Chapter One
Harlow Raine
Age 18
* * *
A young woman determined to make
her steamiest teenage dreams come true…
* * *
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman newly turned eighteen, with a few grotesquely cheap beers in her belly, will want to pounce her best friend’s older brother.
Okay, so maybe that isn’t a “universal truth,” but it’s my truth.
I’ve had a crush on Derrick Olsen since I needed help tying my shoes. And yes, I was nearly ten by the time I finally mastered the skill—why are laces still a thing when Velcro is readily available?—but still…
That’s a long time to crush on a guy who has no clue you’re alive.
Oh, he knows you’re alive, he just isn’t super excited about it.
Wrinkling my nose at the inner voice, I tip my red Solo cup back, taking another gulp of liquid courage as I watch Derrick laughing with some of his high school friends around the bonfire.
Thanks to the combination of the flames and a full moon glowing in a cloudless, spring sky, I can make out every detail of his perfectly structured face. His cheekbones are a little sharper than they were when he still lived at home—he’s twenty-six now and what little baby fat he had left on him as a teen is long gone—but his lips are still a perfectly-shaped love poem and his dark eyes glitter with that mixture of intelligence and sarcasm that sets my panties on fire.
I could stare at the man for hours.
Meanwhile, he barely spared me a second glance as he passed the lawn chairs where my friends and I are camped out by Leslie’s car.
He stopped just long enough to glare into the darkness—no doubt checking to make sure Evie, his little sister and my bestie, wasn’t out after midnight along with me since she still has a curfew. Then he lifted a hand, nodded, and went to join the older set around the fire without so much as a “Hey, Harlow, how’s it hangin’?”
But I probably shouldn’t take it personally.
The Olds don’t usually hang out with The Youngs at field parties.
In a town as small as ours, it isn’t unusual for all the singles from fifteen to thirty to end up at the same after-hours party once the bars close, but in the name of keeping shit decent, people usually stick with their own demographic. And if they don’t—like when twenty-nine-year-old Ronald Meyer got caught with his hand up a sixteen-year-old’s sweater—the rest of the older set steps in to remedy the situation.
We’re a close-knit community. We watch out for each other, and no one wants to see our party field shut down by the police because a few creepers don’t understand the age of consent.
I have no doubt that if Derrick saw me sneaking into the shadows by the creek, where couples go to make out, with an older guy, he’d rush to intervene and make sure I’m okay. But there’s no way in hell he’d ever be that guy.
For starters, he still thinks of me as a child, not a woman.
I don’t see him nearly as often now that he’s graduated from college and started a high-stress job, helping manage New York’s newest NHL team, but when our paths do cross, I don’t so much as register on his radar. His eyes skim right over me without seeing that I have breasts and hips and a semi-feral, permanently lusty shimmer in my eyes.
I’m pretty sure it’s unusual for a girl to be this horny all the time—none of my girlfriends seem to suffer from my affliction—but maybe it’s just another one of those things that women are socialized to keep quiet about. Like periods and big ambitions and how nice it is to let your leg hair grow out in the winter.
Either way, I tend to connect with the boy characters in teen movies more than the girls. I’m the one having graphic sex fantasies in AP Calculus and getting weirdly turned on by the anatomically correct peen drawing in my biology book. I’m the one who spends way too much time in the shower and who has a collection of dirty gifs on my phone I use for…inspiration while I’m touching myself under my covers at night.