CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

HARPER POLSEN

It feels like every nerve in my body is vibrating, and I can’t quite shake the little bit of tremor in my hands, the butterflies in my stomach. Why am I so nervous around Zane? He’s already seen me naked at the lake the night before we had sex, and I wasn’t nervous at all then, not until we heard his parents in the next room.

“When are you heading back?” I ask.

I can feel the beer starting to put a dent in my nerves, and it just makes me eager to drink more. Mom and Dad had both gone to bed by the time I texted Zane, and the idea of sitting around, drinking beers in the darkness, was certainly way more attractive than sitting in my room thinking about whether or not I should make an early trip back to New York City.

“My flight leaves Monday morning, I think,” Zane says.

“Yeah, I have to drive back either late Sunday or early-early Monday,” I tell him, making a face. “They want me in the office as soon as I can get there.”

“Big dealings,” Zane observes, drinking down a little more of his beer.

“Yeah, they actually want to get an early start on the project but… I sort of told them I couldn’t leave early.”

“You did?” Zane raises an eyebrow at that.

“Yeah, I’m not ready to be back to work just yet,” I admit with a little grin. I take a few gulps of my second beer.

“We do have that fancy dinner your parents are supposed to host,” Zane agrees.

“Wouldn’t want to miss that!” I giggle, and drink down the last of my beer.

We keep talking, joking around and both of us go onto our third beer. By now I have to pee, and I tell Zane to wait for me while I go inside for a minute.

I get in and out of the house as quickly as I can, managing not to slam anything in spite of the fact that the door to the bathroom seems determined to spring right out of my hands.

“I think we need to talk about what happened last night,” Zane says.

“I thought you were against talking about it,” I say.

“I changed my mind,” Zane tells me.

“Okay, so since it’s your idea now, you tell me what you want to say about it,” I settle back into my spot, and Zane hands me another beer. He’s already started on his fourth, as he apparently went in to get another six-pack and get rid of the empties while I was in the house.

“We’re just having fun, right? I don’t think either of us really thought about anything other than what we were doing last night,” Zane says.

“I definitely wasn’t,” I admit.

“So we’re just… doing what hot people do sometimes,” Zane continues. I have to snicker a bit at that.

“What hot people do sometimes?” I shake my head.

“Fooling around,” Zane replies.

“And that’s all there is to it? That we’re fooling around?” Something about that doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not like I’m some prude, obviously, I’m not, if I was able to enjoy having sex with Zane the night before with no real reason for it but both of us being stressed out by the party.

“Well what do you want from it? I mean, it’s not like we’ve got time to like, see if there’s a relationship to have, and besides we’re both going back to different places in a couple of days.”

I have to admit that he’s right. “I guess I don’t want things to get weird between us,” I say.

“They won’t,” Zane tells me.

“You’re sure about that? Because I could see it getting weird as hell that we had sex.” I drink a little more beer, and maybe it’s from being a bit buzzed or maybe it’s from being around Zane in the dark, and remembering what we did the night before, but I can feel myself tingling all over. I have to admit that even though we both said we’d never do it again, that it was too weird, there is nothing I want more than to have his hands on me.

“As long as no one else knows about it, we should be fine,” Zane points out.

“So is it a secret because you’d be ashamed to be with me, or because we’ve… I don’t know… like, known each other since we were babies and our parents are close?” I set down my beer as I ask the question. Maybe this late-night chat wasn’t such a good idea.

“I would not be ashamed of that,” Zane tells me, looking me directly in the eyes.

“No?” I hold his gaze for a long moment.

“Please. You’re hot, you’re smart, and you’re doing really well for yourself in New York. If anything you should be ashamed of hooking up with me.” Zane takes a sip of his beer and looks up at the sky for a moment.

I think about that and shake my head.

“This is exactly why we shouldn’t have even started talking about this,” I say.

For a long moment, we just look at each other.

And then Zane does it again — he leans in and kisses me. I respond without thinking, parting my lips and running my hand through his hair. Instead of him kissing me, I’m kissing him, not even paying attention to the beer that slipped from my hands or the one that was in his hands.

“Instead of talking about it, let’s do something about it,” Zane murmurs, and I can’t possibly agree more. I slide the tip of my tongue against his lips and he opens his mouth and then he’s pinning me to the ground, kissing me hungrily while my insides burst with tingles of excitement.

I let my hands wander over him, exploring the lines of his back, sliding down his chest in the front. I can feel the ridge of his hardening cock against my hip, and the only thing I want is to get his clothes off and feel him inside me again. But we’re in the little space between where his parents’ house meets my parents’ house and I know better than to think we can have sex there.

Even knowing that, though, I give into how hot and heavy things are between us. I let Zane pull up the front of my pajama top. When his mouth claims one of my breasts I wrap my legs around his waist and rub against that hard, hot ridge at the front of his pants. It’s almost like we’re trapped like that, like we can’t stop even if we wanted to, and I know neither of us wants to, just like the night before.

“Harper? Zane!” We fall apart all at once at the loud, sharp-sounding whisper and it takes me a moment to recognize it as my mom’s voice.

“Mom!” I pull my shirt down and try to make my poor, turned-on, kind-of-tipsy brain work.

“What are you two doing out here?”

I very nearly ask her if it isn’t obvious what we’re doing and stifle a giggle. It’s funny, but at the same time it’s terrifying that my mom found us.

“We were just talking, having a few beers,” I say quickly.

“You’re drunk,” Mom says, and I look up to see her glaring at me.

“It’s not like that’s against the law, Mom,” I tell her.

“You two were making out,” Mom continues.

“That’s not illegal either,” Zane counters, and this time I can’t suppress the snicker the forces its way through my nose and mouth.

“Look, it’s late,” I say. “Why don’t we all go back to bed?”

“You and I are going to talk about this, Harper Polsen,” my mom says, and I cringe. If she’d thrown in my middle name I would know for sure that I was in deep shit. But how can I be in trouble? I wasn’t doing anything illegal, or even immoral.

“Tomorrow, Mom,” I say.

I manage to get to my feet, and start towards the house, barely even looking at her and definitely not looking at Zane.

I have no idea if Mom is going to say anything to Bev, but I’m also not about to have a conversation about my sex life with my mom in the middle of the night. Zane is on his own.

I go into the house and up to my room as quickly as my clumsy feet will let me, and I crawl between my sheets, with the world spinning a little bit around me. I hope right up until I start to drift off to sleep that Mom won’t decide to come into my room and interrogate me.