Lust - 1 by Robin Wasserman Page B

Stark steel beams, giant windows, a jigsaw puzzle of smooth surfaces—it was like no house he’d ever seen.
    “This is where you live?” he asked in a hushed voice.
    “Like I said,’poor little rich girl,’” Kaia quipped.
    Adam turned off the car and hopped out to open Kaia’s door for her.
    A total gentleman.
    “Listen, Kaia,” he said as they walked up the long, narrow path toward her door. “Obviously we don’t know each other that wel yet, but I just want you to know—if you ever need anyone to talk to, you know, I’m around.”
    Brushing away another fake tear, Kaia threw her arms around Adam and hugged him tightly to her.
    What a body.
    “Thank you,” she whispered into his ear, making sure to graze his cheek with her moist lips. “You’l never know how much that means to me.” She let herself into the house, pausing in the doorway to watch him walk back to the car. Even his silhouette had sex appeal.
    This is almost too easy to be worth my time, she thought.
    Almost.
    By the time Adam got home, it was too late to cal Beth—and besides, what would he say? “In case I didn’t make it clear to you before, I’d real y like to sleep with you—and even though I am the perfect PC boyfriend and wil stand by you no matter what and don’t—I swear to you, don’t— just want you for sex, I think it’s natural for me to want that, too, especial y since I’m probably the only eighteen-year-old homecoming king virgin this side of the Mississippi”?
    Yeah, that would go over real y wel .
    He sounded like one of those Neanderthals in the teen after-school specials they played on local access TV and occasional y showed as a precautionary measure in health class: “But gee, honey, I have these urges …”
    No, best just to wait it out.
    It hadn’t always been like this, of course. Back in the beginning, she couldn’t get enough of him—they couldn’t get enough of each other. He would come over to her house after school and they would try to do homework together, and after a few minutes she would tire of aimlessly flipping through the pages of her history textbook, and he would give up on furiously writing and erasing and rewriting wrong answers to the same trig problem over and over again, and that would be it. He would look up, she would look up, their eyes would meet, and they would be on each other, kissing, stroking, fumbling with buttons and bra straps, desperate to drink each other in, to find every one of their bodies’ hidden secrets, to touch, to meld. Sometimes al it took was an accidental touch—sitting across a table from each other, his hand would brush against hers, and it was like a stroke of lightning, a bolt of charge between them, and he would have to have her. And it wasn’t just him. There were times … that day last spring in the empty hal way when he’d given her a quick peck on the cheek before going off to practice. He’d turned to leave, and she grabbed the back of his shirt col ar, pul ed him back to her, back into his arms. Then Beth—practical Beth, shy Beth, tentative Beth—had pushed him up against the wal and dug her body into him, sucking on his lips and kneading her fingers into his muscles. Not caring who saw. In the beginning it had been like that.
    Not in the very beginning, of course. At first they’d done nothing but talk. Which, to be honest, was the exact opposite of what he was used to. They talked and talked—on their first date, they talked through dinner, through dessert, late into the night, until Beth realized her curfew had long since run out and, like Cinderel a, she’d fled off into the night. He’d never real y talked to a girl before (except Harper, and that didn’t count), but then he’d never met a girl like Beth, who real y listened. Who real y seemed to want to know him—not the al -star jock, not the homecoming king, but him . On their second date they’d talked even more. About everything—families, school, religion, what