“I can’t. We need to fucking talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she says quickly.

I rub my eyes. “Daisy…” What do I say? I’m sorry for going down on another girl? Daisy isn’t my girlfriend. I also warned her that I would be dating again. If this is the right path, then why the fuck do I feel like I need to explain myself?

The answer is there, I just don’t want to fucking accept it. It can’t be my reality.

“Look, I’m sorry you had to see that. Believe me, this is the last fucking thing I wanted to happen.”

“It’s okay. It’s just the cherry on top of a really, really weird night. So weird, that I think it’s going to take years to scrub it all from my brain.”

I frown, my eyes narrowing at the floor. “No one broke into your room, right…” Fuck, Ryke. I run my hand through my hair. I can’t suggest shit like that. “I didn’t think they would.” I don’t want her to think that someone can get in.

“Not weird like that,” she says, her voice high-pitched. Her paranoia practically ekes through the phone line. Her breathing shallows for a second.

“Hey,” I snap. “Have you taken Ambien tonight?”

She clears her throat to calm down. “I will after I get off the phone.”

“Fucking promise me.”

“I fucking promise you,” she says. I hear the smile in her voice.

There’s a soft knock on the door frame to my bedroom. I look up. Emilia stands there, wearing one of my T-shirts. It barely covers her thighs. “Towels?” she whispers.

I point to the hall closet, and she tiptoes there, my shirt riding up to her waist. I don’t look at her bare ass. Mostly because it feels like I’m cheating on Daisy. The guilt just keeps on coming.

I wait for Emilia to return to my room so she can’t hear my conversation. I’ve been in the media long enough to know that friends can fuck you over quickly. Strangers even faster. Eavesdropping on one of my conversations and selling whatever the fuck I said to a magazine was the easiest paycheck five of my old college friends have ever made.

I don’t necessarily hate them. I just don’t go on snowboarding trips and to birthday fucking parties when I’m invited anymore. Two years ago, when the Calloway girls, my brother and Connor were swept up into this publicity mess, I realized we had to band together to survive. From that moment, I knew it was going to be hard trusting anyone beyond the six of us. How can you when a simple fact like I hate Justin Bieber could be worth a grand to a magazine?

The phone line is quiet.

“You still there?” I ask Daisy.

“Yeah.” She pauses. “I don’t want to ruin your time with your…date. We’ll talk later.”

“Fuck that,” I tell her. I haven’t been able to get Daisy on the phone in days. She won’t even let me look at her face. I have no idea the amount of sleep she’s been actually getting. I just want to make sure she’s okay. “What was weird about tonight?”

“You really don’t want to know.”

“Now I really fucking do.”

She lets out a short breath. “I saw Connor’s penis.”

What? “Excuse me?”

“I was looking at porn, and I accidentally stumbled upon Rose and Connor’s sex tape. Hence, his penis. To think, I managed to dodge the explicit version for a whole year. I thought I was going to get away without seeing it forever.”

I lean back against my couch and pinch the bridge of my nose in a cringe. Not a lot can make Connor Cobalt fucking uncomfortable, but learning that his girlfriend’s little sister saw him having sex—that may do it. My face has hardened in a wince.

And I have a hard time imagining her seeing anyone’s dick but mine. Nausea barrels through me.

“Are you going to say something?” she asks.

“I haven’t even seen those videos.”

“Jealous?”

“Not in the fucking slightest,” I tell her. The shower turns on, the pipes groaning through the walls. I glance at my closed bedroom door and then back at the floorboards. “Daisy, you weren’t looking at porn to try and fall asleep, were you?” It’s a fucking path that no one would want her to go down.

“No…” She sounds like she has something else to add, so I wait for her to speak again. I can hear her shifting on her bed. “I had a guy over tonight.”

The temperature drops ten degrees. My head is fucking submerged beneath an ocean again, that gritty salt water sliding down my throat. I see an older guy fucking the hell out of her, and I almost kick the coffee table. I calm down with a deep breath. “Yeah?” I run my hand through my hair a couple times, messing up the already disheveled strands.

“Yeah,” she says, leaving it at that.

“Did you look at porn together?” I shoot up to my feet and head to the fucking kitchen, the phone to my ear with one hand. I open the fridge, nothing in there but a case of water and a leftover sub from Lucky’s. Don’t punch the fucking wall.

