"Are you sure they won't mind?" Sniveling, I use the backside of my hand to wipe my face off. I'm not sure how but Steph convinced me to come to Heather and Leah's to have a drink with her. I was going to go anyway back before I spent ten minutes making out with Alex but after the rejection he just put me through, all I want to do is go home and lie down. I didn't want to but the second I got in the car with Steph, I broke down. I broke DOWN and I mean that in the most literal sense of the word. I was crying so hard that I gagged myself and I almost threw up. I haven't cried that hard since I got arrested last year. I couldn't even get a handle on myself. Steph had to pull the car over at the end of Alex's driveway to console me and even that didn't work. I thought I was okay to make it without crying until I got home to do it in the privacy of my bedroom but the second I got into the car, I lost it.
I just don't understand. I don't believe in God and I haven't believed in God since I was sixteen years old… but if there IS a God, is he really that cruel? I stopped believing in God when the son of a bitch made it possible for a little girl to be beaten and raped the way he let me. Maybe I'm just a tough critic but I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now. I was a little girl and even at sixteen, I still had my innocence. I didn't do anything that I recall that could've deserved for him to let that happen to me. I swear I was a golden child. I did my homework, I made straight As, I was in the gifted program at school, I didn't go out and get high and drink like most teenagers my age. I never sass-mouthed my foster parents, I never even so much as told them "no". I was a picture perfect child and I really tried to be because when you get kicked out of so many foster homes, you start to learn how to behave yourself so you can hopefully stay and when you're a teenaged kid in foster care, they usually look for any reason to throw you out…so I tried HARD to stay.
I was sixteen and I hadn't even been kissed yet! Yet…someone higher than me like "God" decided that I could wake up one morning and get myself a bowl of cereal because the person in the house that I knew would protect me was gone at work and she didn't make me the breakfast she usually made me on the weekends. She wasn't there and to this day, I believe if she had been, I would've been okay. But no. I sat at that table to eat my makeshift breakfast and he came downstairs. And he sat down and he ate a bowl of cereal with me. And he asked me if I was excited for school to start. And I said yes. And he asked me if I had planned on getting a boyfriend in my sophomore year. And I told him I wasn't interested in boys, I was interested in school. And he asked me if I liked girls. And I said I didn't think I did, because at that point, I was still unsure of my sexuality. I found boys attractive but not to the point that I would lie down and have sex with them. I had never seen a girl that I found attractive at that point but I still didn't want to completely rule out the possibility of being bisexual.
He asked me if I was a virgin and I told him that I was, because I was. I was still innocent then. And he said that the reason why I was unsure of my sexuality was because I had never had sex before. And I got up because the conversation was making me uncomfortable and I had a copy of The Great Gatsby that I really wanted to start reading. I went to my room and lay in my bed and started to read because I had nothing else better to do. He came inside and sat down on the bed and he took my book off me and put it on my nightstand. And he told me that he didn't want "gay daughter" so he was gonna "make me sure of myself." I said "okay" because I didn't know what he meant. But he started kissing me on my lips and I got the picture and I started to cry because I trusted him, you know? I trusted that he wouldn't have done anything like that and I felt really safe with them. They were the longest foster family that I had been with. He pushed me down on the bed and held my hands to the side while he kissed me and I screamed. To this day, I still don't know how I screamed like that. I've never heard myself scream like that since.
When he took his hands away from my hands, he forced all his weight on me so I couldn't get up. It was pretty easy for him; I was a pretty skinny kid. I probably only weighed about 100 pounds, no more than that. And he had to have been about 300 pounds. I remember screaming and praying to God that he wouldn't do this to me but he did…and he did it to me for nearly two hours. And I told him that I was gonna tell but he hit me and he kept hitting me and he told me that he was gonna do it again and again and again until HE got tired of it. And I left and I took that car of mine and I never saw him again.
