On Sale for Christmas

"What reindeer game?"

"I've got a sexy call-girl fantasy to put together for you, remember?"

Chapter Two

That can't have happened, I thought, helping my mom to sweep up cookie crumbs and gather empty plastic cups into the trash. My whole body was still burning with the sexual heat that had awakened inside me.

And that was Ben White's fault.

Ben. The boy next door. The kid who once had an Honest-to-God paper-route. The guy whose churchgoing mom said gosh, and golly, and—if she was really mad—fudge. In fact, his mom made fudge! The Whites and their fudge were sweet enough to give sane people a toothache. Unfortunately, Ben's mom was also my mom's best friend—which was always surprising because they were so different. My mom was a divorcee with fairly indifferent parenting skills, whereas Ben's mom was a widowed happy homemaker. I never really got their friendship, but maybe when your town is so small that it's zip code ought to be a fraction, you don't have a lot of options.

That's why I got out of Geece Grove the first chance I got. In a town where dancing was still thought to be a bit scandalous, I'd never fit in here. But Ben had always fit in perfectly. He was wholesome as a glass of milk. Or at least, he had been…now he was the kind of guy who could rattle off every kink imaginable and unearth my secrets in a way no other guy ever had.

And he'd also agreed to play my pimp…

Still buzzing by the time we turned off the twinkling lights of the tree, I made my way up to my old room, which was now a shrine of adolescent folly with band posters tacked to the wall. I found myself staring out the window at Ben's icicle-covered house. We hadn't been close as kids; hadn't rode our bikes together or strung paper cups on a string between our bedroom windows to chat late at night.

But now I kind of wished we had.

Staring at his frosty window and its drawn shade, I waited for the lights to flick out. Ten o'clock sharp. That'd been his annoyingly predictable routine. But maybe we'd both changed, because his shade suddenly lifted. There, across the short but snowy distance between his house and mine was Ben, in the window, wearing an army green undershirt and jeans.

He looked up at my house, our eyes met, and my breath caught. Slowly, he grinned and shook something in his hand. I squinted trying to make it out. Then I realized it was a cell phone. Oh. Crap.

He wanted me to call him?

Ping.

The text message startled me. I went scrambling for my phone in my pocket, then grinned at Ben's message.

WANNA MAKE THIS A NOT-SO-SILENT NIGHT?

We ought to have been ashamed of ourselves. It was Christmastime. Children were dreaming about sugar plums. Stockings were being hung with care. But all I could think about was how well-hung Ben might or might not be…

So I dialed the number.

"Hey," he answered, leaning casually against the frame of his window—the view obscured only a little bit from the old oak tree.

"Thinking better of having turned me down?" I asked, suggestively. "I might still be game if you want to take me for a ride on your sleigh…"

Ben laughed but didn't jump at the chance.

"So what was that today anyway?" I asked.

"A perfectly executed mission," he said, a little smugly.

"Your mission was to convince me that you're all talk?"

"It was to prove that I'm not all talk. Which you'll only believe after the commencement of our reindeer game."

"You're not serious about that," I said, my throat swelling a little at the idea. Both with fear and excitement.

"Totally serious," he answered. "Or are you the one who is all talk?"

"Ben," I said, more sharply than I intended.

"Yes?"

I wet my bottom lip. I wanted to tell him that we'd taken that part of our flirtation too far. That I didn't want to do it. That all I wanted right now was to fuck him and get this insane fling out of my system before going back to college. But the truth was, my whole body was on fire thinking of playing out my naughty call-girl fantasy, with him helping me to do it.