First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (6 page)

Oh, no, she didn’t.

I stood, hands twisted into fists, the blood pounding at my scalp, making the lights on stage go dim. Liam McCarthy jumped to the mic and shouted, “Are you ready to party?”My mouth went dry as I watched him own the stage. Hadn’t seen him in years, either.

Seeing the person who took your virginity really should generate an emotional reaction, right?

The crowd leapt to their feet and my view of the stage was obscured. Damn it! The raised arms, shrill whistles and screams from about a hundred fans made me lose track of what, exactly, Darla was doing to—or with—Sam.

Liam tried to calm the crowd, arms out, palms down in a gesture of quiet. “Let’s get the raffle out of the way.”

Anemic cheers.

“Three prizes tonight.”

“Free drinks!” Someone shouted. That got another round of hoots and some clapping.

“Sorry—go hook up with someone in the crowd for that.” Loads of giggles from the women. Groans from the men.

“First of three prizes—free tickets to our next concert!” I pulled my ticket out of my pocket. Why not? Going home with a prize was better than going home alone. Standing on tiptoes, I kept trying to catch a glimpse of Sam, and to see what Darla was doing to him. With him. Whatever. Liam called out a number that wasn’t mine. As the crowd settled back in their seats, I saw Joe and Sam setting up equipment in the background. No Darla. Good.

“Second prize—a CD from our best live performances.” He read off a number.

Not mine.

“Third and final prize.” Cocky grin. “Let me call out the number and then I’ll tell you what you get.”

“A night with you, Liam!” some drunk girl screamed.

He cocked one hell of a sexy eyebrow at the crowd and leered. “That would make any woman a winner.” He drew the word
winner
out like a finger running down a woman’s breast, over her ribs, down her torso...and the women in the crowd shrieked.

And then he called out my number.

“Anyone?”
 

I was frozen. Holy shit. What?

“I’ll take you if someone doesn’t claim it!” a woman cried out.

“Me, too!” screamed five or six other women.

The waitress happened to pop over and look at my ticket. “Here! She won! Right here!”
She pointed at me with a big gesture that caught the crowd’s attention.

No no no no no
. Sam couldn’t know I was here.

“What are you waiting for, honey? Don’t be afraid. Go for it!” With a mighty shove, she pushed me out into the crowd, a spotlight finding my face.

“Hey there! Our winner! And it’s a chick—whew!”

Every woman I walked past looked at me as if I’d won the MegaMillions lottery. I got to the stairs to the left of the stage, feeling like I was walking a death march. A red EXIT sign glowed to me right. If I bolted right now...

“Not that I wouldn’t mind kissing a dude,” Liam added. A few guys in the audience cheered
really
loud.

“Because the prize is a kiss from me.” Liam peered down the stage steps and when his eyes set on me, all that confidence faltered for a split second.

A
what
? Couldn’t I just get a CD?

One of the stage hands nudged me to join Liam, and I walked on feet made of electrified concrete.

“Amy!” I heard Darla squeal from backstage.

“Amy?” The way Sam said my name made me nearly vomit.

“Amy.” Liam’s smile spread slowly, his voice like buttered suede. “Our lucky winner.”

Lights sprayed across my face, making me half-blind, as hundreds of eyes watched me and Liam on stage. He put his arm around my shoulders as people in the crowd began began to chant “kiss!” over and over.

I couldn’t even look at Sam. Because I knew he was staring at me.

Covering my body with his to shield the view, Liam’s face came so close to mine I could inhale his aftershave, smell the sweat and musk of excitability the performance must bring out in him. A quick peck on the cheek, and he whispered, “Let’s make this look nice and juicy.”

One hand went around my hip, the other snaked up my back, between my shoulder blades, and he dipped me, the crowd seeing mostly his body and my legs.

The roar made me go out of my mind.

And when he let go, I fled out the side door.

Maybe Sam wasn’t the only one who could just walk away when it was all too much.

Chapter Two

Sam

Unh
.
Gasp. Uhn. Gasp.
I shifted on the couch and turned over, shoving my face into the back of it, trying to block out the sun. Trevor and Joe had a great place here on the Fenway, but I could do without the soundtrack.
Uhn. Gasp.

