Last Stand Read Online Free Page A

fuzzy blue velvet inside the box.
     
    “If you don’t like it, I can take it back and you can choose something else.”
     
    Could I sound like a bigger dweeb? I can just hear Keira’s reaction. She’d say,
if she already told you it’s gorgeous, why in the world are you offering to return it? Take a girl at her word!
     
    Amber blinks, then smiles at me. “Never. It’s perfect. I’ll wear it all the time.”
     
    She takes it out of the box and asks me to hold her hair out of the way while she fastens it. Once it’s on, she wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me, long and slow and soft. It’s quiet; I can’t even hear the television upstairs. Just me and Amber and the low hum of the DeWitt’s air conditioning. Like no one could ever disturb us down here.
     
    She must have the same feeling, because she slides her hands down my back, then eventually around to the front to play with the button on my shorts again.
     
    I want to stop her, but I don’t want to, either. The sensation of her fingernails running along my waist, then lower, just below my belly button, is driving me nearly over the edge. I think I’m going to combust, but in a very, very good way.
     
    I know she can tell, since she’s sitting in my lap, but it’s not stopping her. I swallow hard and try to think of something else. Cars I might be able to afford. Ms. Lewis’s stupid syllabus. Ms. Lewis herself. But nothing’s easing the problem.
     
    Then Amber maneuvers my shorts down a few inches, so they’re barely covering me, and pushes me backward on the sofa, so she can get them the rest of the way down if she wants.
     
    “Amber, we can’t.” I tell her in between kisses. “If you keep…any more and I might come.”
     
    She smiles against my lips and moves her body—with her porno-mag worthy breasts—against me. Then she slips her fingers into the waistband of my underwear.
     
    “Really, Amber. We need to stop.” I can’t believe I’m saying what I’m saying to her—it’s bad enough I just used the word
come
in sentence out loud—but what’s my alternative? “If…well, it’ll make a mess. Your parents are gonna know.”
     
    And I don’t want to.
     
    When it gets right down to it, no matter how good this feels physically, my brain’s telling me it’s
wrong
. I can’t get a hand job in her parents’ basement. It was bad enough that she gave me one at Sophomore Blast last year, when we were hidden away in her tent. Okay,
good
, as in how it felt, but bad in the sense that we could have been discovered—by Meghan, who was sharing the tent, by one of the chaperones, by anyone who happened to stumble away from the annual sophomore class lakeside party. And bad in that when I realized what she really wanted then was to have sex, that the hand job wasn’t the destination, but a prelude to what Amber considered the main event, I squirreled my way out of there before she could say the words. I cut her off mid-
I want to…
and told her Griff was going to come looking for me because I’d promised to play on his team in the flag football game.
     
    “We’ll figure something out.” Her eyes lock onto mine, but her hands stay right where they are. “Toby, it’s our anniversary. I—I think today should be the day. I’ve been thinking about it for months, and Toby, we’re ready for this. We are.”
     
    “So you really—?” I can’t say the words, but it’s plain from her face that she’s planning on way more than a hand job tonight. That in her mind, we’re picking up where we left off in the tent.
     
    It felt all out of whack then. It feels out of whack now. Surreal.
     
    “That’s a big step,” I say.
     
    She’s a virgin. Connor pushed her, but she never went all the way with him. I know because she gave me all the details back when I was just her friend, hoping I could give her, in her words, “the guy’s perspective.”
     
    Like I’d have the slightest insight into a mind like Connor