First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (14 page)

As I flipped through my pages, preparing for my next debate, I saw Sam walk by again, running a hand through that auburn hair. Oh, how I wished it were
my
hand. Memory took over my mind and body, the thought of his arms around me just two weeks ago so evocative.
 

He stopped at a drinking fountain and bent over, the gray wool of his suit stretching tight across his shoulders. His lips drank greedily from the stream of water, and suddenly everything else disappeared. The butterflies in my stomach, the tightness in my shoulders, the sense that everything hinged on what I was about to do today—it all rushed away in one mad wave.

All that was left was me taking in everything about this one person who mattered more than anything I was about to do today.

Sam

Don’t throw up, don’t throw up
.

I felt like a genie was trapped in my stomach and struggling violently to get out. A burning sensation rose up through my esophagus, and tension squeezed my jawline. I felt a fiery flush from the anxiety, up my cheeks all the way to my scalp, and I bent over the water fountain as much to hide it as to cool it down. My
entire future
rested on today. My dad had told me that everything weighed on this win—
everything
. I had to make it to Nationals, and I must win without question. The top three would make it, and I had to be one of those three. Just third would do; even dad had relented on that point. It wasn’t about being number one.

For once, it was about being good
enough
.

And yet, good enough would be damn hard.

Dad was a minister at a local church, a pillar of the community, right? Then that made me a preacher’s kid. He wasn’t a preacher in the southern sense, though. No one here in New England would tolerate anything quite as big as what Dad called a “Holy Roller,” but he had a way of making sure that God infused everything in our lives. Funny how God always seemed to have the same exact views as Dad. I’d gone to a small private school from preschool to eighth grade, learning everything through the lens of God. When money started to get tight, he’d relented and let me go to the local public school.

I’d been shocked my first session of science class, sitting in a biology lecture, and learning about evolution. Dad had told me that evolution was something that people had created as a way to separate us from God, so I knew the basics. The scary part was that now I was being told to bridge two worlds, somehow to remain devout and without sin—or at least with as little sin as possible, at the same time that I accepted what so many people at my old school and at my church, Dad’s church, told me were signs of moral failure.

“Fake it,” Dad said. “Get good grades and pretend enough to get the grades you need, and don’t let it bother you. God knows that you understand it’s just not true, and there’s no violation of God’s law unless you choose to actually believe it.”

That’s what he said, but you know, things have a way of backfiring when you lie, and that’s exactly what Dad taught me.
To lie
. To lie to myself by learning something that I wasn’t supposed to believe in, and then realizing I did believe in what they taught, and realizing I had to lie at
home
. That? That I could master. Easily. Because what Dad didn’t know is that I had been doing it most of my life.

Violently poison-tongued, my father could wield words like weapons, especially when he had too much to drink. And
that
was the first lie, the central lie, that taught me how to really pretend to believe something that wasn’t true. The fact was that my father was supposed to be an ethical man, the interpreter of God for his flock, and yet at home he was a tyrant, a real son of a bitch. My stomach tightened at the thought of calling him that, at the contradiction between the truth that it represents and the sin that it is.

Back then, though, in ninth grade, sitting there while my teacher explained the role of vestigial limbs or why humans walk upright, I found a divergence. It was the same feeling today, getting ready for debate. It was a sense that I was being told to go through the motions for the sake of the motions, but I was actually doing it because it’s what I believed. A full ride to college rested on how I performed. Two different high level schools had coaches who said if I could get into the top three, I could make my way through their schools with no debt. Dad didn’t have a college fund for me. He said I could go to a Bible school if I couldn’t get a free ride somewhere else. I’d rather scrape and save and work five jobs to pay for a different college than go to the kind of Bible school
my
father would choose for me, where people couldn’t touch each other, where dancing was considered a sin, and where attitudes about homosexuality were like something out of a 1960s documentary.

Anything outside of the authoritarian rules set up in the structure for someone else was deemed an abomination.

