My Year Zero by Gold Rachel

Author:Gold, Rachel [Gold, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781594934827
Publisher: Bella Books
Published: 2016-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Two

I didn’t tell Sierra right away. I wanted to hold being with Blake inside of me and look at it again and again. I wanted to figure it out before I talked about it.

Sierra and I went home after the party. She fell asleep. I didn’t, not for a long time. In the morning she asked if she could borrow my car for errands. I said yes and went back to bed. Later, in the silence of the house, I wrote everything in my journal and read through it and still didn’t know what to make of it.

Blake would have words for all this. She knew four different kinds of numb. She’d know what to call these feelings. Inside I was like a box of crayons left in the sun, colors and textures running together until they could never be pulled apart into what they’d been.

When Sierra got back I was sitting on the couch with my journal in my lap, staring at the words on the page. I had to tell her because she came over and kissed me. It didn’t feel right to be kissing her without having told her.

“Can we talk?” I asked and closed my journal.

She sat on the other end of the couch and crossed her arms. “About what?”

She hadn’t gelled her hair that morning and the purple locks tousled together all messy. I wanted to run my fingers through it and settle it. Her mouth turned down, halfway between a frown and a pout.

“I kind of did something,” I said.

I remembered the stinging jealousy I felt when she told me about Dustin. I didn’t want to go on. Why had I done that to her? I wasn’t that kind of person. And at the same time, weirdly, having sex with Blake didn’t feel wrong—but hurting Sierra felt awful.

“Did something bad?” she asked.

I braced myself against the couch, let my breath out in a quick huff, and went for it.

“I had sex with Blake,” I told her. “But it was just a thing, you know? I still love you and I’m still with you…” I wanted to keep talking and fill the space with words, but I ran out of points to make.

Her pale face went paler. “You? When?” she asked.

I ran a fingernail along the rolled edge of the couch cushion.

“Last night,” I admitted. “At the party.”

“When?” she asked again.

“After the lake. It was late, you were out back smoking. I went to take a shower.”

Her eyes were crushed ice as she said, “And then you had sex with Blake? After the shower?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Why?”

How could I explain it? We were naked and there was this gross spider and suddenly I was kissing Blake. There was no way to put those words together that made sense to a reasonable person. I could pretend that I would have stopped after the kiss, that it was Blake who pushed it, but that was a lie. Even thinking about it now brought back an echo of incandescence from touching Blake.

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