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.