Dirty Little Secret (29 page)

I shut my door and yelled, “Yuck!” I started the ignition.

“Yeah.” Sam turned up the heat. He adjusted the dials as I drove and the windshield fogged up. He placed his other hand on the inside of my thigh, not high enough to distract me from driving, but in exactly the right place to remind me where we were headed.

Back at his house, I parked as close to the side door as I could get. “Let me unlock it first,” he said. “Most families would have umbrellas waiting in the vestibule or whatever, but we don’t have a vestibule, much less an umbrella.” He trudged to the door, unlocked it, then nonsensically came back for me as if I couldn’t walk three steps through a downpour by myself, and ushered me inside.

We kicked off our shoes on the rug just inside the door, and he poured water into an automatic coffeepot. Then he came back to me, placing himself between me and the door like he thought I might escape. “Why don’t you take your clothes off,” he whispered, “and I’ll put them in the dryer.”

Suddenly I wasn’t freezing anymore, even in the air- conditioned kitchen. Heat raced across my skin. I knew what we were going to do. I had accepted this since the end of Julie’s show. But every new hint at it was like an electric shock to my system.

He stood in front of the door with his arms folded across his tight, soaked T-shirt, melting my insides with his dark eyes. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to watch.

I might have tried very hard in the past year to give off the vibe that I undressed in front of boys every night of the week, but it just wasn’t true. Swallowing, I asked, “Could you turn off the light?”

He reached to the wall and flicked the switch. The kitchen vanished. All that was left was his silhouette in front of me, framed by the streetlight streaming through the window in the top of the door. He could probably still see me pretty well. Now that I couldn’t see his face, I felt more at ease.

The soaked cotton of my T-shirt felt like a cold compress on a wound. After I stripped it off, my skin burned hotter. All I had on underneath was my black bra.

I tossed the T-shirt to him.

The jeans were harder. Now that they were wet, they hugged me even more tightly. I struggled to force them down my legs, hoping my black lace panties made this striptease worthwhile to Sam. I had no idea what I was doing.

I half expected him to chuckle in the darkness. He didn’t make a sound. I finally tossed the jeans to him, and his silhouette caught them with one hand. He cleared his throat. “Be right back.” His voice broke. He turned and disappeared into a room just off the kitchen. I heard his own clothes slide off his body and the dryer shift to life. In nothing but boxers, the muted light smoothing his taut muscles, he crossed the shadowy kitchen and poured us each a cup of tea.

With shaking hands rattling the teacup on its saucer, I followed him through the old house, the small rooms and narrow passageways and squeaky wooden floors. Upstairs he led me down a short hall and opened a door for me. I expected his room to
be wallpapered with signed posters of the Eli Young Band or the Zac Brown Band. Instead, I walked into a guest room with blank powder-blue walls and a crazy quilt on the bed. The weight bench in the corner was probably his, but everybody stored their exercise equipment in the guest room.

Wondering why Sam was taking me here instead of his own room, I looked back over my shoulder at him. Maybe there was something in his own room he didn’t want me to see—in which case I wanted to see it. When I’d first met him a few days ago, I’d tiptoed around him and let him keep his secrets. That time was over.

“My mom erased me,” he explained. “The plant shut down for a week in May. That doesn’t happen often when people are buying a lot of cars, so she always tries to get as much done around the house as she can. She’d already planned to make my room into a guest room when I went to college. She just did it a little early while she had the time.”

“If she erased you,” I said, “where did you go?”

He turned around and nodded to the boxes lined up against the wall. Here were the rolled-up posters of country bands, no doubt. In the shadows of one box glinted his gold football trophies. He paused, gazing down at them as if looking for himself.

I took his cup from him. As I moved, cool air brushed past my bare thighs, and I remembered I was walking around a boy’s room in my underwear. But that was what I’d come here for. I turned and placed one cup on either bedside table, then crawled onto the bed.

He left the room, then came back with a lit candle and placed it on the dresser. He turned out the light. The candlelight dashed across the room and rippled on the black ceiling like water. His shadow crossed to the far wall and opened a window. The sound of the rain and wind rushed in. The light on the ceiling transformed from a gentle ebb and flow into a stormy sea.

As I watched him, I sipped my tea. My mouth filled with hot sweetness. Now he crawled onto the foot of the bed and moved forward to meet me. All of his bare skin warmed all of mine in the cool room. My heart raced and my skin sparkled with the knowledge that no one would disturb us now. No one would stop us. There was nothing to prevent us from losing ourselves to each other, except logic, and heartbreak, and every sound reason in the world.

We moved very slowly.
It was like fooling around in front of a glacier. We couldn’t see it advancing, but we knew that it was about to crush us, yet we didn’t get out of the way.

What felt like hours later, when we were naked and totally open for each other, he interlaced his fingers with mine so that our hands were clasped. He nudged our hands with his prickly chin, watching me. “I want to,” he whispered. “Do you?”

Heart pounding, I nodded. “I do.”

“Promise?” he asked.

“Promise.” My voice came out hoarse.

He rolled off the bed and crossed the room. With a start I realized he’d disappeared out the door. I’d been stuck on the fact that I’d seen him, all of him, naked. Like an afterimage when I’d stared at the sun, I kept seeing him though he wasn’t there.

