First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (9 page)

I heard the word ‘Evan’. Her brother. A younger kid who tended to move in circles that I tried to avoid.

And then, the unmistakable tone in her words. I didn’t need to know what she was saying because I knew exactly what she was
feeling
from the way her voice sounded. She was speaking with a fake smile and gritted teeth—something was wrong in Wonderful Land.

Amy’s mom was a guidance counselor at her high school. Everybody in debate circles knew that.
 
Now I heard her in casual conversation with her mom. A shrub—she was sitting on a park bench behind it, giving me a perfect opportunity to just watch.

Her legs were crossed at the ankles, and she was wearing the kind of pants that girls like to wear that were not quite long and not quite short, cutting off at the mid-calf, muscled legs flexing. Her sandals showed little painted toenails, bright red, and the idea that she had spent time making her toes look pretty made me smile. Muscled legs went up to thick thighs and something about the curve of skin and flesh against bone made parts of me even harder.

I could feel my body zoom from normal to lust in about three seconds as my eyes traveled up over the curve of her hips, her navy pants snug and perfect. My hands itched to touch that waist, to run my hand up her ribcage, to feel the pink cotton of her shirt, the way it rose and clung to the swell of her breasts. I could see it in my head, the two of us together. The memory of a heated embrace and fevered kissing drove its way home into me, one word echoing my head. More. More.
More.

“That’s great, Mom. He’s absolutely fabulous,” I heard her say, and then, her head dipped down and she smiled, a genuine look that made a flush of envy and sadness run through me, mixed in with the rush of hunger for
her.

I hadn’t had a normal conversation with my parents in four and a half years. What must it be like to have parents who care about you? Who are invested in you—not like Mr. and Mrs. Ross, who practically scrubbed Joe’s asshole with a brand new toothbrush every day, or like the Connors, who tried to turn Trevor into something he wasn’t—but
this?
Being able to pick up a phone and talk to your mom for five minutes, ten minutes, and shoot the shit? Must be nice. Must be damn nice.

A flush of jealousy coursed through me at the same time Amy ran her fingers through that long, brown hair over her temple, behind her ears. And that was it. I was done. A goner.

But who the fuck was
he
?

“Liam!” Amy said, an enormous grin spreading across her face. A rush of uncontrolled adrenaline set my feet and hands on fire, quads screaming as I crouched behind the bush.

Amy was dating
Liam
? Liam the manwhore? The guy had slept with a groupie who had his name tattooed across the top half-moon of her waxed butthole.

Ask me how I know.

Liam uploaded a pic of it to Facebook and titled it “True Love.”

It was more like a selfie.

Amy

Joe had wandered away from Sam; I could see it as my mom settled into her monologue. I rolled my eyes at something she was saying, looked back, and then suddenly Sam was gone. Very weird. Whatever Mom’s words were, they just washed over me in a strange sort of ocean of repetition. It felt like we’d had the same conversation over, and over, and
over
. Everything was about Evan—about the hope that Evan would do better, about the despair that Evan wasn’t doing better.

The past four years of my life seemed like something out of
Groundhog Day
—at least when it came to my relationship with my mom. In the saddest moments, I felt sorry for myself, which is really laughable when you think about it. Here I was, a good, safe, loved woman from the Boston suburbs given everything that you could imagine we were supposed to have in this part of our world.

I’d gone to college with friends who had told me stories about physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional torture, at the hands of their parents. Some of my friends had five or six jobs just to scrape by, and a few talked about living in their cars during spring break when the dorms closed. It’d been a shocker to learn how many people were taking out thirty-, forty-, even fifty-thousand dollars a year in loans to get the right education, to get into the right job, and to climb.

I knew the drill—the same phrases and sentences came out of the mouths of all of my friends, and their parents, and of course, mine. But...to hear it in the context of people growing up with mentally ill moms or alcoholic dads, or of the occasional friend in school who already had a baby and was there on some special grant program, it made me realize that feeling bad because Mom was so fixated on the golden child—and it wasn’t me—was a form of indulgence. Kind of pathetic, really. Who was I to be upset when so many other people were suffering far worse than I was?

