“You said it wasn’t fun for you anymore. Isn’t that the same thing?”
It’s actually very, very different, but I’m still getting my head around the “break up” comment. I need to say something. I can’t look at him, so I drop my gaze to my lap. Shit. I am not dressed for this conversation. I bet my hair’s a mess. This is the most fail reunion ever. If that’s what it is.
“Lily?”
“The sex didn’t stop being fun—”
“I’m glad my fucked-up dick is useful.” He sounds so bitter.
I look up at him. “I love your fucked-up dick.”
“Not enough to want to ride it any more, though.”
I’m angry that he’s come all this way and we’re still just talking about the sex. “Your dick isn’t fucked up, and this is about more than sex, Randy!” I shout. I don’t mean to, but this conversation isn’t going in a helpful direction, and now all I can think about is riding his dick.
A car honks its horn behind us. Randy rolls down the window and gives the person the bird. It’s Benny.
“We’re sitting at a stop sign.” I point to the red octagon.
Randy puts on his blinker and turns the corner. He drives around the block before he pulls over in front of my apartment building and puts on his hazards. He strokes his beard, his expression pensive. “I thought I was just gonna be your rebound. I didn’t expect it to turn into something else.”
I go back to looking at my moose pants. “Look, maybe I should have said something long before I did, but casual sex doesn’t work for me, and you’ve made it clear that’s what you do.”
Randy frowns. “So you’re not good at casual, and that’s all you thought this was.”
“Yes.” Finally, I think we’re getting somewhere. I sigh and shove my hands between my knees. “Everything was fine at first when I kind of hate-liked you, and you were eating at the Vagina Emporium in public bathrooms. Then you started taking me out for lunch, and you bought me clothes and joked about me moving to Chicago. Spending time with you over the holidays changed things—it seemed like it changed things for you, too. It started to feel like something else, but you’d told me it wasn’t.”
Randy stares straight ahead, gripping and releasing the steering wheel. “Was it all the talk about you moving to Chicago?”
“You joking around about me moving isn’t the issue, Randy.”
His jaw tics. “I see.” His chin drops to his chest, and he closes his eyes. “What if what we were doing wasn’t just casual?”
“I think the word casual needs to be banned from the rest of this discussion. Can you please explain what you mean?”
“So, like, what if we’re doing what we were doing, but with feelings.”
“Most people call that a relationship, Randy.”
He bites a nail. He looks like a cornered animal.
“If you can’t even say the word, it’s not something you’re ready for.”
“I can say it.”
“Then do.”
“Relationship.” He’s still chewing on his thumb, so it comes out all garbled.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. My stupid eyes decide for me and start to water. I hate crying. “I can’t—” I reach for the handle.
“Wait!” Randy grabs my wrist. It’s the first time he’s touched me since I got in the vehicle. His skin is warm and rough. It’s still electric. My heart aches so badly, and my magic marble is going crazy.
He licks his lips and swallows hard, eyes darting to me and away. “Look, my whole life everyone’s compared me to my dad. How I look, how I talk, how I act, how good I am at hockey—I’m just like him. And he ruined my mom with all his dicking around. She’s never gotten over it and my sister moved halfway around the world to get away from him. I don’t ever want to do to someone else what he did to them, and to me. I don’t want to put anyone through that.”
The pain this has caused him is clear in his eyes, in the rigid set of his shoulders, in the tremor in his voice. This man, so confident on the ice and in bed, is floundering in the face of feelings.
I sweep my thumb across his knuckles. “You don’t have to repeat the same mistakes, Randy. You’re your own person. You control your actions.”
He says quietly, “I haven’t been with anyone but you since we fooled around in the summer. No one.”
“No one?” I’m kind of stunned. Okay, I’m a lot stunned.
“There was that one girl at the bar who kept touching my arm, but all I could think about was you, and then you showed up. I was so relieved and terrified at the same time because I knew I was your rebound. I think I wanted it to be something else even back then; I just didn’t realize it yet. Or I didn’t want to see it.” He exhales a long, slow breath. “I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did when you brought up how things were getting intense, but you said you’d say something if it got to be too much, and you didn’t, and neither did I, and I panicked.”