Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 70546 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70546 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
And then there’s Nina.
My heart picks up speed just looking at her. She’s so beautiful, but her true beauty is that she can laugh at things like this. Her long hair is plastered around her face and shoulders, and that wretched clown on her shirt is now a drowned clown, but it’s still smiling that horrible clown smile. Her skirt is pressed up against the curve of her hips and every inch of her long, lithe legs while her boots appear drowned out. She throws her head back, leans against the wall with her butt, and laughs. She’s pure joy. It’s so tempting to have that, to hold it near me, to partake in it, and want it for myself. Even if I know I can’t have it, it’s impossible not to be affected by it.
What’s happening to me that I find all these farty sunshine rainbows not so annoying now?
I laugh too. I laugh until my shoulders shake, my stomach hurts, and water starts beading off me in unusual spots because my muscles are working that hard.
“I spent almost my entire life trying to attain some level of perfection.” I don’t know why I said that. It just popped out. I haven’t told anyone how I really feel about the money I now have. “Even when I was little, I was always so competitive. It wasn’t just about winning. It was about doing my best. I was really only racing against myself, trying to beat myself and come out on top of what I’d already done. No one pushed me. I just pushed myself. I was like that all through elementary school and then high school and college. I don’t know what I thought I had to prove, but whatever it was, I guess I did it. There always had to be something more, something better, something to achieve. When I sold that software and made all that money, I kept thinking to myself, what now? And the only answer I kept coming up with was that I needed a break.”
Nina’s face is sympathetic. “I think I know what you mean. I might do that a little bit too. Maybe. I don’t know. I think we’re all trying to outrun ourselves and the expectations ground into us by our families, our friends…the world. It’s funny that you ended up here. Funny in a good way,” she clarifies. She takes a few steps away from the door. “Do you have a towel?”
She’s clearly trying to spare me the awkwardness of this conversation, but since I put everything out there without even meaning to, it feels like an abrupt shut-off. She must read the hurt that I try very hard not to show because her smile becomes extra soft. Like I’m safe with her, and I should know that by now.
“Right. Anyway, it’s hot enough in here that we’ll probably be dry in about seven point eight minutes flat. No towels needed,” I tell her.
She crosses her arms, which at least hides half the clown’s scary face, but not the creepy, painted-on smile. Now it’s even worse, pulling upwards and to the side. “Tell me why you’re so against love.”
I don’t want to talk about Janet. I don’t want to talk about how she’d been cheating on me, or rather, in reality, cheating isn’t even the right word for the kind of scheme she and her real boyfriend engineered. I always thought if I told anyone about how my money put a target on my back, they’d nod and do the poor little rich boy saying in their head.
“I think people hate love or any kind of feeling because they think it makes them weak. I don’t think that at all, but it does make a person vulnerable. I think most people get the two confused. No one wants to be vulnerable, even if it’s sometimes the best thing to be, because being vulnerable also often shows us where our true power is,” Nina says.
“Are you sure you’re not a philosophy major?” I ask.
“Nope. English. Very much English.”
“That actually does explain a lot. But I don’t agree. Vulnerability means the opposite of powerful. Despite how many stories or morals of stories there might be that could prove the opposite, I’m not buying it.”
She doesn’t sigh like I’m dense. She knows by now that she isn’t going to change my mind, or at least not without a darn good argument, and she looks like she’s enjoying herself. Like debating might be a fun thing for her. “You need to lower your defenses in order to trust. You need to make yourself vulnerable in order to find joy in sharing your life with another person. If you can’t do those things, you can never truly experience what it means to care or be in love.”