Because You're Different ✔

59. Fragile

Yeah, we were in a bad place, not even really sure if our relationship would survive, but that didn't make it okay to just go and cheat on her.

Cheat, and then stay, fall asleep with her, and kiss her again in the morning — the full impact of what I'd done only started arriving after my brother had called me out on it, and for that, I was even more of a shit awful human being. I hadn't slept with her, though for a long, hard moment, with her touching me like that, I'd had every intention to. Didn't that count just as much? Wanting to?

Desperately wanting to.

What kind of guy did that make me?

So yeah, I did feel guilty, alright. Towards Charlotte.

But all that other stuff Sam had said I was supposed to feel? Disgust. Regret. Yeah, I didn't think I was feeling any of those. Maybe that made me an even worse person. I didn't know.

He'd been right. She was only seventeen. And I had met her when she was just fourteen. And objectively speaking, I shouldn't have been wanting to hold her like that. Shouldn't have kissed her. Shouldn't have kissed her again. Shouldn't have taken off my shirt. Shouldn't have considered the possibility of taking off hers too, and definitely shouldn't have considered taking off even more.

What kind of guy did it make me that I did do all those things?

I could say she was different. That she wasn't like other teenagers — but that just made me sound like an even bigger asshole, making excuses like that. Fact remained she'd been sixteen a day ago, and that it'd taken my brother's eyes for me to see I'd been doing something I probably shouldn't have been doing.

I hadn't lied to her. Kissing was overrated. At least, it had been, most of the time. But there had been something about kissing her, even if it wasn't hard to tell how inexperienced she was, something I couldn't pinpoint, that'd made me want to keep on doing it all night, that'd finally made me understand exactly why Tarzana and Ryan had never been able to stop. Something that set you on edge and didn't let you come back down even if you tried.

Kissing June, it'd been like...

Coming home.

And damn, had I wanted to be as close to home as possible.

But maybe those weren't feelings that were necessarily connected to her, right? Maybe it was just because I'd been struggling these past few months, continuously tired, always out of place, always feeling like I didn't measure up...

And then she kissed me, and all of that vanished, and everything was... was...

Yeah. It still didn't make it okay.

Shit. I did kiss her. And I did want to. Even so, it wasn't like I went around kissing seventeen-year-old girls on a daily basis. The last time I'd been attracted to teenagers, I'd been one myself. Which, approaching it rationally, wasn't that long ago anyway. And it wasn't me who kissed her, it was the other way around.

That raised another question...

Why did she kiss me in the first place?

She'd seemed happy — the little lights in her eyes had been glittering, and that smile... What had been going through her mind when she leaned in? Was it the wine, was it me taking off her jeans, something impulsive fed by hormones? Was it her testing if I'd told the truth when I'd said she was a girl I'd want to kiss? Was it something else, and if so, what had the something else been? Should I even be thinking about this?

And why, why did I kiss her back?

And why had it all seemed so clear and simple last night, and had it only turned into a mess in the morning? Had I really been that drunk? Fabricated feelings. There had been wine. A substantial amount of it. But not that much, because she was far from twenty-one and we were in the US and not in Europe.