Falling Into You by Lauren Abrams Read Free Book Online Page A

in fighting off drunken boys with beer (or hard liquor) goggles on .
    Sophia is dancing with a good-looking boy in the corner, and she catches a glimpse of me and rushes over.
    “We need to find someone for you to talk to,” she suggests, raising her eyebrows suggestively.
    “ Soph , I’m headed to bed. I’m tired.” I don’t have the energy to do battle with her, and although she’s disappointed, she nods quickly.
    “Next time?”
    I smile at her in response, even though my brain says, definitely not. S he flits back to her latest conquest.
    The first time I had ever heard her say that she was “talking to” someone, I immediately assumed that she had made some sort of deep philosophical connection with the ridiculously hot frat guy that we had met at the Back to School Saints and Sinners party.
    “Do you like him?” I had asked her, getting nothing but a snort in reply.
    “I like the fact that he has a car and a room to himself,” she said. “I don’t like this whole towel on the door thing. Trashy. If I want to fuck someone, I want to at least do it without fear of having someone else catch the show.”
    I must have looked puzzled, because she quickly clarified: “ You do know that talking means fucking, right? Like I would actually want to have a conversation with him. I can’t even remember what his name is. It’s like Trey or Tony or Tom. It definitely starts with a T.”
    His name was definitely Craig, which did not start with a T, but Sophia had already moved on to a new topic of conversation while I was still trying to figure out how “talking to” had become a synonym for having sex. 
    Sleeping with someone whose name I didn’t know didn’t sound even remotely appealing. I had a boyfriend back in high school, a solid, respectable guy named Aaron. We had been together for about six months when I had decided that it was time to stop being a virgin. He had come over, talked to my dad about football for almost thirty minutes, and had then taken me to the parking lot of a local park and had sex with me in the backseat of his 1994 Honda Accord. Very romantic. Very…quick.
    It had happened a dozen times after that, and then I had broken it off. It was partially due to the fact that his fumbling fingers didn’t have anything in common with the racy scenes from the novels I had read since I was 12 years old. It was also partially due to the fact that his hands running over my body made me remember long-forgotten moments, the strums of techno music, and the night that I’ve been fighting for four years to remember. The night I’ve been fighting for four years to forget.
    Compared to what I saw and heard from my friends, it was nothing. I was practically a virgin, they said. A romantic.
    “You have to keep doing it until it feels good,” a girl named Jessica had told me, shaking her head. “You can’t just give up like that.”
    “A shocking lack of experience,” Sophia said. “Something we need to remedy as soon as possible.”
    I was going to have to figure a way to get her off of that train of thought , but any planning was going to have to wait for another night . I wasn’t lying when I told her that I was tired . It had been an incredibly long day, and I hadn’t even had time to celebrate the fact that my first real college semester was officially finished. I had finished all of my papers the night before, so there wouldn’t be any loose ends when we arrived in New York.
    I was fairly certain that Sophia still hadn’t turned any of hers in. I was also pretty sure that she hadn’t started any of them and wasn’t planning to. I think my mention of finals week that morning had actually been the first time she thought about it. After throwing her clothes in one monogrammed suitcase and her makeup bag into another , she had responded to my questions about her papers by sho o t ing off an e-mail to the professor of the Psych 101 course that we had taken together. I’ll be away for the