7

My jaw dropped. I froze. An expression of horrified bewilderment spread across my face.

Fuck.

Why can’t I keep my thoughts to my fucking self, just this one fucking once?! Jesus, Sheyna.

He noticed my obvious uneasiness and reassured me, “It’s fine, don’t worry about it, it’s in the past.” I had regained my composure and immediately rattled off on how that couldn’t be true and that he must just be messing with me. One worried glance from his best friend, who had caught on to what our conversation was about, however, set the record straight.

Something about him revealing his weaknesses to me made me feel closer to him, leaving me wanting to know more. Usually, not naive me should’ve been able to look through this one as well, but I, unfortunately, did not.

When the beer garden announced its imminent closure, the rest of the group went to a promiscuous club in downtown Jakarta. There was no way I was going to join them.

So Caleb and I stayed behind and spent another hour in the beer garden talking about this and that until it was time to leave. Since his house was only a few minutes from the garden, I decided to crash at his place. However, not without making abundantly clear to him that under no circumstances was I going to have sex with him. He started laughing and just nodded.

His house turned out to be a freaking castle that I immediately got lost in before even making it to his room. Boy, was it a boy’s room. While extremely clean, it was full of boy stuff. Swords, guns, model airplanes, and a relatively surprising amount of books. As I do, I immediately approached the bookshelf and started examining his collection. It’s a force of habit. I believe one of the best ways to get a read on someone is by looking at what they read. (hehe)

He walked in, tilted his head to the side in confusion, and looked at me:

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Oh, just looking at your books, I hope that’s cool?”

“I’ve never had anyone look at my books before…but go ahead, I guess.”