Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(108)

Oddly, she blushed. “I do get good evaluations.”

“You’re modest. They love you, right?”

“Most of the time, except when we do the personal-health unit—aka sex ed. Then I get the riled-up parents who think we should stick with abstinence education. But even with the parents getting ticked off, I really enjoy that section. We do it co-ed, and all the other science teachers hate it. The dread builds up all fall—the kids get squirrelly, the parents bitch. But I like it. We have great discussions, and by the end they’ve mostly stopped acting like Beavis and Butt-Head.”

Unlike me. I will apparently never outgrow that streak.

“Co-ed, huh? And you cover all the usual stuff with them?”

“What factors go into choosing birth control. The advantages of abstinence. When and why you should sleep with someone.”

“Huh.” He chuckled. “Out of curiosity, since I have the expert on hand, when should you sleep with someone?”

You should have slept with me on New Year’s Eve. But now you are a thousand miles away.

She felt the pivot point in the conversation, a moment of opportunity, a chance to ask questions and outline next steps and swing things, hard, toward where she wanted them to be.

But she wanted other things, too. She wanted to know what he’d been thinking on New Year’s Eve. What he’d thought about that night after he’d gone home. Whether he’d thought of her as he’d lain in bed, and whether he’d done anything about it. Whether he’d wanted to get in touch with her, whether he’d tried to get in touch. Whether he’d wanted to talk to her in the months since New Year’s, or whether he’d accepted with perfect equanimity that those fifteen minutes would always stand alone, like a column of light, in his history.

She wanted to know those big things and a thousand little things about him.

“Well, what I tell them is that you should be in a committed relationship or marriage, you should love the person, and you should use protection. And then I usually say, you should only sleep with someone when you know them well enough to be certain your feelings and your body are safe with them. And you need to be old enough to know what it means to you to be safe.”

Of course, she had felt safe with Henry. She had felt secure in his arms. She had felt singular and loved and cherished.

And she’d felt so terribly, terribly foolish to discover how far astray her gut had led her. Her cracked pride as sharp a pain as a broken bone.

“That’s very wise,” Miles said.

He didn’t try to maneuver them back toward the pivot point he’d created. Instead, he said, “Tell me things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“All kinds of things. About you. Where you were born. Your favorite food, your favorite color. How many siblings you have. What foods you like.”

So they were going to do this. They were going to get to know each other.

She wanted to ask him what this was a prelude to. Where this was leading. Instead, she asked, “If I tell you, will you tell me?”

Again, the crackle over the line of the double entendre, of their shared chemistry.

“Yeah,” he said. Rumbly and dark.

So she began, and they took turns.





Chapter 5


During their second conversation, they relived their middle- and high-school dating fiascos. Until she was snort-laughing.

“I can top that,” she said, when she caught her breath.

“Cannot,” he said. “I put my smutty love note in the wrong locker, but not just any wrong locker: the wrong locker belonging to a girl who actually had a crush on me. I defy you to top that.”

“I broke up with my boyfriend at the beginning of senior year. And the high school psychologist found me and took me aside and asked me to get back together with him because I was going to hurt his chances of getting into his first-choice college.”

“You made that up.”

“Swear to God, it’s true. I was standing next to my friend Sia at the time, and if you need corroboration, I’ll have her email you.”

“That’s … that’s—there are no words. What did you say to him?”

“I was totally flummoxed. I stammered something and slunk away.”

“Did you report him?”

“I did, but nothing happened. He’s probably still there, getting himself overly involved in seventeen-year-olds’ romantic lives.” She shuddered.

“Did you get back together with your boyfriend?”

“No. But he did get into his first-choice college. And I did email the school psychologist to point that out.”

He laughed. “You’re not scared of anything, are you?” No reason that should please her so much.