Casualties

Kennedy woke up the next morning with her hair tattered and all over the place and she felt a bare arm around her bare waist. She flipped her head to the other side and saw Alex laying there, his hair straight and in his eyes, but still looking good with this bed head. She stroked his bangs out of his face and gave him a soft kiss on his lips.
He didn’t move, and she really didn’t want to wake him. She knew that he barely ever got any sleep so the least she could do was let him sleep while he was at her house.
She moved his arm as best she could without really moving him and then got out of her bed and put on some pajama bottoms and a tank top then threw her hair up in a massive messy bun and walked out of her bedroom. She went down stairs and did her 25 minute morning yoga tape and tried to focus on everything but thinking about Alex. She didn’t want to over analyze their relationship right now because there was no relationship.
Either way she didn’t want to over analyze their non-relationship.
She went upstairs and showered and attempted to get all the knots out of her hair and she let it curl naturally again, which she never usually did except for this past week, and she brushed her teeth and all that good stuff.
When she walked back into her room, Alex was sitting on her bed, in his boxers, with his hands in his hair and his elbows resting on his knees. He didn’t notice her come in until she shut the door then he snapped to attention.
“Hi,” he whispered in a soft, delicate voice.
“Hey,” she said back. She was so flabbergasted at having heard h is voice actually be soft and delicate because all she’d ever really heard was him being cocky, even when he tried not to be.
“What time is it?” he asked, groggily, shifting his eyes back down at the ground.
“About 6:15,” she told him then went and sat down next to him. He still wouldn’t look at her. She placed her hand on his bare back and he repelled the touch. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’ve just been trying to think lately and I don’t know what to make of any of this,” he told her, being sincere. He was honestly distraught.
“Any of what?” she asked, sitting back and resting on her hands.
“Us,” he told her.
“There isn’t really an ‘us’ to make anything of,” she told him, and she knew the minute the words came out of her mouth how harsh they sounded.
“…I know,” he said.
“Look, Alex, we both know each other very well. We know that you don’t fall in love, girls fall in love with you and that I don’t fall in love but boys fall in love with me. We know that we are the two biggest players at our school. We know that any girl would give anything to have sex with you and that any guy would give anything to have sex with me. The good thing about our so-called-‘relationship’ is that there are no expectations. You don’t fall in love with me; I don’t fall in love with you. It’s that simple. Any feelings you’re having are just lust because we’re such good friends that you feel like you’re in love with me. But you’re not,” she told him. She didn’t even know if he really thought that he was in love with her, but she knew that she thought she was in love with him. The pep-talk wasn’t even really for him – it was for her.
He looked up at her from his hands, “Are you sure?” he sounded doubtful.
“I’m positive,” she told him, but he still looked apprehensive. “Look, if you’re having different feelings about this then maybe we should just stop whatever it is we’re doing right now before too many emotions get involved,” she told him upfront even though she really didn’t want that to happen.
“No!” he said quickly, “I want to continue this with you. I like, you know, whatever it is that we’re doing. It’s fun, it’s uninvolved and neither of us belong to each other, we can have sex with whoever we want without there being any precautions,” he told her and the minute he said ‘sex with whoever we want’ he stomach churned.
So he had been thinking about having sex with other girls.
Great.
One more thing to deal with. She had to deal with the emotions that she wasn’t sure if they were lust or something else and then on top of it, the jealousy of having to see him with another girl from time to time and knowing that they were either having sex or they were about to.
They’d decided to stay that way and still see other people and in a way they did. Both of them continued to be with each other but neither one of them had sex with someone else. Kennedy hadn’t even kissed anyone besides Alex, but she couldn’t say the same about him because she didn’t know. She asked him once and he completely denied it and she believed him for the most part except for the fact that he was Alex Gaskarth.
Things stayed that way for just have a month. He spent the night at her house almost every night, both Jack and Alex would come over to her house after school, she did her homework, they showered together, and she cuddled with him every single night whether they did or did not have sex and, believe it or not, there were some nights when they did not have sex. They could just stay up and talk to each other for hours, which was good because both of them had stories to share for hours.
She didn’t like to think about what would happen when Alex finally got sick of having sex with just her and decided to continue on with the rest of their agreement and actually have sex with somebody else. She hated it, as a matter of fact, and it just made I that much harder to deal with when she, him, and Jack would walk through the halls and girls would be staring at him, eying him up and down, and flirting with him.
Nevertheless she didn’t like to think about Alex being with someone else other than her.
About Alex pursuing a girl the way he persuaded her, looking at another girl the way her looked at her, kissing another girl the way he kissed her, charming a girl the way her charmed her, about having sex the way he had sex with her. About him falling in love with another girl the way he fell in love with her.