Choices(Waiting for Forever BK 1) (7 page)

“Hey Mayfield, you want to head over to Northridge Mall with us after school for a while?” Kennedy asked Jamie. After glancing up at them once, I pretended to study my mystery-meat sandwich. Kennedy wasn’t talking to me. It was generally understood, by me and by them, that I was just Jamie’s little tagalong geek friend. I wasn’t one of the popular kids; I was just the throwaway foster kid, though that had never mattered to Jamie. In fact, he’d told me that was one of the things that made me special, the fact that I never took anything for granted.

“Can Brian come?” Jamie asked casually. They knew as well as I did that his answer would depend on theirs. If they said no, so would he. Kennedy looked at me for a minute, and I saw the effort it took him not to sigh before he agreed.

“Sure, we’ll meet you out front after last bell. My mom let me take the car, so we can go straight from here,” he said. Jamie and I threw our garbage in the bin and tossed our trays up on the belt for the lunch ladies to get.

“Do you want to go to the mall after school?” Jamie asked me as we headed to our lockers to get our books for our next class.

“You already told them we’d go, so why are you asking me now?” I asked, a little frustrated at being an afterthought. I reached my locker with him lagging several steps behind and tossed the books for our next two classes into my bag along with folders and notebooks. Just for good measure, so I wouldn’t have to look up at him, I made sure I had pens and pencils as well.

“Because if you want to do something else, I’ll brush them off,” he replied, lowering his voice as a couple of girls passed. “Come on, a couple more weeks until we’re done this year, and then we’ll be seniors, and then we’ll be gone. Once we’re in college, we can start over and be who we want to be. It will be a new beginning for us. We just have to get out of here first.” I was surprised by his casual optimism. So, rather than argue, I just agreed to meet him in front of the school after the last bell.

The rest of the school day passed surprisingly quickly. We were gearing up for final exams and final projects, so the teachers were pretty relentless during classes. More work and constant talk of making sure we passed to get to senior year made our minds focus more and wander less. By the end of the day, the mall seemed like a pretty good diversion.

“Ready to go?” he asked with that soft, sweet smile, the one that made my heart race.

“Yeah, are we just leaving our books in Derrick’s car?” I asked. Not really having any friends other than Jamie, sometimes I felt left out:
like a shadow standing next to him, a flat, two-dimensional representation of a boy not really good enough to—

“Hey, whatever you’re thinking, just stop,” Jamie said sternly, and I looked up from my shoes. “We don’t have to stay with those guys the whole time. I just want to hang out with you. Okay?”

Wishing we could have just been alone, I nodded and glanced up the hall to see a couple of younger girls walking past. Jamie was one of the popular kids, and he didn’t understand what it was like to be forced on people who didn’t want him around. My entire life had been like that, until Jamie. Jamie wanted me, but he’d also been friends with guys like John and Derrick since kindergarten. I couldn’t isolate him from his other friends because they didn’t think I was good enough for him. Besides, it was the chance to spend time with Jamie someplace that wasn’t at school or with our parents. That was enough for me to put one foot in front of the other and follow him to his friend’s car.

The half-hour ride up to Northridge Mall was pretty uneventful. Derrick and John were in the front seat, talking about which girls at our high school put out and about girls they might see from North Central, a high school near the mall. For the most part Jamie and I ignored them, not joining in their conversation with more than a “yeah” or a “no way” when appropriate. I was starting to wonder why I had agreed to this straight-boy bonding trip when we finally pulled off the highway and turned toward the mall.

The first half hour was spent wandering around the video game shop, but since I had neither a game console nor a computer, I wasn’t really interested. When we moved on to a music store, I followed Jamie from display to display, watching him get increasingly bored because I knew for a fact he bought most of his music online. We wandered over and looked through a few band T-shirts. As I held up a particularly lurid green one under the pretense of asking Jamie’s opinion, I leaned in closer to him.

