Page 13 of A Little Too Late
“We all want to know why you’re dressed to kill, and why you look guilty as h—” Raven glances toward the child in the room, who’s speed-eating a brownie and listening to the grownups’ conversation with every fiber of her being. “—heck,” Raven finishes. “Spit it out already.”
“It’s not, uh, an appropriate topic of conversation,” I say, and then instantly realize my mistake when Callie takes the empty plate from her daughter’s hands and points toward the staircase.
“Teeth. PJs. Now.”
“You always send me to bed at theworsttimes,” Sutton grumbles. But she’s a good girl, so she heads for the stairs andtrots upward. A moment later, we hear the bathroom door close with a firm click.
Three women turn to me. “Out with it,” Raven whispers with a toss of her dark hair. “Did something interesting happen between you and Reed?”
“Not today,” I whisper back.
There is a collective gasp, and Halley pats the sofa cushion. “Sit right down. You don’t get to have frozen pink wine until you start talking.”
Oh boy. That’s a dilemma, because Callie’s frosé is pretty fantastic. I sit down on the couch with a sigh. “Fine. Junior year. Ceramics class at Middlebury College.” I already knew who Reed was by the time we first spoke. If he hadn’t sat down beside me, I never would have had the guts to approach him myself. But then luck put me in his path. “He couldn’t get the hang of pottery. We, uh, bonded over it.”
Everyone’s eyes light up like Christmas trees. “Ohhhhh,” Halley says on a sigh. “Please tell me you reenacted that sexy scene fromGhost.”
“N-not exactly,” I stammer.
They let out a whoop, and the bathroom door flies open. “What did I miss?” Sutton yells through a mouthful of toothpaste foam.
“Nothing!” Halley says, smiling sweetly.
After Sutton disappears again, Callie puts a glass full to the brim with pink wine slushy into my hand. “Quick,” she says. “What does ‘not exactly’ mean?”
“It means…” I take a fortifying sip and wonder how I could ever put into words the way Reed and I were together. “Until Reed, I thought I was an awkward girl. I thought it was a permanent condition. But then we justclicked, right from the first time we sat next to each other in that art studio. And then…” I break off again, because the truth is that I can’teven remember what we talked about the second day when the teacher introduced the pottery wheel.
We had both struggled with it. But the struggle had been fun. Every moment of it. “We spent a couple of classes getting to know each other while we tried to get the clay to behave. Then he asked me to come over after class to share a pizza.”
“Oh baby,” Raven whispers, her eyes wide.
I guess my face tells the whole story. “We had sex on his coffee table before the delivery guy even showed up,” I whisper. “And we didn’t stop for a year.”
There is a beat of deep silence.
“Holy crap!” Halley hisses. “It’s always the quiet ones.”
“Wow, Ava,” Callie says under her breath. “I would never have guessed you were a wild child in college.”
I take another sip of the miracle that is Callie’s frosé, and I realize it’s still hard for me to believe, even though I lived it. The time I spent with Reed feels like a dream I once had.
Where did I get the nerve?
Confidence with men was never my strong suit. But that first day—in the stairwell of Reed’s dorm—he’d taken my hand. And when he’d led me into his single, I still hadn’t let go of it.
That’s all it takes, I’d think later. When you find The One, you take his hand, and you don’t let go. It had felt so natural when he’d leaned in to take my mouth in a slow kiss, before even getting around to flipping on the lights.
Then we were just…gone. I’d thought I had some experience with boys. But I’d been wrong. Reed had kissed me with the crackling heat of a well-built campfire. He’d kissed me with his mouth and his hands and his whole soul until I felt weak in the knees.
I’d put my hands under his T-shirt.
He’d pushed me down on the sofa.
Our clothes began to come off in quick succession. “Is this okay?” he’d asked as he’d unzipped my jeans.
“Yes,” I’d breathed. “Yes.”
It had occurred to me to slow things down, just to enjoy the moment. But neither one of us could manage it. We kept upping the ante. I’d popped the button on his jeans, and he’d kicked them off. He’d unhooked my bra and had thrown it aside. I’d yanked his boxers off and shamelessly palmed his dick, while he’d hissed his approval.
