How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,41
was so much in this, I didn’t know where to start. “Once a year?” I asked. “Once a year? Jason, we’re practically going to hit seven times before morning.”
A smile twitched the corner of his mouth, but then it disappeared again.
“And only once after you got home?” I couldn’t get over this. “You were engaged to her. You were living with her.”
“I told you it was embarrassing,” he said, his voice tight.
Blonde, perfect Charlotte. Was she insane? “Is there… something wrong with her?” I asked.
He scratched his chin, his fingertips rasping against his dark stubble. “Not physically, no,” he said. The words sent a white-hot blast of jealousy through me, but I swallowed it down. “She just never wanted to. She never enjoyed sex.” The scratching stopped. “At least with me.”
“What do you mean, with you?” Anyone who didn’t enjoy sex with Jason was definitely insane. “Were there other guys? Was she cheating on you?”
“No,” he said. “There were no other guys. I think she has problems with sex in general. But it took a long time for me to realize it wasn’t me.”
“Jason,” I said, my voice coming out more passionate than I intended. “It isn’t you.”
The smile briefly appeared again, then vanished. “I know that now, I think. It wasn’t just the sex—I couldn’t do anything right with her. I never said the right things, got the right job, wore the right things. Nothing. But I think now that she’s just an unhappy person. She’s unhappy with everything, everyone. Unhappy with her whole life. And it took me all that time to see that she was taking all of her misery out on me, and that nothing I would ever do would fix it.”
It sounded perfectly, honestly terrible. I could not imagine living like that. And I could not have been more wrong in my mental picture of their relationship. “Why did you stay?” I asked. “Why did you put up with it for so long?”
He sighed and closed his eyes briefly. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. “We met only a few months before I joined the Marines. So at first the lack of sex was because it was so soon. And then I was deployed, and the first few times I was home on leave I thought it was no big deal, because she needed time to adjust, you know? We barely knew each other, really. She made it seem like it was a burden, being my girlfriend while I was deployed, but she didn’t want to break up. And what could I do, dump her from the other side of the world because I wasn’t getting laid enough? How big an asshole would that make me?”
I bit my lip, but I didn’t speak. Of course Jason didn’t want to be an asshole. That was the last thing he’d want anyone to think of him. It didn’t matter what the cost was.
“So it just went on and on,” he continued. “And then I came home, and I thought, Okay, I’ll fix everything now. So we moved in together and I asked her to marry me. And it didn’t fix anything. Things got even worse.” He shook his head. “We fought and fought, and then we broke up.”
“So she treated you like a piece of furniture for four years, and then it was over? Aren’t you mad?” I ran a hand through my sex-tangled hair. “God, I’d be on a rage path. I’d be so furious if someone fucked with my head like that.”
“Part of it is my fault. I should have sucked it up and broken things off.” He looked at me. “Besides, you have exes. You don’t seem like you’re on a rage path.”
“That’s because my exes are lame.”
“Even the wedding guy?”
Talking about Kyle while I was in bed with Jason was so jarring it made me wince. They were not from the same planet. “Please. I don’t want to talk about how I embarrassed myself over him when I was seventeen.”
“But you’re not angry. You’re going to his wedding.” He smiled a little. “It’s only me you get mad at.”
I stared at him, stunned and a little embarrassed. He was right. When my last boyfriend had cheated on me and dumped me, it had sucked, and it had hurt, and he was an idiot, and I’d beat myself up for my stupidity more than once. But I’d never felt even a shadow of the want-to-break-things anger I’d felt over Jason forgetting me after that