I glanced at the doorway to see Henry standing there with a scowl on his face. Tensing up a bit, I wondered what he thought of me lying down with her, but as she drifted off again, his mustache twitched into a bit of a smile. He nodded at me once and then turned to go back down the stairs, leaving the door wide open.
Without his eyes on us, I settled down and pulled Mayra closer to me. My head was right above hers on the pillow, and the sweet scent of her hair filled my nose. Her fingers clutched at my shoulders, and I realized she wasn’t quite asleep.
“I’m here,” I said quietly. Her fingers tightened on me again.
“I’m glad,” she whispered back. “I can’t sleep.”
“You can now,” I told her.
Mayra just shook her head.
“I can’t stop thinking about it.” Her hand slid down my arm until it came to rest on my bandaged knuckles.
I wished I knew what to say to her, but as usual, I didn’t. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I just lay there next to her and let her fiddle with the edge of my bandage. My mom would have had all the right words to say—she always did—but that was not a trait she passed on to me.
“I was a bet.” Mayra suddenly snarled, startling me from my thoughts. “He bet he could talk me into giving him my virginity. It was the only reason we were even going out at all, because he made a bet on me. When I wouldn’t give it to him, he thought he would just take it!”
My grip on her tightened.
“I won’t let him hurt you.” I made the same promise to her that I had to her father.
She placed a hand on my chest and pushed back until she was looking up into my face.
“He’s not going to get another chance!” Mayra exclaimed. “No one will ever get that chance again! You can’t be there all the time, Matthew. I’ve got to fix this.”
“Fix this?” I asked, confused.
“Yes, fix it,” she said again.
Her hand came up to the side of my face, and she pressed her lips desperately to mine. She broke away quickly and looked into my eyes.
“I want it to be you, Matthew,” she told me. “I want you to be my first. Then no one else can ever threaten to take that from me again. I’m going to give it to you.”
I couldn’t even fathom a way to respond to that, so I just freaked out.
Lose.
Chapter 13—From Freak to Hero
The sheer number of emotions that passed through my head probably equaled the average spending budget of a congressional member for the month of July, fireworks included.
The first set of thoughts focused on exactly what Mayra was saying and whether she meant right here and right now with her father downstairs, watching a baseball game on the flat screen. The notion of being unprepared didn’t even come marginally close. It wasn’t just a matter of not having a condom in my wallet, like Joe always did. He claimed he never wanted to have the opportunity and have to bail because of something like that though I was pretty sure he had never had the opportunity anyway. No, I was unprepared in five hundred different ways. Well, maybe not five hundred, but plenty.
Or at least three.
First, Mayra was scared. Second, her dad was right downstairs and definitely within earshot. And third, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to have sex with any level of understanding past “Tab A goes into Slot B.”
Cognitively, I knew this was a reaction to what had happened to Mayra and
not something she would be considering if the events of the previous night had not occurred. She was scared and reacting without thinking. She didn’t really want this at all.
The last wave of emotion that covered my skin was nothing short of sheer, raw desire.
I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it with Mayra.
In my fantasies I had known just what to do, and sweat had glistened on her forehead as her neck arched back, and she called out my name. I moved in and out of her effortlessly, and every touch of my skilled fingers brought shivers from her heated skin. We went on for hours though the fantasy itself would only last a few minutes. Still, there was little more I could have asked for than having her want this from me.
It didn’t matter.