Not Who You Thought (BxB Drama-Romance)

What Boys Want

Then

Two weeks after Portland 

When my sister was in high school, she went boy crazy. And when I say crazy, I mean batshit crazy. Verónica was obsessed with boys at her school, boy bands, boys on the internet, and the actors who were on daytime television. Boys, boys, boys. That's all she would talk about when she was fifteen.

I was ten and I looked up to her. I thought my older sister was really cool, so I followed her around whenever she was home despite her protests. At some point instead of shrieking at me to stop following her and to get out of her room, she utilized my idolization of her to talk to me about boys. I would sit on her bed and listen to her, swinging my feet so that my ankles rammed into the bed frame in a way that always annoyed her. I loved hearing about Verónica's boys, be they celebrities or locals, it didn't matter.

This is how I learned that boys always want one thing. What thing? What did boys want? I didn't understand sex then. Verónica only explained in the vaguest of terms. All I understood was that one night my sister came home past her curfew and there was a handprint wrapped around her neck. The sex was consensual, she told my mother. The choking was not.

One day Verónica didn't leave her bedroom for an entire day and stayed there with her quilt pulled up over her head. When I came in to try and cajole her into leaving her room and go play video games with me, she said she "Hated all boys and men and anyone with a penis." She was pregnant. My mother took her to get an abortion the next morning.

Yeah, I guess it may have messed me up.

After Portland, Charlie avoided me for two weeks. Two weeks in which I, like my sister as a teenage girl, went boy crazy. I was sick, diseased with desire, and wrought with unwanted emotions.

Charlie didn't answer any of my text messages. In the hallways at school, he made himself scarce, not a single glance aimed at me from him in the classes we shared. I knew I broke his heart, it was inevitable. What I didn't know was that I simultaneously broke mine, too.

I downloaded Grindr. I uploaded pictures of myself that matched the rest of the pictures on people's profiles, appendages with no head. I lied and said I was eighteen, looking to match with all ages. My youth was ripe for the picking.

There on the app, I found not only boys but also men. I found men with broad, hairy chests, and enormous dicks. I found men who were excited that I was only eighteen, and believed me when I said I was a virgin. I found men who liked my pictures of my headless body. I found men decades older than me wanted to gag me, tie me up, rape me, make me bleed, fuck my face, fuck my ass, blindfold me, and spank me.

The conversations that took place stirred something strange inside of me. A memory of a man's voice. A man with no face or body, his voice floating through the dark recesses of my mind. "Good boy," the voice said, "Do what I showed you how to do." It wasn't my father's voice; I'd never met him. I couldn't place the voice with any men that I knew. I was never one to cling to older men in an attempt to find a father figure, and so I had no idea who's voice I remembered.

I shoved the memory down, down, down.

I didn't meet up with anyone from the app. I pretended that I would, planning as far as to where I would meet them. Motels were booked, restaurants reserved, and I stayed home and laughed while the angry messages poured into my inbox when the men realized they'd been stood up.

All I really wanted was Charlie. I didn't even want to have sex with him. I wanted to hold his hand, kiss him, and sleep in the same bed while he was in my arms. I wanted to make him food and watch him eat it. I wanted to sit through one of his god-awful nature documentaries while he rested his head on my shoulder.