SLAMMED #2
Chapter One
I told myself I shouldn’t be surprised. Just because Zack had been my first, real boyfriend, and I lost my virginity to him, didn’t make him any different from any other guy. I curled up on the dorm room couch, watching TV instead of studying, alternating between wanting to cry and wanting to track Zack down again and scream in his face. I wished — useless as it was — that my mom was around, that I could call her and tell her how awful I felt. The thought of my mom plunged me into a deeper sadness; I missed her. I thought I was finished grieving for her loss after a year, but every time something big happened in my life — when I graduated, when I moved into the dorms, and now, the situation with Zack — I thought about her, and wondered what she would say.
“Sweetie, some guys are just jerks.”
Mom told me more than once when I’d come to her — after Zack and I had broken up and I started dating other guys; guys who hadn’t been as loveable as Zack had been when we were both in high school. I could hear her voice in my head telling me that; I could feel her weak hand stroking my hair.
“You shouldn’t take any guy too seriously until he’s proven he’s worth your time.”
My eyes stung and burned and I buried my face against a throw pillow, sniffling. I thought Zack had proven he was worth my time in high school; I had never thought he’d turn out to be like the other guys I dated. I tried to think back to what he had been like. When mom started getting sick, he’d seemed so supportive — showing up in the middle of the night to comfort me, or grabbing my lunch from the cafeteria so I could spend the whole break studying to make up for what I hadn’t been able to do during mom’s appointments.
It was hard not to think about the last, bad months of my mom’s fight with cancer whenever I tried to think of her advice. It had been horrifying for her, I knew; she lost her hair and she thought she was hideous. As she wasted away, I frantically tried to tear myself in two, to do twice the living — rushing through my assignments so I could spend just a few more minutes with her. She had been so strong right up until the end, she kept giving me advice and love, and I felt so incredibly helpless as Dad and I watched her not get better but instead get worse. I had missed Zack, but in the face of my mom’s declining health and long descent into death, it seemed not to matter at all. My mom always was my biggest cheerleader, the person I could turn to with anything — and the biggest problem in my life, that she was dying, gave me no one to talk to about it. I couldn’t tell her how horrible I felt, how much pain it gave me to see her hurting, fighting and struggling against the disease that would claim her life — it wouldn’t be fair to her. She was dealing with so much already.
I knew she was worried about how I was taking the breakup with Zack, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her about that — it seemed so trivial in comparison. I put a cheerful face on and tried to stay as positive as possible whenever I was in the room with her, telling her about how my English teacher wanted me to try publishing some of the stories I’d written, and how the high school newspaper featured me in the Superlatives section as Most Likely to Win a Pulitzer. I sneaked her favorite foods into the hospital in spite of the rules against it, even though she had almost no appetite. She managed to eat a few bites here and there, and I would devour the snacks with her more to keep her from feeling guilty for not being able to eat than because I wanted them.
“Sweetheart, you have a kind and loving heart,” she told me once, close to the end. “It’s a good companion for your active brain. Let them work together — don’t ever let one take over completely. Use your sense and use your compassion. I know you’re going to have a good life, and I’ll be watching you always.”
Normally the show on the TV would have completely taken up my attention, but as I lay there on the couch, I found myself thinking more and more about Zack. Had he really changed, or had he always been a jerk? It was hard for me to say. The guys I dated after Zack and I broke up made me start to largely distrust men in general; Mom’s advice to me whenever I would come to her depressed or frustrated with someone I was dating made me think I just shouldn’t trust any guy I hadn’t already vetted, who I didn’t already have experience with. But I had experience with Zack. He was nothing like Braden, the guy I’d dated a couple of weeks after Zack and I broke up, who had just been using me to get to my friend Lisa — and who called me a frigid bitch when I wouldn’t “put out.” He wasn’t anything like Tony either; Tony had been dating a girl at another school the entire time we saw each other, and I didn’t find out until someone told me they had seen him at the other school’s dance.
Zack had been so sweet when we were together in high school. Even the first time we had sex, he was so careful, so gentle, making sure I was ready for it, making sure there wasn’t too much pain. I didn’t even bleed — we’d made out and teased each other until I was soaking wet. The fact that the sex itself had been a little disappointing had nothing to do with Zack being a bad guy; I’d kept having sex with him after that not because of any pressure from him, but because I kept hoping that we’d have that magic moment when everything came together and it felt amazing, the way I’d read about in books that I kept hidden from my parents. It didn’t become that way, but at least Zack had never tried to force me; and to the best of my knowledge, he’d never cheated on me.
