I tried not to eat out very often. The way I saw it, every meal I ate at a restaurant equaled one more day I couldn’t afford to get my own apartment. But after a week of doing nothing, I guess I was especially vulnerable to peer pressure when Carissa invited me to dinner after the seminar. Or maybe I was just looking for a distraction, anything that would stop my mind from replaying the best parts of my night with Declan over and over.

There were a lot of best parts to replay. It was annoying as hell. A week since he’d rejected me, and I still couldn’t get him out of my head.

I’d been with gorgeous men before. Six-pack abs, tight asses, and big cocks weren’t completely new to me. And I’d even had some great sex. Not a lot of great sex, but more than many women have in a lifetime.

So, why was it so hard to stop thinking about this particular night of great sex with this particular six pack, tight ass, and incredible amount of endurance? And worse, why was I thinking about how much I wanted to ignore all that stuff and just talk to him again?

Okay, sure. Realistically, finding all of those attributes in one person wasn’t something I’d run into before, but those things were superficial. Remembering him should’ve just made me horny. I should be feeling my crotch tighten with the memories, not my chest. And my stomach definitely shouldn’t be the organ that fluttered.

Maybe I was coming down with something.

When Carissa looked across the table at me I had my hand on my forehead. “Are you getting sick?”

“No,” I said, dropping my hand. “I just feel a little off, I guess.” I had to be the only person on earth hoping they had a tapeworm.

Maybe it was E. coli. I dropped my fork and pushed my salad toward the middle of the table.

“Well, I’m glad you felt up to joining me for tonight’s excursion.”

Since Carissa had only lived in San Francisco for about a year and a half, she was on a mission to try out as many different bars and restaurants as she could. I’d lived in the city my entire life, but since I’d only gotten a fake ID four years ago and had only been able to drink legally for two years, almost everywhere we’d gone was new to me, too.

Thankfully, she stuck to the cheaper spots on her list when she was with me since I didn’t have the liquid assets she did and hated feeling like a mooch. Weekends didn’t matter because everything was free for women in the big nightclubs. Except for gay clubs, obviously. Gay men didn’t give a shit about how hot we looked.

She leaned back in her chair and sipped her drink through two thin straws. “This place is cute, right?” The pub was a lot smaller and quieter than the other places she’d dragged me to.

I nodded. “I feel a little like I’m inside a coffin, but yeah, it’s cute.” We were encased in wood—the chairs, bar, walls, ceiling, everything.

She laughed. “I was thinking more of a hunting lodge, but I see your point.”

“Is that why you ordered the steak? Because it reminded you of hunting trips back home?”

“Not everyone from my hometown hunts, Sara.” She poked her fork into the giant chunk of meat on her plate. “But we wouldn’t be able to call ourselves Texans if we ordered salad at a restaurant either. At least not in my family.”

Carissa and I had met on her first day at SF State. She’d chosen to spend her last two years of undergrad at the school that was as far as politically possible away from her very conservative parents back home. And I’d chosen to finally, someday, maybe finish my degree at the school where my very annoying parents were forcing me to take more than one class at a time. According to my stepfather, taking three classes was the absolute minimum if I wanted to live under his roof. Ironically, the last thing I wanted was to live under his roof. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice in that either.

But it was my own fault that I’d had to give up my apartment and move back in with my mom and Timothy, so I tried not to bitch about it too much. I had way more important stuff to bitch about anyway.

Plus, when I was being particularly honest with myself, I’d admit that I actually really liked school. In fact, up until the dream started to die, I thought my life would include four years of college at Berkeley or Stanford and then three years of law school at UCSF.

Now, my life included doing monkey work at Emilia’s virtual assistant company during the day and taking three night classes at SF State. I spent my weekends going to clubs, partying, going home with the occasional man, and then recovering before Monday rolled around again. Except last weekend. Going out just didn’t appeal as much since I’d met Declan.

“Oh shit,” Carissa said, looking up from her phone. “I can’t believe I haven’t given you shit for this yet.”