I’d gotten this close to sex with Liam Keel at a party, and with Aidan Rogers at a party, and with Toby at a party initially and lots more times after that. Though I’d desperately wanted to be a bad girl and I’d thought I wanted to have sex, I couldn’t go through with it with someone I didn’t love. And the setting had been different—the back porch at the house where the party was going on,
a truck, Toby’s car. Never a bed. Never a bedroom, wide enough to see the boy crossing it and coming back with a condom. Before I’d only seen the guy close up, too close for perspective. Sam I saw clearly in the candlelight, shoulders strong and biceps unexpectedly big and solid for such a gentle guy, his eyes on me, his pace deliberate. I owed it to myself to keep my eyes open and watch him. I wasn’t going to dream through this.

He rolled onto the bed beside me again, kissed my forehead, and tore the package open. I watched him put the condom on. And all the while I was thinking through what this meant. He knew I was on the pill. He was using a condom anyway. My doctor had lectured me that the pill protected against pregnancy but not STDs. She’d said I should use a condom too unless I was in a committed, monogamous relationship.

That wasn’t what this was. It never would be. And if Sam wanted to protect himself or me with a condom, either he hadn’t believed me when I’d said I was a virgin, or he’d been lying himself.

“Hey,” he whispered. “My eyes are up here.”

I laughed nervously and met his gaze. At some point I’d clasped my hands in front of my mouth. I must have looked to him like I was terrified.

And maybe that was the reason for the condom. He could tell how scared I was, and he wanted me to have no doubts.

He wrapped one hand around both of mine. “Your hands are cold.” He inched forward until our foreheads touched. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Ready?”

Was I?

“Yes,” I said.

I tried not to think about him and me. I didn’t see how things could possibly work out between us, even though he obviously wanted that now, and I did, too. The best-case scenario was that he was a boy I loved, who would break my heart and leave me. We would stay together for days, weeks, even months. When I looked back on it later, though, I wouldn’t remember our slow fall out of love. All I would remember was this one night.

So I tried to commit to memory every feeling of my first time. But there was a point when everything turned a corner and left me shocked by what I saw there. He made me feel too good, and I loved him too much. There was no way we could leave each other after this.

Much later, the rain stopped,
leaving only the sound of the breeze in the window. The candlelight had dimmed on the ceiling. Sam lay facing me with his arm across my waist, and his chin nestled against my shoulder. My body felt completely flattened, so tired and satisfied that I sank into the mattress. Yet every molecule of me was aware of him, as though I were standing in the makeshift dressing room in the mall, naked and listening for his voice or his guitar.

I murmured sleepily, “I thought it wasn’t supposed to be any good the first time.”

He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at me like I’d gone loco. “Girls may say that. Guys don’t.” He grinned at me and stroked a lock of hair away from my face. “I hate to say this, but you’d better go. It’s getting so late that even I won’t be able to explain it to your granddad. I don’t want you to have to drive across town so late, but if I drove you, that would—”

“No, that would just be harder to explain,” I agreed.

His mouth turned down, and his dark eyes grew serious. The candlelight played eerily across his face as he said, “I want you to know how much this has meant to me. I’m so glad we were each other’s first.” His brows knitted. “That didn’t come out right. This is why I don’t write songs.”

I wondered if he was backtracking because of the look on my face. He sounded like he was saying we were each other’s first, and that was the end of it.

Suddenly he gushed, “Bailey, you have completely turned me upside down in the last four days. Which makes sense, right? There’s a country song about this. Deana Carter sings about it. Lady Antebellum sings about it. Gosh, not just country artists. Katy Perry. Everybody has a song about it because everybody’s been through it. You find that person at eighteen and you lose yourself. And the tragedy is, it’s the person who’s completely opposed to everything you’ve ever wanted. You bond with that person, and that person breaks your heart. I’m that tragedy for you, and you’re mine.”

This was definitely the end of it.

“What about Alan Jackson?” I breathed.

Sam gazed sadly at me, stroking my bottom lip tenderly with one callused finger. “Not everybody can be that lucky.”

Those words were still sinking in as I murmured, “I started the night thinking that way, Sam, but now . . . don’t you want to try to work this out?” I sounded a lot more desperate than I wanted to.

His finger stopped on my lip. “Are you going to ask your family to try to get an in for our band?”

“No,” I whispered.

He shook his head. “Then we can’t be together. In my head I know that’s wrong, Bailey, but I have to follow my heart. I’m messed up right now, and I can’t give you what you deserve.”

Suddenly his touch burned like a cold knife. I slipped out from under him, found my underwear on the floor, and pulled it on. “That’s what you said to Charlotte when you broke up with her, Sam. That’s what you said to everyone.”

I ran out of the room and down the stairs. I stopped in the tiny laundry room off the kitchen and fished my clothes out of the dryer. In the darkness I mistook Sam’s shirt for mine until I pulled it on and, in addition to hanging off me, it smelled like him. Cursing, I tossed it into the dryer and found my own.

“I wasn’t lying,” came Sam’s voice.

He was leaning against the doorjamb to the kitchen in his boxers, with his arms crossed, his face grim, his hair wild, looking like the hunky half of an argument in a country music video. “You were special.”

“Oh,
was
I, in the past tense?” I shot back. “I was different from your other girlfriends, right?”