My Life Next Door (19 page)

“Jase, I want—I want…please.”

He looks up at my face, his eyes drowsy and dazzled. “I know. I know. I want too. But not like this. Not with no time. Not with nothing—” He swallows. “Not like this. But Jesus, Samantha. Look at you.”

And the way he does look at me makes me feel absolutely beautiful.

“I can’t look away,” he whispers huskily. “But I have to go.” Taking a deep breath, he buttons my nightgown back up, then presses a kiss to my throat.

“Jase, are you—have you—”

I feel his head shake once, then he moves so he’s looking me in the face. “No. I haven’t. Almost. With Lindy. But then, no. I just didn’t…I never felt with her the way I feel whenever I even catch sight of you. So, no…I haven’t.”

I lay my palm against the stubbly skin at the side of his face. “Me neither.”

His lips curve and he turns his head to touch them to my palm.

“Then we do need time. So we can—” He swallows again and shuts his eyes. “Sometimes when I look at you, I can’t think. We need time so we can figure it out together.”

“Okay,” I say, suddenly shy for some reason. “Um…”

“I love the way your whole body turns pink when you’re embarrassed,” he murmurs. “Everywhere. Your ears blush. Even your knees blush. I bet your toes blush.“

“That’s not the way to get them to stop.” I flush even more.

“I know.” He slides slowly off me and off the bed. “But I don’t want them to stop. I love it. I
have
to go now. When will you be home today?”

I fumble to think about something other than yanking Jase back down onto me. “Um.…I have a double shift at Breakfast Ahoy. So just till three.”

“Okay,” Jase says. “Too bad the store’s open late tonight. I’ll be back around seven. I’ll miss you all day until then.”

He slides the window open and slips out. I close my eyes, lift my hand to touch my throat where he kissed me.

I’m a virgin. Apparently Jase is too. I’ve heard the Sexual Congress lecture in health class. Seen R-rated movies. Listened to Tracy brag about how many times a day she and Flip can do it. Read books with steamy scenes. But there’s so much I still don’t know. Does instinct just take over? Is it good right away or do you have to acquire a taste for it, the way people say you do for wine or cigarettes? Does it hurt like anything that first time? Or barely at all? Does this mean I have to buy condoms? Or will he? The Pill takes forever to be safe, right? I mean, you have to take it for a month or more first, right? And I’d have to go to my doctor to get it—my doctor who’s in his early eighties and has a handlebar mustache and nostril hair and was my mother’s pediatrician too.

I wish I could ask my mother these questions, but
imagining her face if I tried is scarier than not knowing the answers. I wish I could ask Mrs. Garrett. But…he’s her son after all, and she’s only human. It would be weird.
Very
weird. Even though this is something I know I want, I start to panic a little, until I remember the person I trust more than anyone else in the world. Jase. And I decide he’s right. We’ll figure it out together.

Chapter Twenty-five

When I get home from Breakfast Ahoy, with sore feet and smelling like bacon and maple syrup, the only sign of Mom is a Post-it note:
Vacuum living room
. A task I blow off. The lines from the last vacuuming are still visible. The phone rings, but it’s not Mom. It’s Andy.

“Samantha? Can you come over? Mom’s sick and Daddy isn’t home yet and I have, well, I’m going to see Kyle and…would it be okay if you babysat until Jase gets back? Duff isn’t good with diapers and Patsy has this major rash? You know, the kind you need a prescription cream for? It’s all over her bottom and down her legs.”

I, of course, know nothing about diaper rash, but say I’ll be right over.

The Garretts’ house is unusually hectic. “Mom’s upstairs, sleeping? She really doesn’t feel good.” Andy fills me in while trying to apply eyeliner and put on her shoes at the same time. I redo the eyeliner for her and French-braid her hair.

“Has everyone eaten?”

“Patsy. But the other guys are really hungry? Even though I gave them all Lucky Charms. Alice’s out with Brad or something? I can’t remember. Anyway”—Andy peers out the
door—“Mr. Comstock’s here. Bye.” She dashes out, leaving me to Harry and Duff and George, who are practically brandishing forks, and Patsy, who smiles confidingly up at me and says, “Pooooooooooop.”

I start to laugh. “This is what comes after
boob
?”

Duff opens the refrigerator. Discouraged, he sighs. “Guess so. Mom’s really gonna have to get creative with the baby book. We got nothin’ here, Samantha. What’re you making for us?”

