Free Have to Have It by Melody Mayer Page A

seduce you, you'd be telling me to back off.”
    She stopped walking, turned to him, and grabbed a handful of his navy blue T-shirt. “Totally wrong, Billy Martin.” She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him softly. He kissed her back, and it quickly turned steamy. She felt his hand edge under the waistband of the extremely used but new to her vintage Missoni pink and black knit skirt she'd unearthed late that afternoon at Her Closet on Melrose, a hole-in-the-wall thrift store in Brentwood that was on the way home from the country club. When she'd tried on the size-six skirt, it had hung loosely on her hip bones (a six was way too big for her). Its hem grazed her knees, there was a cigarette burn on the right thigh, and the pink lining hung haphazardly from the bottom of the skirt—all of which accounted for its twelve-dollar price tag. Well, the low-slung waist worked in her favor, Lydia figured. And the price was right.
    She'd brought it home and performed the same machete fashion surgery that she'd done on clothes in the Amazon,except this time with some pinking shears. Now the skirt fluttered midthigh. Then she'd dived into the bottom of her purse to find the engraved matches from the FAB party aboard the
Queen Mary.
She lit one and made a few more burn holes in the skirt's fabric to match the one that was already there, so that the burns looked punk and deliberate. She paired the skirt with a thin, cheap, boy's white sleeveless undershirt (thrift store price was a buck) and wore nothing underneath but creamy skin. No mention had been made of the “borrowed” cosmetics and perfume, so Lydia had been able to do her usual five coats of Benefit BADgal Lash mascara, several sweeps of Nars blush in Orgasm, plus a thick layer of collagen-infused lip-plumping gloss.
    Evidently the entire effect had worked; she'd been gratified to see Billy's IQ drop when he picked her up and took in the hotness that was her … which made it all the more maddening that the boy refused to take her virginity.
    She rubbed up against him, fingering the fly of his Levi's; she felt his hand caressing the minuscule Wendy Glez lace thong under her skirt. Oh yes, this was going very, very well. She tugged him down toward the sand. He obliged, kissing her neck. But then he whispered in her ear: “Not gonna happen here, Lydia.”
    Damn him.
    She pushed against his chest. “If you really wanted me, you wouldn't have so much self-control.”
    He put his palms in the sand and leaned back, staring out at the ocean. “Look, you want this to be some quickie thing, I can oblige you. But I want more.”
    “Great idea! Quickie sex and then move on to something more?”
    “It doesn't work that way. At least not for me.” He scooped up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. “It's all fantasy to you, Lydia. But in my experience, sex too soon ruins a relationship.”
    She thought about that for a moment. “Is that because you're not very good in bed?”
    He laughed. “Oh no, Miz Chandler. I'm not playing that game with you. Let's talk about driving.”
    Lydia pouted her incredibly pouty lips. “You are a very difficult person.”
    “So are you,” he said, but he smiled when he said it, and gave her a kiss. “When do you get a day off? We'll do your first lesson.”
    She cocked her head at him. “You're sure?”
    “My friend Sasha taught me on the Autobahn between Cologne and Bonn when I was fifteen,” Billy explained. “It's not legal to drive in Germany until you're eighteen, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone. Speeds on the Autobahn run somewhere between eighty and time warp. I promise that you'll have an easier time of it than I did.”
    “Sold.” Lydia lay back on her folded hands and stared up at the stars. “Great night, huh?”
    “Oh yeah.” Billy lay down next to her. “I used to look up at the stars when I was in whatever foreign country my parents had been transferred to and watch for meteors. I always wished to come