Ava
I looked up at the sky. It was an inky black canvas stretching from horizon to horizon, covered with a billion pinpricks of light. The darkness wrapped around us in a cocoon that protected us from the pending dawn. If I cleared my mind and stared at the blackness it felt like the night could go on forever.
The grass was cold beneath my back, shivers traveling up my spine, but when the wind blew it was warm the way Florida wind never got cold.
James held my hand tightly, his fingers intertwined with mine, a flame kindled between our palms. He lay so close to me I could feel the body heat radiate from him.
“The sun will be up, soon,” he said.
I turned to look at him. I traced his profile with my eyes – the soft, curled hair blowing in the breeze, low eyebrows, a straight nose and lips I could still taste.
“Don’t talk about that, now,” I said. “We still have tonight.”
He nodded. When the morning came it would all be gone. James would have to go back to Tampa with his dad and leave me behind in Apalachicola to dream about a romance that was so brief it might not have existed.
But it was real. What I had come to feel for James in the shortest amount of time was bigger than any kind of love you saw in the movies. Sure, I was just seventeen. Everybody told me I didn’t know what love was. But when I looked at James and he stared at me, his emerald eyes burning on my skin, I knew that they were wrong. I knew what love was.
It was James.
He rolled onto his side and looked at me. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes in the dark – they were nothing more than bottomless pits that I could fall into and drown.
“We’ll still talk to each other, right?” he asked.
I nodded. “Of course. I’ll write you. You can phone me. We’ve talked about this.”
He nodded. I wanted to stay in touch with James. He lived three hundred miles away, but I wanted to hold onto everything of him that I could, and as soon as I turned eighteen I would go to him. I had grown up in Apalachicola and I knew all the kids in town. Not one of the boys had ever gotten my attention the way James had. And of all the girls he’d spent time with when he’d been here with his father, I was the one he’d chosen.
“Don’t worry about my dad,” James said, even though I hadn’t worried about it. James’s father didn’t exactly approve of the small-town girl James had brought home. I’d been invited to go to the Coombs Inn & Suites for dinner with James, his brother Charles and Mr. Weber.
“I’m not,” I said. If it was love, we would find a way. James was his own person, he could choose who he wanted to love even if his family didn’t approve. This wasn’t the eighteen-hundreds and he was already eighteen. He had to be able to make his own decisions by now. He could do what he wanted.
James lifted his free hand and touched my face. His fingertips were warm on my cheek. He brushed strands of hair from my face and looked into my eyes. I committed his face to memory. The blond hair, the full lips, the eyes that looked at me like I was the only girl that existed on this earth. When he was gone and all I had to fall back on were my memories, this was one of them I would visit.
“Have I told you how beautiful you are?” he asked, his voice like velvet on my skin.
My cheeks burned. I was glad he couldn’t see my blush in the dark. Everything about James made me hot and flustered. He was the kind of boy you saw in movies. He was a Chad Michael Murry look alike except for his long hair and the way he looked at only me with that smoldering look.
My stomach turned. Instead of saying something romantic – he was the one with all the right words – I sighed.
“I’m scared you’ll forget about me,” I said.
James frowned. “How could I?”
I shrugged. “You’re from exciting Tampa in a life that I can only dream about. I’m a small-town girl that you met on your dad’s business trip. I don’t fit into your world. What if this is just a dream and tomorrow we both finally wake up?”
“You’re the only thing I love about this trip,” he said. “And you are a dream – the girl of my dreams.”
I blushed again. It was so cheesy but I couldn’t help it. James leaned forward and pressed his lips against mine. I closed my eyes and lost myself in him. When James kissed me, I melted. Everything disappeared and it felt like the world was at our feet. He wasn’t the prince and I wasn’t the pauper. We were equals in love – Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Beatrice and Benedick – and our love would conquer all.
His tongue slipped into my mouth and my breath hitched. I would never get used to his kisses. It felt like an electric current ran from his body to mine everytime he brushed his lips against my lips and the world melted away until it was just the two of us.
His hands were on my cheeks, cupping my face, and I felt delicate and special.
James broke the kiss. I opened my eyes and looked at him.
“Ava, I want you,” he whispered. His words were dripping with intent.
My eyes widened.
“You mean…?”
He nodded and shifted in the grass until his body was pressed against mine. His skin burned mine through our clothes and I felt his yearning for me in his pants. My stomach turned, butterflies erupting. I hadn’t ever been with a boy. He had told me he’d only done it once before. The whole holiday it had hung between us like an unspoken yearning, and now he had verbalized it. I wanted him, too, but I didn’t know what I was doing. James was rich and handsome and he knew what life was about. He wasn’t a virgin the way I was.
I swallowed hard.
“Come with me,” he said. I sat pushed myself up from the grass when he got up. He held his hand to me and I took it, letting him pull me to my feet. He led me through the field to the car he’d driven us in – a black rental his father was using while we were in town. I got in next to him. The atmosphere in the car was charged, loaded with potential. Neither of us said anything. I didn’t know what was going on in James’s head and I didn’t want to break the spell.
He drove us out to Indian Pass Beach and parked. He produced a blanket from the trunk. The deserted beach was deadly quiet when we walked onto the sand. The waves crashed onto the sand and the early morning air had a wispy quality to it. James pulled me against him and kissed me again. My hair whipped around our face in the wind but I was warm. My body was hot, James’s skin feverish on mine.
He led me into the dunes and spread out the blanket.
“Do you want this?” he asked, pressing himself against me again. Heat flooded my body and pooled between my legs. I knew what I was feeling and I nodded. If there was anyone I wanted to give it to, it was James. It had hung between us and I had answered this question for myself a million times.
We lay down on the blanket, rolling against each other. His fingers were calm and sure when he undressed me. My fingers were unsteady; trembling when I returned the favor. He stripped me of the person I once was. The girl disappeared with the clothes he slowly peeled off me. I lay on my back, looking up at him as his eyes roamed my naked body, taking it, hungry. His lips were parted. He swallowed, sliding his eyes to mine. He smiled at me, looking as nervous as I felt.
It made me feel better. My fingers trembled when I reached for his face.
When we were both naked James rolled onto me, pulling the blanket with him so we were shielded from the wind. He kissed me again and my body did what it was made to do. My thighs fell open and he positioned himself between my legs. His body was taut, muscular, his lust hard and slick when he pressed himself against me. I gasped, my hands on his hips.
“You’re trembling,” he said.
I nodded and swallowed.
“I’ll be okay.”
He kissed me again, moving his body against mine and pushed into me. The intimacy, how personal it was, struck me. No matter how much I had promised James during the time we were together, this was so much more than that.
I had waited to sleep with anyone. Sex had been a discussion since I was a kid but this was the way I had wanted to lose it. James made it perfect. I closed my eyes and focused on the sensation of being filled by someone who took up so much space in my life already. In the first light of morning with nothing more than a blanket shielding me from reality, I gave myself to him.