“Let’s go to the bookstore,” I said quietly, and he nodded, grabbed the T-shirt, and put it back on the rack. Derrick and John, while great on the football field, had probably never been inside a bookstore. They’d much rather hang out with Brad Mosely and Ryan Carter, chugging beers while sitting in the back of Mosely’s pickup truck or beating each other’s brains in on the fifty-yard line than actually read.

“Hey, D!” Jamie called, and Derrick turned away from the pretty store employee, looking annoyed by the interruption.

“We’re gonna head over to the bookstore. Meet you in the food court in an hour?” Jamie asked, and Derrick waved him off with a nod.

We were free.

Nearly sprinting to the front of the store, we escaped the blaring music and turned right, heading in the direction of the large bookstore near the elevators. Once out of the deafening music, we walked slower. It was nice to simply be together, taking in the storefronts and other shoppers. Since it was a Thursday afternoon, the mall was pretty empty.

Jamie leaned down as we passed the pink-frilled door of a lingerie shop and whispered, “Maybe we should go in there and see if we can find you something sexy, silk, maybe? They have stuff for guys too.” My face flamed at the thought of wearing sexy underwear for him, and then again at Carolyn finding them, and I shook my head. He laughed, and when I realized he was teasing me, I laughed along with him.

“Only if I get to blow you in the changing room,” I countered, and he immediately stopped laughing and walking, just staring at me. To my credit, I kept a straight face as he gawked at me. I could tell he’d never, ever thought he’d hear his shy little friend even joke about something like that, especially as hard as I had blushed when I told him about the porn I’d found on the computer.

“I thought you wanted to go to the bookstore?” I asked him casually when he didn’t show any signs of remembering why we were walking at the mall. His feet started moving again, and I hid a smirk as I waited for him to catch up and walked next to him. He didn’t say anything until we were a few stores down. Hip-hop blared from the sports-clothing store as we passed.

“Would you really?” he asked quietly.

“Do you mean in general or in a dressing room?” I clarified quickly.

“In general,” he hedged as we passed a large jewelry store.

“It’s something I’d like to try with you,” I told him honestly. “It’s something I’ve thought about.” I looked around to make sure no one was within earshot. “It’s something I’ve fantasized about… a lot.” I hadn’t meant to say that last part, but it was true.

“I have too,” he whispered as we walked into the huge two-story bookstore at the end of the corridor. Out of habit, I went over to the clearance section and started checking out the paperbacks. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Jamie had gone farther down the aisle into science fiction. Picking through the haphazardly stacked piles of books, I found one by an author I liked and went to find two chairs next to each other, so when Jamie found something we could sit together.

I dropped into the worn leather chair and started to read the back of the novel. It promised to be every bit as good as the last book I’d read by the author, full of intrigue and the triumph over adversity. I knew not everyone triumphed, but it was nice to read about, even if it was just fiction. The music being piped through the in-store speakers was soothing, and when Jamie finally joined me, I’d already finished the first chapter.

He had a bag with him, which meant he’d already paid for his books. When I asked him about them, he just shrugged, dropped into his chair, and took one out of the bag. It was the new paperback novel by John Marshall, the same author I was reading.

“I didn’t know you were a fan of Marshall’s work,” Jamie said as he noticed the book in my hands. “It’s funny, there are books all over your room, and I’ve never taken the time to find out what they were.”

“I didn’t know you were a fan either. You… well, you don’t have any books in your room,” I said, a little sheepishly, because I had always assumed that just meant Jamie wasn’t a reader.

“That’s because I keep my books in my dad’s study. He has tons of bookshelves in there.”

“What else did you get?” I asked, curious to see if we had any other common interests we didn’t know about. I thought, after being best friends for almost six years, that we knew everything about each other. Apparently, I was wrong. However, Jamie didn’t let go of the bag and wouldn’t let me look in it.