On the other hand, I had the right to my own emotions, whatever they might be, and suddenly everything going on with my mom on the phone disappeared in a pinprick when I realized that my life was intertwining, again, with Sam’s.

I hadn’t sought him out this time, had I? This was just me walking around Boston Common with my coffee, chatting away with my nattering mother, and
boom!
There he was.

I was deep in my thoughts when I heard my mom. “Amy. Amy? Amy, you there?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am, Mom. I- I- I’m fine, I’m good. Yup,” I stumbled.

“OK, well, I gotta go, because Evan is on his way.”

“That’s fine, Mom. I understand.”

And then, standing right in front of me, was the one guy I least expected—and it wasn’t Sam.

“Hey, Mom, gotta go. Bye.”
Click.
I’d pay for that later, but that was OK because right now, standing right in front of me was a fine old friend. A giant piece of sex perched on flesh and bone.

“Liam!”

Was Boston Common suddenly hot guy central? How had I not known this? I licked my lips involuntarily—it wasn’t on purpose, but it made Liam grin.

“Amy,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Are you looking for Joe and Sam?” I asked, and then bit back the words, wishing I could swallow them. Now Liam knew that I had seen Sam, and Sam might know that I had seen Sam.

“Not looking for them but if they’re around I’d...” he craned his neck, looking. It gave me a chance to take him in even more. He was just as fine as he’d been four and a half years ago—even better—filled out with broad shoulders, rippled with muscle in that way that cloth can form to and tell you everything you need to know about what someone looks like naked, and yet,
still
want to see them naked.

The feelings that Liam triggered in me were so different from the ones I had for Sam. There was nostalgia, there was a sense of gratitude, and then there was a full blown lust like a light switch being flipped on. Liam had that quality in him and I had to temper it with the knowledge that he would never feel the same way for me.

“You know we have a gig next week? Will you be there?” No hint of anything other than basic friendliness. Liam’s hair was a wild mess, the sun bouncing off the soft waves that framed his temples, his body warm and strong, like a large lion, as he folded himself onto the bench to sit next to me.

Distracted and flustered, I stammered out, “Um, sure. Maybe. As long as I don’t take a raffle ticket.”

His laugh boomed across the grass in front of us, scaring off a small flock of pigeons.

What had happened four and a half years ago was somewhere between tenderness and pity on his part, and I knew that. I didn’t want to know it—but I knew it. I could fantasize, and I could remember, I could let memory stretch me back to the first sexual experience of my life, and I could put on the brakes pretty quickly when the emotions kicked in. Those...Sam
owned
those. I wanted the combination of what I felt for Sam and the burning hot sex I’d had with Liam.

If only, right?

If only.

Sam

What the fuck was Liam doing here? And it turned out Amy had seen me and Joe? This was getting weirder and weirder. Liam was hitting on Amy. There was a familiarity there—I knew they lived next door to each other growing up—but, there was something more. I caught a glimpse of her pink cheeks, the way she ran her fingers through her hair in that flirty gesture that so many girls had. Did she really just lick her lips? And Liam with that cocky grin.

Plus there was that damn kiss on stage.

He had bagged
so
many girls over the years. Groupies loved him—not that we had that many, but...there were a few. He’d pretty much fucked anybody with a vagina except Darla, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have tried. The funny part was, he only slept around after Charlotte dumped him. Before that, he was totally, one-hundred percent a goner for her.

He’d gone silent at the end of our senior year of high school, said nothing about what was going on with her. She was in college and
something
had happened, but Liam was like a steel drum welded shut—buoyant and airtight. The speed with which he’d found his way into so many other girls’ pants had been really,
really
admirable. Most of us couldn’t believe that he could get a girl in bed so quickly. At one point, we’d even timed it—his record was forty-seven minutes. If you were into that sort of thing, it was pretty fucking impressive.

