First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (28 page)

“I see. Amy, can I have a minute with you?”

“No,” Amy said sweetly, the incongruity jarring, looking at her mother with eyes I’d seen only on women betrayed. Back in college if a woman looked at a guy like that, his shit would be out on the common with beer poured all over it within days.

What did it mean to have a woman look at her own mother like this?

Amy’s fingers tightened around mine and I realized she was unhinged. Whatever conversation had taken place before I arrived, it created some sort of crazy dynamic here, and I happened to come along at the exact wrong moment.

My specialty: lousy timing.

“Amy. Be reasonable,” her mom cajoled. My neck tightened and shoulders straightened, so involuntary I couldn’t have stopped it if you’d tried to force me. I knew that voice.

My mom had that voice.

“
I
am being reasonable, Mom.” The voice of Death incarnate might have been less devoid of emotion. I tried to remain completely unreadable, cheering Amy on silently.

“You’re letting yourself be walked all over by an unstable boy—”

“Enough.” Amy’s last word rang down the hall like a gunshot as she actually took her mother by the hand and led her to the door. Stepping awkwardly past me, Mrs. Smithson seemed to find me a safe target for her anger, because her face was like a dragon’s, ready to turn me into a piece of crispy toast with one breath.

Her mouth puckered into a tight starfish as she reluctantly walked into the hallway, and she sniped, “The least you could do is call your poor father. After what you did to him and what he’s going through.” And then she actually
tsk tsked
me.

My what? What did
my father
have to do with any of this? Huh?

Amy’s gasp sounded like a sonic boom and then I found myself being dragged into her apartment, the door slamming as if Amy had telepathically commanded it, the locks clicking like tongues clucking.

And then she faced me. The soulful eyes big as saucers lived on one half of her face, her mouth and jaw dragged low and long by conflict and despair. Her mom didn’t knock. Didn’t shout. In fact, the carpet muffled the first few steps she took away from the door, and then she was gone.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, ready to apologize.
What was that shit about my dad?
The words floated to the surface but died in my throat.

“Sam,” she said, my name a broken word, cracked in half by a sob that made her crumble into a ball in the middle of her futon.

I cracked in half, too, and took the two pieces of me—the two Sams, from four years ago and now—and wrapped them around Amy, hoping my warmth and love and comfort would be enough, because it was all I could give her right now.

Wishing it were more, I rocked her as she cried, no words forthcoming. Just tears.

Maybe my timing wasn’t so bad after all.

Amy

What had just happened?

What the
fuck
had just happened?

Had my mom seriously just come to my apartment to convince me that it was OK to guilt me out of my college fund to pay for Evan’s drug felony defense?

Our bodies began to shake as Sam did his best to cover every square inch of my body with his, legs entwined in mine, arms and chest pressed softly against my back, the steady rise and fall of his breath, in concert with mine, helping me to find my way home to some sort of inner peace that quelled—for now—the massive hurricane unleashed inside.

Standing up to Mom didn’t mean some big blowout fight or a screaming match. Being true to myself had been a surprisingly quiet affair, like a tidal wave that you can’t detect without the most subtle, sophisticated instruments—but one that lurked fast beneath the surface, the accumulated force of the waves amplified by time, the energy so strong when it finally hits shore that nothing is left standing in its wake.

Except it hadn’t washed away anything but my mother’s unreality.

Gone. All those years of dancing like a marionette with its hair on fire, wearing tap shoes and a tutu, trying to please an audience of haters—gone. The ins and outs of lies and half-truths she expected me to memorize like state capitals represented more mental real estate than any formal school curriculum.

And Mom’s standardized testing wasn’t once a year.

It was every.fucking.second of my life.

Until now.

“I can tell you what it means when my mom wrings her hands,” I hissed, still curled in a ball, my hot breath mingling with Sam’s. “Or how to read a glance she sends my way when Evan comes to a football game at the high school, drunk off his ass.”

He grunted, the sound an encouragement.

“I know how to word everything so that no one in our family looks bad. What to say when someone mentions a transgression of Evan’s. Even that damn word—transgression—is my mom’s.”

