ideas, and her hands travel slowly but determinedly down toward the fly of my jeans. The second her hands graze me down there, all reason dissipates and all romantic notions of simply kissing fade away into Washington Square Park. I want her. Right now, I actually think I might need her.
At least I remembered to bring a condom this time.
Chapter 26
I bury my face in Joni’s hair, inhale deeply, and chuckle to myself.
“What’s so funny?” she asks, lifting her head from my sweaty chest and looking at me.
“When I first met you, I thought you were gay.”
Joni laughs. “You did? Why?”
“’Cause of your hair.”
She nods, mock seriously. “Short hair on a girl means she’s a lesbian. I see. In that case, what does long hair on a boy mean?” She lifts a few strands of my hair and raises an eyebrow.
This time I’m the one to laugh. “Shut up.” I roll on top of her again and show her exactly how not-gay I am.
• • •
The sun is low in the sky, and I trace the patterns the warm light shining through the blinds makes on Joni’s skin. When I get down to her hip, my hands linger on her tattoo. Now that we’ve seen every inch of each other, she can’t keep it a secret anymore. It’s a tiny unicorn next to her right hip bone.
She sighs. “You know my secret.”
I smile. “Yup.”
“Are you going to tell me yours?”
My hand halts and my heart jumps. “What do you mean?”
She brushes her finger against my eyebrow scar. Oh. Right. That. “I told you—it was a soccer injury.”
Joni lets out her frustration in a growl and takes my lower lip between her teeth, nipping gently.
“Come here,” I say, pulling her to standing and leading her over to her big, white bed. “The AstroTurf is badass, but not exactly conducive to rolling around naked, you know?”
I sit on the bed and Joni climbs into my lap. She doesn’t seem self-conscious about being naked in front of me at all. Not that she has anything to feel self-conscious about.
“Conducive,” she says. “Nice. I love when you use words like that.”
“Why?”
“It’s…unexpected, coming from you.”
“Why?” I ask again. For a conversation about my vocab, I sure am at a loss for words.
“Um, because of the way you look?” Joni says, like, duh.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at yourself, Ryden. You’re sex on a stick. Even that mysterious scar across your eyebrow makes you hotter.”
I stare at her. “I mean, yeah, I’ve been told that girls find me attractive—”
Joni shakes her head. “It goes way beyond ‘attractive.’ I bet my dad would have sex with you.”
“Um. Thanks?”
“My point is, with all of this going on”—she waves a hand around my face and body—“plus the whole jock thing, people don’t expect you to be smart too. So when you bust out the million-dollar SAT words, it’s kind of a shock.”
“I’m not nearly as smart as M—” I stop myself. Shit. I was just going to say Meg. “As some of my friends.” Jesus. That could have been bad. Even if I didn’t go into the whole story, Joni would still want to know who Meg is and why the hell I was bringing up my ex-girlfriend five minutes after we had sex for the second time. Amazing, super hot sex. During which I did not once think about Meg. Actually, now that I think about it, since things turned the corner with Joni, the gaps between my obsessing-about-Meg stints seem to have been lengthening. So why was I about to bring her up?
Great. Now all I can think about is Meg. Is she watching me right now? Does she hate me for having sex with someone else? Why don’t I ever seem to know what the right thing is?
I hate you, brain.
“Well, I don’t really care about your friends,” Joni says, apparently having missed my mental moment. “I care about you. And you’re going to get into UCLA, I know it.”
I pull her closer and brush my lips across her forehead. “I care about you too.”
And you know what? It’s the truth.
• • •
The rest of the week is one of the best I’ve had in a really long time. Because of school and practice and work and Hope (though Joni doesn’t know about that last factor), we don’t get any more “bedroom” time. And we don’t really talk on the phone much at night since Hope’s always around then and Joni would probably want to know what’s