Free The List by Anne Calhoun Page B

desire tinged with a now gut-deep jealousy through him. “It’s just a figure of speech,” he said mildly.
    “An interesting one. I didn’t lose anything.”
    “Fine. When was the first time you had sex?”
    “Proper sex? It was a step up from a toolshed. A very posh hotel room, actually. Smelled of expensive linen detergent and a stupidly big floral arrangement.”
    “Rory sprang for a hotel room?”
    She turned her face away to stare out the window. The rain was too steady to be showers but too light to be a storm, and he once again pondered the possibility that Tilda made the weather. Today she was quiet, still, reflective, and it seemed perfectly reasonable that water would coalesce into clouds, then shed their excess weight to let the entire city know Tilda Davies’s frame of mind. The curve of her jaw needed to be kissed, so he kissed it, then slid his hand to span the soft space between her hipbones. “Not Rory. Another student,” she said lightly. “Very careful with me. He didn’t rush, didn’t push. I set the pace.”
    “Not a typical teenage boy,” he said.
    The corner of her mouth he could see lifted. “No,” she said.
    “Are you still in touch with him?”
    “No. Are you still in touch with your first lover?”
    That word again. Lover. Maybe everything was more sophisticated in Tilda’s world, public schools and high-class stationery. Her eyes were the color of the sky beyond the trees, dark, cloudy, opaque.
    “Most people as intently curious as you can’t keep their mouths shut. But you never tell anyone’s stories.”
    “I respect that people have desires, and that they want to keep some of them private.”
    “Which would you miss more? Making connections or collecting stories?”
    “They’re the same,” she said. “Stop changing the subject. Are you still in touch with your first lover?”
    “No. Mindy Carlyle,” he said. “Prom night. I was a sophomore, she was a senior. She knew exactly how she wanted it to happen, so there was a mix CD for background music and a bottle of champagne I had to bribe my cousin to buy for me.”
    “And how was it for you?” she said, clearly amused.
    He shrugged. “She knew what she wanted. I respect that.”
    “Sounds a bit artificial.”
    He stroked her hair back from her temple, watched the play of black silk stream through his fingers. “Self-conscious,” he said. “Wasn’t it for you?”
    “I had my first orgasm when I was eight,” she said. “Sex didn’t seem mysterious to me.”
    He felt his eyebrows shoot up. “Eight?”
    “Horseback riding,” she said in explanation.
    “You were eight.”
    She hummed, her gaze avid, bright, probing, testing. “When did you first experience orgasm?”
    “I was probably ten or eleven when I had my first wet dream. A little older when I managed it myself.”
    “As was I. Are you judging me, Daniel?”
    “Just surprised,” he said. “I haven’t had this conversation with a lot of women, but none of them were sexually aware that early.”
    “It’s entirely possible they were lying to you,” she said. “Americans are barely comfortable with a grown woman owning her sexuality, let alone the thought of her being aware of it as a child. First love. Mindy Carlyle?”
    She was relentless. Suddenly shy, he ducked his head and kissed her shoulder. “No. Not Mindy.”
    “You knew you didn’t love her then, or you know now that you didn’t?”
    “I knew then,” he said.
    “How?” she repeated.
    “You just know,” he said. “What about you? First love? Rory with the motorcycle? The guy with the dish for the hotel room?”
    “Dosh,” she corrected. “No. Neither.”
    “Someone else, then.”
    “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love,” she said, looking right at him. “Something to look forward to. God knows I don’t have many firsts left.”
    His heart began to pound against his sternum. To hide his expression he nuzzled against her ear, breathing heat and humidity into the