I thought I’d want it. I thought my body would respond in complete fucking joy.

It didn’t.

Not even a little.

A couple guys with cameras snapped photos of us during the game. So Daisy’s going to fucking see Emilia hanging onto my arm, the pictures posted online already. And I shouldn’t care how Daisy feels—we’re not together—but it’s been tearing up my fucking lungs.

For fuck’s sake, I told Daisy to go screw another guy. Yet, I still hope that she can’t find someone, even if that someone is good for her.

I glare as a horrible image flashes through my head. Of some model fucking Daisy. Of her hands on his back, nails digging into his flesh as he pounds against her. It’s wrong. It looks wrong, even if she’s getting off. Because she’s not getting off by me. I want to rip the guy from her body. I want to fucking punch him in the face for separating her from me.

Really—I should be fucking punching myself, shouldn’t I? Why would you ever tell her to go fuck another man? I can’t fucking be with her. I can’t. That’s why I’m here with Emilia. That’s why I have to date again, even if it kills me inside.

But that fucking picture—of her being intimate with someone else—it’s so fucking painful. Someone is drowning me, my throat burning with salt water and rage.

“Ryke,” Emilia coos. “You okay?” She sits up, her legs dangling off the bed and she touches my hand. No I’m losing my fucking mind. I need to go outside, run eight miles and then go climbing. But if I told you that, you’d want to come with me or you’d say I was crazy.

I didn’t screw Emilia last night. She fell asleep right here, too tired to go home, and I crashed on my couch in the living room. She woke up about a half hour ago, appearing buck naked, and then she pulled me into the bedroom.

My cock didn’t even harden.

Even now, there’s nothing. This has never fucking happened to me before. I’m so knee-ass deep in my fucking head that I can’t enjoy this.

She looks confused, and a wave of insecurity starts coating her face.

My gaze hardens, and I lean forward and stroke her hair. “Hey,” I tell her. “It’s not you, I fucking promise.” I even kiss her cheek so she understands that she did nothing wrong. It’s just me. For however fucking cliché it sounds, it’s true.

“We can take it slow,” she says. “I really don’t mind, Ryke.”

“No.” I shake my head at her. “I’m not in the fucking mood for slow.” Just fuck her.

She bites her lip, and then she slides one of my fingers in her mouth, sucking on it. I unconsciously imagine those lips as pale pink, that hair as blonde, that smile as bright, and that laugh as energetic and full of fucking life as Daisy’s.

I harden. Fuck me.

I feel like utter shit, and Emilia is grinning from ear to ear, my finger between her teeth. She lets go. I’m still hesitating, which is so unnatural for me.

“What do you want me to do?” she asks.

Just fuck her. “Lie on your back,” I say with edge.

She scoots towards the headboard. My laptop slides down towards me as she accidentally yanks the sheet. She said she was checking her email this morning, but she should have fucking closed the computer before we started fooling around.

I pick up my laptop, about to set it on my dresser. I glance at the screen—

What the… Daisy. I see Daisy in a Skype window, but she closes out the moment our eyes lock.

What the fuck.

Did she…

How much did she fucking watch? I almost chuck the fucking laptop at the wall, angry at this situation that I’m in, angry at myself. What the fuck is going on? Why the fuck does this shit have to happen? The one day that I try to preoccupy my mind with something other than Daisy’s wellbeing and it backfires. I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to do anymore.

I don’t understand why bad shit has to happen to people with good intentions. I feel like I’m serving an eternal sentence of bad karma for not meeting my brother as a teenager.

“What’s wrong?” Emilia says.

“I need to fucking call someone. Rain check?”

“What is it?” she asks.

“It’s too fucking hard to explain.” I point to the living room. “I have to call a friend. You can take a shower, and then I’ll drive you home.”

She wavers before she says, “Fine.” She leans in for a kiss, but I end up planting one on her forehead. I don’t wait to contemplate whether or not I’ve hurt her fucking feelings; I just shut the door behind me and sit on my couch, the computer on my lap.

I Skype Daisy back, waiting for her to answer my call.

She doesn’t.

I dial her again and then take out my phone. I text: Fucking answer me. The reply comes almost immediately.

I’ll call you on the phone. – Daisy

No. I need to see your face.

She rejects my third Skype session, so I’m forced to fucking call her by cell. She answers. “I’m sorry,” she immediately says. “You called me on Skype like three minutes ago. I thought you wanted to talk. I didn’t see much at all, I promise. Just…go back to doing what you were doing—”

“I can’t. We need to fucking talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she says quickly.

I rub my eyes. “Daisy…” What do I say? I’m sorry for going down on another girl? Daisy isn’t my girlfriend. I also warned her that I would be dating again. If this is the right path, then why the fuck do I feel like I need to explain myself?

The answer is there, I just don’t want to fucking accept it. It can’t be my reality.

“Look, I’m sorry you had to see that. Believe me, this is the last fucking thing I wanted to happen.”

“It’s okay. It’s just the cherry on top of a really, really weird night. So weird, that I think it’s going to take years to scrub it all from my brain.”

I frown, my eyes narrowing at the floor. “No one broke into your room, right…” Fuck, Ryke. I run my hand through my hair. I can’t suggest shit like that. “I didn’t think they would.” I don’t want her to think that someone can get in.

“Not weird like that,” she says, her voice high-pitched. Her paranoia practically ekes through the phone line. Her breathing shallows for a second.

“Hey,” I snap. “Have you taken Ambien tonight?”

She clears her throat to calm down. “I will after I get off the phone.”

“Fucking promise me.”

