Go Around

Kennedy woke up mid-afternoon the next day with a killer headache. At first she thought it was because of all the drinking she’d been doing the night before but then she realized that she hadn’t drunk anything while at the club the previous night. She lethargically pulled herself out of her bed and put on one of Alex’s shirts that he’d left at her house and she had just kept it with her when she moved. It fell a few inches below her butt and she made her way downstairs and saw her mom sitting at their table and doing the newspaper word search, “Morning, honey,” Lorelei said, not looking up.
“Morning,” Kennedy said in return and went into the kitchen and opened the cabinet and grabbed their Costco sized bottle of Tylenol and took two little pills with some water.
“Headache?” her mom asked.
“How’d you guess?” Kennedy asked back sarcastically.
“No need to be a snot,” Lorelei said calmly.
“Sorry, I’m just grumpy,” Kennedy told her mom as she sat down at the table.
“It’s alright. Did you have fun last night?” her mom asked.
“Yeah, Lisa and I went to go and see Alex’s and Jack’s band play and they were surprisingly fantastic,” Kennedy said and her mom looked up at her and raised an eyebrow.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yeah, I forgot how much I loved listening to Alex sing,” Kennedy remembered how his voice had sounded blasting through the speakers the previous night. Her mom just nodded and it dawned on Kennedy that she had forgotten to call Lisa like she had promised when she got home. “I’ll be right back,” Kennedy told her mom and raced back upstairs to grab her cell phone.
She went through her contact list and dialed Lisa’s number.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
“Hello?” asked a groggy voice from the other end that was too deep to be a girl’s.
“Hi, is Lisa there?” she asked.
“Kennedy?” the groggy voice asked, sounding a little more awake and she knew that groggy voice anywhere.
“Yeah, can I just talk to Lisa?” she asked, frantically trying to get off the phone with him.
“I think you and I need to talk,” he said now whispering.
“Alex, I think that you should just hand the phone to Lisa so I can just get this over with,” she pleaded.
“Alright, here she is,” he told her.
“Hello?” asked a girl voice that sounded like it’d been up for hours.
“Hey, Lis, it’s Kennedy. I just realized that I forgot to call you last night to let you know I made it home okay,” she told her, hoping that sounded like an apology even though her mind was still focused on Alex.
“It’s alright; I figured you made it home okay. Are you feeling better?” Lisa asked, sounding chipper.
“Loads,” Kennedy answered even though that was untrue.
“That’s good! I’m sorry, Kennedy,” she said in between giggles which led Kennedy to believe that Alex was trying to have sex with her or touching her, “but I’ve got to go. I’ll see you on Monday, at school, right?” she asked, obviously trying to restrain herself.
“That sounds great, see you then,” Kennedy told her, quickly trying to get off the phone. She didn’t want to picture Alex, naked, with his arms wrapped around a tiny, petite naked Lisa.
“Okay, bye,”
“Bye,” and then Kenned clicked off the phone and threw it across her room. It was driving her crazy. Even though she and Alex had had a secret relationship the prior year it was easier to deal with because he didn’t really have another person who he was in love with so Kennedy had the feeling of being totally engulfed in his love, but she didn’t get that anymore. Now, since they had slept together, she was more like his whore or mistress than anything else and even though he told her he loved her, if he really meant it then he wouldn’t be with Lisa anymore.
She lay back down on her bed and wrapped herself in her sheets and decided that the best way to stop thinking about it would be to take a nap.
She let her eyes flutter shut and she imagined that Alex was behind her, cuddling with her, and it helped her fall asleep easier than if she had kept lamenting over Lisa and Alex doing the dirty.
She slept for a good three or four hours and when she woke up she felt a pair of arms wrapped around her waist and it startled her. Before she left, she would have known that they were Alex’s arms wrapped around her because they couldn’t possibly be anybody else’s and it wouldn’t have scared her – she expected it. But now she was scared even though she recognized his arms it still made her feel weird when, what seemed like seconds ago to her, he’d been trying to have sex with Lisa.
She rolled over onto his back and looked at his face. She always loved watching him sleep because he always looked so serene, like it was the only time he could be relaxed. She pushed the hair out of Alex’s face and kissed his forehead. She was positive that she hadn’t woken him. She tried to lift his arm and slide out of the bed, but apparently she had woke him up because his arm snapped to attention and pulled her waist tight to him because he didn’t want her to move. He pushed his chest up against her back and let out a deep, heavy, hot breath against her back and it made her giggle because he always used to do that when he was blissfully happy.
“Good morning,” he said to her and nuzzled in between her shoulder blades.
“Um, more like good evening,” she corrected him.
“Whatever, it’s still good,” he told her and made kissing trails down her spine.
She flipped onto her back and then onto her left side so that she was facing him and she was at his chest. “What are you doing here?” she asked him, trying her hardest not to think about Lisa and how Lisa would feel if she saw them right at that very second.
“I needed to see you again,” he told her, sounding like a mature five year old, “I know this isn’t fair, the whole you kind of being my ‘mistress’ so to speak, but I don’t know what to do,” he whispered to her and he sounded genuinely confused, but it was hard for Kennedy to see it as a confusing situation. Even if she took herself out of it and looked at it from a third party member point of view it was relatively simple, but maybe she was just able to cope better with things like that.
