Free BREAK - A Bad Boy Romance by Gabi Moore Page A

on mascara and changing her shoes at the same time, getting ready to go out. I grumbled something back but she stared at me. “I’ve got it! You should come with me. There will be boys there, but I think we can manage without adult supervision, can’t we?” she said, laughing and wiggling her eyebrows at me.
    Twenty minutes later we were in a pretty suburban house crammed full with every flavor of teenage rebellion – somehow I had already finished one beer and mysteriously had another in my hand. Perhaps adults were no less awkward than teenagers, but just tipsy more often? I was enjoying myself, I realized, someway through the second (or third?) beer. I wanted to show Tara that I could have fun, too. I wasn’t some predictable nerd who studied too much. In fact I--
    “Your life line is like, really long.”
    A scruffy boy sat opposite me on the couch, my hand in his hand, examining the lines on it almost as hard as I did my law text books. He was cute, in a scruffy kind of way. Had I seen him around campus? It was hard to tell. There were probably a million scruffy boys just like him enrolled in classes in any one year.
    “That means you’re going to have, like, a long life, you know?” he said.
    It was getting later, the music was getting louder, our friends were getting drunker. I had read somewhere that pretending to read a girl’s palm was a great excuse to touch her …and hit on her. My head buzzed a little. Why not now? Why not him?
    “You also have a really deep love line, which means…”
    Here he locked his soft brown eyes with mine, smiling shyly at me. He flicked his eyes back to my palm, smiled and stroked my fingertips with his. I watched a small vein pulse in his neck. I had rehearsed tons of imaginary conversations with imaginary boys in imaginary situations just like these. In my own mind, I was like a female James Bond, unflappable, never more than a few seconds away from a devastatingly witty comeback. It was clear to me all at once, though, that James Bond probably wasn’t ever as drunk as I currently was. Ok, Christy. It was now or never.
    I took a deep breath. “I want you to fuck me,” I said. The room buzzed.
    Well, there it was. I said it recklessly, easily, but once the words were out there, hanging in the air between us, I realized that I kind of, maybe, might actually mean it. He immediately stopped stroking my hand. My cheeks burned. Oh shit oh shit what have I just said? What if he thinks I’m an idiot? Oh shit. We locked eyes again. It was something even more terrifying: he was grinning.
    “Well, that was awkward!” he said, leaning back into his chair and laughing. I felt like I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I flushed a deep red. He tossed a shaggy brown fringe out of his eyes and stood up tall.
    “But yeah, nice and blunt. I uh, I like it.” He extended his hand and helped me up. “Come with me” he said, leading me out of the room and through a tangled clump of people who were standing around, drinking, laughing, being completely oblivious to the fact that I was about to…
    There they were, being all civilized, fully clothed and polite, meanwhile all this time there was a secret world underneath everything, and I had accessed it easily with the simple, naughty words: I want you to fuck me . It was like abracadabra, but for sex. Turns out, you didn’t need witty comebacks at all!
    I couldn’t believe this was happening to me.
    Had I always been this close to it all along, nothing but these words between me and …”it”? I followed him up some dimly lit stairs, realizing with half-panic that there seemed to be something hot and warm moving down my inner thigh.
    In an instant we were in a quiet, dark room, the thumping music of the party below seeming to become more indistinct and fuzzy. He leant against the now closed door, and pulled me closer to him. I was tipsy and fell into the pillow of his scent, nestling into his scruffy brown hair. He was so soft