Because of that Night (Book 2)

Chapter 53: Everyone ~ Lila

She only saw him for a brief second, not even. She had done her best just to stay out of the way, let Michael and Hunter have their moment to reunite without her being a part of it. But it only took that brief second for her stomach to drop in the same familiar way it had started to whenever she was around him now. All she could think about was that night at "the spot," and everything Hunter had said.

He didn't see her on that second floor, but she saw him: that familiar, bright, white smile, those identical, cinnamon brown locks that matched Michael's. He looked more rugged now, with his longer hair and a stubbled face, but there was something else, too, something more. There was a brightness to him, like being away had illuminated the light in him that had for so long been dimmed out. She wanted to know how his time away had been, what had been so wonderful to make him come back in this way, so bright and new as if he had left the person he was prior to leaving back in Spain to never return again. But she didn't ask any of these things. She only guided Michael downstairs on his own, told him it would be good for them to catch up together. She didn't follow him.

Instead, she went down the opposite hallway, in search of Zooey. They hadn't even been at the party all that long, but she seemed to lose Zooey in the fanfare of it all rather quickly. She had run off somewhere with Seth almost immediately, and Lila assumed that she wanted a private moment alone with him.

"I think I'm going to have sex with Seth," Zooey had said to Lila when they had arrived to take pictures before graduation earlier that day. "Tonight," she added, her eyes wide and her smile gleaming.

"Tonight?" Lila repeated, "are you sure?"

"So sure," Zooey said, bobbing her head and brushing a wavy blonde strand of hair behind her ear.

Zooey accidentally knocked her mortarboard that sat on top of her head off kilter as she continued to fiddle with her hair. She straightened it with frustration, her lips pursed in a concentrated frown. It was about the tenth time she had done this from the short amount of time they had been there already.

"Enough is enough, you know?" Zooey explained further. "It's the end of high school, I'm leaving for Chicago soon. It's just time."

"Zooey, I don't know that "enough is enough," is the best reason to have sex for the first time," Lila replied cautiously.

She wasn't trying to be insensitive, but she knew that losing her virginity was a big deal to Zooey. It had been a big deal for Lila when she lost hers as well. And she knew Zooey; Zooey wanted her first time to be special, with a person who was special and important to her. It wasn't that Lila didn't think Seth was that or couldn't provide that type of experience, but more recently Zooey seemed to be perceiving her virginity as something more of a chore to complete. Having sex for the first time had stopped sounding like a new and exciting experience and more like taking the trash out when Zooey talked about it now. It made Lila almost sad, like Zooey had lost hope or something.

"Li," Zooey groaned. "Please. It's not nearly as big of a deal as I have been making it out to be. It just needs to happen. I don't know what I've been so afraid of. I mean, really? What's worse, having a crappy first time, or going to college and being the only eighteen-year-old virgin?"

It was hard for Lila to even conjure up an answer to this. She didn't know if all the girls in their graduating class had had sex yet or not. People used the joke of someone still being a virgin plenty of times as an easy cop out to make fun of someone they didn't like, but when Lila actually thought about it, she realized that who was she or anyone to make assumptions about what someone did or didn't do sexually? And even if they hadn't had sex yet, what did that really matter? Lila was starting to wonder if it wasn't so much Zooey wanting to share her first time with Seth or her just wanting to ensure that no one could make these jokes about her and have it actually be true.