Free Let Me Be the One by Lily Foster

back into the truck, me in the driver’s seat, he nodded his head and looked at me knowingly.  “So you do want to know after all, huh?  Sure you can handle it?”
    That playful feeling left me then. “No, Tom, I probably can’t.  But you can tell me about just o ne.  Tell me about your first.”
    He took my hand and kissed my palm tenderly.  “Come on, let me take you to lunch.  This story is pretty entertaining but I don’t think I ca n tell it on an empty stomach.”
    We sat in a diner not far from campus and Tom o rdered enough food to feed five people.  My brothers were the same—they could eat mountains of food but it never showed.  He ate and ate.  “Are you stalling, Tom?”
    “Nope,” he said as he popped another french fry in his mouth.  When he caught my doubtful look he asserted, “I’m not!  But I’ve only told this story once before so if I tell you it stays in the vault, ok?  It’s a little embarras sing.”
    I motioned to cross my heart and couldn’t help the g rin spreading across my face. 
    “So after Charlie, you know all that, I really wasn’t into the whole high school social scene until the begi nning of my junior year.  Then it was like all of a sudden a light turned on; I noticed the girls and I noticed that the girls were into me.  And I can empathize with your boy, Matt, I kind of felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get me some soon.  So there was the making out, groping and all, but I only knew ‘good girls’ like Darcy Donovan,” he smiled as he leaned over and fed me a french fry.  “No one was giving it up.  So my junior prom is coming up and I decide to ask this girl, Amy Price.  You know why I asked her, right?”
    “Easy?”
    He smiled and cringed, “Yeah.  She had just broken up with her boyfriend who was a freshman in college ,” he raised his eyebrows and nodded knowingly. “Figured she was definitely putting out.”
    “And did she?”
    “ Oh yeah, and I got a little more than I bargained for.”
    He was laughing then and didn’t go on until I gently kicked his shin under the ta ble.  “Come on, spill it, Tom!”
    “Okay, okay.  So after the dance, Dylan is throwing this crazy house party.  You’ll meet him soon.  He’s great.  He’s the guy in school who has the tricked-out house with every bell and whistle—hot tubs, pool table, you name it.  And his parents always seem to be out of town at these very opportune times.  So he’s having this party, everyone’s there.  All I want to do, though, is get Amy upstairs.”
    “What a dog.”
    “I know.  I’m not proud of myself but hey, I was a horny, nearly seventeen year-old boy.”
    “So?”
    “So she’s willing and able.  She was my age but you know those people who just seem light years older and wiser than you?  Amy was like that; I was a boy, she was a woman.  So basically, I’m doing everything I can to concentrate and not…,” he paused and smiled wide as he looked at me, “shoot my load before things even get started.”
    I couldn’t help but laugh and squeeze his hand for moral support.  I could imagine him as a scared, ner vous, fumbling kid with this worldly chick.  I knew a few girls in high school that sounded like Amy.  “So how was it?  Everything you dreamed of and more?”
    “Hard to describe.  It felt incredible on the one hand, just incredibl e, but then, a little stressful.  Like I said, it was taking an awful lot of mental effort for me to last.  I didn’t want Amy laughing at me; I knew I was being compared to a college guy and Amy didn’t know she was my first.”  He looked like he was smiling wistfully, fully back in that memory.  “So just when I think I have this great rhythm going—yeah, I’m feeling great—Amy goes and…,” he closes his eyes shut tight and shakes his head. “I can’t.”
    I grab his hands again, laughing. “What. Did. She. Do . Tom?”
    He leaned in close to me and whispered, “She pokes her