Read Online No Such Thing as Perfect by Sarah Daltry - Free Book Online

answers. “It looks pathetic. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

16.
    W aking up the day after my birthday was weird. I wasn’t a virgin anymore and I’d had this night that I had thought about for years, but in the morning, something about it felt wrong. I told myself it was because Derek had gone back to Jon’s room immediately after, telling me he didn’t want anyone to find us together, but I wasn’t sure, as the sun came up, that there wasn’t more. I hadn’t said no. I hadn’t wanted to say no – not really. But it had been sudden and I hadn’t thought it would happen and then it did and I couldn’t take it back and there was no big ceremony to address the fact that a part of who I was no longer existed.
    Abby had already had sex, but it had happened with Tony Ellroy, a guy she’d been seeing and they had planned it and spent the weekend at a hotel his cousin booked for them. She’d told me Tony had been shy and he’d brought flowers and grape juice because they weren’t old enough for wine, and that both before and after the actual deed, he had told her she was more beautiful than sunsets. It sounded cheesy at the time, but in my room, alone, feeling somehow less than I’d been the day before, I wanted to be more beautiful than anything. Aside from Derek calling me sexy and reminding me that I’d pined for him for years, he didn’t say much. And the little he’d said certainly wasn’t about sunsets.
    I waited for a while, thinking maybe he would sneak back in, find a stolen moment in the chaos of morning, but no one came. I heard everyone moving and I could smell breakfast, but my door never opened. Eventually, I got up and put on jeans and a sweater, even though it wasn’t that cold despite being November, and I tried not to cry.
    No one prepares a girl for the moment when she allows someone access to herself. When you're still a virgin, there's this aura around you. You're untouched and unsullied. It's almost like being superhuman because everyone else has quiet moments in dark places when they become base animals but not you. You are intact. As a girl you're told to treasure this part of yourself. It defines you. You are good while you're a virgin. Pure and perfect. But when it's gone, it's just gone like that. Maybe you got lucky - no pun intended - and it was something magical and fulfilling but most likely it wasn't. Most likely it was just like it was for me. Awkward and weird and painful and disappointing and, worst of all, intrusive. While he washes you off of himself, just a place he visited, he's been inside of you. He will forever have been there and there is no way to remove him. And the first time? Even if he physically didn't break through that barrier, so to speak, he will always own that part of you. That piece that was yours and was perfect and unbroken is now his. Forever. And you can't ever forget that or make it not true. While Derek was with me, I enjoyed it on a sensory level, but I felt like I’d been drained of the only thing that made me worthwhile.
    “Lily, are you coming down for breakfast?” My dad was in my doorway and I wondered if he could tell. I wondered if he looked at me and saw the shame, if he sensed that I was missing a piece. I felt like I had let him down, that the night before, on my birthday, I had sat at dinner and I was his daughter and I was whole. Now I wasn’t. Whether Derek loved me or not was not even discussed. Someday, if I moved on or if he did, he would always be the person who owned something of mine.
    I shook my head. “I am. Sorry. I was just thinking.”
    “It’s your birthday. Don’t look so sad, honey.”
    I wanted to run to him, but I dug my feet into the carpet. The polyester fibers scratched at my toes, and I pushed down on them until it hurt too badly to ask my dad to hug me.
    “I’m okay, Dad. I’ll be down in a minute.”
    After he left, I went into the hall and I looked towards Jon’s room. The door was open and the shades