Page 6 of Fifty First Times (Sharing You 0.40)
“Do you remember when we ran away from home to live here?” I asked him, dropping to sit cross-legged.
“It took our parents a whole hour to find us,” he said, joining me on the blanket.
“We didn’t think it through.”
“I bet we could pull it off now. Run away for good,” he said.
“Haven’t we already done that?” I asked in a quiet voice.
“We’re both back in Beauford.”
“Only physically,” I said. “I bet your head’s in New York. Maybe even your heart.”
Wes had admitted he wasn’t a virgin anymore, which meant there was a good chance that there was
a girl back at NYU. That thought twisted inside of me and turned my stomach sour.
“My heart is right here.” He placed a hand over his chest.
“So she wasn’t anyone special?” My mind was locked on imagining what she looked like, how they had met, what her name was.
“Huh?”
“You said you lost your virginity,” I reminded him, struggling to push the words past my lips.
“Oh, that.” His voice was flat and he shrugged, looking past me and out at the starry night above us. “I don’t remember much. It was the first and last time I went drinking in the city. She seemed nice. We went out for coffee, but we couldn’t find five things we had in common. She wanted to nail a Texas cowboy.”
The revelation caught me by surprise, and I snorted. “I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to hold back laughter. “But you are hardly a Texas cowboy.”
“I have the Beauford drawl.” He lengthened each word into sweet, Southern syrup. “Let’s just say it was enough to cross it off the bucket list.”
I was hanging on his every word, leaning closer to him, and I pulled back, glad he couldn’t see that I was blushing.
“So you haven’t yet?” he asked.
I shook my head, feeling the nervous excitement in my stomach shift back to embarrassment. “Nope.”
I waited for him to tell me it wasn’t a big deal. To just get it over with already, but instead he nodded as though he approved of this answer.
“Do you remember prom night?” he asked me.
“I remember I wore that awful lime green dress my mom bought me in Galveston,” I said. “And the wilted salad and the eighties pop music.” I left out the part where I sweet-talked Tasha into stealing a bottle of cheap wine from Jesse and that I’d planned to get drunk to steady my nerves, so that I could go through with our plan. I didn’t mention waking up in that wrinkled lime green dress, very much intact, the next morning and spotting him curled up asleep on the pull-out sofa in the hotel room.
“I should’ve called you,” he said. “After that night, I was so angry. It took me a while to realize I was angry at myself, not you. By then we were on opposite coasts.”
“You didn’t get blitzed out of your mind on Boone’s Farm. I don’t think I was ready,” I said. “Or I wouldn’t have been such a jackass.”
“I knew you were drinking and I didn’t stop you. I knew you were nervous,” he admitted.
“How?”
“Because I was nervous, too.” His lips curled into a shy smile. “It took me a while to understand why I was nervous though.”
“Is that why you dragged me out of that party tonight?” I asked him. “To avoid seeing me get trashed again?”
He nodded. “And it’s why I’ve been sobering you up for the last three hours.”
“Three hours?” I repeated in disbelief. We’d been up to Queenie’s and driven around for a while, but it was hard to believe it had been three hours. That explained why the happy, boozy haze had lifted as the conversation grew more serious. “I guess you don’t have to worry about taking me home to my mom now.”
