Unleashed (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (40 page)

“I’m the last.”

I look at Jess, my best friend. She’s sitting at my computer table tapping away on chat. “What’s that?” she asks, but she doesn’t turn around to look at me.

“I’m the last of our group.”

Now she turns, eyebrow cocked, and a look of curiosity on her face. “Are you talking about sex?”

“Yeah,” I say. I break eye-contact with her. I am embarrassed by it. I don’t know why I should be – I’m nineteen, and it’s not like that’s too old – but I am.

“Babe,” she says, wheeling the chair up to me and putting her hands on my knees. “Don’t stress about it too much. It’s not really a big deal.”

“Isn’t it?” I ask, scrunching up my brow. “What if I’m a twenty-eight year-old virgin when I finally get a boyfriend, and I have no idea what to do?”

“Honey,” she says, pointing a finger at me. “Most guys don’t know what to do. They think they do, but they don’t.”

“And what if he does?”

She pauses, pushes her lips together. I can see the cogs whirring in her mind. She’s trying to figure out who I’m talking about. But she can’t, and she won’t. She’d never suspect it. It’s been a few days since Chance and I were down at the beach…

“Are you going out with somebody?” she asks coyly, a tentative smile pulling at her lips.

I feel my ears grow red. “No, of course not.”

“Cassie, you worry about things too much. Why are you such a worrier? Why can’t you just be like normal people and not care about everything so much?”

“Normal people care about things, Jess.”

“Wrong!” she chirps, wheeling the chair back around to the computer table. I can see that the plastic wheels are creating new scratches on the wooden tiles, but I don’t really care.

“What do you mean ‘wrong’?”

“You worry more than usual. Maybe you need to see a professional about that.” She snorts, so I snort back louder.

“Right. Hey, look, I’m trying to talk to you about something here.”

Now she turns around again, but this time she’s not playing anymore, and I’m glad. Jess can be dismissive sometimes, but she does always seem to know when to stop kidding around.

“What’s bothering you, Cassie? Why don’t you just tell me?”

“I’m just… worried, that’s all. I won’t know what to do.”

“Well, have you watched porn?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Well, forget everything you saw,” Jess says, raising a finger. “Porn is made for guys, and it’s not how real sex is. Real sex is slower, more personal. It’s not as loud – well, most of the time, I guess – and you’re not expected to bend yourself into positions that look painful.”

“I know all that,” I say, shaking my head at her. “But I mean, like, okay, I’ll be honest. Sometimes I worry about… you know… how to proceed. Like, is there a cue? How do you know when to move from one—”

“Oh, jeez, girl, it’s not like that. It’s not robotic.”

“Well, can you tell me about your first time? Did it hurt?”

She pauses, looks up at the ceiling while she remembers. “No, not really. I mean, maybe at the beginning. We used lots of lubricant.”

“And?”

She shrugs. “It was pretty good, actually.” I can see a smile starting to form on her face, and it makes me feel at more of a disadvantage. I can talk circles around Jess when it comes to history or economics or even mathematics, but when she says it’s ‘good’, I have no idea what she means.

I hate that.

“Well can you explain it?”

“It’s just good, Cass. It feels good, you know? It wasn’t his first time, and he knew to take it slow.”

“Dave?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?” I frown. “It wasn’t his first time?” I can hardly believe it. I’m not about to say mean things about my best friend’s boyfriend, but to me, Dave was definitely
not
a catch.

“No. That’s what he said, anyway.”

“Does that bother you?”

“It used to,” Jess says. “When we first got together it did. But then I realized there was no point in being jealous.”

“So, can you tell me anything else? Like, did he go down on you?” The question just spills out of me, and before I know it I’ve got my hand on my mouth. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have. I know it’s personal—”

She nods. “He did.”

“And?”

“And it was nice.”

“Nice, good… don’t you have better adjectives?”

“There’s not really a word that describes it, Cass. Pleasurable, yeah. But also nice. The most important thing is that you are comfortable. If you’re not, then how can you expect to enjoy it? It’s the same with everything. Don’t worry about what to do, don’t treat it like a checklist. It’s not. Just do whatever. That’s the beauty of it.”

I sigh. “It’s just… you know, overhearing the boys talking about it at school.”

“Oh, fuck the boys,” Jess snaps, before we meet eyes and start grinning and giggling. “Not like that, I mean fuck what they all said. Most of them are lying, anyway. So… are you thinking of, um—”

“No, don’t be silly. I’m going to England soon, anyway. I’ll be touring LSE’s campus with my dad after he gets back from…
Vegas
. At least… that was the plan. I sure hope he remembers it.”

“Well, you might meet an English boy.”

“Shut up.”

“I can’t believe you got into LSE. I’m so jealous that you’re practically going to be living in
London!”

I can’t help myself. I laugh. She’s absolutely right. It
is
exciting. I can’t believe it myself. Living in London!

Small , winding cobbled streets, red double-deckers, tea and crumpets, all the strange accents… basically every stereotype they play up on television here I’m about to experience… for
three
years, and maybe more.

“You’re really lucky,” Jess says. “I mean, I know you worked for it, but you’re really lucky.”

“You should come and visit me. I’ll probably be staying in a cute little townhouse or something, with housemates, and you can experience the English weather they keep talking about. We can have
tea and biscuits
in the back garden. What do you say?”

Jess stalls, and I know that my invite is the kind of open-ended one that friends make to each other without any real promise. But still, I can’t help myself but ask her.

“Maybe,” she says. “I’d love to visit. I’d love to travel.”

“You should come. From the UK we can just take the train to Paris! And after that, we can travel around Europe if we like. It’ll be great.”