THE GIRL I BECAME

BRIELLE

The bass from the DJ booth bled through the bathroom walls like a heartbeat that wasn't mine.

I had my back against the cold tile, fingers gripping the edge of the sink. My dress was hiked up to my waist and my breath kept coming in short gasps. The guy who was fucking me..Jason, Jax, Jordan? I had no idea what his name was but he had his hand buried in my hair, pulling my hair back so he could bite at my neck. “Fuck it…..arghhh…..yes…fucking go harder” I moaned. He was rocking me so hard and fast that his thrusts made my face slap against the mirror. He grabbed my ass roughly, his hands spreading over my ass cheeks before smacking them hard enough to make them bounce with every thrust. Watching it in the mirror seemed to drive him crazy, because he started pounding into me even deeper. 

I’m Brielle, a 22year old final year college student. At nineteen I had loved someone the way you only love a person when you are too young and too open and too stupid to protect yourself properly. I had given that relationship everything. My time, my trust, my whole chest cracked open and offered up like it was nothing. And he had taken all of it, used all of it, and left me standing in the wreckage of something I had built entirely out of hope.

I cried for months and then I became this.

I wasn't ashamed of who I was now. I was in control now. I chose this, every single time, with both eyes open. I took what I wanted and I walked away first and nobody got to hurt me because I never gave anyone anything worth taking.

“Fuck…..man, arghhhh….ride faster….” I moaned louder

Right up until the bathroom door flew open and nearly came off its hinges.

"BRIELLE HAYES."

I did not even flinch. Partly because I recognised that voice immediately and partly because honestly, at this point in our friendship, Zara Callum walking in on me in compromising situations like this was practically a tradition.

Jason..Jordan or Justin, fuckk whatever his name was, pulled out his veiny bushy dick from my hole and it stood erect, so high and dripping with his cum as he adjusted his shirt but I honestly couldn't resist. The sight alone sent heat rushing through me so fast I could barely think straight. I reached for him instinctively, completely lost in the moment, but before my fingers could touch him, he tucked himself back into his trousers.

Then my loud-mouthed, painfully annoying friend yelled my name, snapping me out of the haze of desire and dragging me back to reality.

Zara stood in the doorway in her gold dress, one hand still on the handle, looking between the two of us with an expression that cycled through shock, disgust and exasperation in about two seconds flat.

"Are you serious right now?" she said. "In a bathroom? Again?"

"Can you give me like five minutes —"

"No." She pointed at Jason-or-Justin with the authority of someone who had zero patience left. "You. Out."

He looked at me. I gave him a small apologetic shrug because what else was I going to do. He straightened his shirt, had the sense not to say anything, and slid past Zara out the door with his eyes on the floor. She watched him go and then turned back to me with her arms crossed.

"We have been in this club for three hours," she said. "Three hours, Bri."

"You're the one who wanted to stay for the DJ."

"That was one hour ago. I have been looking for you for the last forty five minutes." She pressed two fingers to her temple. "We need to leave. My Uber is already outside and if you make me cancel another one I will actually lose my mind."

I pushed off the sink, pulled my dress back into place and checked my reflection briefly. Lipstick still intact and hair fine. I looked exactly like a girl who had not just been caught in a club bathroom and that felt like a personal victory.

"I'm ready," I said.

Zara gave me a long look. The kind that meant she had opinions she was choosing to save for later and that was one of the things I loved about her, she always saved it for later.

"Let's go," she said.

I stayed at Zara's that night because my apartment was forty minutes away and neither of us wanted to deal with that. Her house was big and familiar and her mom was out of town, which meant we ate cereal at midnight in the kitchen and she lectured me about my life choices in the comfortable way that meant she wasn't actually angry, just concerned, which was somehow worse.

"I'm not doing anything wrong," I told her, pulling my knees up onto her kitchen stool.

"I didn't say…wrong. I said empty." She pointed her spoon at me. "There's a difference."

"I'm twenty two, Zara."

"So am I and I'm not…"

"Good for you." I smiled at her so she knew I meant it without edges. "Genuinely. But I'm fine. I promise I'm fine."

She looked at me for a moment and then went back to her cereal and said nothing else about it. That was the other thing about Zara. She knew when to stop pushing. Most people who loved me didn't know that.

We stayed up too late watching something neither of us was really paying attention to and by the time I fell asleep on her couch it was past two in the morning.

The next morning came with sunlight through unfamiliar curtains and the smell of coffee from somewhere in the house.

I sat up slowly, pulled Zara's throw blanket off my legs and found my phone on the cushion beside me. Eight forty three. I had a lecture at eleven which meant I had time to go home, shower and change if I left within the next thirty minutes.

I stood, finger-combed my hair and padded toward the kitchen following the smell of coffee. I was reaching for a mug from the cabinet when I heard the front door.

Then Zara's voice from upstairs, loud and sudden and completely lit up in a way I hadn't heard in a while.

"Oh my God. Reid?"

I froze with my hand still on the cabinet.

Footsteps on the stairs and Zara practically flying down them. The sound of a hug happening in the hallway and her laughing and saying his name again like she couldn't quite believe it and then 

He walked into the kitchen doorway.

And I genuinely forgot what I had been doing.

He had been gone for six years and the last time I had seen Reid Callum, I was sixteen years old with terrible taste in earrings and a crush so enormous that I used to leave the room when he walked in just so he wouldn't see my face. Back then he was nineteen and effortlessly cool in the way older boys are when you are in middle school and completely unaware that his little sister's best friend thought about him more than she thought about her homework.

He was unaware of a lot of things back then, including me.

But the man standing in the kitchen doorway now was not that boy.

He was taller somehow, broader across the shoulders, his jaw was sharper, his eyes were the same; dark and steady. He looked at Zara first, smiled at whatever she was saying, and then his eyes moved across the kitchen and found me standing there holding an empty mug like I had completely forgotten what mugs were for.

"Brielle?" His voice was lower than it used to be

"Hey." My own voice came out normal. I was proud of that.

The corner of his mouth lifted. "Wow. You were like… " he shook his head slightly, something like amusement in his expression, "you've grown up."

"Yeah, six years will do that."

"You look great."

There it was. Simple and easy. I smiled back in the same casual way and turned to finally pour my coffee because I needed something to do with my hands.

Zara was looking between us with an expression I chose not to examine too closely.

Reid said something about getting settled in and that he'd see us later and then he was gone. I stared into my coffee.

Six years had turned Reid Callum from the boy I used to write initials next to in the margins of my notebooks into something I did not have a word for yet.

I took a sip of my coffee.

“Don't”, I told myself.

But the thing about warnings is that you only give them when part of you already wants to do the thing anyway.