Falling Into You (8 page)

I must have looked puzzled, because she quickly clarified: “
You do know that talking means fucking, right? Like I would actually want to have a conversation with him. I can’t even remember what his name is. It’s like Trey or Tony or Tom. It definitely starts with a T.”

His name was definitely Craig, which did not start with a T, but Sophia had already moved on to a new topic of conversation while I was still trying to figure out how “talking to” had become a synonym for having sex. 

Sleeping with someone whose name I didn’t know didn’t sound even remotely appealing. I had a boyfriend back in high school, a solid, respectable guy named Aaron. We had been together for about six months when I had decided that it was time to stop being a virgin. He had come over, talked to my dad about football for almost thirty minutes, and had then taken me to the parking lot of a local park and had sex with me in the backseat of his 1994 Honda Accord. Very romantic. Very…quick.

It had happened a dozen times after that, and then I had broken it off. It was partially due to the fact that his fumbling fingers didn’t have anything in common with the racy scenes from the novels I had read since I was 12 years old. It was also partially due to the fact that his hands running over my body made me remember long-forgotten moments, the strums of techno music, and the night that I’ve been fighting for four years to remember. The night I’ve been fighting for four years to forget.

Compared to what I saw and heard from my friends, it was nothing. I was practically a virgin, they said. A romantic.

“You have to keep doing it until it feels good,”
a girl named Jessica had told me, shaking her head. “You can’t just give up like that.”

“A shocking lack of experience,” Sophia said.
“Something we need to remedy as soon as possible.”

I was going to have to figure a way to get her off of that train of thought
, but any planning was going to have to wait for another night
.
I wasn’t lying when I told her that I was tired
. It had been an incredibly long day, and I hadn’t even had time to celebrate the fact that my first real college semester was officially finished. I had finished all of my papers the night before, so there wouldn’t be any loose ends when we arrived in New York.

I was fairly certain that
Sophia
still hadn’t turned any of hers in.
I was also pretty sure that she hadn’t started any of them and wasn’t planning to.
I think my mention of finals week that morning had actually been the first time she thought about it.
After throwing her clothes
in one monogrammed suitcase and her makeup bag
into
another
,
she had
responded to my questions about her papers by
sho
o
t
ing
off an e-mail to
the professor of the Psych 101 course that we had taken together.
I’ll be away for the holidays and will be able to turn
the paper in after I return
. She offered no
further explanation.

Of course, there was a good chance that she wouldn’t fail. I had seen
the
way the
professor looked at her
during the lectures
. One quick afternoon of h
armless flirting in his office and maybe so
me
not-so-harmless flirting, if she was unlucky,
and the paper would be forgotten. I’m sure
Sophia
knew that.

That’s just the way things worked for her.
O
n our first night out
with all of the girls from our dorm
,
Sophia
had told me that Greenview College was willing to overlook her
“abysmal high school grades
”
because her father had spoken to the dean about his willingness to be an “enthusiastic” contributor to the school improvement fund.

I hadn’t yet seen the
Pearce name
on any libraries or athletic centers, but I know
Sophia
’s father had probably been very enthusiastic, indeed. She had laughed about it
at the time
, but I could tell that it bothered her.

Sophia
wa
s about the furthest thing from stupid that I could imagine, but
she
said that she
didn’t care about things like classes or gra
des. It took careful prodding to get her to admit
that it was a blow to her pride that her daddy had to pay off the school just to let her attend
.

I sigh
.
Sophia
would be
Sophia
. And she would be just fine.

I wasn’t so sure about me.
There were a million thoughts dancing through my head.
Would my
mom ever forgive me for ditching
Christmas? Was
Ben
actually mad?
Were he and Susan taking the annual tour of Christmas lights without me?
What the hell was I going to do i
n
New York for
the next two weeks
?

But there was something else at the forefront of the thoughts.
Chris.

It was obvious that he had just sat in the booth because there weren’t any other ones available.
He couldn’t have made it clearer that he wasn’t interested, even though
he’d been incredibly nice
and made a pretty good
conversation
partner
. The niceness was
a pleasant contradiction
from the whole
thinking
I was the maid
incident.

I decide
to forgive him for that. He clearly hadn’t remembered it, not on the balcony or
at
the coffee shop,
and there had been a bit of real contrition in his face when I had teased him about it as I was walking away
. Rich people always thought someone was the maid. And
honestly, he wasn’t too far off.

I open
the door
when I reach
my room
and
what I find makes me
slam it back in disgust
.
Just as
Sophia
had predicted,
people had definitely found the bedrooms.
Sighing, I open it again.
T
he girl,
literally
wearing nothing but a seriou
s tan
and a red lacy bra
, shouts at me
.
“What are you doing in here?”