My point is that there is no such thing as a God and even if he did exist, he's a selfish bastard that likes to watch little girls get raped by their foster fathers, so it's not a surprise to me that he likes to watch me get my fucking heart broken into tiny pieces by the same selfish fucker over and over again. I refuse to believe that somebody so "holy" could be so cruel so it's comforting to me to think that he doesn't even exist. Call me crazy but since I don't believe in God, I often find myself praying to science…hehe. I thought that was funny.
"I told them you were coming to chill with us. Leah said she didn't mind." Steph hands me more tissues. "Just calm down, okay? You're gonna have fun with us and you'll forget all about him. He's a jackass…" She throws the gearshift in park and turns to me. "No more crying over him. Shake him off and have fun for a couple of hours. It'll make you feel better." She pulls her sleeve down and covers her hand with it. She starts wiping my face off for me and I politely push her away. I appreciate the gesture but I don't need her help. I put my hands over my face and rub my eyes hard. "You cool now?"
"Mhm." I nod, sniff and clear my throat. I open up the car door and step out of it. This is Heather and Leah's place? Wow… I could only dream of living in a place like this. I look at the exterior of the house in its entirety. It's not very big but it's decent sized for two people to be living in it. It's about two stories high and it's all made out of brick. It looks like it might have been a duplex at one point but I'm not sure. I fold my arms across my chest and walk up the front steps, following Steph. I think Steph must've told them that we were outside or coming or something because she doesn't even ring the doorbell, she just opens up the front door and walks right inside and I instinctively follow her.
As soon as I step inside the house, my ears are filled with the sound of loud music and the floor is shaking from the bass of the song that's playing. I follow Steph through a narrow hallway back towards a living room. It smells like Clorox bleach in the house. It's not necessarily a bad smell. The house isn't dirty, either. There's a pile of clothes sitting the steps and shoes strung from one end of the hallway to the other but that's it. Oh, and they could stand to run a vacuum cleaner across the carpet but again, I'm not judging. Heather's sitting on the couch with a red cup in her hand and her nose buried in her phone. Leah's ass is sticking out of a cabinet while she's rummaging through it looking for something. Shane's sitting in a recliner with a Styrofoam container in his lap. It looks like he's eating chicken wings or some other kind of meat with messy sauce on it. If they're the wings that came from Joe's then they're amazing and when he's not looking, I might steal one.
"Jo!" Heather sounds really excited to see me which makes me smile because…well, after getting flat out rejected, it's nice to have somebody that actually appreciates my presence. "You want a cup?" She puts her phone and her cup down on the coffee table in front of their couch and grabs the bottle of liquor from the side of the couch. I nod my head. I don't even care what it is that she's trying to get me to drink. I just need to be drunk. "You want pineapple juice or orange juice for a chaser?"
"What is it?" I take the bottle of rum off her to look at it. It's coconut flavored Calico Jack. "…Gimme the pineapple juice." I take it off her and grab a cup. I pour the pineapple juice so the cup is half full and fill the other half with rum. I swish my cup around to mix it as best as I can without a spoon and take a long, drowned out, much needed sip. It's starting to burn my stomach with how much I chugged down, but whatever. I'm trying to be pissy drunk by the end of the night.
"Damn Jo… take it to the head why don't you?" Steph sits down on the couch, taking the seat I planned to sit in. I'll sit on the floor for all I care though. I put my half-drunken cup down on the table and sit down with my back against the couch. I pull my knees into my chest and dust off the rest of my first cup. "Jo I'm serious… chill out. I don't feel like spending my night in the emergency room with you."
"I know my limit, Steph." I mumble and fill my cup back up with more rum this time than pineapple juice. "I'm trying to get so fucked up that I don't remember tonight." I take her advice and sip my current cup this time instead of chugging it like I did the first one.
"I don't think I ever met someone that INTENTIONALLY got so fucked up that they don't remember the night before." Leah finally takes her head out of the cabinet she was rummaging through with a deck of cards in her hand. "Poker?"