What the hell was he doing talking to
Amy
?

I overheard their banter; it was flirty without being serious. There was something in his tone that said this was not someone he was after. She seemed to recognize it too; there was a guardedness to her. Amy could be like a little puppy, eager and a little too excitable when she wanted people to approve of her, and there wasn’t any of that here. Then again, I was projecting qualities onto her that she’d had four and a half years ago.

Now, all I felt was a massive mushroom cloud of jealousy and an undercurrent of rage because if he touched her right now....

What I needed was to go back home and drum my way out of everything. So, I did, careful to avoid being spotted by the two of them.
 

* * *

The walk back to Trevor and Joe’s place was short and uncrowded. I got into the apartment and then I grabbed a few drum pads, some headphones, some sticks. A full set of drums wasn’t gonna cut it in an apartment building with hundreds of people so the only way I could practice was to go down into the basement, which was surprisingly clean and dry for an ancient building, and I’d set up my drum pads. They were these little circles designed to practice songs without making too much noise.

I organized them according to a standard drum set and then I put my headphones on and set up my playlist. If thinking about Amy made my mind turn into a whirling confusion of emotions I had no right to harbor after four and a half years of what I did to her, then drumming could sort out all the pieces and put them in their rightful places. I may not have any right whatsoever to possess some of the emotions that I had for Amy, but I could at least put them where they belonged.

As I started with a low, quiet beat and then built up to the next level, my shoulders relaxed, the lump that had formed, built of anger and muscle, of betrayal of my own agitation clearing as well. As the song progressed, the tempo carried me out of my mind, away from linear thought and I became my hand muscles, my forearms, my thighs, and yes, my cock. Everything turned on, everything narrowed into the beat, the change, the measures, the chorus, the solo...whatever the music demanded of me, I gave it. I gave it back two-hundred percent.

It was a relationship, it was a love, it was an affair. I could make love to the drums with my hands in a way that got out the hunger, that got out the pain, that made me slide away from being Sam, fucked up Sam, and turned me into a rock
God
. Feet flying, legs moving, arms pumping, neck anticipating where it needed to be next, my eyes floating from space to space, my arms knowing exactly what to do in the right moment, seconds before they needed to do their magic—it was like communing with another body.

Amy’s face popped up behind my closed eyelids. The touch of her lips, how close we’d been, and how stupid I’d become so quickly. How can everything good, and everything righteous, and everything abysmal and horrible, happen to you in the same hour? One hour. You get one hour of your life to experience it all and to make a decision that blows it all to smithereens.

What would these same hands be like running along the soft inner curve of her thigh? What beat would my fingers find, running up her ribcage to the soft swell of her breast? How could these forearms lift her above me, nude and skin glistening in the moonlight that shines through the windows at the perfect moment that we commune?

As I buried myself in the stronger songs in our set, every muscle was rigid, every tendon was primed, every note I played was for
her
.

Chapter Three

Amy

A week later

New show. New location. Same old Amy. Once Liam invited me to the gig, I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

As I sat there at my little table in the back, hiding and trying not to be noticed, I realized that Joe wasn’t there. Some new guy was setting up the bass. This was a nicer place than most of the joints Liam had described them playing in, on and off over the years. There had even been a higher cover charge, which had taken me by surprise—ten bucks is ten bucks when you’re a student, but I paid it, gladly, if it gave me a chance to just sit back and watch.

I brought my tablet with me and I sat in the back, reading through Maya Banks’ latest in her trilogy, and wondering about all of these relationships that lived in books I read. Sam was onstage, quiet, purposeful as usual and he said something to the new guy,who just nodded. New Guy looked like a scruffy version of Joe Ross—without the perfection. They were both dark haired, dark eyed, and sort of Italian looking. Other than that, the similarities ended. I didn’t want to go up and ask where Joe was. Maybe that was what was going on in the park the other day between him and Sam. Had Joe left the band? That would be a shocker.