After Summer (4 page)

There were a lot of things that Kelsi liked about college, but the drunken morons who comprised the bulk of Tim’s frat buddies weren’t among them.

It had been a few weeks since the start of the Greek Pledge, but the number of parties hadn’t tapered off. In fact, they’d increased. There were parties for football games, themed parties celebrating different brothers’ nicknames (Moose, Itch, Belcher, and Tango), and a 48-hour weekend bash called the Beer Olympics.

Kelsi tried to be a good sport about it. After all, it was nice to spend time with Tim. But the time they actually got to spend together at these frat functions became less and less quality. It was usually Kelsi with her back to the wall, dodging beer spills or impromptu Fallout Boy mosh pits, and
Tim off laughing with his buddies. And while she still clung to the belief that her boyfriend was amazing, intelligent, and incredibly hot, his frat brothers were definitely of the idiot variety.

It wasn’t just that they were idiots. It was that they were frigging
loud.
Kelsi was slightly concerned she’d end up deaf. And that while becoming so, she would also lose about sixty IQ points.

For some reason, these things didn’t seem to concern Tim.

Tonight, for example, she and her boy were standing in a hallway, watching one of Tim’s pledge buddies do a kegstand. Kelsi, holding a sweaty cup of beer in one hand, felt slightly ill, but Tim was cracking up, his hazel eyes gleaming. Tim never seemed to have any problem fitting in wherever he happened to be. Kelsi had watched him interact with the same brand of confident ease back at parties at Smith, too, where things were significantly more chill. Usually, she found his ability to have fun wherever he was endearing. Even hot.

But tonight she was just tired.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she’d even see her boyfriend doing kegstands. So far, the brothers had made the pledges sing, perform kegstands, and keep their beers permanently full, which required a whole lot of racing around the crowded fraternity hall.

“We’ll go soon,” Tim promised her, as Kenny staggered away from the keg, looking green. Tim leaned over and kissed her. “Just let me finish my beer.”

“Because the other eight hundred beers weren’t enough?” Kelsi asked with a slight edge in her voice that even she could hear. She hated being a downer.

Tim just smiled at Kelsi’s disgruntled expression. “What can I tell you? It’s Miller family tradition. No dead soldiers.”

“We have traditions in the Tuttle family, too, you know,” Kelsi said. She made a face at Tim. “It’s just that none of them involve drunk, smelly boys.”

“Are you sure about that?” Tim asked and laughed when Kelsi swatted at him. “Okay, okay.” He looked across the room. “I’ll go say good-bye. Wait here.”

Kelsi leaned back against the wall, set down her unfinished beer, and surveyed the crowd as Tim wove a path through it. She didn’t feel
too
bad about making Tim leave—he’d been out until five a.m. the night before and had told Kelsi he’d felt like a zombie all day.

She watched Tim approach the upperclassmen in charge of the frat. The way they started ragging at him, maybe she’d been too hasty. She didn’t want to get him in trouble with his soon-to-be brothers.

“I don’t mind,” Kenny slurred, hitting the wall next to her with a loud, reverberating thud.

Kelsi jumped, half expecting the wall to come tumbling down. Kenny was a big guy. At least he wasn’t chugging anything at the moment.

“Hi, Kenny,” Kelsi said. He could barely keep his eyes open. It took her a moment to retrieve what he’d said from her memory. “What don’t you mind?”

“I’d let you drag me off early, too,” Kenny said, or at least that’s what Kelsi
thought
he said.

“Oh, yeah?” Kelsi wished Tim would come back, if only because she was slightly afraid Kenny might pass out and take her down with him. She’d seen Kenny crash to the floor at a previous party. Everyone had yelled, “TIMBER!” and then gone about their business.

“Tim says you’re amazing in bed,” Kenny slurred on. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, you know? But I can totally see it. I can fully envision the way you tore that dorm room up when Matt was away!”

Kenny chuckled, said something else that was totally incomprehensible, and then mumbled some kind of good-bye and staggered away. He didn’t wait for a response.

Which was good, because Kelsi was speechless. She felt frozen solid in her place against the wall, unable to comprehend what she’d just heard.

Don’t fly off the handle,
she cautioned herself.
Kenny is a moron even when he’s
not
too drunk to stand. And every time
you’ve ever gotten mad at Tim in the past you’ve been wrong about him.