"Deal me in." Shane sucks some of whatever he was eating off his fingers and slides out of the chair he was just sitting in and onto the floor. I scoot over towards the coffee table because that seems to be where we're going to play at. Heather sits beside me and Steph sits on the other side of me. Leah sits across the table next to Shane and starts shuffling the cards. I used to be really good at poker but I haven't played since med school. I'm not sure if I'm good anymore. See, us Harvard kids didn't have many ways to have fun on campus because if we did the wrong thing, we'd get kicked out in a heartbeat. So the most honest way for us to have fun was to sit around in my friend Kaitlyn's room and play a big ass game of poker. "What made you decide to come out and hang with the big kids?" Shane asks me with a playful yet douchebaggish tone in his voice.
"I dunno." I shrug my shoulders and lie to him because I'm not drunk enough to have forgotten about the fact that I just hardcore made out with the man of my dreams and got hardcore rejected at the same time. I don't feel like talking about Alex. "What are we betting?" I start gathering my cards up as Leah deals them out. "I'm broke as hell so we can't bet money. We can bet like… swap monkey or something." I take a sip of my drink.
"We're all broke as hell. We're interns." Leah keeps on dealing out the cards. "But I swear this paycheck on Friday is about to be nice. I put in like 80 hours." She exhausts the cards we're supposed to have and sits flat on her ass. Is it bad that I don't even know what I'm going to do with my first paycheck? Apparently Steph's dad paid all the bills for the month before she even asked me to move in, so nothing needs paid. We're interns so we don't get paid much, but I think I have at least a thousand bucks coming to me on Friday, AFTER they take out taxes. That may seem like a lot of money and it is…especially for me. And the only reason I'll be able to have all my money this month is because I don't have to pay anything this month. So what am I gonna do with the money? I should probably just save it or something.
"Why don't we just play strip poker? It's cheap." Steph suggests in all seriousness. I played strip poker once in my life and I thought it was boring. Maybe I thought it was boring because I didn't even have to strip. I think (if I remember correctly) the concept of the game is to take off some of your clothes every time you lose a round. I never lost so I didn't have to strip…and then it was just me sitting around with a bunch of butt-naked people and it was awkward.
"No thanks." I put my cards down. "I'd rather just watch if you guys are gonna do all that." They're all looking at me like they're annoyed. "…Well I never lose in poker and if I don't lose then I won't strip and it'll be weird! Plus… I don't know if I'm cool with Shane being the only dude here." And I'm serious about that. He's the only boy and I'm not sure if I' too keen on him seeing me naked if I do happen to lose. I'm cool with Steph seeing me naked, I'm cool with Leah and Heather seeing me naked because they have all the same parts as me…but Shane? I don't know.
"You really know how to suck the fun out of something." Heather mumbles.
"…I just…" I sigh and pick my cards back up. "Okay. I'll play." I lean across the table just slightly and glare at Shane. "But I swear to GOD if you tell anyone that you've seen me naked, I WILL kill you." He just winks at me. "I fucking mean it. I'm not bullshitting."
"You worry too much. We're all friends here." He snatches up his own hand of cards and shakes his head, dismissing me. I roll my eyes and spread out my five cards, keeping them close to me. My strategy is to fold before I have to take any of my clothes off. That usually works for me. But this time, I'm playing with some really good bluffers.
Alex's Point of View.
"What do you mean you kissed her?" I feel kind of bad driving over here at this hour of the night just to bother her with my problems but I literally don't have anyone else. I can't talk to Cristina because she gives me shitty advice anyway. Talking to Avery is a NO because if I tell him what I just did, he won't get it. He's in a happy marriage and he wouldn't understand what I'm trying to say. And the only other person I I could actually confide in is the REASON I'm so messed up right now. So even though it's almost 2:00 in the morning on a work night, I drove all the way out to Mere's just to talk.
"Exactly what I mean when I say I JUST KISSED JO." I run my hands through my hair and sigh. I'm so stressed out. This is literally the LST thing I need right now. I'm set to get married in a couple months and up until tonight, I was thoroughly convinced that I'm HAPPY in my relationship. Not that I'm all of a sudden unhappy with Iz or anything like that because I'm not, it's just that Jo's making me think and I DON'T WANT TO think. I don't want to have to think that maybe getting married is a mistake. I don't want to have to think that maybe I should wait to marry Iz until I'm more sure. I don't want to think and Jo just made me think so much. "I don't even know Mere." I hold my head in my hands and shake my head. "It wasn't even a kiss… it was a couple kisses…it was a make-out session."
