Love Me

“I have to study.”

“Yeah, I know. We should study fairy tales and happy endings,” he says, pulling me into his arms and giving me a fiery kiss.

“It’s happily ever after. Not happy endings.”

He shrugs. “Same thing.”

Uh, no. So not the same thing.

He unbuttons my blouse and slides his hand up my skirt.

And I like it.

Shame on me, but I do.

Because it turns out that English is not a very good lover.

Pretty quickly, I’m hot and bothered and kissing Dawson recklessly. I want him. I want to feel wanted.

When he pulls a condom out of his pocket and says, “No mess,” I practically rip it out of his hands to open it.

He picks me up and pushes me against the door.

It’s over quickly. Both of us breathing heavily and quickly getting our clothes back into place.

“Every time is so good,” he says. “So hot. I’m halfway afraid to do it with anyone else.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’m afraid it won’t be as good.”

“It’ll be good if you care about them, I think. And maybe if it’s just for fun it will be good too. I’m not really sure about all that. Dawson, you’ve grown up since you and Whitney. It sounds like you did it a lot this past summer. You’ve gotten better, or more confident, probably.”

“I think I could do it with you forever. Even if we married other people, I’d still want to do it with you. Speaking of that. How are things going with Aiden?”

“After your posting about the bathtub, you mean?”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” he says with a grin.

I shake my head at him. “You are not sorry.”

“You’re right. I’m not.”

“What happened to you just wanting to go to college?”

“That’s months away. Months that we could be having fun.”

In the moonlight.

8pm

Logan is on stage practicing a really fu

I watch Logan make out like crazy—in a fu

The best part of the scene is that the prop hot tub sits up off the ground. There are fake water bubbles in the tub. Each contestant pops up from under the water and then pops down when the contestants change. What's really fu

And Logan plays it up by smirking at the audience.

After the last contestant leaves, his butler brings him champagne. He leans back and says, “They’re all in love with me. I’m wooing them with my words and my lips. My brother doesn’t stand a chance. His being in love with the cheerleader has worked better than I could’ve pla

The stage darkens on them as the thin curtain in front of us goes up and a spotlight shines on Jake and me.

He reaches out, taking both of my hands in his. “I’m sorry I didn't tell you, but for once I wanted a girl to fall in love with me. Just me,” the Good Prince pleads.

Of course, earlier in the play, the Bad Prince told my character that his brother is a total player and that he says that to all the girls.

“Your brother told me you say that to all the girls.”

“Don't you believe in true love? The fairy tale kind?” he implores, pulling my hands dramatically to his chest.

“Yeah, I do, but not with a liar.”

I run away from him, the spotlight and little moon following me to the hot tub.

“Hey, slow down there, Boots,” the Bad Prince says to me, totally straying from the script.

“Boots?” I ask.

“Yeah, when I first met you, you were wearing those cute little cowboy boots.”

My real life flashes before my eyes.

I walk up to the hot tub like I'm scripted to do, sit down, slip my boots off, and put my feet in the hot tub.

“Do you believe in true love?” I ask with a sigh.

The Bad Prince knows now that he's in trouble. That I’m still in love with his brother. Which puts his plan to get all the contestants to fall in love with him and reject his brother in danger of failing.

While I'm staring dreamily at the moon, the butler sneaks on stage and whispers in the Bad Prince’s ear. “Sire, this one could ruin our plan.”

He shoes the butler away, swims over to me, and replies with, “Of course, I believe in it.” Then he pops out of the tub and walks with me in the moonlight. He says one cheesy pickup line after another. How my eyes are beautiful. How I must have fallen from heaven. How it was instant. That it was fate that I met his brother and that he lied to me. Because it brought us together. “You’re my one true love. Can't you feel it? In here?” He touches my chest, reminding me of Brooklyn. “You're the only contestant I didn’t kiss tonight. Yet you’re the only one I wanted to kiss. I want to kiss you for the rest of my life.”

He gently pushes my hair behind my ear and kisses my cheek.

“That’s perfect. Logan, love your improvised nickname for her. Keep that in there,” our director says.

I sit down in my seat. I want to yell at Logan for departing from the script. For including something so personal in the play. But I can’t, because I’m realizing how alike my real life and the play are.

“I’m tired of being the Bad Prince,” Logan says, plopping down next to me.

“You want to quit the play?”

“No. I mean in real life. I miss Maggie. My pride hates her, but the rest of me still loves her. Last year, all my friends told me that it was crazy. That we’d never last through high school, let alone college. Even my parents said it was just puppy love. And I guess they were right. We didn’t make it. But I'm never going to find another girl like her. And it's making me sick.”

“Lovesick,” I say with a sigh.

“Yeah.”

“Why did you just call me Boots? Is that your way of telling me that Aiden is the Bad Prince in real life?”

“Aiden is the only one of my friends who told me if she was my true love, we'd make it. Through high school. Through college. He believes in it. Speaking of Aiden. Why isn’t he here studying?”

I point at the English notes I’ve yet to look at since rehearsal started and say, “English is my new lover.”

He laughs. “Not doing well?”

“Failing. If I don’t do well on the test Thursday, I won’t be able to dance at the game.”

Logan nods and studies his fingernails. I only get through two notecards before he leans back, stretches, and says, “Screwing random girls in the hot tub of life is getting old.”

“But casual sex can be fun.”

“Once you've experienced sex with meaning, the rest never feels the same. No matter how hard you try.”

“I had that with the guy I was with before I came here.”

“The Keats guy?”

“You know about him?”

“Aiden told me about how he quoted Keats the night of the Welcome Back dance. How you kinda freaked out.”

“When I came here, we sort of broke up, but then sort of didn’t. I was confused. Love is confusing.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he says, pulling a flask with a shark on it out of his backpack. He hides it behind the seats in front of us and bends down really low to take a drink. “You know, what really sucks is that in real life, the Bad Prince wins a lot of the time. A lot of guys just tell girls what they want to hear.”

He looks up at the fake moon and sighs. “I want to be the one in the moonlight getting the kiss at the end.”

Wrapped around her little finger.

11:30pm