“I’ve been hiding from you because I was embarrassed—ashamed.” Memories of the phone in my hoohaw made me start to laugh, a loopy, deranged sound that made Sam’s arms tighten around me. Most guys would have bought themselves more space.

Sam dug in and held on for the ride.

“Ashamed of Evan?”

“Ashamed to be in a family where my brother just got arrested.” As the words came out of my mouth in a perfectly formed line, like little drummers on a football field at half time, the steam dissipated. They had no power, no
oooomph
, no magic hold over me. I was stating a fact. Not opening myself up to judgment.

“Your brother did that. Not you.”

I sniffed and realized I was crying, still. Wiping my nose with the back of my sleeve, I laughed, the sound pure and mature, the chortle of someone older than their years. “I know that. And you know that. But Mom has spent my entire life catering to the least reasonable person in the room.”

“And today she thought that was you,” he whispered.

Thud.

There it was again. He knew me so well. My jaw dropped as Sam nailed it.

“Is that why she gave up quietly?” I asked. He shrugged, pulling my arms up a bit with the movement, making me unwind a bit and stretch out, finally meeting his eyes.

Kindness. Kindness and acceptance and a touch of something I’d seen in Dr. Alex.

Goodness. Untouched, untainted goodness.

Sam’s fingertips brushed my damp hair out of my eyes, pulling a strand that had been caught in my mouth. “Just because your mother wants to hook you into her created reality doesn’t mean you have to oblige.”

“Easier said than done.”

He snorted. “I know whereof I speak.”

“Do you?” New territory with Sam. He’d opened up that night we’d reconnected but the distance between our emotional realities had widened. My fault for some of that, but Sam’s, too.

“I told you what happened after the debate. My dad and mom have their own fucked up version of how life’s supposed to be. I get it.”

“You do?”

“Amy, there’s way more fakery back home than you’d ever imagine.” His voice was tight and I could feel him slipping away.

“I’ve been too weak to fight it,” I confessed.
No more
.

“Be weak. Be strong,” he implored, as if asking me to have those emotional states right here, right now, an urgency in his voice and body that made me lean in. “Each of us should be able to be both whenever we need to be. The problem is that you don’t get to pick and choose when you get to be weak or strong. Life doesn’t work that way. It’s unfair and cruel and the best you can do is to recognize that fact and shore yourself up. Where it gets hard is when you need to be weak and can’t. Then it’s brutal. You go into a core inside yourself where you build walls and feel like telling the world to fuck off because you don’t get what you desperately need.”

He sighed, ran his shaking hand through his hair and looked at me with eyes like a caged animal’s, practically begging for release. I felt so helpless. All I could do was listen. That had to be enough.

“Vulnerability,” he continued. “Weakness. It’s not a sin to be weak. It’s the opposite, in fact: it’s a black mark on society that we live in a system that disparages the very essence of what makes us human.” His intensity tapped into something deep in me.

The only way to keep him here seemed to be with a kiss, one that could pin him in place.

Forever.

Or, at least, tonight.

As our mouths met, my hands slipped under his shirt, needing to touch his warmth, his skin, burning to connect on some other level. As his lips caught mine, tongue gentle and then more urgent, I wanted to make the past few days disappear, to have Sam bury himself in me, to wind myself around him and be driven into, made whole through a communing of flesh and soul far greater than anything words could ever express.

He took my boldness as permission, his own hands under my cotton shirt, and then he stopped, the kisses fading in frequency, the urgency dialed down to mere affection.

“What?” I murmured, confused.

“Is this what you want, Amy?” His hand caressed my jaw, the daylight showing in stark relief how strong and mature he’d become. A man’s full beard could grow on that face, a woman could see true love in those eyes, and a lover could know she was the center of his universe if she would let him.

“Ye—yes.” He caught the hitch in my throat.

“Not like this,” he declared, pulling me in for an embrace. My cheek pressed against the well-worn cotton shirt he wore, hip against his taut abs, his shoulder a place for my head to rest.

Sniff. “I do want you,” I insisted. “But you’re right. Not now. Not like this.” Plus, my vagina just went through something no AppleCare plan covers. I was still sore.

