First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (5 page)

When I was ten, I discovered Stephen King’s novel,
The Dead Zone
. My mother had left it on the coffee table when she finished it, I was bored and it was summer, so I started reading. Adult fiction was like this whole other world. More to read than American Girl books and Judy Blume? The children’s librarian at our local library had guided me to read a lot of the Judy Blume books by then, and was moving into things like
To Kill a Mockingbird
and
Holes
and
Fade.
A lot of the Robert Cormier books were most interesting to me, but
this
was another world. Stephen King’s topic, supernatural abilities and horrible visions, was outside my usual subject matter, but that wasn’t even close to the newest experience with that book.

The part that captivated me and that catapulted me to where I am now, twelve years later, was a sex scene. It was the first sex scene I had ever read—unsurprisingly, as I was only ten. An incredible sex scene in a hayloft. Reading this, and rereading it, and re-reading it, my ten-year-old brain was drawn to how poetic it was. Morality aside—the woman in the scene was married to another man, and sleeping with the main character—to me it was most important that it was so sweet, and tender, and new.

I knew the basics; my mom was a high school guidance counselor and had explained sex to me much the way she’d explained Internet safety and the finer points of college application polishing. It was an Important Fact To Be Covered for the purpose of making me well rounded and safe.
 

But this – this was something other than
these parts do this to make a baby
. There were emotions involved in this—and there was pleasure. It stunned me that two people would be together and try to reach something greater than themselves.

I was hooked.

That was it.
That
was what I wanted to read. I didn’t want to go out and
do
it, for goodness sake; that wasn’t at all in my mind, like, for years. But what I wanted was
access
to that world. Adults could interact with each other on this level that actually made me look forward to growing up.

Deciding right then and there that I would learn as much as I could about how adults related to one another, I saw that books in the adult section—not the children’s wing—were the gateway to this other world. Librarians at our local library had to approve kids under twelve for a library card to access the adult section. Convincing them became my mission, and I did it, pretty quickly. It wasn’t hard to use some solid examples of great works of literature that allowed me to have that ever-important sticker on my kid’s library card, and then I went for it.

Danielle Steele, Kresley Cole, Jackie Collins, Eloisa James, Julia Quinn – the big ones, mostly still from whatever the local library stocked on the shelves. When I had read through all of the books they had written, I just kept going. Thank God for the Internet, too. Book bloggers made all the difference for me. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—at those ages I didn’t really have a compass for what to read, but the book bloggers gave it to me.

I think I was seventeen when I ordered my first sex toy off a major online retailer’s website. Hiding it from my mom was the hard part. Figuring out how to use it was easy. A little
too
easy. The Internet had taught me the difference between clitoral orgasms and vaginal orgasms. My toy collection grew. My inventory of clitoral orgasms grew, but the vaginal ones remained elusive.
 

And when I’d found an actual boyfriend in college—I met Brent at a band competition of all places—sex turned out to be, um...OK. He was a drummer. Don’t overread into that. Brent had a saying: “the first time’s for me and the second time’s for you.”

I think that speaks for itself.
 

Watching the way Sam moved on stage, embracing the music through the instrument he played, I saw him seeking an intimacy, a connection to something greater than himself. Seeking what I sought. Sam and I could do that for each other. We could create that world again, the world in that first embrace. All of this came to the forefront of my mind, my lips, my fingertips, and my core when I watched Sam making love to his drums. The way he moved, the way he fingered those sticks, how his body reached out to embrace each part of the instrument he played—he really was the one who got away. There was nothing I could do about that now, just sit here and watch him, and make love to him with my eyes, while he made love to an instrument.

I’d have bet he could touch me in ways that would make my breath hitch, my blood pound, my mind shatter into a million tiny pieces, and then realign in my flesh only to explode again, the thin sound of the molecules in motion all chanting his name. Sam could do that. I could do that to Sam. We could create another world together like he did in his embrace of me, except now we’re not seventeen, we’re not under our parents’ thumbs, and we’re not adversaries. Did he have a girlfriend? Was there a chance for anything with him right now, or was I fooling myself? The swell of the music drove too many competing rhythms through my blood.

It was time to stop thinking.

It was time to just listen.

Sam

It shouldn’t have been a surprise when Beth dumped me. What had been the actual surprise was that she ever dated me at all. She was one of those girls who look like the bored friend in all those ads for cool clothes. You know, the women with small tits and flat stomachs, and little, thin, tanned legs that cross perfectly, with the skirt that practically shows how many hairs they missed at the last waxing. Beth was way too pretty and popular for me, and I knew that, knew it for the entire time that we dated.

She was at Amherst and I was at UMass, and we met, of all places, in a bar. Cliché, I know. I’m okay with cliché. She liked me because I was a drummer, a bad boy, at least until we were headed toward our final semester of senior year, and something in her decided that she was just done with me. Having her dump me six weeks before graduation hurt less than it should have; that was the first clue.
 

When I look back and really think about the times I felt hot and bothered, and way out of control over a woman, there aren’t many. With Beth there was a little bit in the beginning, but then it settled into a routine of being dragged around by the nose and doing her bidding. I went along because, hey, she had a libido and an appetite for sex the way that a teenage boy has an appetite for pizza. The sex was fan-fuckin’-tabulous, but the love, and some of those other words that you hear about in relationships like
respect
, or
mutual appreciation
, or some of that other crude shit that our psychology and human sexuality professors used to claim were part of the human experience. That? Beth wasn’t into that.

Maybe that’s why it didn’t hurt as much as it should have when it ended. I supposed she did me a favor. The hardest part was getting my sexual needs met. You can only date your hand for so long, and hands that were calloused, at that, from playing drums and holding the sticks just right. Plus, my fingers weren’t exactly normal. The drum playing, for one. And what happened four years ago, for the other. Beth had actually been kind of turned on by that. She liked the way the interior skin along my knuckles was hard, how parts of my palm had callouses that she said, when I dragged them along the side of her ribcage and cupped her breast, made her feel like she was with a rockstar.