Which was why she kept her cool until Tim came to collect her. She smiled and said her good-byes to the people Tim cared about, because she could be perfectly polite even when she was screaming on the inside. She waited until they were outside, in the cold, still night air. She tucked her hands deep into the pockets of her coat and bit her lip for a moment, not knowing what to say. Or how to even begin saying it.

“Is something wrong?” Tim asked with his usual perceptiveness.

Kelsi held on to that. He
was
perceptive. He was also kind and sweet and not at all the kind of guy who would do something as disgusting as lie to his friends about her.

She looked at him and opened her mouth. Very carefully and quietly, she repeated what Kenny had said. She was proud of herself for not getting upset while she said it.

“Jackass,” Tim spat, with a shake of his head. “I don’t know what he was thinking. He needs to stop drinking so much.”

Kelsi felt a wave of relief.

“I knew you would never say anything like that,” she said, breaking into a small smile. A smile that faded when Tim stayed quiet. Suspiciously quiet.

She couldn’t believe what that silence had to mean.

“Tell me you would never say anything like that!” she demanded, stopping short in the middle of the quad.

Tim hunched his shoulders against the October chill. “I didn’t actually
say
anything,” he hedged.

Kelsi no longer felt the cold. Or cared that other students were walking by, eyeing them with obvious interest.

“This is unreal,” she said. “Why would you talk about our sex life in the first place? Much less
lie
about it!”

“I didn’t lie about anything!” Tim said, his hands up like he was trying to ward her off.

“So why would Kenny even know about the night I spent in your room while your roommate was away?” Kelsi demanded. A night which they’d spent making out, and talking, and then making out some more. But they hadn’t gone all the way. Now, Kelsi was glad she’d held back.

“You’re blowing this way out of proportion,” Tim said, and it made Kelsi furious that he obviously thought she was getting too emotional. “I didn’t tell anyone anything. I just didn’t
correct
them when they jumped to their own conclusions.”

“Oh, that’s much better.” Kelsi hugged herself and swallowed back the threat of tears. “Because heaven forbid your drunk frat buddies know the hideous truth about your virgin girlfriend!”

“It’s not like that!” Tim retorted, and Kelsi saw his
temper flash a little bit in his eyes. Perversely, it made her feel better. Like he should be hurting—or angry—too.

“Then how
is it?
” Kelsi demanded. “If you’re as supportive of me as you claim to be, why not admit to your friends that you’re not having sex with me? Or are you too afraid that they’ll think you’re
less of a man
?”

“Do me a favor, Kels,” Tim snapped. “Spare me your Smith College knee-jerk reaction feminist crap, okay?”

“You’re the one who has to pretend to be someone he’s not so a group of Neanderthals will think he’s cool!” Kelsi shouted.

“That’s not what happened at all,” Tim said, lowering his voice. “It was a stupid conversation that got even stupider. Someone said you were hot and a couple of people made some assumptions. I didn’t think you’d want me announcing your sexual status to a roomful of guys you don’t know, so I didn’t correct them. Why Kenny the Wonder Lush decided to share that with you, I don’t know. But none of this has anything to do with our
actual
relationship.”

He sounded so rational and his eyes searched hers, but Kelsi shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. Now she felt less like crying and more like socking Tim in the gut. “I mean, what happens if I do have sex with you? Will you, like, send out a mass e-mail?”

“Jesus Christ, Kelsi. Obviously not!” Tim snapped.

Kelsi was quiet for a long moment, looking down at the leaf-strewn grass.

Tim swore and looked away, his breath coming out in clouds against the dark night.

“You know what?” Kelsi spoke, still looking down. “I should probably go home. To
my
dorm.” Her message was clear.

“Fine,” Tim said tersely.

“Fine,” Kelsi snapped back in the same tone.

They walked in silence across campus, back to Tim’s dorm, and they sat in silence waiting for Kelsi’s taxi to arrive. When it honked downstairs, she waited in his doorway for a moment, thinking he would say something—anything—to fix things, but he looked as miserable as she felt.

The whole cab ride back, she swallowed back the hot tears building in her throat. Then when the car got to her dorm, she got out of the car, slammed the door, and ran up to her room, which was, thankfully, empty.

