An Innocent Thanksgiving

But it did, at last, fade, and we collapsed together in the bed, both of us laughing breathlessly.

“Mmm,” Cal teased, his fingertips skating lightly up and down my side. “Who knew there was such a naughty girl lurking behind all that straight edge attitude?”

“You knew there was a naughty side,” I replied. “I seduced you when I was twenty, I wasn’t exactly going around losing my virginity to my high school sweetheart on prom night.”

Cal barked out a laugh. “Neither of us are very conventional, are we?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think we are.”

Cal was looking at me with this… this sort of soft look that I could only call adoring. It made me blush, made me squirm. I had never—okay, so I had imagined him looking at me like that, once upon a time. I had daydreamed about it plenty. But I hadn’t really let myself dwell on it. Not after that disastrous first night. And even if I had, nothing I’d come up with could’ve prepared me for the real thing.

I felt myself blushing and I tugged Cal back down to me, kissing him with everything in me, coaxing his mouth open—not that he needed much coaxing—so that I could slide my tongue inside.

God, I wished that we could go for round two. I wished that we could just keep kissing like this forever. Teasing each other. In our own little bubble.

Cal pulled away with a groan, his mouth swollen, his lips slick. A shiver worked its way through me. I had done that. I was the only one who would be doing that from now on, if I had anything to say about it. “I want to do this all day,” he told me, a dark promise in his voice and his gaze. “I can’t wait for the day I can just have you in bed for hours and hours…” He kissed slowly along my jaw and I melted. “Maybe even an entire weekend.”

Now that would be the dream. Have Fern stay with someone and just let myself fall into Cal, let myself be the ridiculous, in love fool that I could’ve been, that I’d wanted to be, five years ago.

If only.

“I hate that we have to get up,” Cal continued, gently seizing a bit of my neck in his teeth and nipping at it, not enough to leave a proper hickey but enough to sting and make me yelp in pleasure, “but your parents will be back soon, with Fern.”

Ah, yes. I gently pushed Cal away and sat up, looking around for my clothes. I couldn’t let Fern see me like this. As upset as my parents would be, at least they understood the whole sex and adult thing. Fern would be very confused, and the last thing I wanted to do with this was overwhelm or hurt her. We’d have to figure out a way to get Cal into her life that still felt natural and wasn’t too much, too soon.

As I looked for my clothes—oh, there was my shirt, how did it end up all the way over there—Cal continued to speak. “I’ve made a decision.”

“Hmm?” I asked, only half listening. I needed to find my bra…

“I’m going to come clean about everything to your parents.”

My heart froze in my chest and it felt like, for just a moment, the entire world stopped moving. I turned on the bed to stare at Cal directly, feeling my jaw drop open. Was he serious?

He certainly looked serious. I had known Cal for years, and even though I hadn’t really seen him since our first night together, he hadn’t changed too much in the intervening time. I still knew when he was joking, when he was considering, and when he was dead serious. This was the latter.

“You can’t—Cal.” I struggled to swallow, to speak. “We’ve just gotten our feet under ourselves. We’ve just… just figured this out. If you tell my parents, they’ll lose it. I mean really lose it, they will lose their minds. Can’t we have some breathing room first? Some time to… to adjust and get used to having this?”

Honestly, this had been what I’d thought would be the difficult part all those years ago when Cal and I had first slept together. I had thought that we would have to discuss what to do about my parents, and I had been ready to advocate that we date secretly, privately, for a few months first so that when we told my parents they would see that we were serious about a relationship and not just having a disastrous fling.

After how that night had really gone, I hadn’t even thought further about my initial fears. I was so certain, or had been until about ten seconds ago, that Cal and I were on the same page. How could he possibly tell my parents? This would ruin everything. I would have to admit that I had been lying to them, keeping this big truth a secret—they would feel betrayed, by both Cal and me. Their daughter and their best friend. And that wasn’t even counting about the age difference! It wasn’t like we’d had sex when I was twenty-eight, and it wasn’t like there was only five or so years between us. It was over twenty years, and I’d been a sophomore in college!