Page 8 of Change of Course

The music switches from background stuff meant for conversation to louder, poppier stuff. I could complain, but she finishes her drink and looks up at me. “Dance?”

We didn’t go to prom together.

She went as Jesse’s beard. Got chosen as Queen. Eyes were on her, and she said she didn’t want to worry her parents.

Dammit, it sounds even stupider as an excuse now than it did then, and it never made sense to me. Who fucking cares if your parents are living vicariously through you? I’d have just been happy to have my mom’s full attention every now and then.

So I didn’t go to prom. I never got to dance with my Cherry in my arms. But I’m doing it now, while they play Lifehouse and Rihanna and the Jonas Brothers (gag), and she looks up into my eyes, and I look into hers, and I get half-erect and I know she can feel it and I don’t care.

“Can we talk?” she asks. I look at that beautiful mouth of hers and think about kissing it. I think about seeing it stretched around my dick. I think about doing that every day for the rest of my life.

“Anything you want. Do you want to blow this joint and walk around downtown, or, I dunno, get ice cream?”

“I just want somewhere we can be private,” she says. “The staring is starting to get to me.” She bites her lip and looks down, then up. “It’s not that I care that they’re staring, Jackson. I just…want to really talk to you.”

I lean forward and whisper into her ear, smelling her sweet and piquant floral scent. “I have a room here.” I feel the shiver go through her. “Is that private enough, or is it too private?”

“It’s perfect,” she says hoarsely. “Let me get my purse and tell Courtney so she won’t worry.”

I pull the key card out of my pocket and slip it to her. “Room 769. Meet you there.” Just like old times, us sneaking around and leaving at different times so nobody saw us together.

The thought is incredibly exciting, and also somehow sad.

We were better than that, weren’t we? Better than the forbidden part of it.

But fuck, it was good. We were so good together.

I head out past the check-in table, telling the women sitting there that I’m just heading to the restroom. I actually do that, and then I go up to the lobby and ask the clerk details about their breakfast buffet, and she says yes, they do have an omelet station, and I can even get the hotel’s famous spoonbread at breakfast, and they’ve been featured in Southern Living magazine for it, and she hopes I’ll enjoy it very much.

I thank her and go up in the elevator. My heart is pounding so hard I can almost see it through my shirt.

Cheri answers my quiet knock. I gesture toward the small table near the window, with its two Windsor chairs. “That do?”

She nods, swallowing nervously. Neither one of us looks at the king-size bed, but I know I’m thinking about it.

Then my Cherry looks up at me and says, “I made a mistake.”

Chapter 5

CHERI

Back then, we kissed a lot. A lot. But it was a month before his hands went where I’d been longing for them to go, up under my sweater and over my bra, and another week before I got bold enough to reach back and unsnap my own bra, causing him to groan and caress my small breasts lightly before squeezing harder and making me moan.

“Fuck,” he whispered. “You’re so beautiful. You sure this is okay?”

“I want you to.”

So he did. Lifted my sweater and kissed each breast, each nipple, before licking one of them and making my head flop back on my neck in a swoon of delight. I was so excited by what he was doing to me that I knew my panties were wet through.

A week after that, I was dry-humping him in the front seat of his mom’s car, parked back behind the motorcycle club’s building, when I’d told my parents I was going to the movies with Jesse.

Not that I knew what dry-humping was. I just knew that I wanted to be close to him, and it felt good, and it was sort of safe because clothes were in the way, and it felt really good. “You feel so good,” Jackson whispered to me. “Oh fuck, Cheri. Cheri, we need to stop before things get crazy.”

“I don’t want to stop,” I whispered back, and about then he groaned out loud and stopped moving. Then, of course, I had to ask what happened, and he had to tell me, and we were both embarrassed until I asked if I could see, and he got hard again and showed me, and I still wanted to ride on him and he let me, and this time I finished and he wound up having to change into the spare sweatpants he kept in the trunk because he was a mess.

A month after that, my parents went out on a date, and I snuck Jackson in the back door and we Did It. It only hurt a little, and I felt so good afterward, the good kind of tired and satisfied and only a little bit guilty over not being the good girl my parents thought I was.

I was glad it was with Jackson, who never made fun of me or made me feel ignorant or unwanted. He wouldn’t blab it around school. He wouldn’t make things awkward, but he always made me feel wanted and special.