“Stay away from my girl.”
I held up my hands. “I was just walking home, sir.”
Foster’s eyes narrowed. “You were walking way too close to her.”
“If you want her to not walk with me, maybe you should buy her a car,” I suggested. “Then she would have no reason to walk, now would she?”
Foster’s eyes went flinty and hard. “Maybe I will.”
She had a fuckin’ car the next week.
But what her daddy didn’t know was that she gave me a ride in it every single day for the next year.
CHAPTER 3
Bro, all she wants is one of your hoodies.
-Trouper to a friend
TROUP
Nine months later
“This feels so unreal,” she whispered.
I leaned back in the swing and pumped my legs.
“I mean, I can’t believe we’re finally graduated.” She paused. “And you head into the Air Force tomorrow.”
I grinned over at her.
“It doesn’t feel right, does it?” I asked.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” she whispered.
Everything inside of me stilled at the tone of her voice.
“What?”
“I…” She swallowed and dropped her feet, kicking up a riot of dust as she came to a stop. “You know that I’m…” she sighed. “This is really hard.”
There were a lot of things really hard when it came to Beckham Spurlock.
Like keeping my fuckin’ hands off of her, for instance.
The past nine months had seriously been the hardest of my life.
But I’d managed to not only graduate with honors, I’d also managed to keep my fuckin’ hands to myself when all I wanted was to snatch her into my arms and declare her as mine.
“I know that we’re just friends,” she hesitated.
I stopped swinging too to look at her.
A knot of something exciting and dreadful started to fill my chest.
Was she…
“I have a proposition for you,” she licked her lips.
I stood up and faced her, not able to handle what she was about to say next without seeing her face.
“What?” I pushed.
“I know that you’re going to be a top dog in the Air Force. And I know that you don’t want to come back here. Not any time soon anyway. But…” She bit her lip. “I… shit.”
“You’re driving me fuckin’ nuts,” I told her.
She blurted. “I want you to take my virginity.”
I’d expected something like that to come out of her mouth. The only problem was, expecting it and preparing for it were two separate things.
“We have one more night together,” she said. “And when you come back for Easton’s graduation, and I happen to be here, too… I want to do it all over again.”
“Are you talking about me and you using each other when we’re around each other?” I asked carefully. “From now on?”
She swallowed. “It’s hard to trust people.”
Yeah, it sure the fuck was.
“And I want to make sure that I’m safe. And I know that you’ll never do anything to put me in danger,” she continued. “And I trust you with my life… as well as this.”
“I don’t have a condom,” I said.
That was weak.
I could literally walk thirty seconds down the road and get a condom from the convenience store if I wanted to.
Which I did.
But she didn’t need to know that.
What she needed was to be convinced that this was a terrible, no good, very awful idea.
Yet… I couldn’t make myself do that.
I wanted this—her—way too much to ever tell her no.
It didn’t matter if this was the one final nail in my coffin of terrible ideas.
It didn’t matter if I was leaving tomorrow and wouldn’t see her for a year.
Nothing mattered but her.
Over the last year of knowing Beckham Spurlock, a lot of things had become abundantly clear to me.
The things that I thought mattered when I first started the school year? Those were inconsequential.
What mattered was standing right in front of me, looking at me like I was the answer to her prayers. The good guy that she wanted me to be, versus the bad guy that I knew that I was.
But I tried, nonetheless.
I tried to be good. I tried not to get into fights. I tried to get my homework done. I tried to get home at night before she would get worried.
Everything that I did, apparently, was to make sure that I was good enough for her.
And when it was time for me to sign on that dotted line, to give my life away to the United States Air Force for the next five years, I’d had my first moment of doubt since I’d decided that the Air Force was what I wanted to do with my life when I was fourteen.
The one thing that got me through everything—my way out—was now compromised by a beautiful blonde-haired girl that took my breath away and I couldn’t have.
“I have condoms,” she hesitated. “And I’m on birth control. I… I made sure that I was on it. That I had condoms. That you’d have no reason to back out of this. The risk of pregnancy is almost nil. Please.”
She didn’t have to beg.
I’d give her anything.
All she had to do was ask.
Hell, if she asked me to stay with her, to go to fuckin’ college with her, I’d go AWOL for her.
Seriously, I was that far gone for her.
“Beck,” I whispered huskily.
“Do you really want me to trust someone else with this?” she asked.
My heart all but stuck in my throat when I thought about that.
No, I sure the fuck did not trust anyone with that.
Just the idea of her with someone else sent a jealous rage through me.
Hell, just last month when I’d thought that she was going to the prom with someone else? That’d not gone well for me.
I’d shown up at that stupid fuckin’ prom, murder in my eyes, only to find her sitting at the table by herself.
When I plopped down next to her, all rage gone from my body, she’d smiled at me so fuckin’ huge that I’d all but melted.
Now, having her staring at me like she was, I knew that I couldn’t tell her no.
Wouldn’t.
But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t try to convince her.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I’m not a virgin. I’m not… you could find someone way better than me.”
I wished I’d waited for her. God, how I wished that I’d waited.
I’d lost my virginity when I was fifteen, younger than Easton was now. It’d been ugly, sloppy, and I’d come away thinking that it wasn’t nearly all it was cracked up to be.
But as I stared into Beckham’s pleading eyes, I damn well knew that what we shared would be different.
I would realize what I was missing with that other girl.
“I’m not dumb, Troup,” she whispered. “I know that you weren’t a good boy when we met. But I’ve fixed you.”
I snorted out a laugh.
She had fixed me, hadn’t she?
But not the way that one would think.