The Carter Project ✓

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THE WORLD WORKED in mysterious ways. I had gone from Carter's awkward neighbor who kind-of-sort-of hated his guts, to friends with benefits, to his date to the Spring Fling in a matter of days. And part of me just didn't want to question any of it, let the gears keep turning and working this into wherever it was headed, even if that meant complete ruin or something great.

          But my mind was too curious, it just couldn't seem to let go of how this had all happened so easily. While I liked to think of myself as someone who makes their own decisions and not one who gets so swept up in others that I lose myself within their rhythms, I couldn't help but note how all of this change was owed to Landon. He wasn't someone to fill a void, because I was perfectly content before him, yet when he left, he made his own. He created an all new absence in my life, one I was not at all equipped to live with. And admittedly, I had used Carter to fill said void in a moment of drunken desperation.

          I thankfully didn't regret sleeping with Carter as much as I should have, or else said void would've collapsed in on itself and swallowed me whole. But just the thought that I had rebounded into him was so jarring to me, mainly because I never found out why it had to be this way. Why did Landon break up with me? Why did he break my heart?

          Why did he fall out of love with me?

          "Are you okay?" I heard a disembodied voice ask and I was suddenly brought back into reality. That reality being the sight of Carter's ceiling and the warm feeling of his exposed flesh against mine. He had been kissing on my neck — bastard said he wouldn't give me a hickey, but boy, was I scared to check myself in the mirror after this — after making out with me for a little bit.

          School was pretty rough today, the euphoria of the upcoming Spring Fling synthesizing into anxiety as everyone wondered what they were going to do before and after the dance or what they were going to wear and how they were going to get there, now that it was taking place tomorrow night. I had spent an hour when I got home doing my homework before instantly getting self conscious about the dress I had already picked for myself to wear and spending an hour on the internet seeing what stores I could buy from today and expect to see the results on my doorstep in an hour. Nowhere online seemed to have that option, of course, and taking a study break at Carter's seemed like a much better idea. That was, until I had gotten caught up in my feelings all over again.

          "Yeah, I'm fine," I said with a soft grin, reaching up with my neck to kiss his lips and hopefully shut them before he inquired any further. On a hormonal boy like him, this definitely seemed to do the trick, something I could tell by the way his fingers decided to slip themselves beneath my shirt and graze the skin  there in slow circles, practically begging for the shirt above it to come off.

          Was Carter someone I could talk to about my problems? Probably not, I just couldn't picture him operating on that capacity. At least not without short-circuiting into a fiery mess after, his wires spilling all over the place. I decided to hold my tongue and shove it down his throat instead.

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THE DANCE WAS, to say the least, a disaster in the making. That wasn't to say that the Yearbook committee didn't know how to decorate, because it was rather splendidly done. No, the chaos was more on the inside, a flurry of butterflies flapping and beating inside my stomach. Pregaming at Carter's wasn't much of an option, he had no access to alcohol inside his house after his parents found out about the last party and mine wasn't an option because my parents were still home.