“There are only a few options; we continue to do this while you continue to date Lisa, we stop this because you want to keep dating Lisa, or you break up with Lisa to be with me,” she told him even though it seemed kind of unfair to him. She knew that the likeliness of him breaking up with Lisa to date the girl he’d once been in love with but had only dated for a little under a month was very unlikely, but that’s not the option she nonetheless leaned toward.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“It’s not up to me, it’s up to you. But I can tell you that I’m not going to be your ‘mistress’ forever,” she told him, using quote marks with her index and middle finger. She had stray pieces of brown bang hanging in front of her eyes that Alex pushed away and looked into her eyes.
“Why did you cut your hair?” he asked like it was such an important detail about herself.
She let out a half laugh, “Because I needed a change. It’s very…,” her voice trailed off. She kept forgetting about what a sore subject New York was for Alex and Jack when Kennedy talked about it because she was used to being able to freely talk about it, but that wasn’t how it was anymore. She realized that she’d have to think more before she talked.
“New York?” Alex offered and had a pained look on his face.
“Yeah, it’s very New York,” she told him, wanting to get off the subject as soon as humanly possible.
“Tell me more about New York. Of course I’ve been there before, but I want to know what it was like for you this last time being up there,” he told her and she couldn’t tell if he really wanted to hear about it or if he was just saying that to be nice to her.
“What do you want to know?” she asked, trepidacious.
“Well, like did you make any friend? Did you enjoy your school? Go shopping? Go clubbing?... Have any boyfriend?” the last question hung in the air.
“Well, I did made a few friends, but surprisingly all of them were girls. Audrey is my best friend I’d have to say, she’s so great, but I don’t think that you or Jack would really like her,” she said and squinted her eyes so that it crinkled her nose.
“Really?”
“Yeah, she’s very New York; yuppity, brand name, look-down-on-people-from-the-wrong-place, that type of stuff,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. She didn’t really care what Alex and Jack thought of Audrey because she was great to Kennedy. “Anyway, I did enjoy my school, it was way more advanced than here. Of course I went shopping, do you know me at all and of course I went clubbing as well. That’s one of the good things about New York, I could get into any club just because of my connections. As for having any boyfriends… no, I didn’t have any real boyfriends,” she said, trying to put as much emphasis on ‘real’ as she could without being too pushy.
“What do you mean ‘real’?” he asked, obviously getting a little possessive of her.
“Well, I never went on a date with a guy, no guy asked me to be his girlfriend or anything like that,” she told him and shut her eyes because she wanted to be done with this conversation.
“Then what did you do?” he asked even though she knew that he already knew the answer to that.
“I had sex with guys,” she said and shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t feel like she should feel bad about that for a few reasons; 1. He was dating some other girl, too, so she shouldn’t feel bad because he was doing the same thing, and 2. He already knew that about her before they even had their fling the prior year.
He immediately stiffened and she wished that he just hadn’t brought any of this up because this is what got them in this mess in the first place. “I know that I shouldn’t be angry,” he begun, trying to force his shoulders to relax, “but it’s just so hard to think about you, the girl I’ve loved most in my entire life, fucking some other guy. Do you understand?” he asked her, now looking her in the eye which was full of emotion.
“How do you think I feel when I hear Lisa giggling into the phone, knowing that that’s what girls do when their boyfriends are trying to have sex with them?” her logic didn’t really make sense, but she knew that Alex would catch it.
His face paled. “That’s different, she’s my girlfriend,” he tried to defend himself, but it didn’t really work.
“It’s not so different. It’s still having sex with someone that isn’t me, just like how it upsets you that I’m having sex with someone whose not you,” she pointed out and now he had no argument.
“I guess I can understand that,” he told her reluctantly.
“I wasn’t reprimanding you for it, I was just making a point,” she told him, again wishing that they hadn’t gotten into this argument right now.
He didn’t say anything, just leaned down slightly and kissed her on the lips softly. She melted. Even though she’d just sex with numerous amounts of guys, none of them made her feel the way that Alex did. Alex made her want to jump for joy, curl in a ball and cry, have rough passionate sex, do cartwheels, and make her slam her head against a wall all at the same time. It didn’t really make sense to her about why she’d want to cry or slam her head against a wall, but that was just the way her made her feel.
He pulled away, but kept his hand on her face, “I love you, Kenne,” he told her and gave a soft laugh.
“I love you, too,” she told him reluctantly. She didn’t like doing this to Lisa even though she shouldn’t care because Alex was hers for the time being and that’s all she ever really wanted by coming back, right? For Alex to be hers completely.
“I should go, though,” he told her and she could tell that he didn’t really want to.
“Okay,” she said even though she didn’t want to.
“That’s one thing I wish was different about you. The only thing, I guess I should say,” he told her, climbing over her and standing right next to the bed.
“What’s that?” she asked, confused.
“That you would fight for me,” he told her simply and dead in the eye. She didn’t know how to respond and by the time she’d begun to form words he was gone and out the door.
“You have no idea how much I’ve fought for you,” she whispered to herself since there was no one else to hear.