Defenseman No. 9 - Xavier Neal Page 0,37

of Notre-Dame, my parents’ favorite book – but he also talks too fucking much.

Plus, I don’t like the way he won’t stop staring at me like we should be having this discussion in bed instead of here in one of the project rooms at the Folding Fangs, the main library on campus.

“I think candy is gonna be our best bet here,” Leif proceeds to explain, leaning unnecessarily closer. “It’ll provide us enough contrasting substances to properly and poetically express the various eating disorders.”

Nutritional Partnership is not a class I’m thrilled to be taking strictly because every weekly project has to be done with your partner.

Professor LeBlanc explained his belief that partnership is at the core of a healthy nutritional relationship. That every being must establish this with their own body in order to have a successful, healthier lifespan. That the human body relies on the person inhabiting it to provide the required and requested substances, while the person inhabiting the physical form relies on what it cannot see to tell it what it needs. That there is an undeniable psychological component to eating that a person must learn to understand and navigate in order to properly thrive in the field of nutritional science.

I completely concur.

I am using this basis to build my thesis project and, hopefully, one day, a business based around it.

Nevertheless, I still hate the constant collaboration bullshit.

Leif poorly walks me through his minefield of thoughts, explosions on other subjects, consistently going off with absolutely no warning. One minute he’s intellectually explaining how Happy Cola could reflect Drunkorexia, an eating disorder in which a person restricts food intake or vomits specifically in order to have enough open calories to consume alcohol, and the next he’s rambling about how heartbreaking it is that hermit crabs sometimes use empty cans for a home when their shells have been snatched up by tourists. Tourist talks lead him to some nude beach he toured…being nude makes him babble about how he likes the sun on his skin…sun on his skin spirals him into a frenzy about climate change, which somehow brings him back to anorexi nervosa and wanting to use Twizzlers to demonstrate that particular illness.

The nonstop movement of his mouth, in a way, reminds me of Crash’s; however, unlike my best friend who I could listen to aimlessly ramble for a lifetime, I’m tempted to just tell Leif to shut the fuck up.

My own body is beginning to revolt over his presence by threatening to give me a skull splitting migraine and an appetite to overindulge in the fresh mangos that are left over from my last trip to the farmer’s market.

Leif’s tongue wets his lips once more prior to him investigating, “Wanna pick up the supplies after practice and work on putting this together at my place?”

We’ll just go ahead and call that suggestion a bad idea.

Being in an annoying, yet undeniably, attractive dude’s apartment isn’t in my best interest, hence why we had our first meeting outside of class here.

Okay.

That shit isn’t completely true.

Being in an annoying, yet attractive, dude’s apartment really isn’t as terrible of an idea as I’m making it seem.

Rebound sex is actually healthier than people are led to believe. The enjoyment of non-emotional attachment intimacy is one that can be purging for the spirit. The freedom to not overthink and just feel and ride all the endorphins their body has been being deprived of, due to depression brought on from a breakup, can trigger a mental shift into beginning the healing/moving forward process. This is what Dad said to me when I asked him about the subject as I made our one-on-one dinner Monday night. He assumed I was the person in need of the sex, not the person affected by being the subject of someone else’s selfishness. Inquiring about the other person’s feelings in the situation is what led him to lecture me about the importance of communication and consent. People aren’t mind readers, even if they’re experts in body language. It’s an individual’s responsibility to inform others of such crucial knowledge so that everyone involved can make better decisions. He kept talking, but the message was clear.

I fucked up.

I should’ve said something.

I should’ve expressed that I wasn’t interested in being something to temporarily fill in the blank space that’s never blank too long.

The Taylor Swift reference causes me to not only sneer but the hole in my heart to expand outward a tad bit further.

Crash has always been a huge fan of her