Page 200 of Handsome Devil
Of course, at the time, I believed him that the date really happened.
And that afternoon, I had to work on a lab project with Devi in Chemistry. I figured she’d rub my nose in the fact that she’d been on a date with my best friend, because why not? That’s what I would’ve done if I’d gone on a date with her best friend. Rub it in with a detailed play-by-play: just detailed enough to be disturbing and just lacking in detail enough to be haunting.
But it was worse than that.
Devi didn’t say a word about it, like it was fucking sacred or something. Special. Not to be cheapened by mentioning tome.
She was wearing a godawful-bright, raspberry-pink sweater, matching lipgloss, and a pushup bra that made her tits jiggle under her sweater every time she moved.
And I had an aching hard-on under the lab table.
Again.
Chemistry class, and sitting there next to my lab partner, had gradually become my personal hell.
“Have fun last night?” I blurted out.
She looked at me like I’d sprouted devil horns. Ever since the Mark Wahlberg conversation, it was the only time I’d spoken to her about anything besides necessary school stuff.
“Uh… it was okay.”
That was all she said.
Okay?She went on a date with the captain of the hockey team and it wasokay?
What the hell did that mean?
Did she like him or not?
I looked away, and I tried not to look at her again for the rest of the class. I could feel her looking at me, though.
She probably pitied me. The pathetic, popular boy who couldn’t get the new girl to like him.
All the while, there was this achy/numb feeling in my chest, stretching out like a balloon and pressing at my insides; like a cavern opening up to swallow me whole.
It would take many years and many therapy sessions, failed relationships, one-night stands, bottles of alcohol, and a few moments of actual self-awareness to finally come to terms with what I was feeling in that moment.
It was the feeling ofwantingsomething Icouldn’t have.
It was a feeling that, up until I met Devi Sereda, I was completely unacquainted with.
Grotesque, probably, but true.
Before that class ended, I beat a path out of the classroom and jacked off in the boys’ room like a loser for the first time in my life. I stared at the jizz floating in the toilet, panting like a lunatic, with my bare dick throbbing in my hand and my heart slamming in my chest.
“Why do you even like her?” I asked Shane after school when he managed to work “cheesecake” into the conversation, as if that was a word he’d ever used before, or a food he’d ever eaten before last night.
“Whydon’tyou like her?” he replied, deadpan.
“I never said I didn’t like her.”
“You never said you did, either,” he said, cool as shit, all hooded eyes and sly-as-hell smirk. And I knew, I fucking knew he wasn’t even interested in her. Enough to endure a date with her, maybe, but pretty much just to get a rise out of me.Thatwas what interested him.
I didn’t say another word to him about Devi Sereda.
And I didn’t speak to her again, unless I absolutely had to in class.
Then he asked her to go to grad with him.
