First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances Read online

  Oh, no—that was all in Sam’s fingers, in his forearms, his muscled shoulders, the obliques that twisted to play each part of his drum set as if it were my body. In a way, it was. Sitting here in the crowd, far in the back at a quiet table—as if there were such a thing as a quiet table at any set played by Random Acts of Crazy—all I could do was imagine.

  A well-practiced hand slid my drink in front of me, a cardboard coaster under it advertising some local dot com dating service—Good Things Come in Threes. What the hell did that mean?

  Half a drink later, I found myself immersed in the fever of their song. Maybe I was deluding myself, and maybe it wasn’t the song. Delusion has a way of becoming part of life when you least expect it, or maybe when you most need it. I could sit here and pretend that Sam was just a guy on stage playing his drum set, fulfilling his part in the puzzle pieces that made up the song they played so expertly. I could even imagine that I just came here because I was looking for something fun to do after moving into my new apartment and getting ready to start grad school.

  My imagination knew few bounds when it came to the taut rope that pulled me in two directions: one, to the carefully calibrated side of me that organized and categorized and protected and planned to make sure that no uncertain variables could sway me from being centered and grounded; and then there was the other side, the one where my imagination ran wild.

  That was the side pulled tight in a tug of war by Sam’s fingers.

  “You want another one, honey?” the cocktail waitress shouted over the fray of the end chords of Random Acts of Crazy’s famous song “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer.”

  I nodded. Taking risks wasn’t part of my nature, but what the hell—a second Amaretto Sour wasn’t going to kill anyone, was it? Drinking was new to me. I’d only been legal for the past year, turning twenty-one late, after all my friends, with this damn August birthday. So, a year of drinking under my belt (at least legally) meant that it was still a novelty. Besides, I could walk home.

  Alone, of course. My boyfriend these days was molded pink plastic, with stamina that lasted as long as two energized double-D batteries.

  I wasn’t exactly the kind of woman guys picked up and took home. That’s not quite true—it’s more that I wouldn’t let myself be that kind of woman. Not that guys didn’t try. Although, for the past two years I’d either been dating my now ex-boyfriend, Brent, or I had just carefully cultivated an outer shell that screamed, Don’t even try!

  The last time I let someone in, he shut me down. Cold. And didn’t speak to me for four and a half years. Right now my eyes caressed him, watching how he gripped the drum sticks, wondering if he remembered me.

  Wondering if he cared.

  The crowd roared as the song ended, and there pranced Trevor, just like he’d been years ago when the band started out, except that he was larger than life and had the women in the crowd eating out of his hand. A fine, masculine specimen onstage with jeans that were tight in all the right places. All the guys had changed so much since high school, since I’d seen them at their debut.

  Sam raked one of those beautiful hands through his auburn hair, and while I couldn’t see his eyes because of the bright lights onstage, and the shadows that added to the mystique of the set, I knew that those green-and-amber-flecked irises were still the same. He stood, and the change in him made me gasp, scaring the waitress who had come by with my drink.

  “You OK, hon?” she asked, bending down, making eye contact. Short, brown hair. Tight, wrinkled lips, like a smoker’s. Kind, ocean-green eyes. She was as skinny as I was lush, and about my mother’s age.

  I looked back at the stage, but Sam had turned away, was now listening intently as Joe spoke animatedly to him. “I’m fine, I just...they’re just so good.”

  “You mean they’re just so hot,” she said in a conspirator’s voice, nudging me gently with her elbow. “You’re not the first one in this room to think about taking one of them home, hon,” she said, her heels click-clacking as she hurried off to deliver more drinks.

  I laughed politely when she turned back and winked at me, because that’s what you do, right? When someone makes a suggestion that taps into your inner world of fantasies, and hopes, and dreams, and says something that isn’t quite appropriate for public, casual talk.

  And yet every word she said was true.

