“No, I’m a virgin.”
She smirked, adjusted her glasses and made a face like wow. “And you’ve never officially dated and called yourself boyfriend and girlfriend? Or friends with benefits?”
“No.”
“Then you’re not anything.”
“We are.”
“I…” She made that wow face again. “I beg to differ.”
“He loves me,” I blurted stupidly.
“Like a good friend,” she decided, as if I’d given her all the information she needed to make conclusions about my life.
“It’s not… I’m pretty sure there are a lot of people who have weird, complicated relationships with people that are still deep and meaningful but can’t be put into any sort of… like…” Fuck. I was losing my words to the wine.
“Like…?” Dara challenged me with that all-knowing, smug-ass look on her face that made me suddenly aware of how annoying I probably was when I was sixteen.
“Never mind.”
“Can I see a picture of him?”
I jumped at the chance to show her. I’d proudly shown my group of friends from class and they’d gasped, pointed at my face and then burst into a chorus of crazy squealing – about how hot he was and how I totally loved him. It was enough that my instructor came to see what the ruckus was about. She leaned in, looked at the picture and then said “hoo-baby.”
I grinned when Dara looked at a photo I’d taken of Callum at the beach the month before. He was healed up enough to surf – not as well as he used to, but still. I’d gotten a shot of him coming out of the ocean, water dripping from his hair and his triceps bulging as he carried his board back to where I sat on my towel. I was pretty fucking delighted that even jaded old Dara was not immune to his looks. “That’s him?” she asked skeptically, as if I’d just pulled some picture off a Google search for smoking hot blonde surfer dude.
“That is him.”
“He looks older than eighteen.”
“He’s just muscular. And he’s actually nineteen now.”
Dara nodded and kept staring. “Yeah. He seems like he’d be mature for his age,” she said. I smirked. She loved to describe herself as mature for her age. “Does he have a girlfriend?”
“He was on a date yesterday but he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
“You’re in love with him and you don’t mind that he was on a date?”
I paused. No? Was that weird? I’d been on a date last night too but it was just for shits and giggles. And maybe a little titillation. It started Friday night when there were no cabs and I asked a guy if I could share his across town. He was hot, probably in his mid-thirties and just as drunk as I was. Our conversation was flirty from the jump. He revealed, to my delight, that he was a fashion designer. “A straight one,” he said right away. “It’s important for you to know that.”
“Is it? Why?”
“Because I’m going to ask you out before I get out of the car.”
“You should just do it now. I’m going to say yes.”
“Cool. You wanna go out?”
And that was that. Our date was fun. He took me to a Japanese restaurant that didn’t serve sushi, when all I knew about Japanese cuisine was sushi, and then we randomly hit a karaoke bar. We made out in an alley and he dry humped me against the wall and then I texted my friend to call me with an “emergency” and he sent me home with cab money.
Callum’s date was similar. Similar-ish. His girl was someone he’d met randomly at the marketing firm he was interning at on Fifth Ave. She was tall and gorgeous, a little older and had been in the building for a casting call. I’d met up with them toward the end of their first date ever and while she seemed surprised, she wound up flirting with me when she realized Callum liked it. She murmured close to my lips and touched my knee and played with my hair till we all kind of wound up together in his bed that night. Hailey, my go-to friend for fake emergency calls, said threesomes weren’t abnormal and that she’d had one at camp when she was even younger, so I decided it wasn’t weird.
Especially since no sex wound up happening. There was everything but penetration before we all fell asleep. The closest we got to that was when Callum followed me into his kitchen in the middle of the night when I went for water. He was wordless as he pulled me from the fridge, kissed me hard and slid his fingers inside me. He stroked me to an orgasm that he muffled with his hand before we went back to bed, where he spooned me to sleep. The next morning, the girl got cab money to go home and planted a sultry kiss on my lips before leaving. I wasn’t totally surprised. She was nice but I knew she liked Callum and was just trying to show him that she was game in case I came as part of a package deal.
So maybe it was weird.
But even if it was, that was just what Callum and I were. Weird. Indefinable.