“Come in?” I asked.
He stared at me a second too long, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “Sure.”
He didn’t seem sure, though. The swashbuckling pirate I’d wanted was retreating over the waves, and I didn’t know why. He wasn’t drunk. In fact, now that I thought about it, had he even opened the beer I’d handed him? Maybe he was tired from his move. I knew if I’d moved to Minnesota after living in Florida for seventeen years, I would have been stumbling around the frozen tundra, crying, Where am I?
To reassure him that everything was okay, I took him by the hand and led him into the house. I didn’t flick on the light, because that would only have scared him. My dad and I hadn’t finished unpacking from the last time we moved. It seemed futile, when the house wasn’t big enough to hold our stuff. The space that wasn’t taken up with furniture was filled with half-empty boxes. I tugged Will on a path so familiar I didn’t need lights, through the den and down a short hall into my room and onto my bed.
He sat down next to me, his weight drawing me toward him on the mattress. Street lamps cast the only light through the window blind. Stripes of shadow moved up his broad chest and arms, his strong neck, and his sharp chin darkened with stubble. I wondered again if he could possibly look as good in broad daylight as he did in the sexy night.
Will might have been wondering the same thing about me. He pulled my hand toward him and clasped it in both of his, massaging my fingers. He looked me over—my hair, my eyes, my shoulders, my breasts—like he wanted to remember every inch of me. It was oddly touching but also strange. I kept getting mixed messages from him. He seemed to want me as much as I wanted him, but something was holding him back. Maybe he thought I’d be an ugly duck if he saw me walking down the street during the day. Or his reluctance might have had nothing to do with me. I wondered if there was trouble back home in Minnesota.
I reached up to rub my thumb across the line between his brows. “So worried,” I whispered. “Relax.” I swept my fingers through his hair and gently pinched his earring that I found so fascinating.
I’d hit upon his trigger. He sucked in a little gasp. Then he plunged both hands into my hair and held me steady while he kissed me.
I was surprised at how hot his mouth was. His lips pressed the corner of my mouth at first, then the other corner, then kissed me full on. His tongue teased my lips apart and swept inside.
We made out for a long while. He was a great kisser, gently controlling me. I could have stayed just like that with him for hours. But by this time, most guys would have made another move. When he didn’t, I was afraid I’d mistakenly given him the message that I didn’t want more. I took him by both shoulders and pulled him down on top of me as I lay back on the bed.
He held himself off me. I thought for a split second he was going to back away. But he was only arranging himself so that our bodies fit together, his mouth on my neck, his hands on my breasts, his erection pressed against me. He settled more of his weight on top of me, and I sighed with satisfaction.
“Wow,” he whispered against my lips. “I like Florida better now.” He kissed me deeply before moving to my earlobe.
I turned my head so he could reach my ear better. I was rewarded with a gentle explosion of tingles that spread down my neck and made the hair stand up all over my body.
“Do you like that?” he asked, inducing delicious shivers.
“Not really,” I said drily.
He chuckled in my ear. This was the hottest thing he’d done yet.
He trailed one hand from my ear down my neck, traced his fingers lightly across my breastbone, and deftly undid the top button of my shirt. “Do you like this?”
“It’s okay,” I managed between gasps as his fingers continued downward. They blazed a trail of fire across my skin, paused to release another button, and traveled down again. When he reached the bottom, I panted in anticipation.
He reversed direction and smoothed one side of my shirt back against my shoulder. After fumbling underneath me to unhook my bra, he moved the satin out of the way too. With a light scratch of his stubble across my tender skin, he put his mouth on my breast.
“What?” I murmured.
He laughed against me, each puff of his warm breath sending a fresh chill across my chest. “You don’t like this?”
“No, that I’m sure I like.”
In agreement, he took me inside his hot mouth. For long minutes I was afraid I might explode with pleasure, holding my breath for each new thoughtful stroke of his tongue. Boys had done this to me before, yet not so slowly or thoroughly. Not like this.