“It’s nothing,” he insisted, and the note of urgency in his voice made me stop. Obviously there was something in that bag he was either embarrassed about or he didn’t want me to see. Immediately, I let go, and he relaxed a little into the chair, pushing his soft hair back from his eyes. A ton of possibilities, from gay-related books to sex-related books, chased each other through my mind as I tried to figure out what he was hiding.

Nervously, he checked his watch. “Hey, we’ve got to go; we’re supposed to be in the food court to meet Derrick and John,” he said as he pulled himself out of the chair. I tossed the paperback on my chair as I stood, and together we made our way to the door.

“Aren’t you going to get that paperback you started reading?” Jamie asked curiously as we left the store.

“Don’t you have it?” I asked casually.

“Yeah, I have it.” He turned the corner and headed back in the direction we’d come.

“Then I’ll just borrow yours,” I told him with a smirk. He grinned sheepishly as we passed the jewelry store again.

“You’re such a cheapskate,” he said, chuckling to himself, and pulled his bag from the bookstore up, hoisting it over his shoulder.

“Being a cheapskate will help me pay for college,” I told him. There was nothing from my parents. Either they hadn’t had anything, or it’d gone to the state for my care. If I wanted to go to college, I would have to find the money. Being the only child of a middle-class family, I didn’t think Jamie really understood that. He also never understood why I wouldn’t just let him buy the book, or the CD, or even the bag of chips, for me. When it came to matters of money, Jamie and I generally stood at an impasse.

“Of course you can borrow the book,” he said quietly as we walked quickly past the lingerie shop, and I remembered our earlier discussion with a grin. I could tell Jamie had remembered too, because he was blushing.

The food court was relatively empty, so we didn’t have any trouble finding the guys, who were feasting on Chinese. Jamie and I waved to get their attention and motioned that we were going to get food as well.

It had been a nice, quiet time, nothing special in the grand scheme of a teenager’s social calendar, but I liked being able to spend time with Jamie someplace other than school. The constant twittering of girls, the slamming of lockers, and the mocking laughter that followed me whenever I wasn’t with Jamie was absent from the low bustle of the mall.

It made me long for the school year to end.

4

“J
AMIE
,
I don’t think we should be doing this with your parents right down the hall,” I told him between fevered kisses as we lay on the inflatable mattress his parents always put out for me. It was comfortable and just a few feet away from Jamie’s own twin captain’s bed, which had a lot of his character, from the handsome yet functional bookcase headboard to the calming blue plaid comforter freshly laid across its surface. One of the things I loved most about his bed was lying on it while we did our homework together, and his scent would envelop me, and I could torture myself with the image of him lying naked in bed with me.

“You know as well as I do that they won’t come to check on us this late. They’re asleep, and if they’re not, they think we are.” He cocked his head to the side, and his face fell a bit. “Unless you don’t want to?”

I responded by using my arms around his neck to pull his face back to mine. We were facing each other as we lay on our sides, wearing just our twisted and tented pajama pants. Our long-discarded shirts lay rumpled and forgotten, entwined under his desk. Excited and a little apprehensive, I rushed headlong into my first real sexual experience without any thought for what would happen after. All I wanted to think about was the feeling of his mouth melded with mine, or his hands as he rubbed my bare skin.

It was beautiful and sensual.

I wrapped my leg around his and pulled it between both of my mine, feeling my eager erection press against his thigh as his pressed into my hip. The friction, coupled with the emotion that flowed between us, made it the best sexual experience I’d ever had. It was already incredible, and I hadn’t even gotten off yet. Slowly but deliberately, he began to grind his hips against mine, intensifying my need for him, and he emitted soft, mewling whimpers. His excitement just escalated my own. I nearly lost all control of myself when, after sliding his hand down and grabbing my ass for leverage, he gasped, “Oh God, Brian,” almost too quietly for me to hear. Those desperate sounds of pleasure, of sheer need, nearly made me come in my baseball-themed pajama pants.