The Affair: a New Adult Romance novelette Read Online Free PDF Page B

before.
    I thought my knees were going to give out and break in two.
    “Now pop your ass! Smack your butt!” Sabrina yelped out commands like the fiercest dance instructor. “Open your legs so that I can see your vag!”
    That was it.
    I sighed and stood straight up.
    “I can’t do this!” My arms flew into the air in surrender.
    “Yes, you can. You have to, babe.”
    Sabrina was right. For two days, I’d wracked my brain, attempting to figure out what to sell in order to pay tuition so that I could continue classes at Purdue. I was willing to sell anything. Yet, I had no car to sell. The flat screen television in my house was only worth a couple of hundred dollars. Tyler wasn’t willing to sell his truck to keep me enrolled in classes that he didn’t give a shit about.
    The only thing left to sell was myself.
    “You’re right,” I muttered as I turned back towards the mirror.
    I tried it again. I was bent over with my ass in the air, moving it like I was doing a very bad mating dance. I looked awkward and way out of my element.
    Again, I gave up. I kicked off the heels. I charged towards the radio just as Katy Perry asked, “Baby, do you dare to do this?”
    I answered her rhetorical question just as I turned off the radio, “No, I fucking don’t.”
    Sabrina looked at me sympathetically from the bed. I fell face first into her Egyptian linen sheets. The smell of the Gain made the feeling of helplessness mature inside of me.
    “Yes, you can, Karrie.”
    “No,” I whined, my words muffled by the bed linen. “I can’t and I’m not. I look stupid.”
    “You have to. I can’t go through college without you.”
    “You just need me to take notes!”
    “Karrie!” Sabrina smacked my ass.
    My head jolted out of the sheets.
    I yelped in pain as I rolled over onto my back. “Ouch!”
    “That’s a lie, and you know it!”
    I knew that it was a lie. I didn’t bother arguing with her.
    I lay there staring at the ceiling through strands of my red hair that were in my face. Sabrina was right. I had to do this.
    “Have you talked to him?”
    Him .
    Sabrina knew. She knew that I was in a bad mental space, but it was ten times more dramatic because I hadn’t talked to Justin.
    “No,” I answered ever so sadly.
    Justin had continued to ignore my pleas to chat. I’d completely stalked his Facebook page for the last two days. He’d logged on and had even read my messages. He posted randomly throughout those days as if he didn’t care that his silence towards me was killing me ever so slowly.
    There was no chiming. That romantic chime, which had played as a soundtrack to our love, had stopped so suddenly, as if our movie had come to an end.
    The silence was driving me legally insane.
    Justin had become something that I depended on to get myself through life. He was my drug. Unbeknownst to me, I had become addicted to a complete stranger.
    I guess you don’t know that you are addicted until you relapse.
    Suddenly, I felt something crawling on my face. I went to swat it away and, instead of feeling a stubborn fruit fly, I felt something wet.
    I was crying.
    As I wiped my face, Sabrina rubbed my leg.
    “I need him,” I confessed. “I can’t do this without him.”
    “Then tell him that.”
    As I said the words, “He won’t talk to me,” I completely broke down. I was wailing and hyperventilating like a three-year-old.
    “I can’t believe that I’m so fucked up,” I cried.
    Sabrina smacked her lips. She looked at me like I was silly, continuing to rub my leg soothingly, as I attempted to stop the sudden onset of complete hysteria. “You’re not fucked up. Me . I am fucked up. You’re just in a bad place, which this job…”
    “It’s not a job! Stop calling it a job!”
    “Well, you’re just in a bad place, which dancing will fix!”
    I rolled my eyes in disbelief, but she continued to encourage me. “And fuck cyber guy! You don’t need him, Karrie. You have me. I am going to be there every