But I’d managed to not only graduate with honors, I’d also managed to keep my fuckin’ hands to myself when all I wanted was to snatch her into my arms and declare her as mine.
“I know that we’re just friends,” she hesitated.
I stopped swinging too to look at her.
A knot of something exciting and dreadful started to fill my chest.
Was she…
“I have a proposition for you,” she licked her lips.
I stood up and faced her, not able to handle what she was about to say next without seeing her face.
“What?” I pushed.
“I know that you’re going to be a top dog in the Air Force. And I know that you don’t want to come back here. Not any time soon anyway. But…” She bit her lip. “I… shit.”
“You’re driving me fuckin’ nuts,” I told her.
She blurted. “I want you to take my virginity.”
I’d expected something like that to come out of her mouth. The only problem was, expecting it and preparing for it were two separate things.
“We have one more night together,” she said. “And when you come back for Easton’s graduation, and I happen to be here, too… I want to do it all over again.”
“Are you talking about me and you using each other when we’re around each other?” I asked carefully. “From now on?”
She swallowed. “It’s hard to trust people.”
Yeah, it sure the fuck was.
“And I want to make sure that I’m safe. And I know that you’ll never do anything to put me in danger,” she continued. “And I trust you with my life… as well as this.”
“I don’t have a condom,” I said.
That was weak.
I could literally walk thirty seconds down the road and get a condom from the convenience store if I wanted to.
Which I did.
But she didn’t need to know that.
What she needed was to be convinced that this was a terrible, no good, very awful idea.
Yet… I couldn’t make myself do that.
I wanted this—her—way too much to ever tell her no.
It didn’t matter if this was the one final nail in my coffin of terrible ideas.
It didn’t matter if I was leaving tomorrow and wouldn’t see her for a year.
Nothing mattered but her.
Over the last year of knowing Beckham Spurlock, a lot of things had become abundantly clear to me.
The things that I thought mattered when I first started the school year? Those were inconsequential.
What mattered was standing right in front of me, looking at me like I was the answer to her prayers. The good guy that she wanted me to be, versus the bad guy that I knew that I was.
But I tried, nonetheless.
I tried to be good. I tried not to get into fights. I tried to get my homework done. I tried to get home at night before she would get worried.
Everything that I did, apparently, was to make sure that I was good enough for her.
And when it was time for me to sign on that dotted line, to give my life away to the United States Air Force for the next five years, I’d had my first moment of doubt since I’d decided that the Air Force was what I wanted to do with my life when I was fourteen.
The one thing that got me through everything—my way out—was now compromised by a beautiful blonde-haired girl that took my breath away and I couldn’t have.
“I have condoms,” she hesitated. “And I’m on birth control. I… I made sure that I was on it. That I had condoms. That you’d have no reason to back out of this. The risk of pregnancy is almost nil. Please.”
She didn’t have to beg.
I’d give her anything.
All she had to do was ask.
Hell, if she asked me to stay with her, to go to fuckin’ college with her, I’d go AWOL for her.
Seriously, I was that far gone for her.
“Beck,” I whispered huskily.
“Do you really want me to trust someone else with this?” she asked.
My heart all but stuck in my throat when I thought about that.
No, I sure the fuck did not trust anyone with that.
Just the idea of her with someone else sent a jealous rage through me.
Hell, just last month when I’d thought that she was going to the prom with someone else? That’d not gone well for me.
I’d shown up at that stupid fuckin’ prom, murder in my eyes, only to find her sitting at the table by herself.
When I plopped down next to her, all rage gone from my body, she’d smiled at me so fuckin’ huge that I’d all but melted.
Now, having her staring at me like she was, I knew that I couldn’t tell her no.
Wouldn’t.
But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t try to convince her.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I’m not a virgin. I’m not… you could find someone way better than me.”
I wished I’d waited for her. God, how I wished that I’d waited.