Hot as Puck(13)

Libby: Grrrr…







Laura: Don’t growl at me. I’m a friend. I come in peace.

And in puke.

God, I think I’m really going to puke…

Please forgive me before I have to make a run to the bathroom.







Libby: Fine, you’re forgiven.

Go puke. Text you later.







Laura: xoxox

*martini glass emoji*

*skull emoji*

*toilet emoji*







Libby: Indeed. xoxo





Chapter Six





Libby




I can never stay mad at Laura for long. She means well. And then there’s the fact that I’m a dirty, filthy liar who lies, a fact I’m reminded of every time Laura mentions helping me “get back in the saddle.”

The truth is that I’ve never been in the saddle, so I can’t very well hop back onto it.

Brett and I made it to third base and that’s it. By the time I was ready to go all the way, Brett was ready to take a vow of celibacy.

He broke the news the day after he went down on me for the first time, an act that he clearly found so repulsive that it left me with a lingering fear that there is something not right about my lady parts. No matter how many times I’ve checked things out with my hand mirror or compared my situation to the wide variety of poose available for viewing on the internet, I still have an irrational fear that I’m like the mouth of a giant evil sandworm down there. Like something from Beetlejuice or Tremors or other 1980s movies that combine the fear of massive toothed worms and things lurking beneath the sand for horrific effect.

It’s silly, but I can’t seem to help it.

So I suppose I should be grateful that Laura took it upon herself to get third party reassurance that my lady bits are shipshape. But the fact that my sister has picked up on my phobia without me having mentioned a word about it is so mortifying that I want to crawl under the covers and hide for a few years—or however long it takes to convince myself that my face isn’t silently telegraphing “I have concerns about the adorableness of my vagina.”

But I can’t hide. Justin will be here any second. He texted from the sandwich shop down the street just a few minutes ago, and I have to make sure I’m ready to hit the ground running as soon as he arrives.

Scurrying around my apartment, I get out the whiteboard and a set of multi-colored markers I use when I’m brainstorming lesson plan ideas, fetch my laptop in case Jus needs to pull up visual aids on the Internet, and track down the list of concerns and proposed areas of study I jotted down last night over a cup of Sleepy Time tea.

When the coffee table is prepped for lesson time, I glance down at my outfit—brown linen pants with ruffles at the bottom paired with a brown linen pinafore dress with a sheer, long-sleeved top underneath accessorized by chunky jewelry—and consider going to change into something sexier and less me. But in the end I decide to stay as I am. Roger and I rarely cross paths outside of work hours and these are the kind of clothes I wear to teach—professional and cute, but loose-fitting enough to facilitate sitting on the floor with a roomful of kindergarteners, helping clean up blocks and toys, and scooping Simone up under one arm and running her to the girls’ room down the hall when she inevitably waits too long to get in line for our classroom bathroom and is on the verge of an accident.

The poor kid. It’s hard being the youngest student in class. I was homeschooled until the ninth grade, but I vividly remember how mortified I was to learn that I was the only thirteen-year-old at Capital High. But at least I’d had Justin and Laura there to show me the ropes.

And now Jus is going to show you the ropes all over again. Except this time, he’s going to instruct you on the finer points of how to suck a man’s cock.

My cheeks flame at the thought. The only thing that keeps them from catching fire is the knowledge that we surely won’t get that far along in the lesson plan today. Like I tell my students, it’s best to put first things first, and there’s a lot of ground to cover before Jus and I get to anything below the belt. The valley of my ignorance is deep and wide, with acres of undiscovered country standing between me and anything that wild and uninhibited.

“And Roger might not even want to do things like that,” I murmur to myself as I put the kettle on and pluck another gardenia-peach tea bag from the box. I mean, surely not every guy foams at the mouth at the thought of a woman kissing him where he pees. That’s at least partly urban legend, right?

I’m about to trot into the living room to add that question to my list when the doorbell rings, setting my pulse to racing.

It’s time. He’s here.

I hurry to the door, anticipation and nerves mixing in my bloodstream. I try to tell myself it’s not a big deal, it’s just Justin, but then I open the door and he says, “Hey,” in this oddly husky voice and my pulse stutters before rushing even faster.