BEN
Hollister was lying next to me in my bed, face planted into a pillow, fiery hair splayed across her bare back. Dawn crept through the cracks in my blinds, but she hadn’t woken up yet. It had been a long time since I’d slept with a woman and even longer since I’d slept completely naked.
After I went down on her in the kitchen, we’d moved into the bedroom, and she’d done things to me with her tongue that I’d never experienced. As if that wasn’t wonderful enough, a short while later, we had the best sex of my life. I’d never felt so connected, so in sync with a woman before. She watched me as I fell apart, and it was like she was seeing into my soul. Before last night, I wasn’t even sure I believed in souls.
I shifted to look at the clock, careful not to wake her. The cool air of the bedroom felt good against my warm chest and arms, which were normally covered in at least a T-shirt. I was one of those oddballs who actually wore pajamas, both top and bottom, even when I was alone, yet there I was without a stitch of clothing on my body. Being naked in bed felt both liberating and oddly vulnerable at the same time, kind of like living out my fantasies with Hollister. I’d gained so much, but now I had something precious to lose.
I heard her breathing pattern change right before she muttered, “Uh-oh.”
Not what anyone wanted to hear when the woman of their dreams woke up in their bed, but at least she wasn’t leaping up and running away yet. I laid my palm on her back and she whipped her head to face me. There were sleep lines on her cheek and charcoal-colored makeup smudged under her startled brown eyes.
“Whoa. I’m in your bed.”
My chest tightened. “Good morning to you too.”
“Sorry.” She sat up and rubbed her eyes, which only moved the makeup farther afield. “No offense, this is just the last place I thought I’d ever wake up. Unless you kidnapped me and handcuffed me to your bedpost.”
“I take it that’s not a kinky fantasy? You actually thought at one point I might be a psychopath?”
“Of course not.” The sheet slipped, and she pulled it up higher on her chest. “If I’d gone down that road I would have said sociopath, for sure.”
I fell back on the pillow and laughed. “Great, thanks.”
She was quiet for at least a minute. “But seriously, do you have handcuffs?”
That question got my blood flowing in a downward direction. “Uh, not currently, but I can procure some today if you’d like.”
She sank back down into the mattress and dramatically threw her arm over her face. “That’s probably not the question I should be asking. I should be questioning how our first date, which by all accounts did not go well, ended up with me naked in your kitchen.”
“I don’t see a problem,” I said. “We worked out some issues by having mind-blowing sex last night.”
She slid her arm away and opened her eyes, and when I saw the confusion in them, I knew I’d make a crucial mistake.
“Did you say mind-blowing?” she asked slowly.
My stomach skipped and sank like a stone tossed into a river. There was no point in lying. A woman as sharp as Hollister would see right through me.
“When I was at your apartment, I might have seen your YOLO list in a kitchen drawer,” I admitted. “I was looking for a knife.”
She yanked the sheet over her head and screamed. Loudly. I rolled on top of her, forgetting that we were both naked. “Stop yelling! My neighbors are going to think I’m murdering you.”
“I’m going to murder you!” she said, beating her hands against my chest. “How could you look at my list? That was private!”
“I didn’t mean to see it. It was right there. In plain view. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at until you explained it later.”
She got eerily quiet and still, and that worried me more than the yelling. She could easily have been planning my demise. At the very least, her revenge.
Neither of us seemed to notice that I was still covering her naked body with mine. My leg was braced between hers. Under any other circumstances, I would have been in full arousal in that position, but I was too busy being terrified about what she was going to do next.
“So you thought you’d be the one to give me mind-blowing sex,” she said in a hard, even tone that sent a chill down my back. “You wanted a piece of my YOLO list. You wanted to be the man who could check that off my list for me, like it was some kind of award you could win.”
“Of course not.” She was already pushing me off her and climbing out of the bed. “This is not some plan I concocted to get the best of you. I swear.”
