S2 Week 13 Bonus Story: Danse Macabre Pt. 4

Mind Games

Welcome to Trainwrecks: Season 2 (2005-2006)! If you haven’t read Season 1, please start there! Trainwrecks is a free-to-read fiction serial that follows a group of six Seattle-adjacent friends from the year 2004 to the year 2015. Join Luna Cruz, Sebastian Velasquez, Dimitri and Victoria Hale, Duke Kingston, and Jasmine Nolan as they stumble their way from adolescence to adulthood, falling in love, making mistakes, overcoming their pasts, and staying together through it all.

Friday posts are for paid subscribers. For $5 a month or a discounted rate of $50 a year, readers will get bonus content each month that delves further into character backgrounds or expands the current narrative. This bonus content is not needed to understand the main story. Money made from paid subscriptions gets reinvested into the series in the form of art and advertising!

For series introduction, character profiles, relationship charts, and general orientation, check out the Table of Contents!

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Content Warning: CSA, domestic abuse

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I decided that I resented Dimitri’s concern for me. It wasn’t very feminist of him, was it? A girl could sleep around if she wanted to. Guys did it all the time. Men structured an entire culture around notches in bedposts and bragging about how many women they’d taken to bed, and God help them if they were of a certain age and hadn’t lost their virginity yet.

I could seduce older men and then brag about my conquests to my friends. They’d laugh and call me a slut and I’d laugh right back and tell them they’d never catch up to me, and then we’d carry on, happy as could be. Those were our lunchtime conversations. We were too adult for things like homework and college prep and exams; we’d had a taste of the real world.

Because I resented Dimitri, it made me want him all the more. I needed to see his stupid concerns abandoned at the first opportunity he got to feel me up. I needed to see him fall right off his high horse and into my arms.

But since he was playing hard to get, I formulated a new strategy. Basically, I would acknowledge him whenever we were at a party together, and then I’d go after some other guy, showing how wholly unbothered I was by his lack of interest in me.

What I did not anticipate was how dirty Dimitri could fight. For all his moral high ground, he was downright shameless when it came to seducing guys right out from under my nose. And it didn’t even have to be sexual—he would sneak in while I was distracted, or while my target was getting a drink, and he’d make himself so interesting that the guy would forget all about me. He had an arsenal of distraction techniques up his sleeve. He was charming, entertaining, manipulative. I began to wonder if he was a sociopath.