Have you lost your mind or has he taken all of yours too?

Journal,

"In Act II, Scene 3 of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare portrays Brutus and his fellow conspirators as soaking in the blood of Caesar, not to demonstrate that their killing of Caesar was a sacrifice to better Rome, but to show that they become so wrapped up in their quest for power that they failed to recognize their own barbarism. "

I stared at the paper in front of me for several minutes. It had taken me .15 seconds to construct that sentence, and 15 minutes later I still couldn't figure out what to follow it up with.

The fact that I was even working on this paper in the first place was frustrating. I had woken up at noon and headed to Marie-Claire's dorm room at 1, only to find that she was out at the movies with Thomas. I shouldn't blame her for doing things without me, because I was actutely aware of how shamelessly I had ditched her this last week and a half. That didn't stop me from blaming her for my current situation.

I hopped up off the floor, which was were I did all of my schoolwork. I headed over to my bookshelf and scanned the titles. I picked up "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Great way to kill a couple of hours.

I set up two chairs in the middle of my dorm and threw a blanket over them. I grabbed a flashlight, my Ipod, and the book, and set up camp in my makeshift fort. It sounds terribly immature, but if you're going to cut yourself off from society for a day, you might as well have fun with it.

Thirty pages into Part II, there was a knock on the door. I wouldn't have noticed if it wasn't for the break in songs on my Ipod. Truthfully, I didn't know how long the person had been out there, but I didn't feel like getting the door. Sheer curiosity drove me to action.

"Hello?" I said, opening the door. A man with with the hood of his jacket up pushed his way past me and into my dorm. Immediately, I had a pretty good guess of who it was. I stared absentmindedly out the door, noting for the first time that it was dark outside. How long had I been reading?

"Are you going to shut the fucking door or are you going to stand there all night?" Peter Landen snapped, unzipping his jacket behind me.

"Nice to see you too," I replied unenthusiastically. I shut the door and turned around. Peter was peering around my dorm room.

"Is that a fort?" he laughed, poking the blanketed contraption with his foot.

"It is my dorm room," I shot back. "I have every right to have a fort."

"Yea, I guess," he shrugged. "If you're five."

I sighed and turned my Ipod back on. Ignoring Peter, I bent down and disappeared back under my "childish" fort. I grabbed my book off the floor and continued reading. Five minutes later, Peter poked his head in. He smiled and climbed into the fort.

"Did I say that you could enter the fort?" I snapped, slamming the book closed.

"Can I enter the fort?" he murmured and smiled at my annoyance.

"Well, now that the rules of fort etiquette have been blatantly violated, I suppose you can do whatever you feel like," I huffed.

"You're cute," he whispered, and I smiled softly.

"I know," I replied. "What are you doing here? I was under the assumption that I'd seen the last of you. What was it? If I want to find you, which I doubt I ever will, I know where to?"

"Well," Peter shrugged. "I wanted to find you."

"Did your fiancée drive you up a wall?" I asked, curious despite my intense desire to genuinely not give a crap.

"You could say that," he shrugged. "I left her."

The shock read on my face. "What? Why?" I sputtered.

Peter stretched his arms out and laid down on his back. "I kind of don't like girls like I like guys," he stated simply.

"Oh."

"The press is going to have a field day with this," he sighed, covering his face with his hands. "Not even the gay part, because I never even told that to Sofia. But I can imagine it now. "The Drug Problem that Tore Rock's Power Couple Apart." Or even "Sofia Morghan's Affair with Lead Drummer of The Smith's was the Last Straw". God, I hope she doesn't get shit for this."

"That's sort of inevitable," I shrugged. Peter glared at me and I shut up about that. "How long did you two go out?"

Peter shook his head and shrugged. "I didn't exactly come here for the therapy session," he smirked and sat up. The thought of sleeping with him in my fort, right after his breakup, was all wrong. Some lines shouldn't be crossed.

"I'm curious," I shot back, pushing his back down to the ground. "I want to know what happened."

"So you can tell all of your little friends about it?"

"No," I stated coldly. I laid down on the floor next to Peter and stared at the quilt pattern on the blanket. "Did you love her?"