She searched frantically for her clothing, not remembering her wet dress was hanging over the shower door in my bathroom.
I pointed to my dresser. “Take a T-shirt. Middle drawer.”
She yanked the drawer open and pulled out a white T-shirt that advertised my orthopedic practice. After pulling it over her head, she opened another drawer and got out a pair of boxer briefs without asking for permission. She slid them up to her waist. I certainly wasn’t going to stop her. She looked adorable.
“What am I supposed to think?” she asked. “You just said ‘mind-blowing sex’ and got this self-important look on your face.”
“Hollister.” I sat up in bed, leaning against the headboard. “You’re not a prize I’m trying to win. I like you. I’ve always liked you. In fact…” I took a deep breath, gathering the courage to speak my mind, bracing for possible humiliation. “I’ve had very strong feelings for you since high school.”
“Strong feelings,” she repeated. “Like loathing?”
“No, I…” I ran my tongue over my teeth and looked away from her. This was harder than I thought it was going to be. “I had a crush on you for many years. Even after high school.”
She studied me warily. “You’re lying.”
“I swear, I’m not lying. I came to the reunion because Ethan Winter mentioned you were one of the people on the RSVP list. Otherwise I never would have gone. But then I got so nervous about seeing you and uncomfortable being back in that place that I got drunk and made an ass of myself.”
“Wow.” She perched herself on the foot of the bed, and I tried to imagine the calculations going on in her brain. “When exactly did these feelings start?”
I knew she was going to be shocked, but I was already in too deep to stop now. “When I moved to town, and we met in Mrs. Feeney’s class.”
She jumped to her feet. “What!? Ninth grade?”
I’d expected this reaction, but it still made me cringe. I hadn’t known how to connect with her, the beautiful red-haired girl who sat in the desk in front of me, so I tried to impress her with my brilliance. If I could spout out the answer to every one of the teacher’s questions about The Odyssey, surely this girl would notice me and like me. If I could be the expert on diagramming sentences, she’d think I was cool. It was the flawed logic of a fourteen-year-old boy with limited social skills—in other words a typical fourteen-year-old boy. What it took me a few months to realize was that she was just as smart as I was, and once she let me know it, I was in even deeper. Hollister Moran became the only girl worth having, and the one who would never think I was worthy of her time.
“I know I wasn’t the easiest person to get along with back then,” I said, “but I was trying to get your attention. I simply didn’t know how to go about it.”
“Oh, you got my attention.” She sat down again, and her shoulders relaxed an inch. “I probably talked more about you than anyone else. My friends got sick of hearing your name.”
“Yes, Ben Rose,” I said. “But last night, you called out my first name. Just Ben.”
She knitted her fingers together and studied them. “Yeah, I remember that.”
I moved toward her and took her hands in mine. “I want to be Ben. Not Ben Rose, the asshole from high school. Can we put the past to rest and see if this could work? Last night was amazing. I don’t know about you, but if I had a YOLO list with mind-blowing sex on it, I would be crossing it off right now.”
She smiled and bit her bottom lip. “It was pretty great.”
“So can I take you on another date?” I asked. “We can do this again?”
She squeezed my hand. “No teachers this time. We don’t do well in school together.”
Happiness welled in my chest until I felt like I could barely breathe. This romance was twenty-nine years in the making, and I was determined to make our next date the best one of her life.
“It’s a deal. No teachers. Just us on a romantic adventure.”
Her lips parted as her eyes roamed over my face and chest then lower to what was still hidden under the sheets. Desire flooded through me, and my hands twitched with wanting to touch her. Even with bedhead and raccoon eyes, she was irresistible.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but how much time do you need before you leave for work?” she asked. “Do you have time for a shower with me?”
I was out of bed and halfway to the bathroom before she could blink. “I have instant hot water and two shower heads,” I said. “Heated towel rack and radiant flooring.”
“Fancy schmancy,” she said as she followed me. Then she pinched my bare butt.