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She was quiet for a second, looking at me. Her lashes were thick, her makeup expertly done, her hair blonde. But she was still Ava.
To me, she was always Ava.
Finally, she sighed. “You need a haircut, Dane,” she said, a smile touching the corner of her mouth. “I guess we should get started.”
Four
Ava
* * *
Here are the facts of Dane Scotland and me: He’s my brother’s best friend. I’ve known him since I was eleven and he was fifteen. I practically lived with my brother and his friends during my teenage years, when I didn’t want to be home with my mother. I don’t want to talk about my mother.
I didn’t sleep with Dane until much later, when I was nineteen and he was twenty-three. I hadn’t planned to be a virgin at nineteen, but somehow I still was. It drove me nuts. I couldn’t find a likely candidate to fix the problem—someone I trusted, someone I thought was hot, someone who would help me through an experience I knew would probably be a big deal. I didn’t want it to be a big deal, but my brain always trips me up over these things. Everything is a bigger deal than I want it to be, and I never know how to stop it.
Losing my virginity was the biggest possible deal, unfortunately. I needed help with it. I picked Dane.
By that point Dane had created the software that the boys sold for an incredible forty-six million dollars. They were nobodies, and then they were millionaires. We still had the old apartment for a while, but one weekend the other three went away, off to meetings or real estate buying ventures or whatever, and I realized that Dane and I had the apartment to ourselves for two whole days.
So on Friday night, after waffling for hours about what to do, I finally picked the direct route. I got up from the sofa where I was wrapped in a blanket, watching TV, and walked into Dane’s dark bedroom, where he was lying asleep. When he woke up and said, “What is it, Ava?” I said, “I’m tired of being a virgin.”
And then he surprised me by saying, “So am I.”
The whole thing changed when he said those three words. So am I. So simple and so complicated at the same time. I knew Dane—I knew he was a geek, a software programmer with glasses who rarely changed his shirt. But he was twenty-three. And under the glasses, he was cute. Under the old tees, he had nice shoulders and a flat stomach, and he smelled really good. He had a nerdy-hot thing going on big time, and as much as I liked to tease him, deep down I’d never suspected he’d gone all the way to twenty-three without sex.
This was supposed to be an adventure with a nerdy-hot older guy who could teach me things. And then he changed the game by saying So am I.
This, I realized, was a better game. A scarier one. But one that was much more exciting.
So I took off my clothes and got in bed with Dane, and we both fixed our problem.
Oh, my God.
Most women will tell you their first time wasn’t all that good. It was fast, no one knew what they were doing, it was a race to the finish line. Dane and I should have been like that. We sure as hell didn’t know what we were doing. And both of us really, really wanted that finish line.
But somehow, while we were getting there… Oh, my God.
We did it once, and then we did it again, trying different things. Then we slept for a while and did it again, trying even more different things. We spent most of that weekend in bed, with breaks to eat and shower, and except when we were exhausted almost none of that time was spent sleeping.
On Sunday night, when the others started to trickle back in, they found Dane in his room, on his computer, while I was sitting on the sofa, watching Gilmore Girls reruns. Same old, same old. I thought at least one of them would notice that both of us were glowing and Dane’s sheets were freshly laundered, but no one did.
I thought someone might notice when I went on birth control and accidentally left my pills in the bathroom, but no one did.
I thought someone might notice that Dan
e and I made excuses to stay home when the other three went out. That if we got the chance, we’d take even an hour alone. Hell, half an hour. Twenty minutes could do it.
No one noticed.
That long, cold winter, while everything changed around us, Dane and I…well, we practiced. It wasn’t going to be permanent, or even a relationship. We both knew that. I was only nineteen, and I had plans to go to New York and get into the fashion business. Dane was a genius and a sudden, somewhat reluctant multimillionaire who should not be living in our rundown old apartment anymore. The boys started Tower Venture Capital, and they made their plans for offices in New York, L.A., and Dallas, as well as proper offices in Chicago. It was a crazy time, great and sad and terrifying all at once, none of us knowing where we were going or what the next day would bring.
I was mixed up—not a new thing for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted. I knew that I liked Dane, that I trusted him, that we had the natural ability to give each other orgasms. I knew that the future seemed wide open and impossible at the same time. I knew that I wanted a career in the fashion business, but I didn’t know what that career would look like. Like any nineteen-year-old, I knew everything and nothing all at once.
It wasn’t until later, after all of the bad things had happened, that I realized that all that winter, I was happy for the first time in my life.
Dane hurt to look at. I mean, it actually hurt. The glasses were gone, for one. His brown hair used to be tousled, but now he’d grown it long enough to tie back in a man-bun that was sexy because it was actually careless instead of a studied fashion statement. He matched it with a dark brown beard that was in need of a trim.
And his body… What had happened to Dane’s body? I remembered him as all lean, rangy muscle, taut biceps and warm, flat chest. Now he had bulk. His shoulders were muscled, as were his arms and his chest. He was wearing basketball shorts, which meant I could see the thick, defined muscles of his thighs and his calves. Did Dane have calves like that eleven years ago? I was pretty sure he hadn’t. For someone who’d had pretty frequent interactions with Dane’s body at one time in my life, it was like a crazy double vision. He wasn’t Dane—and yet he was. That was Dane’s face under that beard, those were his handsome cheekbones and his dark eyes. He still moved like Dane, sounded like Dane. And he still pissed me off like Dane.