Peter didn't say anything for awhile. "I lost my virginity to her when I was 17."

"Was this before or after you realized that you liked guys better?" I asked. This time I wasn't trying to poke fun at his sexuality. I was genuinely curious.

"Before," he said. He covered his face with his hands and mumbled something else.

"What?" I inquired.

"By two days," he restated. "I had sex with her two days before I first kissed a guy. And I had sex with a guy four days after I lost it to her. Two different situations, two different guys."

"You made up for lost time quickly," I remarked.

"Yea, I guess," he chuckled. "I was talking to my friend Teddy about how it went with her, and I was showing him something that we did and I just kissed him. I didn't even think about it, either. I just went for it. I was able to play it off like it was all part of Show n' Tell, but..."

"That's when you knew something was horribly wrong," I said in my deep, horror movie trailer voice.

"Two days after that, I was at a cast party for Melissa's first season of EastEnders. She was... 14 then, so that would make Mark Simpson 19. Two years older than me at the time, and the star of the show."

"Isn't he out now?" I asked.

"Yea," Peter nodded. "But he wasn't when I was 17. He was far too much of a sex symbol back then to come out."

"As compared to now?" I asked, recalling all the times I had seen him on the cover of magazines in the last year.

"Yes, well now he's a sex symbol for a different sex. Do you want to hear the story or not?" Peter grumbled. I shut up obediently. "So I was at the cast party and my band had just done our set and I was in the back room, getting drunk out of my wits. Mark Simpson comes up to me and introduces himself, talks about how much he loves working with my sister and how great the band was, and slips his hand into my pocket "for a light." I, being jacked up on adrenaline from the show and being a lovely stew of confused teenage hormones, went hard as a rock." Peter paused for a second and chuckled.

"So I guess he had you figured out pretty fast."

"We shagged in the bathroom of the club. I mean, just think about that lovely story. I lost it, for real this time, in a bathroom of a club."

"How poetic."

"How romantic," he scoffed. "I was still going out with Sofia. I was an amazing boyfriend."

I concentrated on ceiling of blankets and thought about how weird, but great, it was that he was telling me all of this stuff.

"So what about you?" he asked. "I want your story."

"My story's boring," I shrugged. "I lost it to a girl on the field hockey team in the locker room when I was 14."

"Locker room and bathroom?" Peter smiled. "We're a classy gang. So what about on the flip side of things?"

I bit my lip and tried to think of how to word this without sounding like a major loser. "Well, okay. See, here's the thing. I like to mess with people. Halfway through this last year I met this guy at my school, and it was obvious that he was in to me. I couldn't pass up the opportunity, especially because he was in this "perfect" relationship and his girlfriend was blind as a bat."

Peter laughed and rolled over on his side to look at me. "You're evil."

"Wait, I'm not done. So this guy and I fooled around for like 3 months, but whenever it came to sex, I didn't want to and he couldn't bring himself to. I was way more into girls than I was into him, and the whole thing kind of grossed me out. So we never really got that far, and eventually he decided to try to be "straight" once again."

"Uh-huh," Peter nodded. I looked over at him, but he was staring up at the ceiling.

"So my best friend made me a bet that I couldn't get this one celebrity to sleep with me, and me being me, I won that bet. And I slept with her brother too."

Peter turned to look at me. I felt weird meeting his eyes, and once I did, I couldn't decipher his expression. "Holy shit," he murmured.

"Ever since then, I've sort of been on a roll," I shrugged.

"That's insane. You're insane to lose it to someone you knew for all of twenty minutes."

"Crazy like a fox," I chuckled nervously. "Congrats, you're the first person to make me feel horribly inexperienced."

Peter sighed and shook his head. "10th grade, you said you were in?"

My forehead was on fire and my fingers were trembling with... I don't know what. I nodded.

"Don't do something stupid and fall for me," he murmured. "I leave for Lollapalooza in America in a week."

I nodded, not bothering to think of some shitty remark about how it would be ridiculous for me to fall for someone. Peter sat up and kissed me softly on the lips and this time, I was fine with that just how it was.