Free The Space Between Us by Megan Hart Page B

put me off.
    “The best sex I’ve ever had is always the last sex I had,” Meredith told me. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
    “Lucky you,” I murmured.
    She leaned closer. The table was just large enough for our two plates and glasses, and since I’d already leaned in a bit myself, she got pretty close. Her pupils had gone wide in the dim light, giving her a look of innocence completely at odds with the tilt of her mouth.
    “So. Tell me,” she said, and again, I did.

Chapter 9
    H er name was Melissa. She was two years older than me, and unlike the other partners I’d had, she came on to me first. We were camping, of all the crazy things to be doing in the late fall, but the leaves were turning colors, the rates at the state park campgrounds had gone down, and I was friends with a bunch of people who liked to go out into the woods and get liquored up and rowdy.
    She had dark, dark hair that fell to her ass in long, straight lines. Her hair was heavy. Even now I can remember the weight of it against me, how when she slept next to me her hair would cover me, warm as a blanket. She had dark eyes, too, tilted at the corners, and she wore eyeliner to emphasize them.
    We had mutual friends and had met a bunch of times before, but we weren’t quite friends ourselves. When we got to the set of matching cabins we’d rented for the weekend, people started pairing off—some of them couples, some friends who’d already decided they were going to bunk together. I didn’t mind sharing with a guy, but I didn’t want to share a room with Shawn, who had some personal hygiene problems. Kent had a nervous laugh and bad acne, which wouldn’t have been an issue except that rumor also had it that he had the hots for me—and I didn’t feel like fending off his advances and ruining the weekend for all of us by turning him down. I hadn’t met the other three girls, Cindy, Dee and Tina, before, so when Melissa asked me casually if I wanted to room with her, I said sure.
    “We got the room with only one bed,” she said, as if she was surprised, and I like to think she was. “Hope you don’t mind sharing.”
    I didn’t care. We dumped our things and headed out to the campfire, where there was plenty of beer and marshmallows. And if she sat a little closer to me on the downed log that served as a bench, well…there were a lot of people and not many places to sit.
    I didn’t realize Melissa liked me romantically until we were taking a hike along one of the trails toward what was supposed to be a “pretty bitchin’ waterfall,” according to Scott, one of the guys who’d organized the trip. When she took my hand, linking her fingers casually through mine, I must’ve looked startled.
    “Is this okay?” Her palm was warm on mine, her fingers strong.
    “Sure.” And it was, actually. Before that moment I couldn’t have told you if, my crush on Marilyn Monroe aside, I liked girls. Not definitively, anyway.
    I’d put the Murphy boys years into my past, Vic even further back than that. I’d had a few boyfriends in between, nobody serious. Nobody who’d made me feel as thrilled as Melissa did when she took my hand.
    We slept together in the same bed that entire weekend, and though I lay awake listening to the sound of her breathing as she fell asleep, and waiting for her to touch me, Melissa never did. She didn’t move fast like that, she said seriously on our last morning there, when we’d both rolled over to stare into each other’s eyes.
    “I’m not in this for giggles,” she said. “I want you to be sure this is what you want.”
    By that point, I wanted it. I wanted her. It had grown from a kind of giggly curiosity into full-blown desire, hot and aching in my blood. But I didn’t know how to make the first move on a girl. I wasn’t afraid she’d turn me down, but it was like I was a virgin all over again. I had no idea where to put my hands, which way to tilt my head to go in for a kiss.
    We saw each other