Free Record, Rewind by Ava Lore Page B

“Yeah,” he said. “I kind of thought there would be. Maybe I should have written some down.”
    From below me came Dwayne’s distinctive voice. “Loser!” he yelled through his window, and Damien blushed bright red.
    Ah. The regret of a pot-idea. I couldn’t blame him, though. Sometimes things just sounded like really good ideas when you were high. Now he was laid low by performance anxiety.
    Well. Dalton Rooker isn’t perfect after all. Or is it Damien Colton?
    The question was too philosophical for me. “You’d better come up,” I said to Damien, then closed the window and retreated, waiting for the wonderful feeling of being pursued, and when the buzzer on my door sounded, I smiled.

Chapter Seven
    “H ow’d you find my apartment?” I asked a very nervous-looking Damien as he sat on my beat-up sofa and sipped a cup of three-day-old reheated coffee.
    “Called your parents,” he said.
    Of course he did.
    I studied him from my perch a few yards away on the coffee table. I wasn’t comfortable being too near him yet, but I also didn’t have any other furniture. That sofa did triple and quadruple duty sometimes.
    He sat awkwardly, nothing like the suave and confident rock musician who had showed up on the street outside my window. His knees knocked together and he held his elbows in his lap as though he were trying to protect his nuts from a beating.
    Which he might very well be doing, I thought. I probably had every right to kick him in the nuts, actually. You don’t go confessing your love to a girl, give her the most intense orgasm of her life, and then tell her not to call you.
    He knew it, too, because he wouldn’t meet my eye. Now that he wasn’t wearing the armor of his guitar, he seemed vulnerable and small.
    “So,” I said finally, “is there something you wanted to talk to me about?”
    He bit his lip and I tried not to forgive everything then and there for the chance to bite his lip for him. “Yes,” he said. “There is.”
    “...And?”
    Damien took a deep breath. “I want to start over.”
    “Yeah?” I said. “You and everyone else in the universe.”
    He finally met my eyes with a pained look. “I mean start over with us.”
    I pursed my lips. “You mean like with our smoke break?”
    “No,” he said, “I mean like with our whole relationship.”
    “So you want to start over at the point where you got onto the elevator?”
    His jaw clenched. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I mean we should go all the way back to the beginning. When we met in high school.”
    “We never really met in high school,” I couldn’t help but point out.
    “Yes,” he said, “and that’s the problem. I don’t know about you but I’ve been carrying around this little flame for you for years, but when we finally met on that rooftop you were nothing like I remembered.”
    He must have seen the dismayed look on my face because he hastened to add: “I mean, you are like I remembered, but you’ve changed a lot, too. And that’s great. I think I might like you even more now. Especially because this is the version of you I’ve actually spoken to.”
    I had to smile at that. I’d been thinking the same thing. And I knew the reverse was also true. Was I talking to Damien, or Dalton? The boy I’d known, or the man I didn’t? And did it matter? I’d never really known Dalton anyway, except as a girlish dream. “I get what you’re saying,” I told him, “although I think you still have an idealized version of me in your head.”
    He frowned. “Really? Why?”
    I tugged on my ear, nervous. “Because I’m not...you really liked the smart girl, remember?”
    “Are you saying you somehow got dumb since high school?” The idea seemed to amuse him.
    “It happens,” I said. “Especially to people who smoke too much weed.”
    “Okay, fair enough. Still. You think you’re stupider now?”
    I shook my head. How can one person be so dense? I thought. “I mean I’m a huge failure