I’m woken sometime later by the click of the door. I wish I was a heavier sleeper. Quiet whispers and a few giggles follow, along with some shushing from Rookie, who is clearly not alone. I can’t tell if he’s only got one, or if he’s brought along a pair.

“My roommate’s sleeping. We gotta be quiet,” Rookie whispers, but he’s slurry and louder than he probably intends.

Not that it matters. The sound of a cricket can wake me from a dead sleep.

More chatter follows. “Can’t we turn on a light?”

That voice makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

He laughs. “Then we’ll wake him up for sure.”

“So? Maybe he’ll want to play, too.”

The rustle of clothing follows, and a second female voice whisper-yells ow!

I should’ve known she’d find a way to fuck with me.

I feel the edge of my mattress dip.

“That’s not my bed,” Rookie says.

I smell Tash before I feel her. The scent of my shampoo and her lotion hits me like a puck to the face. I try to untangle myself from the sheets and get out of bed before she reaches me, but I’m not fast enough.

She straddles me and her palm comes to rest on my throat. The light beside my bed comes on, brightness blinding me. Long, dark hair tickles my chest, and the spiders are back, crawling under my skin. Goose bumps rise across my arms. Not the good kind. She pulls down the covers until they reach my waist, then stretches out on top of me. She’s topless. Braless.

“Get off me.” I reach out to grab her wrists, but she shifts around next to me.

“Whoa, Romance, calm down, bro!” Rookie says. “Hey don’t do that.”

Tash’s cheek presses up against mine. “Smile.” The flash blinds me again.

“Fucking Christ. What’s wrong with you?” I’m faster than she is this time. I grab her waist and flip her so she’s face down on the bed and I’m on top of her.

The other girl is staring at us, slack jawed.

Rookie tries to pull me off Tash, but I’m not seeing anything but red right now, so my first instinct is to punch him in the face. He goes reeling back, and the other girl screams.

“Give me the goddamn phone,” I yell at Tash, who’s laughing underneath me.

I stretch out over her, pushing her down into the mattress. In that moment I recognize how close I am to the edge. I wonder if this is what it was like for my mum, if she was always at this point with my dad, if he did the kinds of things to her Tash does to me.

The thought sends my head to dark places, where all the bad things I’ve done over the years taunt me.

I want to hurt Tash the way she’s hurt me. But she’s fucked up. Worse than I am, maybe. And as much as I hate her, I get that her head isn’t right, just like mine.

“You’ll have to fuck me for it,” she laughs.

“Just give me the phone.” I see movement out of the corner of my eye, and the other girl has her phone out. “Don’t.”

It’s too late, though. I know it by the way her eyes jump from me to Tash and back again.

“Sent,” she tells Tash.

Tash stops fighting and drops her phone on the comforter. I nab it and push off the bed as fast as I can, so I’m not touching her, and she’s not touching me.

“Who did you send it to?” I ask the other girl.

She cradles her phone to her chest, seeming a little scared.

Rookie looks super confused. “What the hell is going on? Do you know her?”

I bark out a bitter laugh. “Unfortunately, yeah.”

A flash of hurt passes over Tash’s face before she gives me one of her sneers. “When did you stop being fun?”

“When you decided to keep bringing me gifts I didn’t want.” I turn back to the girl. “That picture you took, I wanna see it, and I want to know who you sent it to.”

She passes over her phone. “I didn’t post it publicly or anything.”

A sick feeling washes over me as I take in the image. I’m wearing a pair of boxers, and I’m fully lying on top of Tash. Most of my face is in profile, and I look pissed. But it’s her expression that makes the roll in my stomach become a knot. Tash, who is very clearly topless, is smiling directly at the camera. Like she planned this.

“Who did you send it to?”

“Me,” Tash says. She’s sitting on my bed, long hair cascading over her shoulders. She’s still shirtless.

I pick her shirt up off the floor and toss it to her. “For Christ’s sake, put this on and delete the damn picture,” I bark.

She doesn’t catch the shirt, letting it fall on the bed. “And Poppy, of course.”

“Bullshit.”

“She has all sorts of social media accounts. Posts all kinds of pictures of the flowers someone keeps sending her.”

“You’re stalking her? Jesus, Tash, what the fuck is wrong with you?” I ask again.

Her face falls, the anger I’ve witnessed before pushing to the surface. “Just interested in finding out what gossip is true and what isn’t.”

I laugh. She’s said that to me before—when I said I wanted just her, when I tried to make it work. She would hit me with words, and then she’d take them all back with apologies and promises, only to slice me apart again when she brought me another present in the form of someone she could fuck.

“You don’t even want me. Why can’t you leave me alone?”