He started to say something but I brushed past him, got my bike, threw it on the rack, got in the car, and drove off.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Allie
“You can’t just lie around and mope.” My mother stood in the doorway to the guest bedroom, looking down on me, both literally and figuratively. “You’ve been here for two whole days, and you’ve spent the majority of the time in this bedroom. Not acceptable. What happened with Cole is unfortunate, but you’ve got to get on with things. You can’t let this completely derail you. Now let’s get up; we’re going out.”
She strode across the room, threw the curtains back, and yanked up the blinds. Sunlight poured into the room, and I squinted against it, wanting nothing more than to burrow underneath these covers, hopefully for forever.
Was I being dramatic? Yes, I was, but I couldn’t help it. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to pull myself out of this funk. Did I ever envision that I would be one of those people who simply could not function after a breakup? No. But then again, I’d never been broken up with before. Cole was my first for basically everything, and the fact that we were no longer together was more painful than I had ever imagined would be possible.
“Sweetie.”
My mother came over and sat down on the edge of the bed. She brushed my hair back from my face and waited until I was looking at her before she continued to speak. “I know things did not work out how you had hoped. How I had hoped. You and Cole are great together. But there are other great guys out there, too. You know that, right? I personally think he was a fool for breaking up with you, but that doesn’t mean you won’t meet someone even better than him.”
“I don’t care about that,” I said.
“Of course you don’t right now. And that’s fine. Right now, I just want to see you up and out of bed and getting some sun and doing something that would maybe put a little bit of a smile on your face.”
I finally forced myself up, because I knew my mother would continue to harass me until I did. And my back was kind of sore from lying around for so long, but my heart just really wasn’t into anything that my mother wanted to do.
She tried her best, though. When I finally got dressed, we left, and she took me out to get coffee and pastries, and then we walked around for a little while, and then she took me to her favorite spa and paid for a two-hour Swedish massage followed by some time in the sauna and a pedicure.
I was lying facedown on the massage table, naked underneath the sheet, while the masseuse kneaded my lower back muscles. It felt good, but in an abstract way, almost like it was happening to someone else. And I was remembering that time I’d had my annual appointment with Cole, how long ago that seemed, how mortified I’d been, yet how there had been an element to it that had been exciting, exhilarating. And then how our relationship had progressed, how just knowing he was right there next door was both a comfort and a thrill, how losing my virginity to him had just seemed like the right thing to do. Like he was the reason that I had waited so long.
I didn’t even realize that I was crying until the masseuse said to me, “It’s okay, it happens sometimes. We store emotional trauma in our muscles, so when we get our body worked on like this, sometimes it brings things up.” She laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed; then went back to the massage.
My face was in the face cradle, so I just managed the slightest of nods. I didn’t want to be crying, but the whole thing just seemed so sad. I had been in love, and it didn’t work out—but who knew that it would feel like this? Who knew that another person could cause someone so much pain?
The thing was, I couldn’t even be mad at Cole. It wasn’t like he had done something—he hadn’t cheated on me, he hadn’t lied to me, he hadn’t abused me in any way, shape, or form. But his absence felt like an injury I would never recover from. Even as the masseuse gently kneaded my muscles, trying to release the stress and apparently whatever emotional traumas I had been storing, even with all of that happening, I just had the feeling I would never be the same again.
After we were finished at the spa, my mother wanted to go to a café, so we went and got coffee. I already
felt jittery, so I ordered an iced decaf latte instead, and I sipped on it slowly while we sat at an outside table, under the awning.
“Now, didn’t we have a nice day out?” my mother asked.
“Yes,” I said, wanting to be careful not to make it sound like I was being ungrateful. I tried to smile. “The massage was nice.”
“Oh, tell me about it.” She rolled her shoulders back and leaned her head to one side, then the other. “I just feel so limber now. It really just melts the stress away.”
My shoulders did feel slightly less tense.
“So, are you planning to stay over tonight? We could go to this nice little trattoria for dinner...”
“I should probably drive back soon,” I said. “I think I’ll probably leave in a little while.”
“I’m glad we were able to get out of the house then today. I would’ve hated it if the whole time you were here, you just stayed in bed.”
“And I appreciate you trying to make me feel better. I just feel like the whole thing isn’t fair,” I said. “I know that sounds immature and that I should just get over it, but what was the point in waiting this long to lose my virginity if the guy I lose it to is just going to dump me not long after that?”
My mother sighed. “It’s noble that you waited as long as you did,” she said. “Romantic, even. But you can’t let it mean something more than it does. Most girls your age have had sex by now. Very few people only sleep with one person. Meaning, for the majority of us, we sleep with a whole bunch of people before we finally find the right person to settle down with.”
“I know that,” I said. “But it still feels shitty.”
“It won’t forever; I can promise you that. Sometimes that’s the only thing that you have to hold onto—the knowledge that it’s not always going to feel this way forever. Even if it seems that way.”
When we were done with our coffees, we went back to the house so I could get my stuff. My mother walked me out to the car and gave me a long hug.