A door creaked open and I heard Trevor mumble, “Where the fuck is the extra lube?”

I rolled my eyes and turned enough to wedge my entire face into the corner of the couch. Oh, God. Again? It didn’t help that I woke up with morning wood and the last time that I’d actually been with a woman...well, let’s just say I was dating Pamela Handerson or Jennifer Handiston. I had been arguing with Harry Longfellow. Strangling Patrick Stewart. And it made me feel like Hand Solo.

“Right there,” I heard Darla groan.

The bathroom door slammed and Trevor’s feet pounded on the floor as if he were running, and then, I heard the unmistakable sound of bedsprings. Did he just launch himself onto the bed? I crammed the pillow over my head. In my dark little cave I could still hear the sounds of obvious hotness. So, while my friends were acting out something out of an amateur YouPorn video, I was sitting here on the couch with an aching dick and no end in sight.

Amy
. Her name flashed through my head and damn, if the morning wood didn’t grow from a twig to a Goddamn log. She’d disappeared last night, out of the blue. Darla had come up on stage and then
poof!
Amy was gone. I didn’t know what that meant—not that I had a right to know what that meant.

Some sort of slapping sound hit the wall and the bedsprings creaked in a steady pattern. Jesus Christ, this was one macrobeat I did
not
need to hear. Whenever Darla was over here they went at it like ferrets, or bunnies, or whatever rodent goes at it a lot. At least twice a day, usually more. Who the hell has the stamina? Who was I kidding? I had that kind of stamina. I just didn’t have a girlfriend. Amy. Dammit! What was she doing there last night?

“
Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!”
came a feminine chant from the bedroom.

I flung the blanket off of me, threw the pillow against the wall where it smacked with an utterly unsatisfactory sound, and slammed my way into the bathroom down the hall. Peeing was like pulling a tight slot machine lever, I had to use a hell of a lot of forearm force to keep it down or I was gonna end up with splatter in my face.

Morning rituals complete, I wandered back into the kitchen and opened the fridge to see what I had to eat for breakfast. My share of the food consisted of two eggs, and a half a quart of chocolate milk. I shrugged. Better than nothing. Finding a dish was more challenging than figuring out what to eat.

“Get the one with the tickler,” Darla said, the walls impossibly thin here. I shuddered.

A sauté pan caked on with something that probably had been cooked four days ago was on top of the heap of dishes. Joe and Trevor didn’t have a dishwasher—I supposed that, technically,
I
was the dishwasher, considering the fact that they weren’t charging me any rent to couch surf. It probably was the best thing to do. I pulled the plates, and cups, and pans out, stacked them neatly, put them back in and filled the sink with hot water and soap, letting everything soak before I tackled them.

This gave me the chance to set the nasty sauté pan filled with hot water and soap on the counter, give it five minutes and I’d be able to start eating. The chocolate milk, thank God, wasn’t rancid, so at least I filled my stomach before setting down on my bed—that would be the couch—to wait for the water to do its job. That gave me five minutes to obsess about Amy, not that I needed an excuse to think about her. The events of four and a half years ago came slamming through my mind,
boom, boom, boom,
like paintballs, multicolored and painful.

Slap. Slap. Slap.
It sounded like someone’s upper body was being flung against the wall. Why did they have to do it right there? The wall that they were sexually bitch-slapping was the one right behind the kitchen sink.

“No, you climb on top,” a guy’s voice said, I couldn’t tell whether it was Joe or Trevor, and I didn’t want to know. I grabbed my pillow and just curled it around the back of my head, my palms pressing against my ears.

Amy. Amy. Amy
. That long brown hair, her sweet smile, that intense gaze when she was laser-focused on something. Why hadn’t she come up on stage and said something to me?
You stupid idiot
, I thought,
of course she’s not going to do that. You’re the one who blew it
. Four and a half years and I hadn’t spoken to her, nothing. It was as if she didn’t exist. All of that anger, and resentment, and confusion, and desire from four and a half years ago...it turns out, hadn’t really gone away.