 
Here in debate the rules were objective. They never changed, and the goal posts weren’t moved. The answers were challenged with fact and reason and analysis, not with emotional mudslinging and accusations. This was a world that made sense.

It was like drumming. The notes were on the page, the measures were clear. Which instrument needed to be struck at which time was laid out in an orderly pattern. How you tackled it emotionally was up to you. Emotions and debate didn’t really have much to do with each other, except in one area.

And she walked past me just as I bent down to get a drink of water.

Amy

Harboring a crush on a guy for years is probably the definition—no, the
epitome
—of desperate. I talked to Sam, sure, and I debated him, and I joked with him, and I did plenty of other things that gave me an opportunity to interact, but when it came to sending out a signal, or flirting, or finding some way to communicate how I felt? Nope. I closed up. Watching him take a drink from the water fountain, knowing he was just as nervous as I was about the debates today, gave me a warm sense of camaraderie with him, yet I kept my feelings to myself.
 

It was easier that way because if I didn’t take the chance I couldn’t get rejected, right? I was torn between wanting to let him know, and terrified of the genie I’d be unable to tuck back in its bottle if I pulled the cork.

Instead, I lived in that world of ambiguity, where I knew that the feelings I had for him were becoming larger and stronger, at the same time that I couldn’t take any of the pressure off by letting them out. When our eyes met, there seemed to be a kindred spirit there, but if he felt anything, even one one-thousandth of what I felt for him, I had no way of knowing it. You would think that our hug from two weeks ago would have calmed me even now, that it told me how he felt, and yet a deep insecurity in me left me with more questions than answers from his touch.
More
was what I wanted.

Did he?

I walked past him at the water fountain, and he stood, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then called out to me when my back was to him. “Hey! Amy!”

I stopped and froze, skittering a little bit on the tile floor, unaccustomed to wearing high heels. I turned around gingerly, making sure I didn’t fall. The last thing I needed was to split my skirt open or bang up my knee, or worse, embarrass myself in front of him.

“Yeah?” I replied. Witty, I was, first thing in the morning. Shaking inside—and not just from the specter of the day’s debates. His smile made me feel like none of it mattered. As if the entire world was nothing but us.

He leaned back against the wall and crossed his long legs at the ankles, his elbow bent, the skin around his eyes crinkled up as those warm eyes took me in. The seconds ticked by. My skin floated inches above my body and I took my hand and rested it on my thigh, unsure what to do. The tangible feeling of my own fingers against my body felt like the most real thing on the planet. The only thing more real would have been if his hands had touched the same place.

“I’m not going to even ask if you’re nervous,” he said, looking down.

“Does a bear shit in the woods?” a guy’s voice said, interrupting us.

I turned, and then my heart picked up in double time because there stood Joe Ross. Every, and I mean,
every
girl except for the gay ones, had a crush on Joe at some point. He looked like a really hot version of Orlando Bloom, and yet that wasn’t quite right. Add in a little Brad Pitt, and then some George Clooney, and a touch of Channing Tatum, all mixed into a Roman God, and you had Joe.

Too bad his personality didn’t match. He was the biggest grade grubber you could imagine, and in the debate world, he was the great white shark. What I didn’t like about him was that he had this way of making comments that pierced my confidence. He wasn’t a sexist jerk; he was a jerk to guys and girls alike. An equal-opportunity jerk. I slid a step away from him, as if being closer to him would make it more likely that he could wound me and make me go into my first debate unstable and questioning myself. His presence snapped me out of the wonder of Sam.

With a blank look on his face, Sam turned to Joe and said “You doing your pre-debate damage, Ross?”

Joe had the decency to pretend to look offended, even taking one hand and pressing it over his heart, as if shocked. “What are you implying, Hinton?”

“Take it however you want,” Sam said, his face impassive.

One-on-one in a debate, that impassivity was Sam’s greatest tool. The power in the ability to appear unruffled was something so divine that a part of me would have traded anything for that skill. Okay—almost.

