Second Helpings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [132]
“Why did you feel the urge to do anything?”
“To heighten my senses. Or to feel numb. Depending on the day, and the drug.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Never,” he said.
“Really? Not ever?”
“Never,” he replied. “Life is actually more interesting without it.”
“Why did you let people think you were hard-core when you weren’t?”
“Because I’ve learned that you can’t control what other people are going to think about you. The best you can do in life is not piss yourself off.”
That was a very profound observation, I thought. I would be much better off if I lived by it.
Then I started thinking. If the drug stuff wasn’t true, maybe the stuff about the girls was all hype.
“So going back to my original question . . .”
“Jessica . . .” he said, biting into his pillow.
“How many girls? Or was that highly exaggerated, too?”
He gritted his teeth in an embarrassed smile that made it clear that the stuff about the girls hadn’t been exaggerated one bit.
“Oh, Christ.”
He took my hand.
“Jessica, since the first time we really spoke, that time in the Cadillac outside your house, you are the only one who has ever mattered. I don’t want to talk about the girls before you because none of those girls matter to me now, just like Len doesn’t matter to you now. Fortunately for us all, love does not work on an exclusive first-come, first-served basis. Think of Gladdie and Moe, and everyone else out there who would’ve missed out if it did.”
He wanted to say more, I could tell.
“What?”
I knew what he wanted to say. And I needed to hear him say it.
“So you aren’t the first girl I’ve slept with. But it’s the first time I felt like it was more than just fucking, it was making love, as hackneyed as it sounds.”
It was totally the cliché of the perfect thing for a reformed male slut to say to the girl he’s recently devirginized. But this time, I actually I wanted to hear it. I needed to hear him say it because I knew it was the truth. I finally believed it. I believed him.
“Knowing that you waited for so long, then picked me . . .” He stopped again. He pressed his face into the space above my navel, his hands grasping my hipbones, as it to brace himself for what he was about to say. “It means more than you will ever know that you picked me to be your first.”
He moved up and up until our bodies fit together like a living, breathing ying-yang symbol.
“I just wish I hadn’t been such a moron,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“We could’ve been together all year,” I said. “Think of all the time we wasted.”
“It’s like I said before. There’s no point in dwelling in the past,” he said.
“But we could’ve spent so much more time together—”
“Jessica,” he interrupted, pausing to lightly kiss the tip of my nose. “By going through what we have, we helped each other be the people we’re supposed to be.”
“But . . .”
“As complicated and confusing as our courtship was, it happened the way it had to.”
“But . . .”
“Jessica, we were perfect in our imperfection.”
“But . . .”
“We are the way we are supposed to be.”
I placed my lips on top of his head, running my lips over his velvety crew cut. I breathed in his earthy and sweet scent and I needed to do more than kiss him. I needed to drink him. I needed to gobble him up. I needed—
“Jessica Darling.”
“Marcus Flutie.”
I want you to be the first and the second and the third and the last, I thought.
And then we looked at each other and started laughing. I loved that we were lying there naked and laughing for no reason other than the fact that we—and nobody else—were us.
Together.
The entire universe as an interconnected whole.
Samadhi.
the fifteenth
One last edition of Pinevile Low:
WHAT NOBODY FOOLED YOU ALL YEAR LONG?
TARYN BAKER, THAT’S WHO. SEE YOU NEXT YEAR IN THE SEAGULL’S VOICE.
I called Taryn to congratulate her on her very brave confession.
“Remember, don’t just slam people for the pure enjoyment of slamming them,” I said. “It’s fun for a while, but it gets old. And it isn’t good for your karma.”
“Right.”
“Try to do some good. Try to make a difference in this crappy cesspool