The anger had, the resentment, too. It was what had happened when I went home and saw Dad that made me never contact with her again. It had absolutely nothing to do with her—that was the kicker. It was my own shame. All me. Knowing her, she assumed that it was all about her, and bridging that was like asking me to go to the moon on a pogo stick.

Joe rounded the corner, naked, ass muscles rippling as I caught him out of the corner of my eye before I could quickly turn away and close my lids, wincing. “Jesus, Ross, do you have to parade that shit around?”

“Sorry.” I could tell from his tone of voice that he wasn’t. “We just need some food.”

I could hear the refrigerator door open. He grabbed something, slammed it shut, and padded away. And then, the unmistakable sound of a can of whipped cream being discharged. “I’ll get a yeast infection if you put it
there!
” I heard Darla say.

My stomach tightened and I cringed.

“How about there?” I heard one of the guys say.
Sshfft!

“
Oh
, that’s nice,” she moaned.

I walked to the window and stared out over the rooftops. Joe and Trevor had a fourth floor apartment in one of those brick blocks that littered Allston, where all the students were crammed in. God, I needed my own place. I reached in my back pocket for that card Liam had given me last night, pulled it out. Entertainment, huh?

I found my smartphone—even when you’re stone cold broke, you’ve got $35 a month for a basic plan—and dialed the number. I got a machine, some woman, so I left a message just saying that Liam had given me her number, and that I was interested in applying for the job. Entertainment... probably some DJ thing, or helping set up and break down for a crew, whatever. I didn’t care. I needed money.

I wasn’t exactly a trust fund kid. Dad had cut me off in more ways than just financial the day I lost that debate to Amy. I’d moved out and pinged between Trevor and Joe’s houses. Both had been nice enough—or, at least, their parents had been nice enough—to let me live out my senior year. My school district never knew. My dad apparently covered up the fact that I didn’t live at home. Couldn’t have the flock thinking that there was something wrong with their shepherd, right?

“You are a bull!” Darla shouted.

I looked at the counter, reached in my front pocket; three bucks and a debit card for an account with $17 left in it. We wouldn’t get paid for last night’s gig for at least a month. Fuck! I grabbed some earbuds, shoved the cord into my phone and found whatever the first song was on my playlist. The combination of Black Sabbath, Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Nickelback could kill anything, could override whatever tortured fun was taking place in the other room. All I could do this morning was scrub that pan, make my eggs, and wait.

Amy

The thing about living in the city is that everything is
right there
. You can walk out of your front door and hop on the T to some other part of the city or across the river to Cambridge. You can walk a block and hit three different restaurants of three different ethnicities. Fifteen different buskers playing eleven different instruments can give you music free—of course, they’d love it if you throw them some sort of recompense for their effort and I tried, until I finally figured out that I wasn’t able to help everybody.

That was a major revelation for me—not the busker part. The idea that you can’t help everybody.

This morning I was avoiding my mom’s early morning call—ever since I moved out she made it a point to call at least once a day and text a couple times. Nothing had changed. Everything was about my nineteen year old brother. Evan this and Evan that and Evan.
Evan. Evan. Evan
.

Evan was the golden boy—and had been for years—except, how many golden boys are on their second year of detox? This was our family secret. You see, Mom was the high school guidance counselor and having a son with an addiction problem was something that she just didn’t want to admit. Of course, having him show up at school drunk his senior year made it really hard to remain Cleopatra—the Queen of Denial.

I’d known since he was eleven or twelve when he’d find older eighth and ninth graders to supply him with beer from their older brothers and sisters. He’d even tried me but there was no way—I was the good little girl. I didn’t
do
that. And besides, who would I go to? I didn’t even know who the drug dealers were at school or who could hook you up with a six pack of beer.

That was a world I had no interest in. My nose was in a book, on the Internet doing research, and involved in academic pursuits. That’s where I excelled—that’s where I was Mrs. Smithson’s daughter. The good little girl. Maybe I ruined it for Evan—I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly going to let myself be wracked with guilt over that considering the fact that he was first caught drunk when he was twelve and ever since then, for the past six years, two out of three sentences that came out of my mom’s mouth involved the word
Evan.