Almost
trade.

His eyes were hooded and his face was slack, leaving the other person absolutely no way of knowing what he was thinking. It undermined Joe and made my face crack with a smile. I bit my lips and turned away to try to hide it, but Joe just nudged me, making me wobble on these damn high heels.

“If your case is as droll as your face, then good luck getting to third place.” Joe’s eyes narrowed as he tried to stare Sam down.

“You’re a poet, and you know it,” was all Sam said in return.

I took two steps back and turned, standing at the midpoint between them. Sam, tall and slim with that wavy red hair and those speckled eyes, eyes that gave no quarter. Joe, with a face carved out of marble, an angry red flush in his cheeks, and clenched hands. They stared each other down and I began to feel a strange, tingling sense of arousal. The naked aggression that each showed triggered something more adult in me. It transcended all of the silly flirting, and skirting, and questioning that made up the web of high school relationships and gave me a glimpse into a world of something completely different between men and women, and between men and men.

This was a high stakes game, but nobody realized just how high the stakes really were that day.

Sam

What the fuck was Joe up to? Nothing I’d done should have triggered this kind of bullshit. With Amy’s eyes on us I tried to keep myself in neutral. Faking placidity wasn’t just a skill I’d honed; it was a survival strategy at home. When your father screams at you for forgetting to mop up the water you spilled on the floor while in the shower, or hauls you out back for a thrashing because God told him to keep you from mouthing off after you forgot to say “Sir,” you learn to hold it all together and act as if nothing upsets you.

Nothing. It can’t, because giving that little splash of emotion to the world means that anyone can pick it up and use it like a hammer against you. Joe was trying to provoke me and while he might be a master at finding weak spots in people, I was the fucking king of impassivity when it came to emotionally charged situations. Joe wasn’t my dad, and I could probably kick his ass if I had to, but who wants to do that at a
debate tournament
? It wasn’t like we were at a cage fighting event, you know?

“Why should I care?” Ross said, feigning ambivalence. “I already got into BU on early acceptance. I don’t need a trophy.” But his eyes said otherwise.

“Then just do your best and have fun,” Amy replied in a sing-songy voice.

He glowered at her. “I’ll shred you if we face off, Smithson.”

“Like you did three weeks ago on the voting topic?”
Zing
. Amy had practically ripped his balls off and pinned them to the grill of his school’s bus. She’d gone 4-0 and won the entire tournament.

“Like I—? Oh, shut up.” He stormed out, grumbling to himself. His phone rang and we heard the distant echo of his voice as he talked to his mother, muttering something about making sure he had his car back by four o’clock.

We both laughed, and the tension lifted. Good. In that moment everything changed, as if color itself became brighter, the air more infused with oxygen, the quality of light making everything about Amy ethereal and so real. As if everything else in the world was fake, and the only way to connect to a different level of the universe was to touch her.

So I did. She tipped her face up to me as I took two steps toward her and reached for her hand, the smooth, soft skin like a lifeline. I didn’t realize how much I’d been drowning, but when I felt her skin against mine I was suddenly on dry ground. Solid land. She was my anchor, my savior.

My home.

Her lips were the front door, and I crossed the threshold with a boldness I didn’t know I possessed.

Amy

 
The rasp of his palms sliding around my waist, the wool of his suit crackling static against mine, the softness of his lips, all told me I wasn’t dreaming. And then my own hands were behind his neck, and my lips were returning the kiss as ardently, and my brain and body melted into a puddle of Amy. He pulled his lips away and then came back, this time with more intensity. This was the kind of kiss I’d read about in books, the kind of kiss I’d hoped for.

“Hey, you two! Go to your assignments!”

We broke away, completely shocked, and I slid backwards and almost fell, only saved by Sam’s strong arms grabbing onto me, lifting me up. We both turned in surprise and Sam wiped his mouth, while I pressed my fingertips to my lips as if holding the kiss in. It was Erin, my best friend.