Down Penn’s elevator, three buildings over, and up another elevator was the distance between our two places, and it felt like miles. I wasn’t sure if anyone noticed me, the girl struck dumb, as I stumbled around in last night’s clothes. France wasn’t prudish like America, but still, I was sure I was a sight.

Amy came running out of her bedroom as soon as she heard me enter the apartment. “Oh my gawd!” she squealed. “You were gone all night. All night! I know what that means. Did it happen? Huh? Did it?”

“Yep,” I said, gritting my teeth. “It happened.”

“Oh no, honey, was it…bad?”

I laughed a slightly hysterical thing. “Bad? No. No, it wasn’t bad at all.”

“Okay, I’m hearing your words, but you seem to be saying something else. What happened?”

She followed me back to my room where I stripped out of last night’s clothes and pulled on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. Comfort clothes. I handed Amy back her dress and heels. Thank god, they weren’t mine, or I might have burned them.

“Uh, thanks,” she said. “Now, spill the details. What’s wrong?”

“I think we need icing for this.”

“Oh fuck,” Amy said. “That bad?”

I nodded, and Amy disappeared to go find a container of icing in the kitchen. It was her mother’s defense mechanism. Every time something went wrong at work or with Amy’s dad or with Amy’s grandparents, we would come home and find her mom sitting in the middle of the living room with her hair in a messy bun and a half-empty container of icing in her hand. Icing was now a go-to for trauma.

Amy came back with a container of icing and two spoons. “Here you go, sister. Spill the deets.” We plopped down on the bed and dug in.

I took a heaping portion of chocolate icing and devoured it. Sugar hit my system like a two-by-four. “He left.”

“Be more specific.”

“We had the most amazing night. Dinner on the Seine in front of the Eiffel Tower, sneaking around the Paris opera house, dancing all night in a club. Then, we went to his place and did…” My eyes cut to hers. “You know.”

“Yes. That is the part I’m interested in,” she said with a laugh, taking her own bite of the frosting.

I held up three fingers, and Amy nearly choked on her icing.

“Three times?” she gasped.

“Yep.”

“How are you walking? I was so sore after my first time that I pretended to be sick the next day, so I wouldn’t have to walk around like a camel.”

I snorted in disdain. “No idea. Everything hurts.”

“But not just your body.”

I shook my head and stared blankly out the open window. “I woke up, and he was gone. He had a maid tell me to leave. She said she took out the trash.”

Amy hissed between her teeth. “He didn’t!”

“Yeah. So, you were right. Go ahead. Tell me you told me so.”

“I don’t want to,” Amy said. She pulled me forward into a tight hug. “I hate that this happened. I don’t want to be right this time.”

“You knew from the start what kind of guy Penn was. And I just dismissed everything you’d said. I have next to no experience with men and certainly not with someone like him. And he just played me.”

“You don’t know that.”

I shot her an exasperated look. “I do know that. I thought we were connected on some other level.” I rolled my eyes at myself. “What a crock of shit. He was acting the whole time.”

“Do you really think he needed to act with you to get in your pants?” Amy arched her eyebrows and held her hands up. “I’m not saying he didn’t, just that I don’t know that he needed to work that hard.”

“He didn’t,” I agreed. “But I just don’t think he wanted to be at that party. All our conversations are just…well, I see them in a whole new light.” I laughed bitterly at myself. “He told me that he didn’t believe in happily ever afters. That he preferred tragedies and didn’t agree with my romantic notions. It was all in front of me.”

“There was no way for you to know what he was going to do.”

I scoffed. “Except the fact that you told me.”

“What he did was elaborate,” Amy said. “I didn’t know he was going to do all that.”

“Great. So, I found the one guy I wanted to give my virginity to, who happened to be a total con artist. Look at Natalie, great choice in men.” I ate another huge dollop of icing.

“Maybe he just…had somewhere to be?”

I glared at her.

“Okay,” she said. “Maybe he’s just a dick who took advantage of you, and we can burn him in effigy.”

“And now, I’m turning into my mother.”

Amy laughed. “That’ll be the day.”

I flopped back on the bed and sighed. “Did you at least have a good time with Enzo?”

“Truthfully?” Amy asked. “He drank way too much and had whiskey dick.”

I snort-laughed. “You’re joking?”

“Nope. Couldn’t get it up at all.”

“Oh my god!”

“So, at least you got three orgasms in before Dickface left. That’s three more than me.”

I held up my hand. “Five.”

“Five?” Amy asked in disbelief. “You’re not human. What the fuck?”

“Dickface he definitely is, but the man sure knows what he’s doing,” I said wistfully.

“Ugh, I both hate and love that this was your first time. It was so good, and he totally ruined it.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, forget about him,” Amy said, pulling me back into a sitting position. “We’re going back home today. We’ll be going off to college in a few short weeks. So, it’s like you got it out of the way. Now, you can have as much fraternity dick as you want and not feel like you wasted your first time on some idiot.”

I arched an eyebrow. “That’s your argument?”

“Oh, whatever! College is going to be so much fun. We’ll be roommates. We’ll have as much sex as we want. And we’ll forget all about Dickface. What do you say?”

I laughed. “Let’s do it.”

“Good! We should probably pack. We have a transatlantic flight in a few hours.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said, eating more icing.

“You’ll be fine.” Amy patted my hair and then smiled at me more seriously. “You really will be fine. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I do. I just feel so stupid. Like I should have seen the game he was playing with me. Instead, I only saw what I wanted to see.”

“We all do that when a hot guy blinds us.”

“Thanks for being here for me, Amy.”

“Let me know if you need me.” She smiled and then darted across the hall to her room.

Amy was right. I’d been blinded by Penn. By his James Bond good looks and the way he talked about writing and books. It felt like we had so much in common. But how much of that was real, and how much of it was him leaning into what we’d talked about? Did I make up our connection? Because I’d certainly felt it in bed.

Apparently, I could have a mind-blowing connection with someone during sex, and everything else could be a lie.

I set the icing aside. That was my takeaway. I wasn’t going to be this stupid again. If I was going to have a one-night stand, then I wanted to know where I stood in that regard. Because I didn’t want to fool my heart into seeing more than there was again.

Penn had taken something from me.

Something I could never reclaim.

My innocence.

Oh, how cruel it was.