In the end, the Garretts’ dinner that night consists of English muffin toaster pizzas, boxed macaroni and cheese, and my mom’s lemonade and broccoli/sun-dried tomato and pecan pasta salad (less than a success), which I send Duff over to my house to get, explaining about the special ice cubes.

While I’m giving Patsy and George a bath, there’s a commotion from down the hall. Voldemort the corn snake has escaped again. I hear Duff’s footsteps thundering around, and Harry shouting excitedly, and then see this slim shape squiggling into the room, trying to coil itself into George’s dirty Transformer sneaker. I’m so proud of the way I reach out, scoop up Voldemort, and calmly hand him over to Duff. Without even screaming when Voldemort, evidently stressed, does what corn snakes will do, and defecates all over my hand. “Pooooooop!” Patsy shouts delightedly as I go over to the sink to wash it off.

Half an hour later, Patsy’s asleep in her crib, with the five pacifiers she insists on holding in her hands—she never puts them in her mouth. George stretches out drowsily on the couch, nodding over Animal Planet’s
Ten Most Startling Animal Metamorphoses
. Duff’s on the computer, and Harry’s building what looks like the Pentagon out of Magna-Tiles when the
door slams. In comes Alice, whose hair is now a deep auburn with an inexplicable blond streak in front, and Jase, evidently fresh from delivering lumber, sweaty and rumpled. He lifts his chin when he sees me, his face breaking into a broad smile. He heads toward me but Alice blocks him.

“Shower before you smooch, J,” Alice says. “I rode in the Bug with you and you’re officially disgusting.”

While he’s upstairs, I fill Alice in. “Mom’s
asleep
?” She’s incredulous. “Why?”

I shrug. “Andy said she felt lousy.”

“Crap, I hope it’s not the flu. I’ve got three tests coming up and no time to play stand-in mom.” Alice starts taking the dinner dishes off the table and dumping leftovers into the disposal.

“Samantha’s done here now.” Jase, returning to the room, picks up a yellow plastic backscratcher that is on the kitchen counter, along with a pair of dirty socks, an empty Chips Ahoy! box, five Matchbox cars, Andy’s eyeliner, and a half-eaten banana. He taps the backscratcher on each of Alice’s shoulders. “You’re now officially Mom until Dad gets home. Samantha and I are going upstairs.” And he takes my hand, dragging me after him.

But all that urgency is apparently more about getting away from the chaos downstairs than about luring me to his bed, because once we get up to the room, he just loops his arms around my waist and leans in for a leisurely kiss. Then he tilts back, surveying me.

“What?” I ask, reaching back out for him, wanting more.

“Here’s what I was wondering, Samantha. Do you want to—”

“Yes,” I respond immediately.

He laughs. “Here’s where you need to hear the actual question. I was thinking, a lot, about what we talked about this morning. How do you…? Do you…want to plan it all out or—”

“You mean like the date and the time and the place? I think that would make me too tense. Like some sort of countdown. I don’t want to plan you. Not that way.”

He looks relieved. “That’s how I feel. So I was thinking we should just make sure we’re…well, uh, prepared. Always. Then see when things move there so we’re both…”

“Ready?” I ask.

“Comfortable,” Jase suggests. “Prepared.”

I give his shoulder a little shove. “Boy Scout.”

“Well, they didn’t exactly have a badge for this.” Jase laughs. “Though that one would’ve been popular. Not to mention useful. I was in the pharmacy today and there are
way
too many options just in, uh, condoms.”

“I know.” I smile at him. “I was there too.”

“We should probably go together next time,” he says, picking up my hand, turning it over to kiss the inside of my wrist. My pulse jumps, just at that brush of his lips.
Wow.

In the end, we go to CVS later that night, because Mrs. Garrett wakes up and comes out of her room, rumpled in a sapphire bathrobe, to ask Jase to pick up some Gatorade. So here we are, in the family planning aisle with a cart full of sports drinks and
our hands full of…“Trojans, Ramses, Magnum…Jeez, these are worse than names for muscle cars,” Jase observes, sliding his finger along the display.

“They do sound sorta, well, forceful.” I flip over the box I’m holding to read the instructions.

Jase glances up to smile at me. “Don’t worry, Sam. It’s just us.”

“I don’t get what half these descriptions mean…What’s a vibrating ring?”

