Page 42 of The Bride
I pounded the thought into my head so that it was louder than all the other ones. I couldn’t go downstairs and hang with him, naturally. I knew enough about myself to know I needed distance. But he would think it weird if I bailed this early for bed.
So I did what smart girls everywhere did when they wanted to get out of an awkward situation. I lied.
I walked out of my room and called down to Jake from the top of the stairs.
“Hey, no TV for me tonight. I’ve got a book I’m behind on for English.”
There was a beat. A moment when he said nothing and I cringed.
“Okay,” he finally called up to me.
But that’s when I knew something had changed. I had seen him not as Jake but as a man, and now he knew I was freaked out by it, enough that I needed some distance.
On a scale of one to ten, this event was definitely a solid eight.
Eleven
Ellie
November
Wow. Whoa. Holy freak. Eww, gross. Was that even humanly possible?
You probably want to know what I was doing. Frankly, I was watching porn. That’s right, porn.
I was a healthy teenager, not having sex, but I had… curiosity. Given that every guy in school had completely frozen me out, thanks to Jake. Because even though he said he didn’t say anything to anyone, I know he must have said something to someone because this was not just retaliation to Bobby being an asshole.
This was something else.
Whatever. It didn’t matter. I had already reconciled that cows were my future, but now that I had seen my first penis I was simply curious how it stacked up.
Hello internet. Google search porn and penises and… Voila.
All the dick a girl could ever want to see. And no lie, there was some dick I hoped I never saw again.
I was so focused on what I was seeing that I didn’t hear Jake calling to me as he came through the back door.
“Ellie didn’t you hear me?”
“Eeek!”
Obviously I didn’t hear him or I would have shut off my laptop well in advance of him coming into the kitchen. Instead I made that horribly girly noise and slammed down the lid of the laptop as fast as I could, which immediately made me look suspicious.
Also my blazing red cheeks.
Girly noise.
Slamming laptop lid.
Red cheeks.
It all spelled porn surfing.
However, I was a girl. Which meant I might get away with it if Jake didn’t suspect I would ever be doing such a thing.
“What were you doing?” Nice leading opening salvo by him.
I looked at him—well, at his left ear. I shrugged. “Nothing.”
