Free Snark and Stage Fright by Stephanie Wardrop

life—Cassie’s the connoisseur of male torsos in my family—but the sight of his chest and abdomen made me suck in my breath. Of course, I’d seen him shirtless before, having been in his pool and on the beach with him now many times, but somehow this was different. Being on this bed in this room, alone, made me feel like I’d just drunk a lot of champagne really fast, bubbly and giddy.
    When I didn’t rip my own shirt off with equal speed, he chided, “Your turn, Georgie. Tit for tat,” before placing his mouth on my neck again.
    “I can’t believe you just made an off-color pun.” I gasped while I still had breath enough; the feeling of his fingers gently freeing each of the buttons on my shirt was making me dizzy. While my brain and my heart were still debating each other about the wisdom of the Big Night Together, the rest of my body had already voted “yes.”
    When I was shirtless and more than a little self-conscious, he let out a ragged exhale, saying, “You’re so beautiful, George. You really are.”
    And then I wasn’t conscious of anything anymore except the amazing warmth of skin against skin and the feel of my fingers gliding all over his torso.
    “I love you,” I blurted out when he was kissing his way across the lace edge of my bra.
    He stopped and looked up at me, dark eyes hooded, and said, “I love you, too.”
    “I’ve never felt like this,” I said as he guided me down onto the bed and looked down at me, eyes incandescent. I cupped his face with my hand and admitted, “It’s a little scary.”
    He nodded and took my hand from his face and kissed my fingers and I swear almost burst into flames. He said, “I know. But it’s also more than a little awesome.”
    I pulled him down with me and we kissed, our bodies curling and twining around one another, touching and exploring. I didn’t think human flesh was capable of feeling this good. But at the exact moment his fingers fumbled with the button fly of my shorts, I heard a thump on the stairs down the hall and I bolted upright, my heart pounding like I’d been caught breaking into someone’s house.
    “What was that?” I gasped.
    Michael’s voice was muffled when he said, “Probably just my parents, going to bed.”
    When I looked down at him, he looked disheveled and sleepy, his eyes heavy-lidded, hair tousled from my twisting it in my hands, his lips a little swollen from all the kissing, and I swallowed hard. Somehow in the delirium of touch, I had managed to forget that his parents, two adults whom I may respect perhaps more than any two people on the planet, were one floor away from us, a matter of yards, really. However great I had felt in the loss of self-consciousness that comes when you are focused only on your body, on feeling, that was gone now, run off like a small animal that had scurried off the bed and under the closed door and down the hallway. I tugged a piece of hair over my ear and whispered, “I don’t think we should do this.”
    He looked stunned for a second, and then a shadow of recognition passed over his face. He smiled and took my hand.
    “It’s okay. I came prepared. I’ve got something in my room. I’ll go get it.”
    “It’s not, um, protection I’m concerned about,” I sighed. “It’s your parents.” He sat up. And he didn’t look happy.
    “What about my parents?”
    “Weeelll, I don’t know how they would feel about this,” I faltered, gesturing to indicate our bodies on the bed. He frowned and rubbed his right eye with the back of his hand. I explained, “I’ve messed up so much on this trip—and I just want to be a good guest. I want to … respect what your parents would want, what they’d find … appropriate, I guess.” I sounded lame even to myself. So much for my brief reign as a sex goddess.
    “They won’t care. Trust me. They’ll be happy that we’re happy.”
    “How do you know that, though?”
    He covered his face with one arm and groaned. “Because I know,