There, finally, she threw herself onto her bed, burst into tears, and cried herself to sleep.

When she woke up the next morning, Kelsi immediately remembered the events of the night before, and the humiliation and regret made her stomach drop. She rolled over and saw, with a small pang of relief, that Taryn’s bed was still empty. She hadn’t come home last night.

Probably having sex with someone,
Kelsi thought, and tears sprang to her eyes again.

Okay. She’d admit it. The whole mess last night had forced her to admit it to herself. She was ashamed. Ashamed that she was eighteen years old and had less experience than her little sister. Ashamed that her own boyfriend was so embarrassed by her lameness that he lied about it to his friends.

Blinking away her tears, Kelsi lay with her comforter pulled up to her chin, and wished, as hard as she could, that her virginity meant to her what it had meant to Ella. For Ella it had been something insubstantial—an inconvenience to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.

If only Kelsi believed that.

Kelsi’s first two boyfriends had broken up with her for refusing to sleep with them. One right after the other. Kelsi could make all kinds of excuses for how each one of them was a jerk in his own right, but the fact remained—they had each wanted to have sex with her. And she’d refused. And now, once again, she was back to the same issue.
What is
wrong
with me?

Ella always said that Kelsi made it a bigger deal than it was.
Just get it over with,
her sister would say with an exaggerated roll of her brown eyes, and part of Kelsi thought she should. But another part of her, for no reason she could tell,
just said no. In that quiet, sure voice deep inside. She didn’t know why. She just knew she wasn’t ready.

“Good morning!” Taryn singsonged, pushing into the room. “You know why you love me? Because I picked up a special Starbucks chai latte, just for you.”

She came over and plopped onto Kelsi’s bed, tucking her legs beneath her.

“You got chais?” Kelsi couldn’t process such luxury (or industry on Taryn’s part) so early on a Sunday morning. But she still took the cup Taryn held out to her.

Taryn blew on her chai and took a sip. “Yup. I can’t believe you didn’t come to the Italian movie festival last night. It was amazing!
Totally
worth staying up all night for.” She leaned closer to study Kelsi’s expression. “Oh, my God, Kels. Have you been crying? What’s wrong?”

Kelsi hadn’t intended to tell Taryn anything about last night, but she was undone by her roommate’s kindness.

She opened her mouth, gave into her tears, and let the whole story flood out.

When she was finished, her eyes were puffy, the chais were drained, and Taryn was shaking her head.

“Guys,” she said with a resigned sigh. “That Tim is yummy, but when push comes to shove, just as much of a dimwit as the rest.” She paused, squeezing Kelsi’s hand. “What are you going to do?”

“I have no idea,” Kelsi said with a hitch in her voice. “I mean, I feel like I’m this—embarrassment to him.”

“First of all,” Taryn said briskly, “that’s totally ridiculous. No one should make you feel bad about anything you do—or
don’t
do—when it comes to sex.”

“I just think there’s something wrong with me,” Kelsi confessed in a near-whisper, afraid to look at Taryn. It felt kind of good to finally be so honest. She felt her hands ball into fists beneath her comforter. “I mean, everyone else has this overwhelming urge to do it and I just don’t. I mean, I love fooling around with Tim, and sometimes it’s really hard
not
to go all the way with him, but I just don’t…”

“You don’t have to justify feeling how you feel,” Taryn said matter-of-factly. “Not to Tim. Not to yourself. Not to anyone.”

Kelsi just shook her head. How did Taryn get so sane? She was so calm, never particularly fazed. Everything Kelsi felt she wasn’t.

“My philosophy? Sex is supposed to be
fun,
” Taryn said after a moment. “Not weird or dramatic or whatever. Definitely not something to get upset about, or you’re missing the whole point.”

“I’m not sure other people agree with you,” Kelsi mumbled. Meaning herself.

“I’m also not big on other people’s expectations,” Taryn said, grinning. “I guess I’m a kind of a nonconformist.”

Kelsi sniffed back tears. “Let me guess. So you’re not a weird, dramatic virgin like me?”

“Well, I’m not a virgin,” Taryn said, drawing her knees up to her chin. “And I’m not even sure I’m straight. But I try not to be weird or dramatic about anything.”