Page 44 of XOXO, Valentina

My jaw dropped. “Kaitlyn is a lesbian?”

Kennedy scowled. “Labels, Gabi,” she warned. “People don’t have to fit into boxes.”

Of course I knew that, but I really hoped Kaitlyn was a lesbian with a capital L, because it would make me feel better about the whole swimsuit-top-in-the-bathroom thing.

“I haven’t told you the best part yet,” I said.

“There’s more?” Lacey asked.

I nodded and drank a long sip of wine to fortify myself. “I think I had my first orgasm today.”

Everyone stared at me, jaws slack.

Thatcher recovered first. “You mean multiple orgasms, right?”

“No.”

“You mean with just the D, right?” asked Lacey.

I shook my head. “I mean a real orgasm. Toe-curling, earth-shattering, mind-blowing orgasm.” I took another gulp of wine. “A lot of them.”

That shocked my friends into silence. I stared at them, waiting for someone to say something, but I’d rendered them speechless with my truth-bomb.

Finally, Mia broke the silence with a click of her lighter. She fired up a cigarette and took a long drag.

Thatcher didn’t even tell her to put it out.

20

Chapter 18

Joey

Gabriella and I avoided each other for a week. Instead of spending my planning period in the teacher’s lounge, I sat outside on a bench in the school’s garden. I stood in the back of the room during the staff meeting, and I changed my weekly long run from Sunday morning to Sunday afternoon, when I knew Gabriella would be at dinner with her family.

If she didn’t think we were a match, who was I to argue? I had plenty of other options. The manager at Hyperbole’s Café had been flirting with me for months. And every time I took my shirt off at yoga, at least three women tried to strike up a conversation after class.

A month ago, I’d have flirted back. These days, I could barely muster a nod and a smile.

Gabriella’s voice over the intercom for morning announcements stirred my blood. Catching her eye in the staff meeting made my dick swell. Seeing her at the track meet with her family made my heart ache.

I envied Gabriella’s interaction with her parents and the man who resembled her enough to be her brother. Watching them made me miss my family, even my pain-in-the-butt baby sister, Ava, the attention hog of the family.

I tried to focus on the meet, but it was hard to ignore Gabriella’s family shouting cheers for Mossy Oak from the bleachers. It was an away meet at Windy Rush High, but Mossy Oak supporters were there in record numbers, making it difficult for our rival school to have much of a home field advantage.

Mossy Oak won the four-hundred-meter relay, and the energy surged in our favor. But Windy Rush had a talented hurdler who’d crushed everyone in the one-hundred-meter race, and the outcome of the meet would probably come down to the final event.

I usually stayed calm during a meet, but watching Shane line up at the blocks for the last heat of the three-hundred-meter hurdle race made my heart jump into my throat. The favorite from Windy Rush was in lane five, the most desirable lane where the turns weren’t too wide and the main competition was in view during the entire race. In lanes three and six were two runners who’d already qualified for the state championship race with smoking-fast times.

This was going to be one of the tightest races of the meet, and tension filled the stadium.

If Shane raced the way I knew he could, he would beat most of them, and earn a state qualifying time for himself. Shane had drawn lane one. Some people considered the inside lane to be undesirable, but it wasn’t any longer than the other lanes. Everyone ran the same distance and jumped over the same number of hurdles.

At practice, I’d reminded the kids about Olympians who had won gold from the outside lanes. “Run your own race in your own lane,” I’d said.

I hoped Shane remembered my advice as he lined up on his block. As a former hurdler, I knew the race was mental as well as physical. Winning from lane one took focus and confidence. It was easy to get discouraged on the tight curves of lane one when the rest of the field seemed so far ahead. But it was all about perspective, and by the time the track straightened out, everything would look different.

The gun went off, and the runners exploded off their blocks to a loud cheer.

---