The sex I’d had with him the other night was totally different. I felt myself burning up from the inside as I remembered it — how good Zack had been at touching me, at getting me off. How good he felt inside of me. It had been like night and day compared to our high school years, and I had to assume that the reason why he was so much better at sex was that he had been with other women in between. Had he broken up with me purely so he’d be free to sleep around? I wanted to know and dreaded the possibility at the same time. I wavered between wanting to be mad at him again for possibly breaking up with me right before I would have to deal with the most difficult thing in my life — losing my mom — and thinking about how incredibly hot our tryst together had been.
“It was just sex,” I heard him saying in my mind, blowing me off as if we had no history, as if I was just another freshman girl who’d gone to a party and ended up with him in bed. I heard his frat brother in my mind referring to me as Zack’s “piece of ass” for the night.
I writhed and squirmed on the couch, thinking my reaction painted me firmly as the naïve freshman girl who thought sleeping with someone meant something — the insecure, hyper-sensitive girl who was probably a virgin. I wanted to go back to the dining hall and tell everyone who saw me dumping Zack’s food on him that I wasn’t a virgin — that I wasn’t naïve, or a dumb, freshman girl. That the reason I thought it meant something was that Zack and I had a history. But that would only make it worse. I buried my face in the throw pillow and groaned, picking my head up and letting it fall over and over again. It was so stupid to think about Zack. I should have just let it go and never thought of him again.
I had no idea if the girl Zack had been talking to was his girlfriend, or some other girl he was sleeping with, or even just a friend as he claimed. He seemed pretty close to her; he seemed comfortable with her. It grated on my nerves that Zack could have had sex with me for the first time since we’d broken up and just consider it regular sex while I was completely and totally hung up on him without even knowing if he was really single.
I heard the dorm room door open and close and looked up to see Jess, her face dancing with amusement, her eyes practically sparkling. “Evie! Baby girl! Is it true what I heard?”
I groaned and sat up. “That depends,” I replied, rubbing at my face to get rid of the last traces of tears I shed over my own stupidity. “What did you hear?”
Jess laughed and sat down. “I heard you humiliated Zack in the dining hall. Someone said you dumped his lunch over his head.”
My cheeks burned and I buried my face in my hands. “Ugh, please tell me that only a handful of people saw that. I feel like such an idiot for doing it.”
Jess shook her head when I looked up. “It’s all over campus. Trust me, no one thinks you were an idiot — there are some girls who want to elect you class president for it!”
I smiled slightly. So, it was true then: Zack had been sleeping around since we broke up, as soon as he got to college.
“Yeah, but I’m sure plenty of people are calling me a naïve freshie who thought a one-night stand actually meant something.”
Jess shrugged. “If there are, who cares about them? I’ve told a few people you and Zack had a history, so it’s going around that he’s the kind of stupid asshole who sleeps with an ex and expects it to mean nothing.”
I chuckled. “As long as he’s the one who’s being called an idiot, I guess that’s okay.” I sighed. I wanted a shower — in spite of the fact I’d already had one that morning. “I thought I had zero feelings for him. Like — I thought I was completely over the breakup, Jess. I didn’t expect to see him at that party, and I didn’t even think of him when we went to that game.”
Jess shrugged, shaking her head. “That’s the thing with exes. You think you’re over them and then boom! You get blindsided by feelings the next time you see them.” She shook her head again. “But I do have to say, if you had to get involved with an ex, Zack isn’t hard on the eyes. And you said you had a good time.”
I blushed. “He was…much better in bed than I remembered. I guess that’s part of why I sort of…let myself think there was more to it than just sex.”
“Girlie, there is more to it than just sex, even if Zack doesn’t think so. He had to know it when he got you back to his place. I never saw a guy work harder to convince a girl to take a walk with him.”
I rolled my eyes. “That might be because you never make them work very hard if you’re interested in them, and if you’re not interested, you shut them down early.”
Jess laughed. “It works for me. Look, Evie: don’t think about it too much. You ran into an ex, you screwed him; he turned out to be an ass. It happens. Just take delight in the fact that there are plenty of girls who won’t screw him now.”
I chuckled, but in spite of the fact that I was feeling — at least a little bit — better, I couldn’t quite make myself stop thinking about Zack. Had I been totally wrong about him when we’d been dating as teenagers? And why couldn’t I get him out of my mind now?