“Shit for what?”

“For making me almost pee my pants at that karaoke bar a couple weeks ago.”

“I don’t remember you peeing your pants. Was it after I left?” I’d grudgingly agreed to go to the karaoke bar with her. Carissa had never been to one, and I’d never wanted to go to one. Of course, that’s where I’d met Declan, and considering the way the night ended, I should probably thank her. Or never forgive her.

“Duh.” She started scrolling through our texts. “You realize the whole point of sending me a picture of a guy’s driver’s license is so I know who he is in case you disappear, right?”

“Duh back at you.” Of course, I did—I’d been the one to tell her about it. Safe casual sex wasn’t just about condoms these days. Safe casual sex meant a friend knew the name of the guy you were going home with and could give his license number to the police if you didn’t check in the next day.

“So…?”

“So…” she repeated, holding up the picture I’d sent her right before I’d left with Declan that night. “I swear, I almost peed my pants when I got your text.”

Oh shit. I’d had his stupid name in my phone the whole time. I’d spent one of the most glorious nights of my life with him, being too embarrassed to admit I hadn’t heard his name when he’d told me. Thankfully, he’d kept me so distracted that I’d forgotten my own name for most of the night, but still…

I don’t slut-shame anyone—including myself—but not knowing if the guy’s name was Declan or Dylan until after you left his place wasn’t good. I really should’ve just sucked it up and asked him. Or looked for a piece of mail. Or, you know, remembered I’d sent a picture of his license to a friend.

“Damn, he looks good.” I grabbed her phone to take a closer look. His address wasn’t right, though. According to his ID, he lived in Los Angeles. “He’s even hotter in person. And naked.” And with his head between my legs.

“You wish.” She tore the phone away from me. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve googled images of him. So, yeah, believe me, if a picture existed of him naked, I’d have found it by now.” She flicked the screen, probably swiping through pictures.

I’d always assumed everyone from Texas spoke slowly and with a drawl. But not Carissa. She had a drawl but spoke so quickly, it sometimes took my brain a minute to translate what she said into something I could understand.

“I didn’t even tell you I met the real him last week, did I? After you left with your stepbrother. I can’t believe how much I embarrassed myself. He makes me turn into a tween, I swear. I will murder you if you tell anyone that, by the way.”

She groaned as she swiped through some more pictures. “Where did you even get a picture of Declan’s driver’s license anyway?”

“I took it before we went back to his place,” I said, confused.

“Wait. This is the guy you were talking to that night?” Staring at me with huge eyes, she slowly raised up her phone again. “The one you went home with?” The seriousness of her expression was actually starting to freak me out. “No fucking way.”

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong with him? He seemed so nice.” …said the neighbor of every serial killer ever.

“You slept with Declan Hollis, Sara. Declan-fucking-Hollis.”

Calm down. I wasn’t dead. I still had all the body parts I’d started out the evening with. We’d used condoms, a bunch of condoms, actually, because Declan’s version of “foreplay” was more like “fore, during, then back to fore, then even more fore, during again, in another room, during, during, even more during, and then after-play”.

Oh, my God. Had he learned how to do some of those things in prison?

I grabbed her arm. “Tell me what he did!”

People’s heads spun toward us when she squealed.

“Owww!” She swatted at my hand. “Stop squeezing me so hard, and I’ll tell you.”

I let go of her and pretended I didn’t massively regret texting her the picture of his license. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and all the fantasies I’d had about Declan ever since that night would still be making me feel the good kind of dirty instead of the disgusted kind.

She glared at me and rubbed her arm.

“Oh, come on, Carissa. I don’t have enough upper body strength to have hurt you that badly.” I sighed. “I’m sorry. Now, can you please tell me if the guy I slept with is a fugitive or something?”

“You really don’t know who he is?” After another century of making me wait, she burst out laughing. “You slept with Declan Hollis, and you didn’t know who he was!”

