Page 27 of Tell Me I'm Enough

“You know what, Mason? You’re a real asshole sometimes. You wanna knowwhyI was kissing him?”

“No,” I tell her flatly.

“Because if we’re not having sex, you don’t even talk to me. You don’t pay me any attention. It doesn’t even feel like you love me.”

I laugh bitterly. “Well…I did.”

“I don’t think you know how to love.”

“I don’t!” I yell. “Congratulations, you figured me out. I’m fucked up, Jackie. I thought you knew that!”

“Then let me in,” she begs. “Let me help.”

She goes to grab my hands, and I jerk away.

“Not after that shit. We’re done.”

I don’t let her say anything else. I dip out of the bathroom, out of the bedroom, and out of the house.

She yells my name behind me, but I don’t answer.

It’s humid outside, and the anger boiling inside me makes me feel like I’m sweating bullets.

I hate how my dad’s words are constantly thrown back in my face.

“Focus, Mason. Don’t let women distract you. The minute you start caring is when they use it as a weakness against you.”

He’s wrong about almost everything. But maybe not that.

I look around and realize I have nowhere to go. I can’t drive, and I had planned to crash here. I really don’t feel like asking anyone for a ride home or trying to search for the very few sober people here.

Reluctantly, I turn around and head back into the house. I make it up the stairs when I hear Jackie call my name again.

“Mason!”

I find the room I left my overnight bag in, and she catches up to me as soon as I slam the door…right in her face.

“Go away, Jackie.”

I press my head to the door, my heart beating so fast. It feels like it’s going to beat out of my chest while it also feels like it’s simultaneously being ripped in half.

“I can’t,” she says softly through the door, and I can tell her head is lying right where mine is on the other side.

“You have to.”

“Please, Mason.”

I don’t answer her. I can’t. I’ll be damned if I let myself be weak for another woman ever again.

I willnevergive myself to another girl who can hurt me like this.

8

Mason

FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE

To all of the people who say you’ll find yourself in college…you left out the part where you lose yourself first.