I didn’t want him to stop, but I couldn’t be greedy. I took his cheek in my palm and brought his lips up to meet mine. Then I moved my hand down between us, under his weight, and into his waistband. I knew he was enjoying it because he forgot to keep kissing me.
“Do you like this?” I asked innocently, as if I didn’t know the answer.
Will was holding his breath like I had been before. On a couple of quick exhalations, he grunted, “I haven’t decided. Keep doing that . . . until I collect enough data.”
This was something I pictured a good-looking, wholesome nerd like DeMarcus saying if Angelica ever had the courage to reach down his pants. But Will said it with the irony of a smart, worldly pirate. I giggled.
Through my laughter, I was careful to continue touching him. I didn’t want to make him choose between feeling good and cracking jokes. This perfect boy, sent to sit next to me at a party, was quickly becoming one of my best friends with bennies. If he kept sounding so pleasantly shocked at what I was doing to him, he might even replace Sawyer as my favorite bad boy.
Brightness grew in the room. Headlights shone in from a car turning around in my driveway. The lines of light across Will’s face changed and moved. As they caressed his jawline, I was surer than ever that his good looks weren’t my imagination.
He was watching me again, and the worry line between his brows was back. “Don’t tell me. Your dad’s home.”
“Oh, no,” I assured him. “That’s probably my friend Kaye—we talked about her, and I think you met her inside at the party—and her boyfriend Aidan. You know, student council president,” I reminded him in a smarmy Aidan imitation. In a normal tone I said, “They stopped by to check that I got home okay before Aidan has to get Kaye back for her curfew.”
It must have been a lot later than I’d thought. I didn’t have a clock in my room, which was the way I liked it. I didn’t want to feel nagged. But I did wonder about the time. It seemed like my night with Will had passed in an instant.
The bright light hung around for an annoyingly long time. I rolled out from under Will, crawled across the bed, stuck my hand through the slats in the window blind, and waved. The headlights retreated.
When I turned back to Will, he was sitting up on the bed, smiling at me. “You have good friends.”
“Yeah. So good I want to kill them sometimes.”
He pulled his phone out of his back pocket. “God, it’s late. I’d better go. My mom’s called me three times.”
“That’s so sweet!”
“Yeah. She’s worried about me in a strange town and all, and I have to be somewhere at eight in the morning.”
Something wasn’t right here. Will didn’t seem like the type of guy who went home so he would be rested for an early morning, or whose mother would check up on him. And even if she did, most boys I knew wouldn’t admit this to a girl. But people were different. Maybe even pirates went to bed at a decent hour in Minnesota.
Then he motioned to a spot in front of him on the bed. “Come here, Tia.”
I could have made another joke out of it, crawling across the bed to him in a parody of a sex kitten. But he sounded so serious and looked so solemn that I simply slid closer.
He held my gaze as he maneuvered my bra back into place, then reached behind me to rehook it. He had some experience doing this, I gathered. Then he felt for my top button and fastened it, then the next. I’d never had a boy dress me before. As long as he watched me like I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, he could put as many layers of clothing on me as he wanted. He fastened the last button, and his hand slid down to my thigh.
I asked him, “Do you know how to get home from here? Maybe I should walk you.”
He squinted as he grinned. Then his smile faded. Stroking the corner of my mouth with one finger, he whispered, “I’d like that, if you would come inside and we could do this over again.” He moved his hand to cup my jaw, coming closer until the tip of his nose rubbed mine. He kissed me again, so slowly, just tasting at first and then more deeply, like we had all the time in the world and he was going to explore each angle, enjoying every second. Finally drawing away, he said, “And then I could walk you home, and we could do it again.”
I wished I could spend this night with Will over and over. It had been one of the best nights of my life. Repeating it with no thought to consequences and no concern for what happened next . . . that made it perfect.
After one final stroke of his hand through my hair, he picked up his phone. “What’s your number?”
