“I don’t want those kind of details,” came Andrew’s hard voice.
“I meant he found excuses to touch me in class…but okay. The other touching came late—”
“Stop.”
“Okay, jeez. Anyway, after a few weeks he asked me out, and we started dating. Once, I asked why we weren’t going to any of the big football parties I’d heard so much about, and he said I was too nice a girl to be exposed to the stuff that went on there. He said I was different, and he didn’t want to treat me like his previous girlfriends.
“Like an idiot, I believed him, and I fell hard. That is, until the last week of the semester. The night after our lab final, I went to his house to surprise him with a bottle of wine to celebrate the semester being over and found him hooking up with another girl. Apparently, he’d been running around with her the entire time he was seeing me. He’d been close to failing the class and paid my old lab partner to drop so he could team up with me, as the one with the highest grade. He used me to pass the class, so he wouldn’t lose his football scholarship. He broke it off with me right then and there.”
The other end of the line was silent.
“Andrew?”
Andrew made a choking sound. “I’m gonna have to call you back.”
The line went dead.
Lauren lowered the phone and looked at the screen, dumbfounded. What had just happened?
She sat up and crossed her legs. When he didn’t call back after a few minutes, she texted him.
Lauren:Is everything okay?
He didn’t reply, so she waited. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him about Will. It had happened a long time ago. But because Will was in the public eye, she was constantly inundated with images on social media of the first man she’d given her heart to—with beautiful actresses or models on his arm. Reminding her that he’d used her.
She opened Instagram and swiped through several photos, barely seeing what was passing across the screen.
What was Andrew doing?
Finally, he called her back.
“Andrew?”
“Sorry about that.” His words were clipped, his breathing heavy.
“Where did you go?”
“First, I got onto my Fantasy Football app and benched that fucker. Then I found my Gearhart jersey, went outside and threw it in the trash, and took to the punching bag my dad has in the garage to try to calm down.”
“Oh.” Lauren chewed on her bottom lip. A warm sensation settled in her belly. “Did it work?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t believe he did that to you. How any man could treat you that way is just… It makes me so fucking mad. I don’t think I’ve ever been this angry.”
“You don’t need to be,” Lauren said in as soothing a tone as she could muster. She’d never heard him talk that way and, though a small (okay, medium-sized) part of her was thrilled that he was so indignant on her behalf, she didn’t want him to be upset. “I’m sorry I told you. Even though it probably would have come up eventually, since Will’s the reason I hadn’t planned on giving you a chance in the first place—”
“Whoa, what?”
Lauren toyed with the edge of the comforter. “Ever since that happened with Will, I’ve only had bad experiences with men. I’ve kind of sworn off really attractive guys in particular. You know, the super-hot ones who have no business living among us mortals. I’d pretty much decided guys like that were all conceited tools that existed only to use and break the hearts of average-looking women like me.”
The other end of the line was dead silent. A few indecipherable sounds came through, and then finally, Andrew spoke, his voice low. “Average-looking?”
“You know what I mean. I know I’m not ugly, but I’m nothing special. I don’t typically attract the attention of men like you unless they want something from me.”
“I…” he said, then stopped.