French kiss Read Online Free

Holly finished, grinning. Her face flushed.
    Tyler nodded, swallowing hard, his eyes on the road. "Practice," he affirmed.
    23
    "Practice" was Holly and Tyler's secret code word for fooling around. It made sense, Holly reasoned, since the rest of their lives revolved around other, regular kinds of practice, like track and lacrosse.
    This, though, was practice for something truly exciting.
    When Holly had first started dating Tyler after spring break last year, she'd assumed -- based on information she'd read in Seventeen -- that he'd start pressuring her to have sex right away. But Tyler had taken things deliciously slow, progressing to new levels on a month-by-month basis: April had been about serious kissing; in May, he'd unbuttoned her shirt for the first time; in June, they'd carefully progressed to the undoing-the-belt-buckle stage. One cool evening in October, Tyler's parents had miraculously been away at a wedding and Holly's parents miraculously hadn't been calling her cell every twenty seconds. They were lying half clothed on Tyler's bed when Holly, feeling brave and hopeful and terrified, turned in his arms and whispered in his ear the truth that had been nagging at her for a while: She was a virgin.
    Holly had actually been cool with her virgin status -- before Tyler, she'd hardly given it a second thought -- until her best friend, Meghan, passed her a Twist article in Italian class. The article claimed that,
    24
    apparently, seventeen-year-old virgins were as rare as, say, spotted owls in North America. An endangered species. I am a freak, Holly had decided, feeling horrified and forgetting the fact that Meghan, Jess, and most of her friends fell into that very same category.
    But when she'd made her big confession to Tyler, he'd simply pulled her in closer and murmured that he didn't mind; they could wait as long as she wanted, and he himself had only ever been with one girl, which, when you thought about it, barely even counted.
    When Holly thought about it, though, she realized that the one girl Tyler referred to was Alexa St. Laurent. Tyler never spoke about Alexa, but Holly knew that the two of them had dated for most of junior year. Holly had practically grown up with Alexa, and especially since their bonding experience in South Beach last year, thought of her as a semi-sister. Holly was certain that Alexa didn't care about Tyler anymore. But sometimes the whole tangled web of connections still bothered her.
    Tyler had been as good as his word: He never pressured Holly. But that Friday night, as he parked the car on a secluded dead-end street, under a thick canopy of trees, Holly felt a tingling -- part desire, part regret -- in her belly. She wished that Tyler wouldn't always be quite so patient. She wished she
    25
    weren't flying off to London as a seventeen-year-old endangered-species. It was funny, but in recent months, Holly had been feeling more like the aggressor, while Tyler was the one who held back -- as if they'd switched standard boy-girl roles.
    True to form, it was Holly who undid her seat belt first and reached for Tyler, drinking in another one of his knee-weakening kisses. Tyler's hands slid up her sides, over to the zipper on her fleece. Without breaking the kiss, he tugged off Holly's fleece and her black cotton cardigan until she was wearing only her red tank top. Holly drew back slightly to push Tyler's jacket off his broad shoulders and pull his hooded sweatshirt over his head, the better to admire his toned body. The windows were already fogged up, and they were only getting started.
    His breath hot against her skin, Tyler planted kisses all up Holly's freckle-dusted collarbone and her neck until his lips reached her ear, which he nibbled on gently. Tyler knew the sensation was one of Holly's favorites. She sighed appreciatively and twined her arms around his neck, breathing in his crisp, clean scent; no matter how hot and bothered Tyler Davis got, he always smelled like fresh soap.