  Sam

  “Trevor fucked a chicken?” I could barely hear anything Joe was saying to me onstage, my ears ringing, my hands throbbing, but I heard that. Fucked. Chicken. You don’t miss that kind of statement, even after pounding away in the zone.

  “Would you guys let it drop?” Trevor growled.

  “No, just a French kiss,” Joe teased. “After he proposed.”

  “What?” I shouted.

  Trevor waved his hand dismissively in Joe’s direction. “It’s a bad joke.”

  No,” Joe argued, “if I’d said you thought she was too fowl-mouthed for you, that would be a bad joke.”

  Groans all around.

  “Watch for a song about Mavis,” Joe added as we stepped off the stage and walked back to our dressing room. Dressing room was far too fancy a term. Alcohol-infused dump filled with eau du vomit was closer, though still kind.

  I slumped into a couch that sagged so close to the ground I might as well have been riding in a pimped-out Civic and threw my head back, ears ringing and hands on fire.

  Ever since Trevor disappeared and Joe went and rescued him in Ohio, the band had felt...different. Richer and fuller in some ways, with Trevor writing some of the best damn lyrics, not only in the entire band’s history, but really some of the best I was seeing in new music like ours. Whatever had happened to him in Ohio had transformed him.

  I knew about Mavis the Chicken and started laughing, a little slow on the uptake. “Maybe she could be our mascot,” I said.

  “I’m your mascot!” an excited voice chirped. And then the hair appeared, followed by those bright green eyes.

  Darla.

  Getting together with Joe, Trevor and Liam for practices and new song development had always been fun. We had Joyce tagging along sometimes, and the rotating girlfriend of the month for whichever one of us was dating someone. Beth had been mine for almost a year. That ended a month ago when she questioned how serious I was about life. I guess having a homeless boyfriend with an undergrad degree in Political Science from UMass Amherst, and nowhere to live except his friends’ couches, didn’t really fit with her image of what her future needed to be.

  “You take your music too seriously,” she had said in that final conversation.

  “I do take it too seriously, because it’s serious.”

  “I am what you should take too seriously.”

  My silence had made her stalk off, muttering a slur of profanity that beat out any sorority chick’s drunken ramblings on TMZ.

  And so we were done.

  Good. It’s good that we were done because life is a hell of a lot easier when it’s just you. Just you and the drums and whatever crappy job you have to work to get by.

  Getting back to Darla. She was unlike any girl I had ever met. Big and curvy and wild and sweet, in a ragingly sarcastic way that made her one of the guys. Sort of. Damn if that woman didn’t say whatever came into her mind. Who does that? No one in our lives did.

  Trevor planted a kiss on Darla’s cheek and mouthed “thank you” as she handed him, then Joe, a cold bottled water. “You want one?” she asked me, so friendly and open.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Trevor slunk out after her, hands all over that nice, round ass, giggles filling the hall. Then silence. Then a moan.

  I wasn’t getting that bottled water. Not, at least, until they’d finished.

  Joe watched them leave, an amused half smile over his face. “So listen, man, remember how I got waitlisted for Penn?”

  How the hell wasn’t he jealous?

  “Earth to Sam.”

  I shook my head, lost in that thought. Sh
aring one woman...I got it in principle, but in reality....“Yeah.” Getting into the University of Pennsylvania Law School was Joe’s wet dream. He probably jizzed all over the college catalogues nightly, hoping that it was some form of sacrifice that the admissions gods would view favorably.

  “They called.”

  “No fucking way, man.”

  “Yeah.” Joe nodded. “I can’t believe it, either.”

  It was late July, in the middle of the worst of the Boston summer, and everyone I knew who was going to law school, med school, or getting their MBA, was settled.

  “But you’re going to BC,” I said. Boston College.

  “Not now.”

  “You accepted?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “That’s wicked cool. Congrats!” Penn was a big deal, Ivy League. A very big deal. He looked puffed up and deflated at the same time, proud of his accomplishment, but...

