Total pages in book: 185
Estimated words: 180510 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 903(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 602(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 180510 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 903(@200wpm)___ 722(@250wpm)___ 602(@300wpm)
“Can you make me come?”
I gulped and thought about that for a second. My instinct was to say yes. Sex was one of the most basic acts of humanity; I couldn’t imagine making a girl orgasm required any sort of special sorcery. Then I considered how many times I fell off my bike before learning to ride without training wheels. Biking seemed pretty basic too.
“I guess there’s only one way to find out.” I faked sixty percent of my confidence and managed a smile that matched at least forty percent of that confidence.
That made Josie relinquish a tiny grin and loosen her grip on my hand just enough to enter uncharted territory.
By a fucking millimeter at the very most.
Because …
My mom decided to come into my room. Nope. I did not lock the door. I never locked my door because it was an unspoken rule to knock. I wasn’t five anymore. It was a given that behind a closed door someone could be half naked. If the bathroom door was closed, we knocked. We never just opened the door.
Etiquette.
Rules.
Protocol.
Come on!
“Oh!” Mom gasped.
Really, everything happened at once.
The gasp.
Josie closing her legs so damn tight, I could barely withdraw my hand from between them. Then she lurched forward, grabbing her shorts and panties while I stood with my back to my mom so I could adjust my dying erection.
My dad used to say my mom spewed the most nonsensical things at the worst moments. I wasn’t sure what he meant until that moment.
“Condom. Do you have … do you want me to get a condom? No! I mean … this is wrong. Colten, this is wrong!”
When I turned around, her hands were covering her face.
“Mom! Get out.” I grabbed her shoulders, turned her around, and guided her out of my room.
“Dinner’s ready,” she squeaked.
I closed the door behind me and leaned against it. My head eased back while I closed my eyes to Josie zipping her shorts with frantic hands.
“Your mom has impeccable timing.”
When I opened my eyes, Josie rolled her lips inward into a closed-mouth grin.
“Are you going to be in trouble? Do you think she’s going to tell my parents? Should I tell them first before she gets a chance to tell them?”
“No!” I shook my head a dozen times. “Do not tell them anything. I’ll talk to my mom. She won’t say anything. Just promise me you won’t tell them.”
“Colten touched me between my legs. I was half naked on his piano bench, and we decided to do the finger thing instead of having oral sex. What’s that, Dad? Oh … you’re getting your gun. What are you going to do with your gun?”
“Colten, I want to tell them before she does. I can make them understand.”
“She’s not going to tell them. And what’s to understand? How are you going to sugarcoat what just happened?”
Josie shrugged a shoulder. “I’ll tell them we were heavy petting. That’s what their generation called it. And no one can get pregnant from heavy petting, so it’s not the worst sin in the world.”
Seriously?
I’d felt my life slipping through my hands years earlier when Josie ratted me out for kissing her when she fell out of the tree. Heavy petting? Every cell in my body physically ached and shook with fear at the thought of what Chief Watts would do to me for that.
“Josephine Watts …” I took two big strides forward and cupped her face, tipping her head back so she had no choice but to give me her full attention. “Do. Not. Tell. Them. We will be over. We won’t even be friends. We’ll be nothing. Less than nothing. Is that what you want?”
She blinked several times before easing her head side to side the tiny fraction my hands allowed.
“Go home. I’ll talk to my mom. And we won’t ever discuss it again.”
“K,” she whispered.
I released her and blew out a big sigh of relief.
“Colten?” She stopped at my door.
“Yeah?” I looked up at her as I followed her lead.
“We can’t end.”
I didn’t know what that really meant for sure, but I nodded anyway.
“I never felt normal and accepted until I met you. So … we can’t end.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“You ended us. We are over,” I reply to Colten’s regurgitation of the words I fed him so many years ago. “There is no we. There is you, and there is me. Even if you’ve managed to run off my date tonight, it doesn’t change anything.”
He studies me in silence for several seconds. “Do you remember Tessa? The day she came to my house, and you were there?”
I remember everything. Every word. Every breath. Even the tiny spaces between breaths. He doesn’t need to know that, so I give him nothing but several bored blinks and a straight face.
Easing his head side to side, he grins. “I was fucking drowning. Trying to figure out who I was, where my life was meant to go, why my dad was such an asshole, and how to be what my mom needed me to be. Then there was you, Josephine Watts. When I was with you, nothing else mattered. Until Reagan came into my life, I couldn’t imagine ever meeting someone who made me feel so …” His face contorts into a slightly painful expression while he averts his gaze to the floor for a second. “I … I can’t even find the right word. It’s not ‘important’ or ‘purposeful.’ It’s like I just knew I was meant to be your friend, the way I just knew when I held Reagan that I was meant to be her father. Not that you needed me or that she needed me. Just that I knew I was part of something …”