Page 38 of She Used to Be Nice
“Stop, Jonathan. It’s too tight.”
He lifted her ass even higher. “Just hold on. I think we can do—”
She smacked him away, hard, and he drew back, a horrified expression flashing across his face at the red welt materializing on the side of his stomach.
“I saidstop,” Avery snapped.
She faced forward and inhaled a shaky deep breath, then released herself from his grip, felt around in the backseat for her lace underwear, and slipped it on as fast as she could. She rested her hand on her chest, which ached from how fast her heart was beating, and closed her eyes to block out the feel of Noah’s large, imposing body pressing down on her back.
“Is everything okay?” Jonathan asked quietly. His dick was soft now, dangling between his legs like a tube sock with no foot. Avery busied herself by massaging her chest, begging her heart to slow down. If her body was the crime scene from that night senior year, where was she supposed to go when she still felt in danger?
“Yeah. I’m just not in the mood anymore.” She zipped up her jeans and crawled to the front seat. “Sorry.”
Jonathan cocked his head in confusion. Avery mumbled an apology again before flinging open the car door and slamming it shut.
By the time Avery got home, her heart rate had slowed to a normal pace. What she wouldn’t give for a glass of wine to dull her senses and help her pretend this afternoon never happened. It was too early to start drinking, though, and she didn’t want her parents thinking she was more of a degenerate than she already was, so she’d have to settle for carbs. She went into the kitchen, poured a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, and dove into Instagram, the dopamine from scrolling through her feed sufficiently distracting her from the fact that Jonathan had almost fucked her from behind. Her forbidden position, thanks to Noah. She clicked on a red notificationin the top right corner of her screen as she went to take a bite of cereal. Then she dropped her spoon.
Pete had started following her.
Avery navigated to his account, which was public. Charlie was following him. She browsed through Pete’s pictures. The first picture was cropped, and judging by the red Solo cup in his hand, appeared to be from a party. A Woodford party? She zoomed in; she didn’t recognize the background, so maybe not. She scrolled to the next picture, where he was in a tuxedo with his hands folded in front of him. In the next picture, he was flipping burgers in front of a grill, the bright red and orange leaves on the trees behind him signaling the onset of fall. She scrolled down his page some more, scanning a picture of him playing Ultimate Frisbee, standing on top of a mountain, smiling with his arm looped around a girl in a pale blue dress. Avery scrolled through the likes and comments on that last one; there were tons. Definitely an ex. The thought made her jealous, irrationally.
She came across a video still of a prepubescent Pete playing guitar, with the captionA legend in the making.She let the video play. Preteen Pete hummed to himself to find his starting note, then strummed the guitar with his clammy fingers and began to sing in a sweet high-pitched voice. Avery had a feeling he’d posted this video to laugh at himself, but the earnestness of it all tugged on her heartstrings, made her want to reach through the screen and wrap her arms around him in a tight hug. She liked Pete’s heart, his confidence, his sense of humor. She liked so many things about him.
The garage door rumbled open. Avery turned her phone face down on the table just as her mother came into the kitchen and dropped her purse on the countertop.
“Hi, hon,” Mom said. “Saw the car parked in a different spot from where it was this morning. You went out today?”
Of course Jackie would notice that. Avery had never missed the subway more. “Yeah, I had lunch with Jonathan. Jonathan Williams, from drama club.”
“Oh, sure! I remember him. What’s he up to?”
“Nothing much. He wants to go to law school.”
“Good for him.” Mom grabbed an apple from the fruit basket on the counter by the sink and took a bite. “He was so handsome. I always thought you’d end up with him. I cried in the audience during that wedding scene inFiddler on the Roof.” She tried to hide the smile prompted by her reminiscing. “I don’t know. You two looked good together.”
Avery did not want to continue talking about Jonathan. “Okay, Mom.”
Mom sat down at the table and tapped the surface with her nails pensively, like she was debating whether to say the next thing she wanted to say. “You meet anyone special in the city yet?”
Avery rolled her eyes. Mom always tried to be casual about how painfully single Avery was, but she’d been so transparently upset after Avery and Ryan broke up. She would do anything to have grandchildren running around soon, continuing the traditional Italian-American family culture that she’d surely dreamed of before she had kids of her own. Avery had dreams of that, too, of Sunday dinners with fun-loving shouting and marinara sauce simmering on the stove, a mighty Feast of the Seven Fishes on each Christmas Eve, the velvety sounds of Frank Sinatra crooning through every speaker in the house. A month after Ryan dumped her, she looked up statistics around marriage to see how much time she had left before she was doomed to be alone forever. She learned that the average age women got married now was twenty-eight-and-a-half, and that number went up to almost thirty when you looked at just the New York area. She had plenty of time, but the clock was certainly ticking, and she wasn’t exactly trying to find a boyfriend to settle down with. All she did with guys was fuck them. It was all she could do. Her secrets turned her body radioactive from the inside out, poisoning any man who got too close.
“Nope.” Her voice was clipped. She took another bite of cereal.
“Well, are you going out on dates?” Again Mom sounded breezy in that awfully manufactured way.
“Sure.” Semantics.
“Maybe Morgan could hook you up with one of Charlie’s friends?”
There was nothing more unappealing than a pity setup with one of Charlie’s old lacrosse teammates, who were also Ryan’s teammates. The ones she already knew and had been friends with hated her now. The other one was Noah.
“I’m not interested,” she said.
Mom sighed and peered out the bay window overlooking the front lawn of their neighbor’s house. Avery noticed that there was a little kid’s swing set in the backyard and wondered if that meant that old man Heath finally moved out. She hoped so. In middle school, Heath used to stop her during her walks around the block to tell her he liked her outfit. It always started that way, at least, and then in high school his comments got even more predatory. One day, he’d tell her he liked her shirt. The next day, he’d say he liked her hair. The next, she had beautiful eyes, they reminded him of his dead wife’s, and oh, by the way, did she have a boyfriend? Sometimes now, when she wore a low-cut top, she thought of suffocating Heath with her chest so he’d never objectify underage girls again. Although that was something that would probably happen over and over again in those girls’ adulthoods, through the hungry eyes of men they didn’t know as well as men they did. And when those women tried to take back their power, the memory of their degradation would put them right back in their place, making them leave in the middle of lunchtime car sex in distress.
“Well, whoever you meet,” Mom said, “I hope you don’t get too drunk with them. Like you did the night we got that hospital bill for.”
Avery closed her eyes. She felt like a child putting their hands over their ears. “Mom,please.”
