Beaches, Boys & Bitches

Chapter 23

Jessie's chest rose and fell as she cooled down from her intense run. Exercise was how she coped with her heavy emotions; it was her escape. It was her way of dealing with stress or in this case, heartbreak. The death of her grandmother and the emotional catastrophe with Christian was too much to handle so Jessie decided not to think about it.

In fact, she avoided it all together. She didn't let the emotions get to her. She had cried in front of Lay, and Jessie was not a crier- she was a fighter. She believed tears made her weak and she was furious with herself for breaking down in front of Lay. She didn't care that Lay was her roommate or that she should be able to cry in front of her.

Jessie had let a boy make her a weak and now she was paying the price.

She approached Cali Cove and sat down on a stool at the bar. Creepy kid -Dennis- was working his shift.

"I'll just take an ice water, thanks," Jessie said.

Dennis nodded and filled up a glass of water for her. He placed it in front of her and then leaned back against the counter behind him. He watched her as she took a small sip of her water.

"Is there a reason you're looking at me like that?" Jessie interrogated.

"Like what?"

"Like you think I'm getting what I deserved."

"Maybe you are."

"Yeah. Maybe I am," Jessie said. She brought the glass up to her lips again and slammed it back down onto the counter a little more aggressively than she intended to.

"I guess that's what you get for messing with a player. It never ends well, you know."

"Yeah. I was stupid to think I'd be different," Jessie confided.

"You're not stupid, you just had a far-fetched picture of a future with him."

Jessie glared at a couple of girls who had been walking by staring at Jessie like she was some poor lost puppy. She hated the pity. It was if everybody on campus thought of her as some sad, blind cat that walked on three legs. News had spread fast and everybody was whispering about her and what happened. Some rumors were spiraling out of control and didn't even make sense.

What made everything so much worse was that Stephanie didn't even seem to care that everybody was judging her for being the homewrecker. She bathed in the attention. She loved when everybody talked about her like she was some huge celebrity. She soaked up all the spotlight and had somehow still convinced people that what she had done wasn't so bad. That her Christian were meant to be together and they were star-crossed lovers. Simply put, she wanted people to believe that Jessie had stolen Christian from her first and that she had had sex with a committed man as an effort to winning back her boyfriend.

Some people believed her. A great majority.

Lay had been trying to cheer Jessie up for days, but it almost seemed as if Jess was gone for good. She wasn't teary-eyed from crying all the time, her face was always tinged pink with rage and she was working her body to the breaking point from all the intense exercising.

Her knees were screaming at her to stop, they couldn't take another fast-paced run. She had run nearly sixty miles in four days. If she kept going at that pace, her knees would give in and she would collapse.

---

Christian laid in bed on his stomach, breathing in slow steady breaths. His eyes seemed to be trained on his side desk for the past four days. He had barely eaten and really only got up to use the restroom or to drink some vodka. He almost seemed brain dead, like he was living in an entirely different world from everybody else.