After all, she kind of was.

Someone had left a half-empty cup on my floor tom, and I threw it away. As I got ready for the next set I looked out into the crowd. The stage lights were off, and some sort of boring, late 90’s hard rock played, sounding like elevator music in the distance.
 

I froze. The blood drained out of me and my body went hot and cold at the same time, hands clenching around sticks I didn’t have yet.
Amy? So I wasn’t making it up. Could that really be her?
I rubbed my eyes. I must be getting tired, and yet...I looked again, peering out into the crowd. If it was her,
damn, had four years been good to her.
She still did that little thing where she stuck her pinky finger into the corner of her mouth, her tongue worrying it in a way that was so hot it made parts of me come alive.

If anyone was going to make me hard, it would be Amy. Not that I had any right to it. What I did to her four years ago was so shitty, I should be flogging myself, and not in
that
way. As penance. The Sam that I had been my senior year of high school couldn’t handle the fact that she, with one hug, one kiss, and one win, had cut off my balls and served them on a platter for my father to shove down my throat.

I knew better now.

Now that it was too late.

“Hey, Sam.” Liam stalked over, jaunty and sweaty. “Here,” he said, shoving a little piece of paper at me.

It was a business card, and I flipped it between my front two fingers. “What is it? Louise Erhardt Entertainment.”

“It’s a job opportunity,” Liam said. Something in the way he smiled at me made it seem like a leer.

“Job opportunity? What, like a gig?”

He pressed his lips together and puffed some air out. His arms flexed, and if he’d been wearing anything other than a cotton t-shirt, he’d have split the seams. He crossed his arms over his chest, looked down at me, and whispered, “Give her a call. Seriously, dude. It’s a good job.”

“What job?”

He stalked off and called out over his shoulder, “Pays a couple hundred a night.”

Couple hundred a night? Serious money. Shit. That could save me.
I looked back at the table where Amy had been sitting and she was gone, her drink still there. Maybe I was fooling myself and it wasn’t really her. Why would she come here, and most of all, why couldn’t I stop thinking about her?

Amy

The bar’s bathroom was about as scuzzy as I’d expected, and the face that looked back at me from the mirror was, of course,
exactly
what I expected. Sometimes I found myself looking into the mirror and actually thinking that I would see something different, as if the layers that were inside me would somehow show themselves by giving me a different appearance. The Amy who always stared back seemed too plain for the person who lived inside. Long, brown hair, with just enough wave to give it shape. Big, brown eyes that seemed a little too fearful for the strong person I knew was smothered under some of those layers. My nose wasn’t big or small. My skin wasn’t clear or a mess.

And then there was my body. I liked to think that I was just a head. Literally. A head that walked around attached to this thing that I required in order to function in daily life. My body didn’t really matter to me, until it
did
. Some people like to use the word voluptuous. My mother called me curvy, while my grandma called me chunky. No one was mean about it, but it was there, as if having extra curves on my hips or a thicker than acceptable waist, and breasts that filled a cup and then some, were a quiet damning. An indictment of a body that didn’t fit in with modern society.

My ex, Brent, hadn’t seemed to care too much about my weight, though I would catch him ogling other women, most of them a good twenty pounds lighter than me. The paradox was that the same body that I pretended to ignore was the one that I explored so tentatively, and at other times aggressively, in trying to understand the core of myself.
 

What I wanted was someone else’s hands to do that work, someone else’s obsession to be zeroed in on me, a man’s desire to be at the center of finding Amy’s sensual self. Instead, there was only me and my books, and essays, and readings, and the occasional prop ordered discreetly online. None of those, not even Brent, came close to being a substitute for the richness that I knew was out there in the world.

Couldn’t I find that one person who would come to treasure me? Who would view me not just as a mind, as a bodiless head wandering around, or not just as a headless body, there to be fucked and thrown away,—but as the whole package? What I wanted most wasn’t Sam, although as I settled back at my table I found myself searching the crowd and the stage for him.
 

It wasn’t the
idea
of Sam that I wanted; it was the reality of a partner who would go the distance with me. Someone I could give up the entire world for, so that we could go deep and burrow into each other—mind, body, soul, and everything. I knew it was possible...it had to be, right?
 

If I could think it, it could be real.

As I looked up and found Sam on stage, getting ready for the next song, and wondered if he could be the one, I saw Darla walk over to him. No,
past
him. She reached for Trevor, who reached back with a familiar embrace, and then a kiss that...
whoa
, practically set the stage on fire. Jeez, the two of them needed to get a room.

I finished my drink, the watery taste of melted ice cubes and alcohol familiar, like the words “the end” on the final page of a book, and then, out of the corner of my eye, Darla stepped away from Trevor as a hand slid up her back, under her shirt. The hand was attached to...
Joe
? Who then proceeded to...oh, dear. If they showed any more tongue I would think I was at a butcher shop.
 

Who on earth was she
actually
with? The kiss with Joe went on and on until my own face started to flush, and the creeping red from my chest stretched up, then
down
.

I felt like a voyeur, as if I weren’t supposed to be watching this, but what are you supposed to do when they’re onstage in front of a crowd? Trevor’s hand splayed across Darla’s ass, an ass about the size of my own. There I went comparing again—does any woman not? I admired whatever was going on in a sickly kind of way, my stomach twisting in knots. Was it possible? Were the two of them...no,
the three of them...?

And then Sam approached her. My whole body turned to melted chocolate, and then tensed up to granite, revolving in a cycle that left me weak.

Then very, very angry as Darla reached out for Sam.