How about, not Dex?

"Well if you're going to be shitty and mean, I want whichever of you isn't you," you tell Dex.

"Fine by me," he says, setting his armload of stuff on the coffee table for Scott. "Good luck. You'll need it. And, a word of advice based on past experience: I don't recommend letting her listen to anything with a saxophone solo longer than ten seconds, if you have any desire to move her off this depressing-seventies kick she has going." He leaves the room, in what you would term: a general huff.

Scott refrains from commenting on any of that. Instead, he picks up a tube of something from the table and opens the cap, surveying you doubtfully. "Where you want me to start, Bridge?"

"Don't care." You eye him with glum dejection. So he starts with your calves, rubbing the cool aloe gel into your skin. It feels kinda nice, better than nice, actually, really pleasant.

"You feeling okay?" he asks. "You want some more ginger ale?"

You shake your head.

"You want to talk about it?"

You shrug. "Won't help."

"Might make you feel better."

"Maybe I don't want to feel better."

Scott finishes with your calves and starts rubbing aloe onto your knees. "Why's that?"

"I don't want to feel better about us breaking up," you say in a small voice, and watch his shoulders slump momentarily. "I don't wanna just go home and then that's it and we never hang out again. And I don't want to go to stupid fucking school in the fall where I won't know anybody." You use the inside of your wrists to scrub at your eyes. "It's like, what even is the point of my stupid idiot life?"

He gives you a sort of pained look. "You still have us."

"No, I don't," you disagree. "I have, being in the middle of you two and you both pretending the other one doesn't exist. I have, trying to hang on to the jokes I made to one of you, so I don't forget to tell the other. I have, a depressingly virginal existence."

"How's that last one our fault?" he inquires, moving up to your thighs with the gel and beginning to massage it in.

"It's not. It's just adding to my general pathos."

"I didn't know you were a virgin," he remarks after a short silence. "We thought maybe you and Mike Senft..."

"Nope. We hung out. A few times. First semester. And I thought it was going okay. But then he said he thought we should stop going out and then later. He told Lacey I intimidated him."

Scott shakes his head. "Told you to stop taking that handgun on dates," he says, which is kinda funny even though you're not in the mood for funny, so you give him a **** little smile. "Shoulda listened to me."

"How am I supposed to stick him up in the parking lot. Without a gun?" you ask, and Scott smiles. He gives your thigh a squeeze, which to your embarrassment... feels really good. Wow. You hadn't noticed till now, how peripheral his hands are right now, to some of your very most important girl parts. "Anyway. Yeah. So Mike." You're suddenly very distracted by the whole, Scott massaging you, like, pussy-adjacent. "We didn't. Get up to much. And then, the grounding. So," you say, trying to **** your mind away from it, "now I basically. Get to go to college with all the sexual experience of an eighth grade math club president."

"You went out with Casey Jacinto, though. Don't tell me you guys didn't—"

"—I haven't even been fingered," you tell him. "And thanks. In advance. For not making me feel even stupider."

"You shouldn't feel stupid," he says, and then he says some other stuff that you don't quite catch because you're too distracted by how close his hand is to your crotch, and you're a little worried that he's going to notice you're a bit turned on.

"What'd you say?" you ask, when you drag your attention away from how badly you want him to do something extremely ungentlemanly right now.

"I just said, maybe you should talk to Dex."

"About what?" You look blankly at him.

"I bet he'd help you out."

You picture Dex playing matchmaker or something and fixing you up with somebody to take your virginity. The idea is ludicrous. "I don't trust him to pick me somebody."

"I didn't mean he'd pick somebody. I meant he might be your somebody," Scott says, and you stare at him in astonishment.

"Which one of us is actually fucking wasted here?" you scoff.

"Gimme your arm," Scott says, motioning with the aloe tube. You hold it out for him.

Great, so now he's boob adjacent.

"Did you miss the whole. Dex-likes-guys thing?" you ask after a minute.

"You know he's bi," Scott says.

"Starting to think more like ace," you say, "considering he got up to"—you hiccup—"absolutely nothing all through school."

There's enough of... something, in Scott's reaction to that that makes you stop and stare at him. "What was that look?" you demand. "Do you know something?" You gasp as another thought occurs to you. "Did he get his v-card punched and never told me?"

Scott's shaking his head. "No—and no—and no—and no to anything else, too. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm just saying, you trust him, maybe he'd be a good person to have as your first. You could ask."

"Well, I trust you too," you point out. "If you're volunteering people to deflower me, why not you? Considering he's queer, and you're not."

Scott falls silent, kind of dropping your arm at this. He shakes his head. "I'm, um. Going to see if he'll finish up here. I should get started on something for dinner."

He gets up, leaving you staring after him in embarrassed confusion. Well. That was extremely fucking awkward. Scott couldn't possibly have made it any clearer how incredibly unattractive he finds you.

You heave a sigh befitting your general doldrums, then twist onto your belly, even though aspirating to **** is starting to gain appeal as far as your suite of potential next moves is concerned, and bury your head in your arms. And, ugh, your head is still spinning. You drop one leg off the side of the couch and plant it firmly on the floor. It helps a little, anyway, even if it doesn't fix your general hot and bothered state from having Scott—the apparent reigning king of platonic body touching—rub his hands all over you.

Maybe you can just sleep it off and then go walk into the lake tomorrow and never come back out.