Love Backwards

V is for Vain

December 20th 2020
Age: 18
Rosalie Gutierrez

As we walk up the driveway we hear music and smell alcohol. Great, drunk, barely legal, adults. We walk in and immediately Amanda is dancing with a smile on her face, already fitting right into the party autmosphere. She's already said hi to at least twenty people, she's the center of attention, everyone is drawn to her. I look around and see the one other person I know, Derek.

"Hey, I'm gonna go talk to Derek." I shout over the music to Amanda who's doing her fourth shot. She just smiles and waves. I walk over to Derek.

"Hey." He says when I reach him, he has a red solo cup in his hand and a smirk across his face. He puts his arm around my shoulders and takes a big gulp of whatever is in his cup.

"You swore off drinking Derek." I grab his cup from his hand and take a swig, I wince at the strong taste and make a face.

He chuckles and takes the cup back taking another sip. I look at him, analyzing his features. I do that a lot with my friends, but Derek's extra fun to look at because he gets flustered easily. He is one of the only Puerto Rican guys I know, we basically clicked since the moment we started talking, bonding over our similar experiences with a immigrant mom. He has naturally curly hair, brown eyes, a "medium" skin color as he says, high cheekbones, and a huge ass forehead.

"Stop that Rosalie Gutierrez." I chuckle and feigned ignorance as his ears turn bright red.

"Stop what?" I smile looking at him.

"Stop staring at me like that, you know I hate it." He rolls his eyes and take another drink from his cup.

"And that's the reason I keep doing it." I smirk and grab his arm taking it off my shoulder to hold his hand. I pull us toward the backyard of the huge frat house.

"Where are we going?" He asks while staring at me, slightly spilling his drink at the sudden movement.

"You need some fresh air, you reek of alcohol and weed." I smile at him and he sniffs toward his armpit, chuckling at my disgusted expression. We finally make it through the crowd of people and I take a deep breath of the less infested air. I look around and see a couple of chairs and guide us to them. I let go of Derek's hand and plop into one of them. He sits next to me and stares at the dark sky.

"Where's Nash?" I ask, as he settles. Derek stirs a second before answering.

"We...broke up." I look over at him, he stares into his cup and sighs.

"I'm so sorry Derek." He shrugs, sitting a little further back on his chair.

For a moment he just looks up at the sky before continuing, "I mean it was bound to happen, we've been arguing a lot lately and it was draining both of us. She told me that she couldn't argue anymore and it was time to let us go, so that's what we did. Well she did, I guess."

"Why didn't you tell me? I would've been there for you D, y'all just had yalls second anniversary." Derek chuckles, and makes eye contact with me before grabbing and squeezing my hand a little.

"I appreciate you Rose but it's not your place to be my therapist. Plus, I came here to have a good time, not a pity party" He lets go of my hand and stands to stretch.
"Lets go back inside and have some fun. It'll be my first time hitting on girls in 2 years." He takes one last drink from his cup and throws it in a near by trash can. Reaching a hand out to help me get up efore we're oth stopped by a familiar voice.

We look up to Amanda "YOLO" before jumping into the pool. I jumped up and ran towards the pool.

"AMANDA!!" I stare at the pool till she comes up giggling, by now there were tons of people gathered around to see what was going on.

I pull her out of the pool and Derek puts his jacket on her and helps me walk her to the front door. The whole way she's giggling as I'm scolding her, trying my best to cover her with Derek's jacket. I drive all of us home and Derek helps me get Amanda, who fell asleep on the ride back, into the apartment building. I get her dried off and change her clothes while Derek makes her some hangover tea for the morning. I finally get Amanda in bed, one thing aout drunk adults; they're just like toddlers at bed time. When I get to the kitchen, Derek is putting the soup in a container, I help him with the dishes before he decides to abandon me for the couch. After I'm done with the dishes I sit next to him, pulling the blanket he has over me.

"What show is this?" I ask putting my feet on his legs.

Without looking up he says, "Criminal Minds." I gasp and he looks over.

"I LOVE CRIMINAL MINDS!!" He covers my mouth and chuckles.

"You are gonna wake up Ama and I'm not going to be the one putting her back to sleep." I move his hand and laugh. We watched criminal minds till eventually we both fell asleep.