Page 106 of Holidating
He blinked once. Then, without a word, he turned toward the front door.
Like a fool, I’d run out onto the porch without my coat. So immediately I broke out in goosebumps. But the cold air felt good in my lungs. I needed to calm down. Likeright now.
“Should I get your coat?” Andy asked. “Do you want to go?”
I shook my head. As stupid as I probably looked right now, I wasn’t quite ready to bail.Jeez. If I let myself get this freaked out about seeing all those jerks from Beta Rho, what a long year it was going to be. “Crap,” I swore.Get it together, girl.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” As Andy said that, he draped his sport coat over my bare shoulders.
“Thanks,” I stammered. “I’m not usually such a drama queen.”
His eyebrows arched. “Well, maybe you have a good reason.”
There was curiosity in his eyes. But it wasn’t judgmental. “I don’t like the way they look at me,” I blurted, before I could think better of it.
“Why?”
Right. The reason was much too embarrassing for polite conversation. So instead of answering, I just looked down at my shoes.
“Let’s just go, then?” he suggested. “You look a little… traumatized, actually.”
That’s when I let out a big sigh. Because there were people in the world who had good reason to feel traumatized. But I wasn’t one of them. I hadn’t been raped, or injured, or abused in any way. I’d justbeen stupid. Very, very stupid. “Ugh,” I said. “If I leave, I’m giving him too much power.”
“Maybe not,” Andy challenged. “What did he do?” After asking, Andy immediately clapped a hand over his own mouth. “Sorry. It’s none of my business. But you have me imagining the worst, here.”
Ouch. Now a nice guy was worried about me, and I didn’t even deserve it. “That’s the stupid thing! Everything that went down…”Gah!I cringed at my unfortunate choice of words, “…between Dash and me was voluntary. I wasn’t even drunk. Not very, anyway.”
This explanation did not seem to appease Andy. When I looked up, his face was still full of concern. I hadn’t meant to talk about this tonight, or maybe ever. And certainly not with him. And now he’d know that he was on a date with someone who was crazypants.
I took one more deep breath of cold air, which helped. A little. “Okay, I broke up with him because he didn’t seem all that interested in me as a person. All he wanted to do was play video games with the brothers, but I was supposed to just hang around and watch until bedtime. Like a good little woman.”
“Charming.”
“I know, right? In my defense, I realized pretty quickly that he wasn’t worth the effort, and I told him we were through.” What I might have added was the fact that Dash didn’t seem very broken up about losing me. And that should have been a big clue. But I’d missed it.
The story should have ended there. Because my instinct about him had been dead on. But itdidn’tend there. And that’s why I’d been hearing a chant playing inside my head all week. And the mantra was:Stupid… stupid… stupid…
Andy was watching me with patient eyes, waiting for an explanation. It was silent there on the porch. And somehow I kept talking. “So, last week I went over to the Beta Rho house for a few minutes, just to drop off a bin of Christmas decorations for tonight. It was quiet there that night — the usual video games but no party.” I’d been telling this part of the story to my shoes, but now I looked up to find Andy watching me. God, this was going to be embarrassing. “That night, for the first time, he made a big effort to talk to me. You know, the full courtpress.”
Andy smiled at my basketball reference, but he didn’t say a word.
“He got me a glass of wine and asked me a lot of questions about my classes, and pledging Tri Psi, and…” I rolled my eyes. “Ugh. I just sort of fell under the spell. He was so sweet and patient, telling me how much he missed me…”
“So far, so good.” Andy pressed. “What went wrong?”
Yikes. I hadn’t told a soul about this, not even my roommates. And tomorrow, I would probably regret telling Andy. I really didn’t need even more people to know this story. But I wasangry. And I wanted someone toknowwhat pigs they were.
“Okay, he played me like a hand of poker,” I sighed. “After my second glass of wine on an empty stomach, and two hours of heavy flattery, he wanted me to come upstairs with him. Fool that I am, I went.” I looked down at the porch floorboards again. “He took me into one of the brothers’ rooms. And we…” I cleared my throat. “We fooled around a little bit.”
Andy dropped his voice. “But you didn’t want to?”
He was about to get the wrong idea. “That’s not it. See, I didn’t mind at the time. I didn’t start feeling bad about it until two days later. But that night I heard some voices in the hall. I heard a couple of the brothers laughing. But the door was shut, and I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Oh,shit,” Andy whispered.
I looked up quickly, catching a wince on his face. “What?”
He closed his eyes for a long moment. And when he opened them, he said, “please tell me that this was not a hole-in-the-door situation.”
