Falling into You (Falling #1)(9)
“Do you feel like you were ready?”
She didn’t answer right away. “I guess. I don’t know. I mean, I wanted to. I really did. We talked about it for weeks, planned out when and where. We went to dinner first and it was romantic. But I was scared. Jason was too, but I think not as much as I was.”
I met her eyes and saw the hesitation. “Did he pressure you, Becca?”
She looked away, then back to me. “A little? I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t want to. I just might have waited a bit longer, if it was only up to me.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “You were…safe, right?”
She nodded vigorously. “My cousin Maria is twenty-three, and she took me to get birth control from a clinic. And we used a-a—you know. Protection.”
“Could your cousin take me too?”
Becca met my eyes. “I can ask her, if you’re sure. But wait until you’re sure you’re ready.”
She took a couple deep breaths, then her shoulders shook, and I pulled her into a hug. “Are you okay?”
She shrugged, shook her head, but said, “Yeah, I guess. I’m overwhelmed. I mean, I can’t believe I did that.” She pulled away and met my eyes. “I”m not a virgin anymore, Nell. I’m a woman, now.” She laughed, the sound almost a sob.
“You weren’t ready, were you?” I whispered.
She collapsed onto me. “N-no. But I love him, Nell. I do.” She took a long shuddering breath, and then composed herself, sitting back and wiping her face. “I love him and I didn’t want to disappoint him. And-and I knew we couldn’t keep skirting the line like we had been, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh come on, Nell. You know what I’m talking about. You make out, and it gets more and more intense. And eventually, you just know where it’s going, and you have to keep stopping yourselves before it goes there accidentally. Like I said, I really truly did want to. Please don’t think Jason was putting all this pressure on me. It wasn’t that, and it wasn’t that I didn’t want to, because I did. I just…I don’t know how to explain it.”
“I think I understand,” I said. “Making out with Kyle is starting to reach that point of having to stop ourselves before we get carried away.”
She took my hands in hers. “Well, just do what we did. Talk about it. If it’s going to happen anyway, we figured it would be best to plan it, make sure it happens on our terms, you know?”
I nodded, but I had to push away the dizzying storm of thoughts rushing through my head from the conversation. Becca hung out for a while longer, finished Teen Mom, which suddenly took on a whole new level of meaning, and then went home.
It took me a long time to fall asleep after Becca left. All I could think of was how I’d had to push myself away from Kyle that evening, how I’d felt like I was drowning in him, losing myself in his kisses. How easy it would be to just let go and let myself be swept away.
I didn’t want to have any doubts, though. I didn’t want to show up at Becca’s house afterwards and cry because I hadn’t been a hundred percent ready to have sex with Kyle.
A voice whispered deep in my head, though, and asked me if I’d ever be completely ready, if it was even possible to be a hundred percent ready for something like that.
*
Two weeks later, late on Friday night, I was sitting in the passenger seat of Kyle’s Camaro as we carved through a thick blanket of drifting snow. Our favorite song, our song, was playing on the radio: Jason Mraz’s “Lucky”, and I sang along. Kyle was frowning in concentration, the brights on and still barely able to pierce the pall of falling white. He was going barely thirty on a dirt road near our houses which I knew he knew like the back of his hand.
“This snow is effing crazy,” Kyle said. “I can’t see ten feet in front of me, and my back tires keep slipping.”
“Maybe we should pull over and see if it lets up a little,” I suggested.
“No, I’ll be fine. We’re not far from home anyway. I’ll just take it slow.”
I rolled my eyes, having known even as I suggested it that he wouldn’t pull over and wait. We rounded a curve and Kyle let out a curse as the back tires fishtailed. I peered through the snow ahead of us and saw the reason for Kyle’s panic: a huge doe standing in the middle of the road, eyes gleaming blue-green-silver in the headlights, stock still and frozen and getting larger by the second. He cursed again and downshifted, trying to get the car under control, but the Camaro only fishtailed worse before twisting into a flat spin.
“Move, goddamn it, you stupid deer!” Kyle shouted as we span closer to the animal.
Kyle knew how to drive in the snow, however, and he pumped the brakes, turned into the spin and touched the gas. The Camaro went through a third complete three-sixty, but it was slowing on the dirt, gravel and snow mixture. The front quarter of the car thudded into the deer, and the car shook violently on the impact. I screamed and braced my hands on the dashboard, but was unable to look away as the deer was knocked backwards, stumbling and falling to its side in the snow. Kyle was able to get the car to a stop, the lights bathing the motionless deer in the middle of the road, snow like a curtain of white all around us. We were both panting, Kyle’s hands clenching the wheel in a white-knuckle grip.