  “You tell Trevor and Darla yet?” His eyes cut away as he shook his head. Aw, he was so dead. For the past few weeks I’d watched how the three of them interacted—admired it, really. Managing one girlfriend, two people in a relationship was hard enough. The three of them seemed to manage their...arrangement...so fluidly.

  I started tapping a beat on my thigh, trying to ground my brain as it started to spiral away from me while the emotional implications of what Joe was saying began to sink in.

  “I haven’t told them, but I have to tonight.”

  “What about the band?” I practically shouted.

  Joe grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the couch. I tapped out a more complex rhythm on my leg hoping to communicate with the part of my brain that was freaking out and tell it to calm down, tell it that nothing Joe said had anything to do with who I was on the inside.

  “If I’m in Philly there’s no way I can stay in the band.”

  “No way!” We were just starting to get good paying gigs, the kind that would let me drop the temp jobs in the factories and the crappy cubicle farm shifts where I processed paperwork that had no real meaning in life. “If you leave we need to get a new bassist.”

  “Yeah, I know you do. But I’m leaving.”

  “Dammit, Joe, why’d you have to go and get a backbone just as we’re starting to break out?” I smiled. I was glad for him—this meant a lot. “Damn,” was all I could say.

  “It’s not just about the band, though,” Joe said, his eyes shifting. “It’s about everything.”

  “Your mom’s going to shit a brick.”

  “She already did. It was a vegan, free range, organic brick.” He just shook his head, looking like an old Italian grandmother tsk-tsking. “A proud brick,” he said, chuckling. “But look,” Joe added, with that face that looked like something out of a movie poster, “I’m going to Penn. I’m not going to be able to room with Trevor, so if you want to take over my half of the apartment, you can. Have your own bedroom, the whole bit.”

  I went numb. That was great and all, but how the hell was I going to pay for it? “And you and Darla...and Trevor...?” The words seemed so weird coming out like that.

  “I’m going have to deal with that next,” Joe said, his eyes breaking away.

  Trevor came up behind us. “Why so serious?”

  Damn. They were fast. Darla’s eyes were hazy and unfocused, the kind of look a woman has after she’d just been thoroughly enjoyed. Trevor strutted a bit more than usual, and I saw small red streaks on his neck. Fingernails.

  “We’re just talking about the mating habits of chickens,” I answered.

  “Fuck off,” he grunted and stormed off.

  “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck OFF!” Joe said like a chicken’s bawk. We laughed. “It always works, doesn’t it?”

  I just shook my head. It felt like the entire room was balanced on one tiny, tiny shard of glass on top of a feather bed that was about to tilt.

  “Five minutes!” the owner said, popping his head in.

  I walked off to find my own damn water as Joe pulled Darla into the adjoining room.

  Amy

  The last time I saw Sam was four and a half years ago at the qualifiers for the National Debate Tournament. He was from a neighboring school and I’d seen him since freshman year at different speech tournaments, every Saturday, from the end of October through March with few exceptions. I had a sense of who he was from the start. He was Lincoln-Douglas debate all the way, baby. Smart, determined, and turning from a silent geek into one hell of a hot guy by the time we were seniors.

  The funny part was he didn’t know it.

  The awesome part was that was what drew me to him.

  He wasn’t awkward, like the other guys. Sam was so self-contained and knew himself so deeply that he didn’t need to talk about it, or show off, or prove his manhood. Talking to Sam could be torture. Catching him in the halls, in the cafeteria with his group from his high school, and me with my group from their rival, we intersected enough to hang out. Over ice cream bars and the occasional cup of coffee by our senior year, there was an accumulation of just enough conversations for me to decide that I wasn’t crazy and that there was a spark of interest there. What happened to confirm that was burned into my brain, the second strongest memory of my life.

