Free Return to Us by Julie Cross

doing?”
    “Looking…”
    “Looking for what… ?” Oh… looking .
    His lips touch mine, kissing me quickly. “Relax. I’m just making this easier on you.”
    Easier? I give him a few seconds to… um… look and I pull his hand from my eyes. “Jordan, that whole deal thing earlier… I was just trying to help, but—”
    He kisses me again, stopping me. “I know, it’s okay. I promise to keep my promise no matter what.”
    This isn’t going right. I’m gonna have to be more direct. More honest. “I want to do this. Even before the whole ‘let’s make a deal’ plan, I wanted to do whatever is next. For me.”
    Tension I hadn’t even noticed a few seconds ago dissolves from his face. “Really?”
    “I have no clothes on,” I remind him.
    He rests a hand on my cheek, studying me. “Then why are your hands shaking and why do you look like you’re going to cry again?”
    As if to prove his point, a single tear slips down my cheek. It’s hard to explain the crying part. I think it’s a combination of things I just said outside of this tent and the emotion behind it. I need him. I really need him. And that’s difficult for someone like me to admit and at the same time, it’s a blessing. Loving someone that hard means I’m not alone.
    But I don’t want to say all these things right now. I’m not sure the words would come out right. So I wipe the tear from my cheek and say, “I’m a girl, Jordan. Crying at random times is pretty common. And I spend so many hours doing something I’m good at. Not knowing what I’m doing throws me off my game.”
    He smiles. “You have a game?”
    “Yes, I have a game.” I move his hand from my face and use it to cover his eyes. I sit up on my knees and take a deep breath, before pulling my gaze from his face to… well, lower. He must have heard my nervous inhale because he’s trying not to laugh. “What? I’m getting the part that makes me most nervous over with. Aren’t you at least a little apprehensive about the fact that I’m seeing you naked?”
    “I already told you my parts are in perfect working order. I have nothing to hide.”
    Is he really that confident? Having nothing to hide is the part I’m most afraid of. And I wonder who will answer all these questions that have already started rolling into my brain since we stripped down minutes ago? Topics like puberty, boys, and sex are all subjects I’ve discussed in great detail with my mom on several occasions and it was never awkward or uncomfortable for either of us. But even if she were still here, I’m not sure I’d be able to ask her the things I want to know. Before, it was all hypothetical, all something I’d do or deal with in another lifetime. The second I started seeing myself experiencing everything with Jordan, it became a potential reality and it’s like if I open my mouth to ask a question it will become a personal inquisition rather than a hypothetical discussion. Even with Jordan, talking about this stuff was way easier when I couldn’t fathom the possibility of me and him ever being… us .
    But I’m not completely naïve either. I’ve seen pictures, I’ve read books. I understand the basics of what things are supposed to look like and how they operate. I’ve even read scenarios where characters are going through the same relationship steps that I’m going through right now. I think about Kath and Michael in Forever . She got nervous about not knowing what to do, how to touch him, just like me. She compared his anatomy to descriptions from romance novels and found the reality to be much less intimidating. I’ve always wanted to have an experience similar to that because it felt okay to be bad at things. At first, anyway. Though I’m really hoping that if Jordan has named his penis, he doesn’t share that information with me.
    “You haven’t fallen asleep, have you?” Jordan asks. “That would not be good for my ego.”
    I laugh and rest a hand on his stomach so he