He left the room, then came back with a lit candle and placed it on the dresser. He turned out the light. The candlelight dashed across the room and rippled on the black ceiling like water. His shadow crossed to the far wall and opened a window. The sound of the rain and wind rushed in. The light on the ceiling transformed from a gentle ebb and flow into a stormy sea.
As I watched him, I sipped my tea. My mouth filled with hot sweetness. Now he crawled onto the foot of the bed and moved forward to meet me. All of his bare skin warmed all of mine in the cool room. My heart raced and my skin sparkled with the knowledge that no one would disturb us now. No one would stop us. There was nothing to prevent us from losing ourselves to each other, except logic, and heartbreak, and every sound reason in the world.
We moved very slowly. It was like fooling around in front of a glacier. We couldn’t see it advancing, but we knew that it was about to crush us, yet we didn’t get out of the way.
What felt like hours later, when we were naked and totally open for each other, he interlaced his fingers with mine so that our hands were clasped. He nudged our hands with his prickly chin, watching me. “I want to,” he whispered. “Do you?”
Heart pounding, I nodded. “I do.”
“Promise?” he asked.
“Promise.” My voice came out hoarse.
He rolled off the bed and crossed the room. With a start I realized he’d disappeared out the door. I’d been stuck on the fact that I’d seen him, all of him, naked. Like an afterimage when I’d stared at the sun, I kept seeing him though he wasn’t there.
I’d gotten this close to sex with Liam Keel at a party, and with Aidan Rogers at a party, and with Toby at a party initially and lots more times after that. Though I’d desperately wanted to be a bad girl and I’d thought I wanted to have sex, I couldn’t go through with it with someone I didn’t love. And the setting had been different—the back porch at the house where the party was going on, a truck, Toby’s car. Never a bed. Never a bedroom, wide enough to see the boy crossing it and coming back with a condom. Before I’d only seen the guy close up, too close for perspective. Sam I saw clearly in the candlelight, shoulders strong and biceps unexpectedly big and solid for such a gentle guy, his eyes on me, his pace deliberate. I owed it to myself to keep my eyes open and watch him. I wasn’t going to dream through this.
He rolled onto the bed beside me again, kissed my forehead, and tore the package open. I watched him put the condom on. And all the while I was thinking through what this meant. He knew I was on the pill. He was using a condom anyway. My doctor had lectured me that the pill protected against pregnancy but not STDs. She’d said I should use a condom too unless I was in a committed, monogamous relationship.
That wasn’t what this was. It never would be. And if Sam wanted to protect himself or me with a condom, either he hadn’t believed me when I’d said I was a virgin, or he’d been lying himself.
“Hey,” he whispered. “My eyes are up here.”
I laughed nervously and met his gaze. At some point I’d clasped my hands in front of my mouth. I must have looked to him like I was terrified.
And maybe that was the reason for the condom. He could tell how scared I was, and he wanted me to have no doubts.
He wrapped one hand around both of mine. “Your hands are cold.” He inched forward until our foreheads touched. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Ready?”
Was I?
“Yes,” I said.
I tried not to think about him and me. I didn’t see how things could possibly work out between us, even though he obviously wanted that now, and I did, too. The best-case scenario was that he was a boy I loved, who would break my heart and leave me. We would stay together for days, weeks, even months. When I looked back on it later, though, I wouldn’t remember our slow fall out of love. All I would remember was this one night.
So I tried to commit to memory every feeling of my first time. But there was a point when everything turned a corner and left me shocked by what I saw there. He made me feel too good, and I loved him too much. There was no way we could leave each other after this.
Much later, the rain stopped, leaving only the sound of the breeze in the window. The candlelight had dimmed on the ceiling. Sam lay facing me with his arm across my waist, and his chin nestled against my shoulder. My body felt completely flattened, so tired and satisfied that I sank into the mattress. Yet every molecule of me was aware of him, as though I were standing in the makeshift dressing room in the mall, naked and listening for his voice or his guitar.
I murmured sleepily, “I thought it wasn’t supposed to be any good the first time.”
He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at me like I’d gone loco. “Girls may say that. Guys don’t.” He grinned at me and stroked a lock of hair away from my face. “I hate to say this, but you’d better go. It’s getting so late that even I won’t be able to explain it to your granddad. I don’t want you to have to drive across town so late, but if I drove you, that would—”
“No, that would just be harder to explain,” I agreed.
His mouth turned down, and his dark eyes grew serious. The candlelight played eerily across his face as he said, “I want you to know how much this has meant to me. I’m so glad we were each other’s first.” His brows knitted. “That didn’t come out right. This is why I don’t write songs.”
I wondered if he was backtracking because of the look on my face. He sounded like he was saying we were each other’s first, and that was the end of it.
Suddenly he gushed, “Bailey, you have completely turned me upside down in the last four days. Which makes sense, right? There’s a country song about this. Deana Carter sings about it. Lady Antebellum sings about it. Gosh, not just country artists. Katy Perry. Everybody has a song about it because everybody’s been through it. You find that person at eighteen and you lose yourself. And the tragedy is, it’s the person who’s completely opposed to everything you’ve ever wanted. You bond with that person, and that person breaks your heart. I’m that tragedy for you, and you’re mine.”
This was definitely the end of it.
“What about Alan Jackson?” I breathed.
Sam gazed sadly at me, stroking my bottom lip tenderly with one callused finger. “Not everybody can be that lucky.”
Those words were still sinking in as I murmured, “I started the night thinking that way, Sam, but now . . . don’t you want to try to work this out?” I sounded a lot more desperate than I wanted to.