I gave it to him. Since the night did have to end, I wanted him to be able to get in touch with me the next time he got the urge to drink (or not) on someone’s back porch and walk me home. It could happen, but only in the next few days. Most guys seemed to love hooking up with me, at least at first, but they paired off with a possessive girl pretty quickly. Afterward they wanted to cheat on their girlfriends with me, and that was something I refused to do. Kaye might not believe it, but even I had morals.
Will wouldn’t be any different. Alcohol wasn’t fooling with my perception anymore. By now I was almost sober, and he was still incredibly handsome as he squinted at his phone in the dark. His soft lips pursed in concentration. His long hair fell forward into his eyes. Looking like he did, and being the new guy at our school, he would have girls hanging off him by lunch on the first day. He wouldn’t need me for a hookup anymore. But he’d been heaven while he lasted, and I was glad I’d seen him first.
My phone rang in my pocket, a snippet of a salsa tune, and vibrated too. I pulled it out and glanced at his number with an unfamiliar area code. “That’s titillating. Call me anytime.”
He laughed, and I sighed with relief. I hadn’t realized how nervous I’d gotten when he looked so pensive.
I tensed right back up again when he asked, “Are you busy tomorrow afternoon?”
I countered suspiciously, “What do you mean?”
“I thought I could take you to lunch, and then you could show me around town.”
I didn’t know what to say. Truthfully, I would be busy tomorrow. But he wasn’t asking about just tomorrow. I could tell from his tone that if I wasn’t able to go to lunch with him, he would ask for another date. Eventually we would hit on a time that I could fit into my schedule. But I didn’t want to fit it into my schedule, and I couldn’t let him go on thinking that I did. I might have been a lot of things, but a tease wasn’t one of them.
A hookup after a party would have been fine with me. But the idea of a deliberate-sounding date made my stomach twist. All three of my sisters had gotten excited about a date. They’d been smitten quickly. The boys they’d dated became the most important people in their lives overnight. My sisters left high school before graduation to be with those boys. Two out of three boys had already abandoned them.
“Let me guess.” Will took my hand and stroked my palm with his thumb, sending a shiver down my arm. “It’s such a small town that showing me around would take five minutes, and then what would we do?”
I laughed softly, because his guess was so far off. I pulled my hand away. “No. It just sounds kind of serious.”
His brows went down. “Serious? What do you mean? It’ll be fun.”
“I mean, you’re moving too fast.”
“Too fast!” He looked around the ceiling. “Weren’t you the one who invited me into your bedroom when your parents weren’t home?”
So I was a little, shall we say, open with boys. I didn’t see how that hurt anything. What bothered me was when boys participated equally, and seemed to enjoy it, then complained about it afterward like I was somehow at fault.
“You know what?” he backtracked. “I’m sorry. I got to Florida yesterday. It’s a huge change, and I’m going through some other stuff. Maybe what I said didn’t come out right. I didn’t mean to creep you out and move in on you. We could just have lunch and that’s all. Or just ride around and that’s all. Or . . .” Searching my eyes, he ran out of words.
“No,” I said, “I mean I don’t want a boyfriend. Period.”
Not a muscle moved in his face. I couldn’t read his expression. He stared at me for a long time, as if he’d never heard of such a thing as a girl who didn’t want a boyfriend. He wasn’t taking this well.
Finally he nodded very slowly, then looked toward the ceiling again. “What I said definitely didn’t come out right.” He stood up and walked out of the room, headed for the front door. His eyes must have adjusted fully to the darkness, because not once did he scream out in pain as though he’d veered off the path and hit something sharp.
As I trailed after him, I reviewed the night, searching for the point when it had gone wrong. He wasn’t the type of guy who just wanted a hookup. How had I missed this? I was that type of girl and made a point never to hide it. Why did it surprise him now?
Surely he hadn’t been so attracted to me that he’d known I was wrong for him but pursued me anyway. I was okay looking, nothing special. A lot of guys seemed to like my auburn hair, but that usually got canceled out when they saw that I was almost their height. And while some boys enjoyed a flaky girl, others said I was stupid and couldn’t stand me. At least I wasn’t so flaky that I didn’t know I was flaky.