Kimmie entered Vronsky’s dimly lit bedroom and flipped his desk chair around to face him as he sat on his unmade bed. Vronsky offered her a beverage and suggested they talk in the kitchen, but she refused. What she had to say to him wouldn’t take long. He gestured for her to begin and she did.

She told him about her time in Arizona and her many exhausting therapy sessions. She told him how she had learned a lot about herself and explained that when she got back to New York after her ice dancing dreams were dashed that she never properly grieved for her loss. Her therapist’s theory was she had been suffering from low-grade depression because of it. She then told him that when he kissed her on New Year’s Eve it was the first time she had been happy since coming back to New York.

She went on to say that she didn’t have much experience with guys and she used to be ashamed to admit this, but now she no longer cared. She was only fifteen years old, a baby really, and she now knew it was dumb to pretend she was worldlier than she was. She then told him how he had really hurt her feelings when he didn’t call her the day after they had sex for the first time, and admitted to him that she had lied about sleeping with her coach and she had been a virgin, which made their first time her “first time.”

“Did you know?” she asked. “Did you know I was lying?”

To his credit Vronsky admitted he’d suspected as much, but he’d ignored it. He asked if she’d felt pressured into having sex, and she told him while he didn’t pressure her physically or verbally like in a creepy way, she had felt a kind of pressure, because she was so desperate for him to like her back. She really felt like she had no choice but to give it up, so to speak. He had asked her to come back to his house, and they had sat in the living room where he made a point of saying there was no one home. Clearly, he wanted to fool around, and at the time she had wanted it, too.

But he moved so fast, and she was shocked when he stripped her down and took off his own clothes. He had seemed so matter of fact about it all, so confident that her legs would part for him, that she followed his lead and figured that was just how these things went.