The Monster (Boston Belles #3) - L.J. Shen Page 0,64
Sparrow and Troy. My childhood was an endless stream of arguments, object tossing, and my parents disappearing to Europe for months at a time, together or alone, leaving me with the nannies.”
I stared at her blankly, showing her she hardly mustered enough pity in me to inspire me to get up and grab her a Kleenex.
“Then I lost someone I really cared about when I was seventeen, in a pretty … brutal way.” Her throat bobbed with a swallow, and she looked around, uncomfortable all of a sudden. I didn’t ask whom it was.
Rule number one was to not get attached. It clouded your judgment.
“What else have you got for me?” I yawned, leaning back, making a show of checking the time on my phone.
“My first time …” She hesitated, biting down on her lower lip. My interest piqued, and I found myself sitting upright. “I lost my virginity to my professor.”
“How old was he?”
“Forty-one.”
“And you?”
“Nineteen.”
“That’s—”
“Disgusting?” She smiled sadly, her eyes shimmering with tears again. I was going to say hot as fuck, but of course that was out the window now. “Yeah, I know. Wanna know the disgusting part?”
“I thought I already knew. He was forty-one.”
She shot me a tired smile.
“I found out three weeks after we started sleeping together that he was married with a kid. See, he didn’t wear a wedding band and lived in an apartment complex on campus, alone. He looked young and stylish and hung out with the students so often…” she picked a cuticle around her fingernail, tugging on it nervously “…I wanted to lose my virginity to someone with experience, and I knew he had it. We continued seeing each other after we had sex. Until one day he just disappeared into thin air. Stopped answering my calls. Just got up and left. He didn’t even complete the academic year. I needed some sort of closure, so I found him. And, well, I found out why he left. Because of me. Because his wife, who taught at another university two states away, had found out and dragged him back home by the ear. When I found his new address, I made the mistake of driving down there and knocking on his door.”
Bad call. But I had plenty of life experience, and Aisling lived in a protective bubble. Of course she wanted answers, closure, and all the other mumbo jumbo you read about.
“She opened the door and threw the phone he’d used to call me. She started screaming at me in front of the entire neighborhood, calling me a whore, a homewrecker, a spoiled bitch. She said my mother is a slut, that everyone in America knows one of us doesn’t belong to Fitzpatrick, then promised she would let all the hospitals in Boston know what I did. It was humiliating. Especially since I never knew this man was married.”
“Is that why you never tried for a hospital here?” I asked.
She bit down on her lower lip, pulling more and more dead skin from the side of her fingernail. “Partly. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s not the entire reason, anyway. Since then, I limited my interaction with men even more.”
“Good,” I deadpanned. “We’re all fuckers.”
Silence hung in the air. I wanted her to leave. She wasn’t going to tell me anything about her parents’ relationship, about Gerald. This was pointless.
“Tell me something personal.” She rested her cheek on her shoulder. “Just one thing, Sam. It will make me feel better. Please.”
“Aisling, it’s time for you to go.”
“Why?”
“Because this is going nowhere fast. We fucked. It was a mistake. It’s time you move on. Whatever you think is going to happen, I can assure you it won’t happen. I don’t have a soul, or a heart, or a conscience. We had fun, yes, but women are all the same to me. I will never choose you above all others. If you think life with Gerry is a nightmare for your mother, imagine your father at his worst and keep going. That would be me.”
That was when it finally happened.
She finally cried in front of me.
It was just one tear. It rolled down her cheek, flying off her chin like a cliff, landing with a splash on her knee.
“Goddammit, woman,” I hissed, looking away, feeling … feeling. It wasn’t a big feeling, just a little discomfort, but I did not want to see her cry.
One time.
This would be the one and only time I was going to humor this infuriating woman. No more.