Falling for Romeo (8 page)

“Jefer!”

“Hey.” The greeting warmed Jennifer. A sudden sadness came over her, like she was about to give something of her innocence away. She took Amber’s k

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pizza-greased face in both of her hands and squeezed, willing the sadness inside to leave. It was only a kiss, she reminded herself. And she was doing this for a reason, to be able to deliver a believable kiss on stage.

“You going to eat?” her dad asked.

“Nah.” Jennifer quickly headed back to the front door. Her stomach was in jumbles and she didn’t want to have garlic-breath. “I’ve got to do some studying. I’ll be back. Oh.” She stopped, tried to appear casual. “We’ll be studying out front.”

“In this weather?” Her mother craned her neck to look outside the bay window into the back yard at the trembling trees. “It’s freezing.”

“I know. We’ll be in the truck.” Both of her parents stopped chewing and looked at her, their cheeks bulging with food. Her father swallowed.

“Truck?”

“We?”

“Yeah. I just didn’t want you to be worried when you saw the red truck and, you know, didn’t know whose it was.” She turned.

“Whose truck?”

Jennifer stopped. “Alex Jesperson.” Her parents exchanged looks of surprise. “Alex Jesperson, the football player Alex Jesperson?” her mother asked.

“That’s him.”

“You know him?” she asked.

Jennifer shrugged.
I’m going to know him a lot
better in a few minutes
. The very idea knotted her stomach. “Yeah. He needs some help in English.” Her dad got back to eating, satisfied with the

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explanation. “Most football players can’t read their way across a football field.”

But her mother wasn’t convinced. Skepticism crossed her face. “Well…” Her mother’s heavy pause was interrupted by Amber’s whine for another liter of soda.

“It’s nice that you can help him.” Jennifer closed the front door with a quaking heart.

Standing on the porch, she looked at the shiny truck.

Alex sent her a friendly wave from inside the cab, then his fingers curled, beckoning.

Cold nipped at her now that she was outside, and she started toward the truck. She glanced at John’s house, then down the street. Not seeing his car in the driveway had her wondering where he was, if he’d stayed after rehearsal to help Chip, something he was known to do.

Candy-coated thoughts of John flooded her. His face and all of its familiar expressions flashed into her mind. Her whole body yearned for the ease of being with him as she approached the unknown.

Alex leaned over the long stretch of front seat and opened the door for her. Why did she feel like she stood in front of the gaping jaws of a shark?

He patted the seat with a smile. “Come on in.”

“Wow.” Jennifer pulled herself up and into the cab, but her foot slipped. “You need to be a mountain climber to get into this thing.”

Alex laughed. Reaching over, his fingers wrapped tight around her upper arms and he drew her to him.

Jennifer’s laugh fluttered out. She lay on her stomach the full length of the seat, her head perched in his lap. She looked up at him.

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He grinned.

Then he helped her sit up.

Jennifer cleared her throat and pressed her rigid spine into the back of the seat. The heater blasted warm air in her face. She felt like she was in a car commercial with a perpetual wind blowing her hair. Hard rock music pounded from speakers. She liked the band well enough, but didn’t think the tune particularly romantic.

“You wanna close the door?” Alex asked, stretching out his long arm along the back of the seat.

“Oh. Sure.” She slammed it shut and the thud closed everything around them into a box. In that instant, she realized where she was and exactly what was going to happen.

Alex looked amazingly comfortable and at ease, she thought, half annoyed.
He’s no doubt done this
hundreds, if not, zillions of times
. He was the lion, she was the cat. Though they were the same species, there was a world of difference between them.

For a long while, they looked at each other. Finally, Alex shifted, reaching his long, bulging arm out toward her. She shrunk against the door. He smiled. “Don’t be scared, Jenn. It’s okay.” His meaty palm wrapped around her bicep and he pulled. The next thing she knew, she slid across the seat until she was snugged up to his side.

