“Just let me say one more thing. I know he’s my brother and all and I give him shit a lot, but he’s actually a decent guy, and I think you two are great together. Okay, I’m done.”
Will coughed again and the topic changed to bitching about how much we didn’t want to start classes the next day.
***
“What happened with Stryker? I know you didn’t want to say in front of everyone, but you can talk about it. You know, if you want. No pressure.” Sure there was pressure. There was so much pressure I could feel its hands around my neck, and its insistent voice in my ear.
“Okay, but this falls under the roommate umbrella of secrecy. No twindar, or any of that.”
“If there’s one thing that Will doesn’t want to know about, it’s other people’s relationship drama, so no worries. He’ll probably beg me not to tell him anyway. So, your secret is safe.”
“So I didn’t want to tell you this, but Stryker and I weren’t dating, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t having sex.” I paused, waiting for her reaction. I expected surprise, not for her to snort and say, “And?”
“You knew?”
“First, I’m not blind, and second,” she said, holding up one, then two fingers, “I’m not an idiot. We all knew.”
Now I was the one surprised.
“Everyone?”
She nodded. Well, shit. I guess we weren’t as covert as I thought.
“Great. They must all think I’m a slut.”
Lottie scoffed, making this little snorting noise.
“No one would think that.”
I gave her a look. “Not even after everything I did with Zack?”
She shook her head again.
“We just want you to be happy, and it seems like Stryker makes you happy. So what happened?”
I took a deep breath and went into the whole story, giving her every detail from the Thanksgiving dinner I cooked, to our kiss to when he told me he wanted to wait to have sex. She was uncharacteristically silent the entire time, and her silence reeled the story out of me, including tearing up the pictures with Kayla and writing on my wall and the fight I’d had with my mom. I kept talking and talking, the words spilling out of me and into the air, filling the room up with my voice and my insecurity and my confusion and my hurt.
“And I have no idea what to do. None,” I said, finally done.
“You, my dear,” she said, raising her hands above her head to stretch, “are in a pickle.”
“I guess that’s one way of thinking about it. ‘I’m fucked’ seems more appropriate.”
“Well, if you want my two cents, I’d say you give him his space. He’ll come to his senses.”
I inhaled and said the one thing that scared me the most. “What if he doesn’t want to be with me anymore and he’s trying to let me down easy?”
Lottie laughed, throwing her head back.
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head as if I’d said something absurd.
“Maybe he realized that he just wants to be friends.”
“Listen,” she said, coming over to sit next to me on my bed and putting her arm around my shoulder. “No guy who looks at you the way Stryker does wants to be just friends. He looks at you like no one else is around and he wants to throw you down on the table, right there, right then. Like you’re the only girl in the entire world and he’s ready to worship you.”
If it wasn’t Lottie saying it, I would have thought she was mocking me, but she said it with such sincerity that I believed her.
“Well Zan looks at you like he’s dying and you’re standing there holding the cure to whatever’s killing him.”
She blushed and giggled.
“Listen, we can trade these back and forth all night, but we should probably go to bed.” Giving me a quick shoulder squeeze, she got up and went to her dresser to get her PJs.
“Speaking of Zan, why aren’t you staying the night with him?”
“Because I figured he could deal with one more night without me. I don’t want to be one of those girls who can’t breathe without a man around all the time. Even if I do find it hard to breathe without him.” She traced the edge of a picture Zan had taken of the two of them. One of those where he had to hold the camera at arm’s length and they had to squish their faces together to get them both in the shot.