Gina comes over for dinner. It’s late, but we’re both night owls. I’m making my famous chicken Alfredo, her favorite. She sits on my couch, curling her feet under her. Hercules doesn’t allow anyone on the couch without a cuddle, so he sits next to her and lays his head on her lap. She opens a bottle of wine, pours herself a glass and offers me one. I decline. After those embarrassing texts to Ram, I may never drink again.

“How are things with Evan?” Gina asks.

Dishing pasta onto our plates, I look up at her, surprised for a moment. I haven’t thought about him, not one single time since being with Ram on the beach. Normally his hateful face will pop up in my head at least once an hour. I picture his head on a pike in the middle of town, him getting some nasty STD that causes his dick to fall off, his new girlfriend leaving him penniless and desolate to the point where he comes crawling back to me just so I can kick him while he’s down—the usual. But there’s nothing. A blissful span of hours with nothing but memories of my incredible time with Ram on the beach.

“Oh, you know, still a piece of shit as always. His girlfriend is knocked up. About five months or so by the looks of it.”

Gina freaks out. I bring pasta to her and sit in the chair opposite, listening to her rant while I eat. It really is a nice change of pace to have someone else point out all of his flaws for a change.

“Did you call Ram?” she asks.

I stop eating and look down at my plate. Suddenly my stomach is full of butterflies and I can’t take another bite.

“Yeah, actually, I did.”

I tell her about the drunken texts, running into him in front of the studio where he’d been working, and then him going down on me in the parking lot at the beach.

When I’m done she takes a drink of her wine and slowly puts it down as if she were being purposefully slow in order to come up with something to say. By the look on her face, it isn’t good and I have to steel myself for a lecture.

“You’re beaming when you talk about him,” she says.

I shrug. “He’s a good time. I’ve never been able to come before with a guy going down on me. It was almost spiritual,” I joke—well, kind of. It was pretty damn heavenly, that’s for sure.

She wipes her mouth. This takes an obscene amount of time. I frown, waiting for her to get to the point. “I just want you to be careful around him. You’re all starry-eyed, but you know he’s not someone you can ever date, right? I mean, he’s the Bed Shaker. A one-and-done sex machine. You can’t take him seriously.”

“That’s just his reputation. He might be the Bed Shaker, but he’s still a person behind the reputation. You talk about him as if he’s nothing more than a vibrator.”

As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I’m surprised by them. Why the hell am I defending this man—who I don’t know anything about—to Gina, the girl who introduced him to me in the first place?

I know she’s right, of course. I was never under the illusion that he and I could be anything more than fuck buddies. I can’t imagine a man who’s built a reputation such as his, letting all of that go to be with one woman.

“Just look at his Instagram comments, Cadie. Look at the way these women throw themselves at him. Even if you did date someone like that, do you think after the shiny top-coat of a new relationship wore off, he could resist the temptation?”

I take her phone from her and scroll through the comments. It’s worse than porn. These women have no filter and will say anything to get into his pants.

I hand the phone back, feeling deflated. My thoughts are in a tangle and so are my emotions. All of this bullshit with Evan must be making me desperate. There’s no way I would ever want to date someone as pursued as Ram. My self-esteem couldn’t handle that.

“You’re right, I’m so stupid. I swear I won’t fall for him. It was just a good time and an escape from my shitty life.”

Gina sets down her plate of pasta on the coffee table. Bad idea. Hercules sees his opportunity and takes it. His face is in the plate, eating it up. Gina is more concerned with my feelings than food and comes over to sit on the edge of my chair. She runs her fingers through my hair.

“You’re not stupid. You’re a beautiful, perfect, trusting person who tends to fall for the wrong guys. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

I lean my head against her and smile. “I know.”

That night, I eat my weight in pasta and garlic bread and try to forget men exist.