"So wait… explain this to me again." I'm already sitting at her kitchen table so she leans against it and looks directly at me. "You kissed her or she kissed you? Because there's a difference. Was it mutual?" She closes her eyes and shakes her head. "Alex, I thought you said you could control yourself around her. I thought you said you weren't into her. I thought you said that you had absolutely NO desire to be with her…. and now you show up at my doorstep at two in the morning to tell me you made out with the girl? Which one is it?"
"I don't know!" I pick up a fake wax apple from the basket in the middle of the table and swing my legs. "We were having fun and we started talking about sex and it was turning her on…I could tell she was getting turned on and so was I. But she cut the conversation off so I thought we were good! But then she acted all weird and she wanted to leave and I dunno…something in me wouldn't let her just leave like that. And I could tell that she wanted to kiss me. And I was so tired of fighting it. I'm tired of acting like I'm not attracted to her because I am. I really am. Ever since the tunnel incident, I've been thinking about getting her in bed and I wasn't gonna lie to her about it because I've already been a shitty enough person towards her. So I kissed her back. It was mutual."
"If you're falling out of love with Izzie, don't you think you should tell her?"
"But I'm NOT, that's the thing." I sigh again. I'm about to just go the hell home. I don't like talking about my feelings and I thought that talking to Mere would make me feel better but it's making me feel worse. I haven't felt this shitty in a long, long, long, LONG time. "I don't love Jo and that's where we clash. She thinks I want to be with her when all I want to do is bang her." I grit my teeth. "What is it with chicks? Why do they automatically think that a kiss means I'm going to drop everything and be with them? And okay, I guess I care about the girl's feelings because I don't have it in me to tell her that I only want to have sex with her. So I kicked her out and I told her that was it."
"You keep telling yourself that, Alex." She yawns but keeps on talking to me. "If it's working for you, then keep telling yourself that. But it's only a matter of time before you get tired of lying to yourself."
"You think I'm lying?"
"I know you're lying because I know you." She shrugs like it's not even a big deal at all to her. "I think you're trying to tell yourself that you don't care about Jo. I think you're trying to convince yourself that you two are just friends when you know damn well that couldn't be further from the truth. I don't think you love her. You're not lying about that. But I think you're feeling something for that girl and you're afraid that if you KEEP feeling something for her, whatever you're feeling for the intern is going to overtake the love you have for Izzie and you're trying so hard not to let that happen that you're killing yourself. I think you do have feelings for Jo…and I think deep down, you know you do."
"You're wrong, Mere. I don't feel anything for her besides the desire to get in her pants." I rub the bridge of my nose. "If anything I'm afraid that if I stay around the girl, I'm gonna cheat on my fiancée with her. THAT is what I'm afraid of."
"Well you need to get your shit together then. If I'm wrong like you say I am and all you want to do is sleep with her, then you need to get it together. Because of course I'm on your side, but I'm gonna tell you when you're wrong. And you are SO wrong to do this to her."
"I'm not doing anything to her! I already frickin' told her that this isn't anything between us! She's being stupid with it. I'm not doing anything."
"Oh Alex, it wouldn't kill you to stop being a pompous asshole for a minute. You say you care about the poor girl's feelings yet you don't mind being a pulsating DICK towards her? If you know that you don't want to be with her then you had no business kissing her."
"…You suck as a best friend."
"I'm not gonna nurture and coddle you anymore. We're not interns anymore."
"Yeah yeah yeah." I close my eyes and rub my temple because I'm getting a headache just talking to her. "So do you think I'm making the right decision by cutting off all contact with her?"
"I do." She nods. "Because if you feel like you can't restrain yourself around her and you don't want to cheat on Izzie, then you don't need to be around her. It sucks for her but it's the right decision for you."
I sigh again. "…Thanks Mere."