“I wouldn’t want anything more than you want to give. Ever. And I want to be together for the right reasons. Not out of sorrow or sadness. I’m not
that
guy.”

Liam.

Was Liam
that guy
?

No. Just no.

The conversation had drifted without Sam’s knowledge into very dangerous territory. How vulnerable could I really be with Sam? How much truth could one relationship handle?

It was more than being taken advantage of, because I wanted what Liam gave. That had been entirely different, a cleansing of sorts, like being baptized and reborn.

Sam must have felt me stiffen, because he pulled back and looked at me, the question in his eyes. “Did I say the wrong thing?”

Sigh. “How honest are we being?”

“Is this twenty questions?”

“You only need to ask me
two
questions.” Would he take the hint?

Puzzled, he opened his mouth to ask, then got it. “Ah. Then you need to ask me—“he began counting on his fingers “—eight questions.”

“Are the eight anyone I know?” No one likes to play the “what’s your number” game, and yet here we were.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Any of yours?”

Nodding my head slowly, I just stared in his eyes until he got it.

“Liam.” The name came out like a gasp. Then a growl.

Then a whispered roar.

“And it was just like this, Sam. I was crying and sad and he made it—well, I asked him to—” Why was I talking about this? Way to ruin a mood. Open mouth, insert foot.

Or phone. Or whatever.

“Why are you telling me this now?” he asked. Dropping his hands from me, he took a step back, but didn’t seem pissed. Stunned—yes. Disturbed—yes. But angry? No.

“Because you just saved me from myself. Again. It’s not that I didn’t want to sleep with Liam, it’s just that it was Prom night, and—”

“Prom night?” The question was a strangled grunt.

“Yes.”

“I wanted to go so bad,” he mumbled.

What?

“Huh?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated.”

Bzzzzzz.

My phone rang. I ignored it.

“Maybe I should go,” Sam muttered.

“Sam Hinton, if you leave this apartment I will take your favorite drumsticks and hide them where you can never find them.”

“I would do a cavity search,” he said, grinning.

“I’ve had worse things up there.” And I had.

He snorted, relaxing. “Someday I want to hear what happened with Liam. Not—” he looked sick “—the details. Just...what happened.”

“And someday I want to know why you didn’t take me to prom, but wanted to.”

“Should
someday
be now?”

“Can someday be someday?” The daylight was dimming and a wave of utter exhaustion hit me. “Because what I really want most is to lie in bed with you and fall asleep in your arms.”

“That’s what you really want?”

I nodded.
Please don’t leave
.

“You’re inviting me to spend the night with you and
not
have sex.”

Nod.

“You are so weird, Amy.” Crooked grin as he folded himself into me and we stretched out on the bed, the light fading, giving in to the sadness that threatened to sweep me into sleep. Sleeping alone seemed like torture. Sleeping
with
Sam wasn’t right. Not right now.

Sleeping next to him, though...

“You don’t know the half of it.”

And then we did exactly what we said we would, and I had the best night of sleep I’d had in weeks.

* * *

Hot breath tickled that spot between my earlobe and my jaw, the rasp of sandpaper on skin more a sound than a sensation, the scent of him blanketing me before the heat of his body added another layer, all hardness and burn. No moon tonight, leaving the inky darkness of my apartment to turn his face into less a shadow and more a phantom. Kisses turned to demands as his mouth found mine, his sighs and my moans a composition of passion that demanded the finest orchestra to play to its fullest potential.

“Amy,” he whispered, the sound of my name escaping his lips like a thread that tingled from toes to the base of my neck, his palms sliding from behind me to cup warm, swollen breasts, naked and needy. We spooned, his hard erection filling me with want, the press of throbbing granite against my soft skin like something out of a prayer.

Sam pulled back and the withdrawal of his heat made me groan in disappointment, soon dispatched as he loomed over me, face serious, eyes burning with desire. Another kiss combined with hands that slid down my torso like he owned me, his thighs straddling my hips now, hands taking in my body like a man memorizing a sculpture through tactile transgressions.