“There,” he said, wrapping his arm around her. “Or are you just acting scared, you know, to get me hot.” Her breath raced in and out.
Nope, this is real.
She looked at his face, so near she could count the blonde stubble like sand across his jaw. His light eyes sparkled.

She’d never noticed that his lips were wide and full, pulled back now in another lazy grin.

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“Just relax,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said, but the words warbled out.

“You’re too tense. I feel it.” He tugged her close.

“Let go.”

“O-Okay,” she repeated, and went stiffer.

He took her chin in his fingers and lifted her mouth up, looking at it. “You have great lips.”

“I do?”

Nodding, his gaze sharpened. “Great lips.” She watched his mouth descend to hers and then she said,

“What makes lips great?”

He seemed in a daze for a few seconds. “Uh, well.

I don’t know.” His eyes dropped back to her mouth.

“Supple. Ample. Kissable.” His eyes darkened, his fingers dug at her shoulder. “Sexy.”

This time he dove for her mouth. At first, she backed her neck into the crook of his arm. But his lips had adhered to hers. The hardened plane of his chest pressed her into the seat. The heater turned into an inferno. She sweat. His lips were warm, wet. Not soft like John’s, but slippery, moving over her mouth, tugging and nipping.

She winced, but he swallowed it. She’d heard about tongues, but teeth? Strangely, the hard enamel of his teeth against the tenderness of her mouth sent a brilliant strain through her.

“Put your arms around my neck,” he whispered.

She did. Their faces were so close, his was a blur. He took only a moment to look into her eyes before his eyes shifted down to her mouth with another eager look. She wondered if he was going to kiss her again.

“Am I doing it right?” she asked.

He barely nodded before inching toward her. “Oh, k 0

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yeah.” Then his mouth was hot on hers again, shooting heat in fast, riveting sparks everywhere inside of her.

His arms wove around her, and he eased her back so they were lying down on the bench. Halfway down, Jennifer opened her eyes. His were closed, his light lashes fluttering against his cheekbones. Strange. But then what did she expect? To find him with his eyes open?

The weight of his football-player body smashing her caused her lungs to feel like two balloons, slowly being compressed. She turned her head, searching for air but his mouth followed hers. A little squeak erupted in the back of her throat. He went still. He lifted up, looking down at her. “You okay?”

She gulped in air, nodded. That heavy-lidded look meant he was going to dive for more; so she pressed her palms to his shoulders. “Uh, can we take a little break?” He froze, hanging over the full length of her. He let out a sigh and nodded as he sat upright, running his hands over his face.

Jennifer scrambled up and decided then that the prostrate position was not for her, at least not at this moment in time, with this particular guy. And she wasn’t sure she was learning anything. Wasn’t there more to kissing than this? Technique or something?

“So,” she began casually tucking a stray hair behind her ear, “Is there anything I need to know? I mean, you know, about doing it?”

Alex’s eyes hooded. Extending his arm once again behind her, he shook his head. “You’re doing fine to me.” But I don’t know what I’m doing, she thought miserably. Surely, as with anything else, this thing can be taught. She figured he must have seen her dismay,

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because he said, “Okay, look. Keep your lips moist, but not too wet. And parted. Nobody kisses with their mouths closed, that’s only in the black and whites.”

“Black and whites?”

“Yeah, the old movies.” He went silent then, staring at her mouth as if it was something edible and he was ready for a snack. The muscles in his arm shifted, coiled around her shoulder and he brought her over for more.

“You worry too much,” he said with an amused smile. He lowered his head and kissed her again.

She made herself relax against him. Kissing Alex wasn’t as enjoyable as it was with John. Alex’s cologne was too musky, filling her nostrils with a scent that almost desensitized her nose. He told her to keep her lips moist, but his bordered on slobbery. Every time he pulled back the air hit wet and she felt like she needed a napkin or her sleeve.

Still, the way his body moved, his hands stroked, it was obvious he was enjoying himself. She liked knowing that. The gentle pressure he exerted against her only became more urgent as minutes ticked by, as if he was forced by a power he couldn’t resist. It gave her a sense of feminine power she’d never felt before.

