Page 10 of Unwrapped

So yeah. Tyler. Maybe that’s what I need. A practice run. A way to get it over with so I can stop thinking about it.

All I want for Christmas is to not be a virgin anymore. Is that too much to ask, Santa? Seriously.

I cap my pen and close the notebook. Well, that was embarrassing. Thank God nobody’s going to read it.

An hour passes. I do some laundry, and I text my roommate about Tyler, and she sends back seven crying-laughing emojis and JUST DO IT ALREADY. Around three, I remember that I’ve volunteered to buy groceries, and I look out the window to check the weather. It’s stopped snowing, and the road is clear.

I grab my notebook and head downstairs. Vince’s office door is closed, and I can hear him on a call, so I don’t interrupt. In the kitchen, I open the refrigerator and check what we have against my grocery list. We’ve got eggs, so I set the notebook on the counter and cross them off the list.

My phone buzzes on the kitchen island, and I turn away from what I’m doing to look at it.

Tyler:

What time tomorrow?

I pick up the phone and write back:

8ish? Vince will be gone by then

Cool. Anything u want me to bring besides beer?

Chips?

Doritos it is

I check the weather app. The snow’s supposed to start again in an hour, so I’d better get moving. I walk out of the room completely distracted, still looking at my phone as I grab Vince’s keys from the bowl by the front door and then pull on my jacket. Chicken, potatoes, broccoli, chocolate, I repeat to myself as I walk out the door, so I don’t forget. Chicken, potatoes, broccoli, chocolate.

Four

DECEMBER 20

Vince

I touched myself last night thinking about someone I shouldn’t be thinking about like that AT ALL.

Someone completely inappropriate.

But my body doesn’t seem to care.

I came haaard thinking about him.

The words I should never have seen have been running through my mind since I read them yesterday.

Yet I’ve read paragraph four of the brief I’m working on three times now and I still have no idea what it says. Something about jurisdictional boundaries. My eyes keep sliding off the text like it’s been greased.

Yesterday afternoon, Sophie’s blue spiral notebook was lying open on the kitchen island after she’d left, the grocery list visible in her familiar, barely legible handwriting. I picked it up to glance at the list. When I set it down, the next page flipped over, and there it was. More of her writing, but faster. Even messier. Sentences that ran into each other. I should have put it down, I knew that, but I kept reading anyway.

All I want for Christmas is to not be a virgin anymore.

She didn’t name me. The closest she got was a description that I could maybe recognize myself in, if I was looking for it. She touched herself thinking about this person. She came and then felt like the world’s biggest creep.

So did I.

Two years of being the grown-up, the guy who built a stable home for a kid who’d never had one, and I stand in my kitchen reading her private thoughts like I have any right to them. I violated her trust, plain and simple. And the worst part, the part I’ve been trying not to think about, is how my body responded. First it was dread. The sensation of a boundary you’ve been carefully maintaining suddenly turning out to be quite thin. Then came the desire. That night, lying in bed with my hand on my cock, thinking about the things she wrote. Thinking about her. Again.

I scrub a hand over my face. I need to do something that doesn’t involve sitting here turning the same three sentences over in my head. If she meant someone else, then I’m an asshole for reading her diary and an asshole for assuming it’s about me. If she meant me, then I’m still an asshole for reading it and the problem is considerably worse. Either way, I’m the grown-up. I’m the one who’s supposed to know better.

I stand up, my chair rolling back and hitting the bookshelf behind me with a dull thud.