Page 201 of The Long Way Home

His heavy eyes catch mine.

An oxygen mask, is what I don’t say. Also what I don’t say is that I haven’t left Julian’s side barely at all. Nor do I say that he might be my favourite oxygen mask to date, that I don’t get tired of breathing him in, and actually whatever Julian’s atmosphere’s made of, a small part of me likes how it feels in my lungs. I can’t say any of that though, so I just raise my eyebrows a fraction.

“It’s just sex,” I tell him.

BJ watches me quietly, a hint of a frown present before he shakes his head. “I don’t believe it. You can’t do casual sex.”

“I don’t know—” I shrug. “Maybe you had a point all these years...”

He sighs, shoulders falling like I threw a weight on him. “I didn’t.” He shakes his head.

I flash him a look that’s a delicate mix of hurt and trepidation. “We shall see.”

His face pulls, sort of grimacing at the thought. “Just sex, huh?”

I nod.

“Does Julian know that?”

I give him a little look. “I don’t suspect he’d care…”

BJ looks over his shoulder and he cringes.

“You might be right.”

I follow his gaze to Julian at the side of the club, an awful girl on his lap.

Orangey blonde with Marilyn Monroe curls, stroking his face.

The skin on the back of my neck prickles and my chest goes tight.

I don’t know why. I know what Julian is to me — Julian knows what he is to me. I’m in love with someone else so maybe it’s a terrible thing to have thought — maybe even hoped — that I meant something more than that to him.

Which I mustn’t. Your mind can play tricks on you when you’re having a lot of sex with a person, it’ll make you feel closer than you really are.

I had thought he liked me more than that, more than how little he must actually care about me to do this — hooking up with some stupid girl on a couch in the middle of a club when I arrived here with him forty minutes ago holding his hand, when the papers have been writing about us, when I’ve spent every day of the week in his bed, after he’s told me time and time again not to go home — and now he’s here, doing this right in front of me.

In front of BJ, which is worse, I think, because I have a quiet but prevalent worry that BJ might see me as a tiny bit disposable and the very idea of him seeing someone else perpetuate that makes me want to cry more than I already wanted to cry from just seeing Julian do this in the first place.

All of it spirals me too quickly, in a way that I lose all footing on all my thoughts.

In the same second I see Julian with his hands on another girl’s waist like he had them on mine this morning, I lose BJ too. Again. Twice. Once to Paili, once to Jordan — never mind the thousands of times in-between with a million girls whose names even he doesn’t know.

For all the ways BJ hovers around me, all the ways he shows up and says all the right things after doing the wrong ones, all the times his eyes find mine no matter what room we’re in — none of that matters because he never can manage to love me more than he loves an orgasm.

And I hate him for that.

That’s my mental process in two and a half seconds. Foot to the pedal in my mind that speeds me to the conclusion that Julian’s stupid hands on that stupid girl’s body is somehow my stupid ex-boyfriend’s fault.

I don’t even look back at Beej as I march over — I can feel that he’s close behind me anyway.

I stand in front of Julian, waiting for him to take his hand out from under the dress of the girl he’s with.

Declan elbows him a bunch of times.

Jules looks up at me, his eyes look funny. Almost as though he’s annoyed at me for the interruption.

“Oh — hey?” He blinks up at me, innocent.