Page 126 of Swallow Your Sorries

“Nothing really,” I flush.

“Uh, I’ll fill in the blanks if you won’t,” Aria says, tapping her chin and squinting at me. “You guys hate each other, so there’s a lot of pent-up sexual tension. A lot of anger ... So he ripped your shirt, gazed at your breasts and lost it.Snapped. That’s when he grabbed your throat…. Damn, I love it when they do that.”

“He didn’t,” I murmur, but he had before…

“How would you know if you like it?” Stassi asks Aria, her eyes wide. “Who’s been grabbing your throat over the summer?”

As if we don’t already know.

“No one. I have subscriptions to streaming platforms,” Aria sneers. “Anyway, I bet you were arguing. Running your mouth when he tore it. That’s why he gripped your neck, shoved you back and slammed you up against the glass wall. He runs his eyes along your lips and tells you to just shut the fuck up already, but keep your mouth open.”

Stassi gasps, rubbing her own throat.

I even rub mine. I can almost feel Gant’s fingers against my skin. I can almost see the scenario Aria’s creating playing in my own mind because Gant had done just that on the first day we’d met. I’d been scared. But I liked it.

“You try to resist. To say something, but the moment you try, he spits right on your tongue.” Aria goes on. “Then he strokes his thumb over the hollow of your throat, coaxing you to swallow it like a good girl.”

“Who the hell would like that?” I ask, even as my mind decides that I would like that.

Stassi shushes me with a flap of her hand. “Go on Ari.”

As the two keep up their toxic banter, I start to wonder what’s wrong with them and what’s wrong with me. Because all the fucked up things Aria’s saying are things I could envision Gant doing and me enjoying.

I’d never met anyone like him before, and maybe that’s playing into my obsession. I was used to boys with salt and vinegar crisp breath trying to lean in for a hands-free kiss that made them look like fishes while giving me the ick.

I think back to my idea of finding another sexual distraction than Gant and the more I think about it, the more I don’t think anyone else will do.

The more I think, I don’t want to try with anyone else.

“I can’t be Gant,” Stassi huffs, adjusting her wig. “I’m ginger, just like Elle.”

“I can be ginger too,” Aria says, trying to rip the wig off Stassi’s head. But Stassi pushes her palm against Aria’s forehead to keep her at bay. With her free hand, she grabs a velcro moustache and sticks it above Aria’s lip.

“Gant doesn’t even have a moustache,” she protests, but Stassi is resolute in being me.

Eventually, Aria gives in, swapping her pink wig for a short dark one, and I ignore them both as I look through a rack of shiny satin corsets. The sage green one doesn’t look too cheap and didn’t Gant say I looked good in green? Maybe I could make it work…

“Gant!” Stassi squeals, backing herself against the brick wall. “What are you doing?”

Aria, coming around to the idea of the moustache, strokes it fondly before throwing up an arm beside Stassi’s head. “What you won’t,” she whispers. “What you dream about every time you shut those pretty green eyes and see me in another realm.”

“You think my eyes are pretty?” I gush, but both girls ignore me.

“This…this doesn’t make sense,” Stassi stutters. “We’re enemies.”

“It doesn’t mean we can’t lie together.”

“It means exactly that. Those are the rules—”

“My kingdom, my rules.”

Okay, that definitely sounds like Gant, so much so that I stop digging in the bins to watch them.

“My goal is to make you ache. Make you hurt. I can do that.”

“And you think I’d just let you?”

“We both know you’d let me do anything.”

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