten degrees below freezing.

This was the opposite of the Reed who had so confidently inserted himself into my life. The guy who had been persistent and determined and did everything in his power to win me over. The same guy who had made me fall in love with him.

This guy wasn’t him. This guy gave zero fucks about me or my feelings.

This might’ve seemed like a small, minor snag in our relationship, but it felt like a chasm to me. It was a mindfuck of epic proportions and had me questioning if Reed and I really wanted the same things in a relationship.

Hell, did Reed even want an actual relationship?

Right now, it didn’t feel like he wanted one with me.

Passionate words reveal a passionate soul, he’d said. And right now, his soul couldn’t even look me in the eye, let alone connect with a passion.

“This rationale is a bit fucked up,” I said in irritation and stood up from the couch. “What’s going on here? Do you not want to spend time with me?”

“I never said that,” he said, but his face, still indifferent, belied his words. I wanted to strangle him.

“Then, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I don’t do what people expect.”

Raw sadness surged into the plump of my lip, and I bit down with my teeth to temper the flow. This conversation was going nowhere. Reed was so fucking concerned with doing the opposite of what everyone expected of him that he didn’t realize he was hurting the one person who probably cared the most about him in the process—or even worse, he did realize.

He was hurting me, and I wasn’t going to stand around and take any more of it.

The need for self-preservation reached an all-time high, and I had to get the fuck out of his apartment before the abyss of his nothingness metaphorically clobbered me.

“You already made that loud and clear, Reed,” I retorted and swung my laptop bag over my shoulder. “You don’t give a fuck about the fact that you lost your job. You don’t give a fuck about spending time with me and my family. You don’t give a fuck about doing anything that revolves around expectations.”

I waited for panic to pucker at the edges of his eyes, but nothing but a weird fidget with that goddamn cigarette ever came. I reached out and knocked it out of his hand like some kind of child.

His face following the action was one of the first signs that he was still alive. Of course, now that emotion lived there, now that there was a flicker of the guy I was in love with, I was too cowardly to look him in the eye.

“Fine, Reed,” I muttered after collecting myself and heading for the door. “Don’t worry, I don’t expect anything from you. And I hope you have a really fucking wonderful weekend doing the opposite of what anyone might expect from you.”

Maybe I was overreacting, but I couldn’t find it in me to care.

Reed’s feedback was so underwhelming, I’d had more than enough emotional space to fill—in fact, he’d left a void big enough for the both of us.





I’d spent a lifetime avoiding problems altogether, and within the last week, I’d confronted enough to make up for all of that lost time.

Apparently, I wasn’t very good at confronting them head on.

Yet another flaw to add to the list. And, as much as I liked to pretend everything in my life was just as it should be, there were many.

Truth was, I was a vagabond thirty-one-year-old with no job, no close friends, and a girlfriend—if I could even still call her that—who wanted nothing to do with him anymore because he was a goddamn idiot with shit priorities and a messed-up sense of purpose.

Sure, I had enough money socked away in the bank to maintain a vagabond status for a good three years, but I wasn’t the type of guy who just sat around and let my hourglass of time slowly trickle without cause or direction. I was a doer. An experiencer of life. And I opened my arms to everything new and unconventional, and I savored the fuck out of it.

But this wasn’t experiencing or living. This was something else, and the way I’d handled things with Lola had left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. There wasn’t anything savory about the way she had left my apartment looking equal parts sad and pissed off. I was certain three-day-old French fries from McDonald’s held more appeal.

What made it all worse was that I hadn’t heard a peep from her since it all went down. Not a single text or call or unexpected visit. And days without Lola’s sunshine of quirky and adorable didn’t feel like days at all. Sadder than hell, they were infinite monotony in a thousand blasé shades of gray. They were fucking purgatory.