Chaos

“What happened last night?” I groan into my arm when I hear him sit across from me and slide a cup of coffee in my direction.

When Shawn doesn’t answer, I lift my head enough to peek up at him, and he asks, “How much did you have to drink last night?”

His five o’clock shadow has turned a day old, making him look even sexier and more disheveled than he normally does. His navy blue band T-shirt is hanging loose across his collarbone, stretched by my frantic fingers the night before.

“I don’t know. Five? Six?” I sit up and prop my forehead on my fist for a moment just to get myself used to being in an upright position. “Too many.”

Shawn studies me while he sips his coffee. His eyes are bloodshot like I’m sure mine are, a sign I wasn’t the only one who overdid it last night.

“How much do you remember?”

Everything. I remember the way his fingers skated across my stomach on the dance floor, the way his hips moved with mine. And I remember the weight of those hips on the bus, the way they rocked between my thighs.

It’s the moment of truth, and I lie my ass off. “I don’t know,” I mutter. “Did . . . ” I give him my most confused look. “Shit. Did I kiss you? In Mayhem?”

Shawn stares at me while rubbing calloused fingertips over his eyebrow. “A little.”

If that was just a little kissing, this dress is just a little short. “Oh God. Then what? I was so wasted, I can’t remember shit.”

“You got pretty sick,” he says as I blow nervous ripples into my coffee. Then he skips all of the in-between and jumps right to the end. “I brought you back here and put you to bed.”

So I’m not the only one who’s full of shit. Interesting. I continue blowing on my coffee while my swollen brain tries to make sense of what’s happening. Shawn is lying, and it’s either to save me the embarrassment of remembering what I did, or more likely, because he regrets it just as much as I do.

My coffee burns my tongue when I take a sip, but the sting is nothing compared to the sudden burn in my heart.

“Did anyone see me kiss you?” I ask, and Shawn shakes his head.

“If they did, they would have said something. Peach texted me, but I told her you were trashed and I was dropping you off at your place.”

“Won’t they think it’s weird you didn’t come home last night?”

“Not if I tell them I called that annoying chick who was digging her claws into me after the show.”

I nod and take another scalding sip of my coffee, wanting desperately to ask him why he’s lying, why he kissed me back. I was drunk, but I wasn’t too drunk to know what I was doing, and I don’t think he was either.

But I guess it doesn’t matter, because whatever spark flared between us, it’s clearly been put out.

Or maybe it was never there. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I was just what I wanted to be—just a hot girl in a hot dress.

Maybe I meant nothing more to him than that girl with the auburn hair, nothing more to him than I did the last time he made me feel like this.

I hate myself for letting him. For letting him make me feel like this again.

Chapter Nine

I WAS LATE to the first band practice we had after Shawn and I made out on the bus. I was late, but he said nothing. I missed my marks, but he said nothing.

So I started missing them more. I started plucking the wrong strings. I started telling the guys that Shawn was the one who was off.

Still, he said nothing.

Whatever lies he told the guys about what happened after I dragged him on the dance floor at Mayhem, they believed him. And whatever lies he told himself, he believed those too.

The entire practice, I searched for any sort of acknowledgment in his eyes—I looked to see if he’d look at me the way he did when he was kissing me, when his hands were on my skin and his heart felt like it was beating in my own chest—but he barely even looked at me at all.

It was like nothing happened—less than nothing. It was like he’d forgotten the way he danced with me on the floor, the way he buried his hands in my hair. It was like I was nothing.

It was just like before.

Before writing songs in my apartment. Before sunsets on my roof. Before tugging my feet into his lap.

And I didn’t dare tell a soul about what happened between us—not until this weekend at Dee’s, when it was weighing so heavily on my mind that I accidentally blurted that I slept with Shawn in high school. I was at Dee’s apartment with Rowan and Leti to help Dee pack up her stuff since she was planning on moving back home, and then we were going to celebrate her birthday before she left, and . . . yeah, it just came out.

The girls surprisingly kept their questions to a minimum, but that night after they were both fast asleep in a blanket fort in the living room, Leti locked himself in the bathroom with me—while my pants were down around my freaking ankles—and grilled me like an overcooked sausage. He held me hostage until I confessed every last detail about Shawn, with only one that I managed to keep to myself: I didn’t tell him that the night I slept with Shawn in high school was the night I lost my virginity.

I could barely sleep that night, and the next morning, after a trip to IHOP for coffee, Shawn showed up with Adam and Mike to help move Dee’s boxes out of her apartment. He ignored me while we loaded the van, and he continued to ignore me that night while we all drank ourselves stupid in her empty living room. I sat right next to him, and it was like I wasn’t even there.