“Sounds like the part that breaks on the washing machine. What’s extra-sensitive?
That
sounds like how we describe George.”

I’m giggling. “Okay, would that be better or worse than ‘ultimate feeling’—and look—there’s ‘shared pleasure’ condoms
and
‘her pleasure’ condoms. But there’s no ‘his pleasure.’”

“I’m pretty sure that comes with the territory,” Jase says dryly. “Put down those Technicolor ones. No freaking way.”

“But blue’s my favorite color,” I say, batting my eyelashes at him.

“Put them down. The glow-in-the-dark ones too. Jesus. Why do they even
make
those?”

“For the visually impaired?” I ask, reshelving the boxes.

We move to the checkout line. “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” the clerk calls as we leave.

“Do you think he knew?” I ask.

“You’re blushing again,” Jase mutters absently. “Did who know what?”

“The sales guy. Why we were buying these?”

A smile pulls the corners of his mouth. “Of course not. I’m sure it never occurred to him that we were actually buying
birth control for ourselves. I bet he thought it was…a…housewarming gift.”

Okay, I’m ridiculous
.

“Or party favors,” I laugh.

“Or”—he scrutinizes the receipt—“supplies for a really expensive water balloon fight.”

“Visual aids for health class?” I slip my hand into the back pocket of Jase’s jeans.

“Or little raincoats for…” He pauses, stumped.

“Barbie dolls,” I suggest.

“G.I. Joes,” he corrects, and slips his free hand into the back pocket of my jeans, bumping his hip against mine as we head back to the car.

Brushing my teeth that night, listening to the sound of a summer rain battering against the windows, I marvel at how quickly things can completely change. A month ago, I was someone who had to put twenty-five unnecessary items—Q-tips and nail polish remover and
Seventeen
magazine and mascara and hand lotion—on the counter at CVS to distract the clerk from the box of tampons, the one embarrassing item I needed. Tonight I bought condoms, and almost nothing else, with the boy I’m planning to use them with.

Jase took them all home, since my mom still periodically goes through my dresser drawers to align my clothes in order of color. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t buy the “supplies for a really expensive water balloon fight” excuse. When I asked if Mrs. Garrett would do the same and find them, Jase looked at me in complete mystification.

“I do my own laundry, Sam.”

I’ve never had a nickname. My mother’s always insisted on the full
Samantha
. Charley occasionally called me “Sammy-Sam” just because he knew it bugged me. But I like being Sam. I like being Jase’s Sam. It sounds relaxed, easygoing, competent. I want to be that person.

I spit out toothpaste, staring at my face in the mirror. Someday, someday not too far away, Jase and I will use those condoms. Will I look different then? How different will I feel? How will we know when to say when?

Chapter Twenty-six

Two days later, Tim’s following my directions to Mom’s campaign office for an interview. He looks like a completely different person than the one at the wheel for the Bacardi run to New Hampshire, neatly clad in a khaki suit with a red and yellow striped tie. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, lights a cigarette, smokes it, firing up another the moment he’s done.

“You feeling okay?” I ask, indicating that he should turn left at the four-way intersection.

“Like shit.” Tim tosses the latest cigarette butt out the window, punching the lighter down again. “I haven’t had a drink or a joint or anything in days. That’s the longest that’s happened since I was, like, eleven. I feel like shit.”

“You sure you want this job? Campaigning—it’s all show—it makes
me
feel that way and I’m not even drying out.”

Tim snorts. “
Drying out?
Who the hell says that? You talk like my frickin’ grandpa.”

I roll my eyes. “Sorry I’m not all down with the current slang. You get my point anyway.”

“I can’t stay home all day with Ma. She drives me up the frigging wall. And if I don’t prove that I’m doing ‘something
valuable with my time,’ it’s off to do hard time at Camp Tomahawk.”

“You’re joking.
That’s
the name of the place your parents want to send you?”

“Somethin’ like that. Maybe it’s Camp Guillotine. Camp Castration? Whatever the hell it is, it doesn’t sound like anyplace I’ll survive. No way I’m gonna have some epiphany about how I need to apply myself to life while living on roots and berries and learning how to build a compass out of spiderwebs or whatever the hell they have you do when they drop you in the wilderness by yourself. That shit is just not me.”

“I think you should go for the job with Jase’s dad.” I point to the right as we come to another intersection. “He’s a lot more relaxed than Mom. Plus, you’d have your evenings free.”