Swallow Me Whole novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Dead Weight
Sadie's ex tells his friends she just lay there, and she walks downstairs to her sister's best friend and asks him to teach her.
My ex-boyfriend told a dozen people that sleeping with me was sleeping with a throw pillow.
I know because I counted the names in the group chat.
Somebody had screenshotted it and sent it to me with a crying-laughing face and the words "thought you should know."
I read it at ten o'clock on a Friday night, standing at the top of my sister's back stairs in my bakery apron.
"Sadie just lies there," Trent had written. "Like I'm doing a dental exam."
Under that was a row of skull emojis.
Under the skulls somebody wrote, "dead weight lmaooo."
I was nineteen years old, and I had slept with exactly one person, twice.
Both times I had said sorry when it was over.
Sorry for what, I couldn't have told you.
I locked my phone and looked down the stairs at the light in the downstairs kitchen.
My sister Keeva owns this green duplex on Jenifer Street.
I was subletting her upstairs apartment for the summer while she worked a thirteen-week nursing contract in Phoenix.
The downstairs belongs to her best friend, Ashton Sheridan.
He is twenty-seven.
He builds kitchen cabinets in the garage out back.
He has been eating dinner at my family's table since before I could ride a bike.
He was also the only person I knew who had never in his life been described as a throw pillow's boyfriend.
The women who left his place at seven in the morning had a certain walk.
I had seen it from my bedroom window.
I went down the stairs before I could change my mind.
His back door was open behind the screen, and the kitchen smelled like cedar and onions.
He stood at the stove in a faded gray flannel with the sleeves shoved up, stirring something in a cast-iron pan.
He is six foot three.
He has black-brown hair that falls to his jaw and a beard he keeps short.
His front tooth got chipped by a skateboard when he was eleven.
His forearms have a lot of scars from sharp things.
"Hey, Sade-bug," he said without turning around. "There's pasta if you want some."
"I need you to teach me how to have sex."
The spoon stopped.
He turned around slowly.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"I need a teacher."
I opened the screen door and stepped inside, because if I stayed on the porch I was going to run.
"I'm bad at it, Ashton. My ex says so. His friends say so. I want to stop being bad at it."
He set the spoon down on the stove very carefully.
"Sadie."
"You've slept with half of Madison."
"That is a gross exaggeration."
"A third."
"Sade."
"You're good at it. I know you are, everyone knows you are. I'm nineteen, I'm not a child, I know what I'm asking."
My voice shook on the last part, and I hated that.
He crossed the kitchen in three steps and stopped in front of me.
For a second I thought he was going to put me out of the house.
Instead he caught my left wrist in one hand.
His hand went all the way around it with room to spare.
He turned my arm over and laid his thumb across the inside of my wrist, right where my pulse was going.
He held it there and looked at it.
It was the first time a man had touched me and made my knees weak instead of turning my stomach.
"Your heart's going a hundred and twenty," he said quietly.
"Because I'm scared you'll say no."
"That's not why."
His thumb moved, one slow stroke over the pulse.
My breath came out of me in a sound I didn't mean to make.
His gray eyes came up to my face and went very dark.
"No," he said.
"Ashton."
"Keeva would murder me. I'm not touching her baby sister."
"She doesn't have to know."
"That's worse."
"It's worse if I ask somebody I don't trust," I said.
"It's worse if I go to a bar and ask a stranger."
"You want me to find some guy at the Tin Roof and say, hey, teach me?"
His jaw flexed.
His hand tightened on my wrist, just for a second.
"Don't you dare," he said.
"Then say yes."
He let go of my wrist and turned away.
He put both hands flat on the counter, and his shoulders rose and fell once.
The pasta started to burn.
Neither of us moved to the stove.
"If I do this," he said to the cabinets, "there are rules."
"Okay."
"I mean actual rules. I mean written down."
"Okay."
He yanked a paper napkin out of the holder and a carpenter's pencil from behind his ear.
He wrote in block capitals while I read over his arm.
NO KISSING ON THE MOUTH.
LESSONS ONLY DOWNSTAIRS. NEVER IN KEEVA'S PLACE.
NOBODY SLEEPS OVER.
NO FEELINGS. NO PET NAMES. NO MISSING EACH OTHER.
KEEVA NEVER FINDS OUT.
He stopped and held the pencil out to me.
"You pick the last one," he said. "When does it end?"
I thought about it, and then I wrote the sixth rule in my own handwriting, small and neat.
IT ENDS AUGUST 31.
That was the day Keeva came home.
I signed my name.
He looked at the napkin for a long time before he signed his.
Then he dumped the burned pasta into the trash.
He turned to face me with his back against the stove and his arms crossed over his chest.
"Lesson one is tomorrow night at nine," Ashton said. "Wear something you don't mind me taking off."
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