Amidst the euphoria, she heard the familiar clattering of John’s engine out the window.

Alex’s mouth moved like a fish’s, opening and closing, opening and closing, and she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do in response.
Open—close?

Stay closed?
When he moaned every nerve inside of her swayed with gratification. Alex made her feel things…

things triumphant.

John’s rattling engine slowed outside the red truck.

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Jennifer heard it idle for a moment before it revved once and then died shortly thereafter.

When Alex’s hands began to move, her eyes shot open. Alarms rang in her head. She wasn’t ready to share any other part of herself with Alex and she wriggled away, quickly looking at the windows blocked by fog so dense tears of sweat dripped down them.

“What?” he croaked.

“I can’t see.”

He looked utterly confused. “See what? All the action’s right here.”

She sat as close to the door as she could, taking in a deep breath of moist, breathy air. “So, you think I can do it?”

“Oh, you can do it. Come back here.” Leaning her direction, he grinned. The glittering in his eye was as obvious as a neon light outside a strip club. He wanted to kiss her again. With the power of the moment in her hand, she decided to try out her new skills and moved closer to him like a little girl leaning her face to an alluring flower she wanted to sniff but might hold a bee.

Alex seemed spellbound, captured. Jennifer delicately pressed her lips to his in a simple kiss that left him motionless.

She sighed happily at what she did to him. “Alex.

Thanks.” Then she opened the door and got out, taking one more opportunity to look at him, stretched out on the bench, eyes closed, his mouth poised and waiting.

Finally, he sat back, letting out a blustering sigh.

“Whew. Later, Jenn.”

She shut the door with a smile of newfound secrets.

Crossing the grass her steps crunched the iced

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blades. Wind, weaving through the lacy leaves of the locust trees, seemed caught in applause, as if they, too, were pleased for her. She looked up into the black sky and stared at the sparkling stars.
Sparkling, like Alex’s
eyes.

Her dreamy gaze came down from the sky, star by star until it reached the warm glow of John’s window. She stopped. He was there. When he saw that she had finally discovered him, his shoulders twitched. Then he turned, vanished, and the room went dark.

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Seven

“Man, what’s up with you?” Justin trailed John toward the locker room after a sweaty sprint around the track. “If coach had been timing you, he’d have clocked you at half your record speed.” John shoved the double doors open. Younger, more easily impressed boys kept respectfully behind him in the march from the field, and now they slowed with caution.

As captain of the track team, every other boy in the phys ed program at Pleasant View High School understood John held a title that reigned alongside football captain and basketball captain. His outstanding state scores had taken the track team to national competitions three years in a row, winning PVHS the title—something no other school team captain had accomplished. Because of his social status, when John Michaels walked through a room the crowd parted. Conversely, when John was angry, or anything less than the have-a-smile-and-a-hey-for-everyone, the crowd took notice.

John yanked his sweat-drenched tee shirt over his head and balled it between two tight fists, striding to his locker. Justin did the same. “So, what’s up?” Justin persisted.

John wiped the sweat beading his face with the tee shirt and flipped the dial. “Nothing.” He didn’t want to talk to anybody, not even one of his friends, about what

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he witnessed last night.

The younger boys already in the locker room quieted. Most pretended they weren’t listening. Those clueless stood and watched him.

“Dude, where should we hit for lunch?” Justin pulled open his own locker three doors down from John’s.

Commotion at the entrance of the locker room had all the boys turning their attention to Alex Jesperson, coming in followed by half a dozen football players who’d shared the field with the track team during PE.

They laughed and talked—about Jennifer. John’s eyes sharpened on the group sauntering in, stripping on the way to their lockers.

“You scored better than an astronaut, dude.” One of the beefy guys slapped a meaty palm on Alex’s muscled back. “Going where no man has gone before.” The other players laughed and made a variety of cat calls. Alex lifted his burly arms upward in a gesture of victory. “It was sweet.”