“I fucking promise you,” she says. I hear the smile in her voice.

There’s a soft knock on the door frame to my bedroom. I look up. Emilia stands there, wearing one of my T-shirts. It barely covers her thighs. “Towels?” she whispers.

I point to the hall closet, and she tiptoes there, my shirt riding up to her waist. I don’t look at her bare ass. Mostly because it feels like I’m cheating on Daisy. The guilt just keeps on coming.

I wait for Emilia to return to my room so she can’t hear my conversation. I’ve been in the media long enough to know that friends can fuck you over quickly. Strangers even faster. Eavesdropping on one of my conversations and selling whatever the fuck I said to a magazine was the easiest paycheck five of my old college friends have ever made.

I don’t necessarily hate them. I just don’t go on snowboarding trips and to birthday fucking parties when I’m invited anymore. Two years ago, when the Calloway girls, my brother and Connor were swept up into this publicity mess, I realized we had to band together to survive. From that moment, I knew it was going to be hard trusting anyone beyond the six of us. How can you when a simple fact like I hate Justin Bieber could be worth a grand to a magazine?

The phone line is quiet.

“You still there?” I ask Daisy.

“Yeah.” She pauses. “I don’t want to ruin your time with your…date. We’ll talk later.”

“Fuck that,” I tell her. I haven’t been able to get Daisy on the phone in days. She won’t even let me look at her face. I have no idea the amount of sleep she’s been actually getting. I just want to make sure she’s okay. “What was weird about tonight?”

“You really don’t want to know.”

“Now I really fucking do.”

She lets out a short breath. “I saw Connor’s penis.”

What? “Excuse me?”

“I was looking at porn, and I accidentally stumbled upon Rose and Connor’s sex tape. Hence, his penis. To think, I managed to dodge the explicit version for a whole year. I thought I was going to get away without seeing it forever.”

I lean back against my couch and pinch the bridge of my nose in a cringe. Not a lot can make Connor Cobalt fucking uncomfortable, but learning that his girlfriend’s little sister saw him having sex—that may do it. My face has hardened in a wince.

And I have a hard time imagining her seeing anyone’s dick but mine. Nausea barrels through me.

“Are you going to say something?” she asks.

“I haven’t even seen those videos.”

“Jealous?”

“Not in the fucking slightest,” I tell her. The shower turns on, the pipes groaning through the walls. I glance at my closed bedroom door and then back at the floorboards. “Daisy, you weren’t looking at porn to try and fall asleep, were you?” It’s a fucking path that no one would want her to go down.

“No…” She sounds like she has something else to add, so I wait for her to speak again. I can hear her shifting on her bed. “I had a guy over tonight.”

The temperature drops ten degrees. My head is fucking submerged beneath an ocean again, that gritty salt water sliding down my throat. I see an older guy fucking the hell out of her, and I almost kick the coffee table. I calm down with a deep breath. “Yeah?” I run my hand through my hair a couple times, messing up the already disheveled strands.

“Yeah,” she says, leaving it at that.

“Did you look at porn together?” I shoot up to my feet and head to the fucking kitchen, the phone to my ear with one hand. I open the fridge, nothing in there but a case of water and a leftover sub from Lucky’s. Don’t punch the fucking wall.

“That would definitely be another weird thing for the night, but no, we didn’t watch it together.”

“Is he still there?” Don’t fucking think about it. I open the freezer to distract me. It’s just as bare as the fridge. A package of freezer-burnt chicken and a tray of ice. In the last four months, I’ve spent almost no time in my apartment. Maybe to grab some clean clothes and my climbing gear. Other than that, I’ve been at Daisy’s place.

I’ve been sleeping in the same bed as her. I’ve been taking care of her. She’s mine. She feels like she belongs to me. I don’t want to share her with any other fucking guy. And I don’t want to be with any other fucking girl.

Anything else feels like a sickening betrayal. How the fuck did we get to this place?

“No,” she says. “He’s gone. I thought maybe I wasn’t doing it right, so I was going to look at porn.”

“What’s it?” I ask, finding a packet of oatmeal in a drawer. I tear it with my teeth and pour it into a bowl. I uncap the water bottle as she answers.

“Sex. I can’t orgasm. I think it’s a physiological problem,” she states matter-of-factly. I remember a time when she claimed that she orgasmed before. We were in Cancun for Spring Break, and she said she skipped foreplay, just went straight to sex and experienced something more. I should have been happy for her, but I felt more fucking joy when she admitted that she got it wrong. That she thought she climaxed, but after talking to her sisters, it didn’t seem euphoric enough to be that heightened peak.

“You can orgasm,” I tell her. “I’ve fucking heard you, sweetheart.”

There’s no answer. I called her sweetheart—I do it unconsciously, and I know every time I say it, her lips rise.

“Daisy?”

“Huh?” She laughs a little. “Can you say that again?”

“No.” I realize I’ve overflowed my fucking oatmeal with half the water bottle. “Shit,” I curse. I have to dump all of it in the trash.

“Sorry,” she says.

“No, it’s not you,” I tell her. After scraping all of the oatmeal out, I toss the bowl too hard in the sink and it cracks. What the fuck is wrong with me today? I shake my head. “I fucking hate talking to you on the phone.”

“Me too.”

I lean against the cupboard and stare at my bedroom door, keeping an eye on whether or not it opens again. I have to be fucking cautious with people I bring over. I had a one-night stand steal a pair of my fucking boxer-briefs a year and a half ago. She sold them for three grand on eBay. “Were you careful with this guy?” I ask her.