The Home Court Advantage Read Online Free

kinds of activities. He was very intelligent, but not intellectual, more the cute, fun, easy-going kind of guy. He was in a fraternity and he was very popular.”
    “You were close?” she asked and I hesitated. We hadn’t really gotten into a lot of detail about Cameron’s and my former relationship.
    “We hung out together a lot,” I replied, hoping that maybe we were done talking about it.
    “What did you do when you hung out?” Okay, we weren’t done talking about it. What, was she cross-examining me? I quickly started grabbing toiletries and tossing them into an overnight bag like I had sixty seconds to evacuate the building.
    “Um, sometimes we went out to eat or to the movies. Sometimes we just talked,” I said while digging around frantically in my closet. Obviously, I still felt a little uncomfortable talking about this, for some reason.
    “But you weren’t dating? I only ask because you did the same stuff with the gay guy you supposedly
were
dating. The only difference was that you actually had sex with
Cam
.”
    “We were friends,” I answered as I shredded a few garments in my haste. “And I told you, we only had sex that one night.” I rifled through my blouses, grabbed one and tossed it in the general direction of my suit bag. If one considered five feet away the general direction.
    “But never anything other than that? Not even a little fooling around?”
    “No. Just that one night.” I came barreling out of the closet and started frantically digging through my underwear drawer. For something. Not really sure what.
    “Gabrielle, stop! Step
away
from the dresser! You do
not
need your bathing suit to spend the night at Braden’s apartment! And for the record, you probably don’t need the shoe polish that you packed either.” I stopped digging, put the bathing suit down, turned and slowly walked over to sit next to her on my bed in defeat. The Grand freaking Inquisitor over here wasn’t giving up. What in the hell difference did it make now anyway?
    “There was sexual tension between us but nothing happened other than that one night.”
    “So, what happened
that
night?”
    “There was one of those moments, the kind where you look at somebody and think, ‘wow I really want to kiss him.’ So I kissed him. And he kissed me back and he just kind of took it from there. I was planning to tell him that I was a virgin, but I really liked what we were doing, and I seemed to be holding my own pretty well,” I said defensively.
    “I think you should have mentioned it, honey.”
    “Ug! I know,” I admitted, banging my head a few times against the bedpost. “Anyway, he freaked out when he realized the next day that he had deflowered one of his closest friends. I said that I wanted to date him and then he freaked out more. In retrospect, I probably should have mentioned that
before
I kissed him.”
    “And he should have handled it better, even at nineteen. There were more sensitive ways to tell a good friend that you didn’t want a romantic relationship.”
    “He said that he was confused, and that he
did want
to be involved with me romantically but he couldn’t deal with those feelings at that moment, because he was really down on himself at the time. Afterward, when I wouldn’t talk to him, he figured he had damaged our relationship beyond repair, so he just decided to leave me alone.”
    “This is like a bad movie,” she said, shaking her head.
    “Everything seems more dramatic when you’re a teenager. It’s hormones and chemicals from all the Clearasil and Axe body spray. At least that’s my hypothesis.”
    “You really should tell Braden, you know.”
    “What? That I made him negotiate an international treaty to take me out to dinner, but I let his cousin take my virginity on a whim? He already knows.”
    “I mean that you should tell him that Cam said that he cared about you but that he just couldn’t deal with it. At least Braden will know that he wasn’t just using you as