  I lost one of the most intense debates of my career two weeks before qualifiers, and Sam found me in a corner of the enormous high school auditorium that wasn’t being used by the speech kids. I was trying to cry quietly, and mostly not succeeding. He just found me—that’s all. He didn’t lord over the fact that he placed first in the tournament that day, to my third. He didn’t try to say all the right words that everyone thought were kind, and considerate, and comforting, and helpful.

  He didn’t stumble or say “I’m sorry.” He just walked up and stopped a few feet away from me, his brow lowering with a frown of recognition, and then did something so perfect it makes me ache to this day. Decisively, step by step, he closed the gap and just put his arms around me. Tucked my cheek into his chest and wound one arm around my waist, the other around my shoulders, rested his head on my hair, and held me. I would give anything to go back to that moment in the auditorium, with its cracked wood seats and its shabby, threadbare carpet, its smell of lemony bleach.

  To feel again how Sam filled all my senses. My ear against the wool of his suit, his arms wrapped around me like a cocoon of understanding. His aftershave, the rasp of his cheek against my ear. Sam created a world for me in that one moment, a safe world where I could cry. A world where I fell in love. What I didn’t know then was that two weeks later at the qualifiers, I would dismantle that world, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, completely unaware that I was doing it at the time.

  It should have made me feel like a creepy stalker, taking pleasure as I did when I listened to the music and I watched his movement. Just as being behind that drum set was where Sam seemed to make some sort of sense, my place was here watching him as I tried to make sense of my own rhythms, my own beats, and my own choices.

  Sam

  “What the hell kind of state doesn’t have Happy Hour?” Darla asked, incredulous.

  She was at every practice and every gig now that she was living here, somewhere in Cambridge with an aunt who ran a dating service where Darla had a job. It must be a day job, because she had plenty of time to act like a band manager and mother hen. You wouldn’t know that she had her own apartment, either; she’d been spending so much time at Trevor and Joe’s that they’d bought her a toothbrush. Not that I could say anything—I was crashing on their couch for free.

  “In Ohio most bars have Happy Hour all week long. You walk in and they’ve got free food—you know, wings and mozzarella sticks and all kinds of things that you can munch on,” she said. “And then discounts on drinks. Dollar drafts, buy one drink, get one free, or buy one drink, get one half off—you name it. All the major cities in Ohio have it, but here....” She rolled her eyes and threw up her hands. “Nothin’. And why do the bars close at one o’clock?”
r />   Trevor shrugged. “Beats me. I know alcohol can’t be served after two.”

  “Yeah!” Darla interjected. “So why one o’clock? What’s up with being so uptight? Is it the Catholicism in this state, or what? What the hell does the Pope have against a mozzarella stick or a basket of wings? ”

  “Darla,” Trevor said, pulling her in, their hips touching, his hands all over her ample ass. “You go march right over to the bar owner and give him a piece of your mind. Change the world. Free the mozzarella sticks.”

  “The poor schmuck who owns this place doesn’t control any of that. It’s the voters,” she insisted.

  “Run for governor. Vote for Darla!” Trevor shouted.

  “Why would I do that?” she asked. “It’s so much easier to just sit here and bitch about it.”

  Joe walked up in the middle of our laughter looking green and sick. I started to take off and give them a minute for what I knew was about to happen, but Liam marched over and interrupted before Joe had a chance to speak. Joe looked relieved.

  Liam was taller than any of us; he towered over Trevor, and that wasn’t an easy accomplishment. When we were younger, he’d looked like a wiry praying mantis, always too tall for the society he was in. Since senior year of high school, though, he’d taken to lifting weights and had filled out a lot. Liam’s confidence reflected the change; he’d begun to manifest a certain personal authority. He interrupted Joe without apology, confidently certain that what he had to say was the most important.

  I wanted to be that way. It wasn’t easy after my parents spent most of my childhood and teen years reminding me to project happiness at all times, as a sign of confidence, of assurance, and of contentment—none of which I really felt. While that developed, I was cocooned behind my drum kit and managed the truth by omission.