“Not quite. Conor was just a boy. He was my first, true enough, but we were children. We never spent the kind of time together that you and Matty do. I never shared my most personal thoughts with him. When I think back on it, my relationship with Conor wasn't any deeper than my relationship with you, Matty. He was my boyfriend, and we had fun together, but that was it. Me running away from home to stay with him had more to do with my fear of moving to America than any particular bond with Conor himself. Now could we have developed into something more intimate had I stayed in Ireland? Perhaps, but we never got that chance.”

The three of us ruminated on that silently for a moment. Naimh was the first to pick her head up and smile.

“So like I said: I'm the one who's jealous of you. Even tonight, my first time for the second time with him, and you're the one who's been wrapped up in his arms, not me.“

Belle abruptly took her hand off of Naimh's and looked back at me in alarm. "Ohmigawd. I'm SO sorry if you wanted--"

“Relax, relax, it's fine." Now it was Naimh's turn to gesture with her palms downward. "I'm the one that invited you here. Had I wanted him all to myself I'm sure you would've let me."

“Of course I would have. Which begs the question: Why DID you invite me to join you?"

Naimh shrugged.

“It was the Least I could do. I owe my first overnight with him here to you. I owe my entire relationship with him to you, actually. If not for you prodding us that night, we never would've gotten together. And even though we eventually broke up, that was MY fault, not yours."

Belle furrowed her eyebrows, sat forward with her forearms on her knees, and stared down at the floor for a moment. "So this is yet another thing I need to apologize for. I..." Her voice trailed off as she sighed and took another deep breath, gathering herself. "I had my own ulterior motives in prodding you two to get together.”

Naimh frowned and sat up straight.

“What do you mean by that?"

Belle sagged.

“I always believed you two would break up. Matty had been infatuated with you from the beginning -- like I said: perfect body, gorgeous face, complete natural at sex."

“I don't understand."

“I thought that was it. Just physical attraction. I genuinely believed there would be nothing more to your relationship than sex. You two always had white-hot sexual chemistry, but from where I was sitting, it seemed clear to me that you had very little in common personally. At least, you never seemed to have those intimate conversations with him the way I did, y*know?"

I took a moment to lean forward and explain, "Belle believed we'd burn white hot and then burn out -- that we didn't have the intertwined roots to last when being ‘in love’ burned away. She wasn't wrong.”

Naimh frowned at that. "Well, I suppose she wasn't." Looking back at

Belle, she added, “But you actually set us up to fail?"

“I was being selfish. I wanted him for myself, and that wasn't going to happen as long as he remained infatuated with you. So I figured that once he got you out of his system, he'd be all mine.”

Naimh narrowed her eyes and looked back and forth between us left and right a few times as if her head had turned into a stuck ticking minute hand on a clock.

“Given the way you two are so casually explaining this, I'm going to assume things didn't go according to plan."

“You were right to fear that I'd seduce him that night before we all ended the sex boycott. I'd had the big butt plug in my ass all night and I showed it off to him after you all left. He'd gone about four days without sex and I figured seducing him would be easy."

Naimh shot an accusing look at both of us. "You said you two mutually decided it would be better not to spend the night together because it would be too tempting to break the boycott."

I nodded. "We did... eventually. We didn't Lie about that."

“But we didn't tell the whole truth," Belle continued. "I'm going to have to explain this all to the others as well, but I wanted to start with you first because I know how much you love him. I know how much he still cares about you. Even though you went through the whole bit with screaming your ex-boyfriend's name and then breaking up and everything else, he still thinks about you all the time. I had THOUGHT that going through a relationship based solely on sex would get you out of his system, but it didn't. He still thinks about getting back together with you."