The Best Laid Plans(32)

I don’t know how long we stay like that, entwined together on the bed. It could be hours, days, years. I’m in a daze, my only thoughts on the feel of him.

“You should stay over,” he says, breathing huskily into my ear. His voice is a rough whisper and as he speaks, his lips brush the soft skin of my earlobe.

“What about my friends?” I ask, pulling away slightly.

“They’ll be fine.” He brushes a strand of hair behind my ear. “They can stay over too, on the couch. Or they can go home. Whatever.”

“I should just check,” I say, pulling out of his grasp to find my phone. I have no idea what time it is. How long have we been in his room? I press the button to light up the screen, and see it’s already after midnight. I have a bunch of texts.

    HANNAH

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!





DANIELLE

Are you still a virgin?





AVA

have you seeen Deany’s wieney?





HANNAH

Ava is dancing on the coffee table. We might need to take her home soon





AVA





DANIELLE

Ava is singing show tunes! We’re taking her home. It’s for her own good. Stay here and get laid





HANNAH

Do you want to come with us?





AVA

Keely god liuck u luve yo!





“I think they might have left,” I say. I know I should be upset they ditched me, but a part of me is glad I have an excuse to stay. I type a group message back.

    I’m going to stay here. See you guys tomorrow





As soon as the message sends I feel the impact of what the words mean, my stomach flipping uneasily. I’m staying the night. In a boy’s bed.

“Good,” he says. He flips off the light on his bedside table and then he pulls me back down, a smile in his kiss. His lips brush my cheek, then my chin, then down my neck, giving me shivers. He pulls away and then brings his shirt up over his head, revealing a toned chest. I reach a hand up to his shoulder and then brush my fingertips softly down his bare arm, reveling in the feeling of his warm skin.

“Your turn,” he says, his voice raspy. He holds on to the bottom of my top, and then slowly pulls the fabric up over my head. I don’t stop him, but I suck in a deep breath when he leans back to look at me, and I’m thankful the room is dark.

I’m in Danielle’s bra—a black lacy one from Victoria’s Secret, and it’s a little too big for me. She noticed my old sports bra when we were getting ready earlier and insisted I borrow one of hers, a “real bra,” just in case. Now I’m glad I did.

“You’re so hot,” he says.

“Really?” I ask before realizing it’s the wrong thing to say.

“Damn right,” he says, pulling me toward him. He settles down into the mattress and I settle onto him. We stay like that for a while longer, though it’s hard to judge how long. I feel like we’re separate from time—like the world is going on around us, but we aren’t a part of it. We’re in our own galaxy, just lips and warm breath and soft hands. I feel like I’m honey dripping slowly from a spoon.

And then he pulls his face from mine and whispers the words that snap me back into focus.

“Should I get a condom?”

“What?” I whisper back, though I heard him perfectly. I don’t know what else to say. He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and says it again, his voice scratchy from lack of use.

“Should I get a condom?”

Yes. Isn’t that the obvious answer? Isn’t this what I was hoping would happen when I came to his house, when I went alone to his room? I think of Danielle’s warning from earlier in the night, an uneasy feeling churning in my stomach. If you tell him you’re a virgin, it could only go two ways: he’ll be weirded out and lose interest, or he’ll take your virginity and never speak to you again. I just doubt he wants to teach you how to have sex.

It’s a catch-22. I don’t want to be a virgin anymore, but I don’t want to scare Dean away by letting him take my virginity. What if he freaks out at my inexperience? Or maybe worse—what if he never talks to me again afterward, because he’s gotten what he wanted? I wish there was some way to just get it over with, some way to have already had sex. I don’t want Dean to have to teach me. I want to already know what I’m doing. I want this not to be a BIG DEAL.

Maybe Dean doesn’t have to know I’m a virgin. I know the basics. I could probably fake it. But what if it hurts? Hannah told me the first time she had sex with Charlie, it hurt so much she cried. They lay on top of a bath towel just in case, and she bled all over it. I can’t imagine the humiliation I’d feel if I bled all over Dean’s sheets. He would have to wash them right away, would have to take them into the living room where Cody might see them, and they’d both laugh and call me disgusting, and that would become my label: the disgusting high school girl who ruined Dean’s sheets. The lying virgin caught red-handed. I’d be an embarrassing blip on Dean’s timeline: a regretful mistake.

“Keely?” He sits up and leans over to his bedside table, rummaging through it in the dark. Then there it is in his hand—a condom, wrapped in a shiny square package. I’ve seen condoms before in health class. They’re passed around in a basket several times a year while everyone giggles and self-consciously grabs a few, like some twisted grown-up version of trick-or-treat. Still, condoms are novel to me. The fact that Dean keeps them in his bedside table, that he uses them enough to have them on hand, feels strange. To Dean, are condoms just as ordinary as hand sanitizer or Advil?