“Sure, enjoy your laughter. I’ll just be over here having a heart attack trying to figure out what kind of psycho he is.”

“He’s a singer.”

“A what?”

“Singer—a person who sings. In a band.” She waited. “How can someone so smart be so clueless? Sara Antonopoulos meet”—she held up her phone again and turned it over, showing me a picture of—“Declan Hollis.”

“Oh, my God, is that him?” I snatched her phone back.

The background was dark, colored overhead lighting creating splotches of color everywhere. But right in the middle, holding a microphone, his hair wet and falling forward into his eyes was a guy who looked a lot like the man I’d been obsessing about for the past few weeks.

“It’s hard to see him.” I used the phone’s zoom feature to see his face better.

“I have better pictures. Swipe right.”

I glanced up at her in shock. She had pictures of Declan saved on her phone.

“Don’t judge me,” she said, blushing. “Besides, I’m not the one who went home with a celebrity without knowing it.”

“He’s not a celebrity!” Oh shit. “Is he?”

She shrugged. “Depends on what you think celebrity means. Does everyone our age who has decent taste in music know who he is? Yeah. Does everyone he takes home and bangs the shit out of? Obviously not.” She laughed so loudly the people next to us started staring.

I shushed her and then looked down at the phone again. “This is why I never tell you about my sex life, by the way.”

In the next picture, Declan was standing with three other guys, one of whom was Trevor. Declan looked pissed or bored, maybe. I swiped past a few of Carissa’s selfies at school and clubs, some screenshots and memes, then a picture of the two of us with our faces squished together.

My finger froze and I let out a long sigh when I got to another one of Declan. He looked just as amazing as the last time I’d seen him, except this one was in black and white, and he was sitting on a stool with his guitar. But his expression was the same—sad and a little hurt. I couldn’t help but wonder who he’d been thinking about when the picture had been taken.

Luckily, that thought reminded me of how stupid I was, and that I really needed to stop obsessing about him.

“Go be as tweeny as you want.” I shoved the phone back at Carissa. “Doesn’t matter to me. Because I’m not going to ever see him again.”

“Really?” She raised an eyebrow. “So, he has nothing to do with why you’ve been so out of it lately? And by lately, I mean ever since that night.”

“Nope.” I dropped my head forward and focused on my salad. “He’s all yours. And whoever else wants him.”

“Great,” she said mockingly. “His band is playing tomorrow night. I was going to invite you to go with.”

“I was already invited,” I grumbled, stabbing a crouton to death. “And I’m not going.”

“That’s too bad. But just so we’re clear, you’d be one hundred percent okay if I went home with Declan after the show, right?”

“Yep,” I said tightly.

“What if I asked you to watch the door, so we could fuck in the bathroom?”

Good thing I hadn’t eaten much because I would’ve thrown up all over the table.

“Damn, Carissa. That was way too graphic.”

“And you’d be fine if, say…I had a picture of us kissing.”

“I wouldn’t want a copy to put on my wall or anything, but yeah, I’d be totally okay with that.”

“You mean this?” She slipped her phone between my eyes and my salad.

It was a mistake to sit back in my chair because it gave my eyes a chance to focus on the screen of her phone. I turned away as fast as I could, but the image had already burned a hole in my retinas.

Great. I would spend the rest of my life seeing their lips pressed together. As if he wasn’t already on my mind twenty-four seven.

“Relax, girl,” she said, laughing wickedly. “I practically had to tackle him to do it, and he wasn’t pleased with me afterwards. But I’ll have the picture to fantasize over forever.”

Oh, thank God. I’d been the one to give the ultimatum, and Declan was exactly what I didn’t need in my life. But telling myself that and knowing that were two very different things.

“Plus, you don’t care anyway, right?”

My smile hurt. “Right.”

“Perfect.” She stared at me another minute. “You sure you don’t want to go with me tomorrow?”

“Well...” I swallowed. “Maybe I’ll go, after all. Just to see if their music is any good.”

Her smile held nothing back. “Thought you might.”