“Um
…
This is my room.
I think there might be another empty one down the hall, though.
”
I’m trying desperately to avert my eyes. I have t
o sleep on that bed
.

The guy is muttering obscenities and finally manages to get out a
“Sorry, dude.”
I hear the sounds of them
scra
mbling
to get their clothes on, as I
stand
, embarrassed, outside of the door.

This makes me angry.
What WAS it with guys calling me dude? Did I look like a guy?

Once they had managed to collect most of their things (a piece of lacy u
nderwear remained on the floor), I dump
all of the
remaining
coats in the hallway, all politeness forgotten in my eagerness to be alone.
I lock the door behind me, throw
the duvet off the bed
, and stare
into the big mirror on the wall of the attached bathroom.

I definitely didn’t look like a dude.
But
I definitely didn’t look like
Sophia
, either.
I looked at my features
and tried to be objective
.
Everything was pretty average.
Mousy brown hair. Blue eyes. An extra ten pounds that wouldn’t seem to come off no matter how many laps
I swam in the pool.

So, my face hadn’t magically gotten beautiful in the time since I had last looked in a mirror.
I
normally
didn’t spend much time
obsessing over my appearance (the brief moment of panic over my wardrobe earlier was pretty out of character). It’s not like I was totally naïve or
anything; I know that appearance
s
matter. It’s just that
I
always know what I’m going to
find
when I look in the mirror, so it seems
silly to spend
endless hours
preening over myself
.
My looks are good enough.

But
not
good enough for Chris.

He was the most
ridiculously
handsome person I had ever seen in my life. He was going to be famous,
and there was
no doubt about that. I had no idea of whether he could act or not, but it didn’t really matter. He was going to be plastered all over the bedrooms of preteen girls
and they
would draw hearts all over their notebooks with his name stuck right in the middle. I had
a few of those posters myself, and maybe even a few notebooks
, when I was younger.

I try
to console myself with the fact that
I would have a good sto
ry to tell my friends at home
. Not only did he ask me for a light at a party, we had a whole conversation. He even made fun of my shoes.

So, this trip was already a success, if you looked at it in a certain light.

As I lay back,
I shiver
, remembering the way his
skin had felt, taut and smooth
when I had touched him. I just hadn’t been able to resist. If I would never see him again, I had to at least allow myself that.
I let myself slip into a day/nightdream, a moment of indulgence in the moments before I fell asleep. Of course, the perfect life in New York that I had dreamed about since I was barely more than a baby had come complete with a perfect boyfriend. Sometimes I pretended that he was a famous actor.

Chris would have fit that bill. He’d been so real. So normal. Talking about movie sets and co-stars and his actress mother like it was nothing at all. I’d come off like some little country
hick, and I hadn’t been able to scrape my jaw off of the floor once he had started talking about his movie. I had even admitted that I had a whole barn full of guilty pleasures, like terrible teen movies and celebrity magazines. I had peppered him with questions, when the last thing he had wanted to do was talk to me.

It didn’t matter. I would never see him again, I tell myself, hoping that the notion will somehow allow me to sleep.

Chapter 6

CHRIS

After flip flops had run off without even telling me her name, I sat there for a few minutes, unable to
feel of her fingers off my skin
.
God, I was such an asshole. First, I thought she was the maid
.
I had handed my coat to her without so much as a second look
. Then, I ran my mouth the entire evening without even trying to figure out how I would ever see her again.

When I entered the diner, I
had resigned myself
to
a lifetime of chasing
Sophia
Pearce, who
was the same as she ever was—beautiful and ruthless.
She
hadn’t missed a beat, asking me all about the movie I was making with making quick calculations in her head about what could be in it for her.
I wasn’t in love with her. Hell, I didn’t even like her very much.

But there was something about her taunts that made sure that I would keep crawling back for more. It was like her name was inscribed into my brain.

But
Sophia
Pearce
hadn’t even crept into the corner of my head while I was in that booth.
I could find
flip flops
again, I
think
. She had definitely been invited to that part
y by someone who belonged there, because n
o one managed to crash Sampson parties, even if we weren’t at Sampson any more.

Who had she come with?
The thought that
it was one of the guys I went to school with
caused a sick little ripple in my belly. I would think abo
ut how to deal with that later.

I would go to more parties, ask around,
and see
who she was.
Sophia
would be at some of them, I thought, and for the first time in as far as I could remember, I couldn’t quite decipher what I felt about that.