Charmed Thirds_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [13]
I would have loved to have made a dramatic getaway. To instinctively know how to hot-wire a car, or even better, for my female fury to fuel a paranormal event that would spontaneously turn on the ignition without a key. But, alas, I couldn't even open the door, and I burned my hand on the sizzling metal handle in my attempt.
“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”
“Are you okay?” asked Marcus, coming up behind me and reaching for my hand.
“I'm fine.”
Marcus stretched out his white T-shirt with his fist and used it as a buffer between his skin and the hot handle, opening my door. He walked around the front of the car and did the same on his side, and adjusted the Holiday Inn towels meant to prevent our asses from blistering on the leather interior. He slid inside and cranked up the air-conditioning.
I was still standing, the rubber soles of my flip-flops melting and melding with the parking lot.
“Jessica,” he sighed.
I got in the car and slammed the door so hard that the plastic pink flower tied to the radio antenna quivered as if in fear.
“Jessica,” he said again, only this time with his hand on my knee. “I hope you understand . . .”
“Oh, I understand!” I said, with sarcastic venom. “I understand that we live in a very small town, and that you slept with a good percentage of the female population before you met me. And I understand that it was a statistical inevitability for us to bump into one of your former conquests. I understand that this is a consequence of dating someone like you . . .”
“Do you understand that she meant nothing to me? Do you understand that?”
Of course I understood that. This understanding is what makes it possible for me to be with Marcus at all. Outside of the awkward but necessary STD-clearance conversation we had prior to our first time, Marcus and I have barely acknowledged his industrious, illustrious sexual history. I accepted his past under the premise that he was “a different person” then. After all, he was largely under the influence of various mind-altering chemicals during his prime fuck years. (Ages thirteen to eighteen. Forty girls over five years. An average of .666 girls a month.) It was a necessary conceit for our survival.
But Sierra made Marcus's past seem all too present. He did it with her, he did it with all of them, and now he's doing it with me. Or not doing it with me. Which makes it even worse.
“Jessica?” he asked, squeezing my knee with calloused fingers.
“I understand,” I said, arching away from him so I could rest my head on the window. “I just don't feel like talking right now.”
And then he drove me home with nothing but the blast of the air conditioner to drown out the din of our silence.
the nineteenth
I blamed it all on physical logistics, but I now know why I'm turned off by the idea of sex in Marcus's car: It evokes all the girls I don't want to think about. The girls who were splayed and layed across the backseat. The girls before me. Girls like Sierra.
So now, I'm lying in this bed and I'm thinking this: I have had sex exactly four times. Three out of four occurred within the first two weeks of my sexual initiation on June 7, 2002. The fourth took place last New Year's Eve on the Columbia University campus, as the ball dropped from one year to the next.
Considering how I'm the anti–teen queen, it's ironic that I lost my virginity not only on prom night, but in a scenario straight out of the eighties teen movies I love so much, with Marcus, the reformed bad boy, boldly declaring his love in a song written for me, yes, me the Brainiac virgin, in front of the gaping mob otherwise known as the Pineville High Class of 2002. Prior to the act, I'd even made fun of the type of girl who fantasized about losing her virginity on an “event” night like her birthday, homecoming, or prom. I'm redeemed only because we never made it to the prom proper, and sped straight from a preparty to his bedroom, where he slowly lowered the zipper on my red dress and let it fall in a satiny whisper onto his floor. That night, Marcus loved me in ways worthy of overwrought adverbs—rapturously,