“That would definitely be another weird thing for the night, but no, we didn’t watch it together.”

“Is he still there?” Don’t fucking think about it. I open the freezer to distract me. It’s just as bare as the fridge. A package of freezer-burnt chicken and a tray of ice. In the last four months, I’ve spent almost no time in my apartment. Maybe to grab some clean clothes and my climbing gear. Other than that, I’ve been at Daisy’s place.

I’ve been sleeping in the same bed as her. I’ve been taking care of her. She’s mine. She feels like she belongs to me. I don’t want to share her with any other fucking guy. And I don’t want to be with any other fucking girl.

Anything else feels like a sickening betrayal. How the fuck did we get to this place?

“No,” she says. “He’s gone. I thought maybe I wasn’t doing it right, so I was going to look at porn.”

“What’s it?” I ask, finding a packet of oatmeal in a drawer. I tear it with my teeth and pour it into a bowl. I uncap the water bottle as she answers.

“Sex. I can’t orgasm. I think it’s a physiological problem,” she states matter-of-factly. I remember a time when she claimed that she orgasmed before. We were in Cancun for Spring Break, and she said she skipped foreplay, just went straight to sex and experienced something more. I should have been happy for her, but I felt more fucking joy when she admitted that she got it wrong. That she thought she climaxed, but after talking to her sisters, it didn’t seem euphoric enough to be that heightened peak.

“You can orgasm,” I tell her. “I’ve fucking heard you, sweetheart.”

There’s no answer. I called her sweetheart—I do it unconsciously, and I know every time I say it, her lips rise.

“Daisy?”

“Huh?” She laughs a little. “Can you say that again?”

“No.” I realize I’ve overflowed my fucking oatmeal with half the water bottle. “Shit,” I curse. I have to dump all of it in the trash.

“Sorry,” she says.

“No, it’s not you,” I tell her. After scraping all of the oatmeal out, I toss the bowl too hard in the sink and it cracks. What the fuck is wrong with me today? I shake my head. “I fucking hate talking to you on the phone.”

“Me too.”

I lean against the cupboard and stare at my bedroom door, keeping an eye on whether or not it opens again. I have to be fucking cautious with people I bring over. I had a one-night stand steal a pair of my fucking boxer-briefs a year and a half ago. She sold them for three grand on eBay. “Were you careful with this guy?” I ask her.

“We didn’t have sex,” she says.

I shut my eyes and take a deep breath. Thank fucking God. “Was he a part of your weird fucking night?”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “I just don’t understand why I meet people and they seem so perfect for me, and then I get them in bed, and they’re just…wrong.” She pauses. “I think it’s me.”

“I already hate this fucking guy.” That’s a real understatement.

“You would hate him more if you saw him last night. He thought I was a virgin, and he was happy to deflower me upon a first-time meeting.”

I glare. I want to rewind time and take everything back. I want to tell her to not date a single fucking soul. I wish my brother’s claims hadn’t gotten to me. “Stay away from him.”

“I plan on it.”

The shower cuts off. “Hey, Daisy?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s almost four in the morning where you are. Take a fucking Ambien and go to sleep, okay? Call me when you have time.”

She hesitates. “I have time to talk more now.”

“You need to sleep before you go to work.”

“It’s pointless. I have to be in for hair and makeup at five thirty. Ambien may knock me out for hours, so I might as well just stay up.”

My door swings open, and Emilia stands with a towel wrapped around her chest, her hair dry. “You’re out of soap,” she says. “I couldn’t find any in your cabinets.” She hasn’t even taken a shower yet.

Fuck. I grab my keys off the kitchen bar. “I’ll get you some. Wait here.”

“You don’t have to go buy more,” she says.

“I’m not. There’s some in my friend’s apartment. She lives below me.”

“I’ll come with,” Emilia says. “Hold on a sec.” She disappears back into my room, and I catch her slipping on her blue dress from last night.

I still have the phone pressed to my ear. “Daisy—”

“I’ll go.”

“No,” I suddenly say. I don’t want to stop talking to her, not if she’s just going to spend the next hour paranoid. I can distract her from her fears. Even thousands of miles away, that’s still fucking possible.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

Emilia comes out and gives me a smile.