“I’m going to assume by the look on your face that you aren’t seeing him anymore?”
“No, I’m not,” Raine said. “He was really just a friend to me. He helped me after my father died. I loved him, in a way, but not the way he wanted.”
“What was his name?”
“Andrew,” she told me. “His father was my father’s best friend, and we grew up together. After my father died, he came over a lot and just helped me through all of it. He’d drive me to the courthouse and wait while I met with the judges and then console me when they told me no – when they told me no again. I think I just needed his closeness at the time, but he wanted something more. So, I gave it to him.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“Do you always have to be so crass?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Well, I’m not going to talk about that,” she said with conviction.
“You did fuck him,” I said with a laugh.
She smacked me playfully again and damn if the sound of her skin hitting mine didn’t get me thinking about other ways our skin could be making contact.
“Come on,” I said, figuring if she could pressure me into talking about shit I didn’t want to talk about, turnabout was fair play. “Tell me.”
“He was my first,” she said softly, “and I was his. We were in the back of his dad’s minivan parked on a deserted road. Neither one of us knew what we were doing. Frankly, the whole thing was a disaster.”
“So you had crappy first time sex,” I clarified. She wouldn’t be the only chick to say that. “Did you do him again?”
“We tried a couple more times,” Raine said with a giggle, “but really, it wasn’t much better. It didn’t hurt, but I still don’t know what the fuss is all about.”
“The fuss?” I said, leaning back away from her a bit so I could look at her from another angle. “The fuss is how fucking awesome it feels, babe. Didn’t you notice?”
I let out a short laugh.
“It was…okay.”
“Okay? That’s all you can say about it? I mean, I’m not a chick, but the ones I’ve fucked thought it was better than okay.”
“Well, that’s not how I felt about it,” Raine grumbled.
“Holy shit,” I said as the realization hit me. “You never did come, did you? You guys didn’t know what you were doing, and he couldn’t make you come.”
“I don’t know,” she said, her shoulders moving up and down. “I mean, it was nice after a while, but…”
“Nice? Just nice? Yeah, baby. I’ll tell you one thing for sure; you didn’t have an orgasm if it was just nice.”
“Whatever.”
“Seriously, Raine?” I shifted my position so I was looking at her straight on. “You’ve never had one, have you?”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed again. No wonder she seemed so uptight about the whole thing. She had no idea what she was missing.
“Stop laughing at me!”
“Really, babe,” I said, trying to stifle my snickers but not being overly successful. It was just too incredible. “I’m not laughing at you; really I’m not. I just can’t believe a girl as fucking gorgeous as you hasn’t had a team of guys begging to bring you to orgasm.”
I could see her cheeks darken with her blush as she looked down at the floor away from me. She must have had offers – she said she had gone to college for a while, right? There was no way a chick this hot walking around campus wouldn’t be invited to every frat party in town. If she went to just one single party, there was no way some guy didn’t try to get up in there.
An image of Theresa flashed through my head for a second, and it suddenly occurred to me that something like that could have happened to Raine, too. I mean, it wasn’t a crime reserved for the underprivileged or anything. Date-rape in college was a fucking epidemic.
My hands clenched into fists. If someone had done that to Raine, I’d paddle this fucking raft to wherever the hell she went to school and kill the motherfucker.
“Raine…” I had to clear my throat to keep going. “Did someone ever…hurt you? Like that?”
“What?” Raine looked up to me. The look in her eyes was so confused; I knew immediately I must have been wrong and relaxed a little.
“Thank God,” I mumbled.
“Oh!” Raine’s eyes got wide and she shook her head violently. “No, nothing like that. I just never really dated after Andy.”
So, either she turned down the offer to go to the parties, or she pushed the guys away. Why would she do that? Mourning for her father? Ticked at the ex-boyfriend who couldn’t get her off? Or did she just not think she would ever enjoy it?