Chapter 2: Lace 🌶️

After he confessed, June froze for a long moment.
She didn’t lift her head. She looked down at the small stones at her feet instead. Her face had gone the color of a ripe tomato — fine skin almost translucent in the spring light, a thin layer of color rising under it.
“Okay,” she said softly. She nodded, just once.
His eyes — narrow, dark — lit up like something behind them had been switched on. Pieces of dappled light scattered across his lashes. There was something almost moving behind them.
He was really, really happy. She could see it.
—
To this day she still didn’t know why he’d said it that afternoon. There hadn’t been much between them at the time. Tate was team captain and class president — patient with everyone, polite to everyone. That was just how he was. She’d never expected anything extra from him.
And on that afternoon, he’d handed her the right to have him to herself.
Walking beside him now, three months later, she felt a little unreal.
She squeezed her own fingers shut. Remembered the warmth of his hand when he’d held hers walking back from the magnolia tree that day. That kind of body heat didn’t leave you. She could still feel it.
She wanted to touch him again.
But when she glanced over, his arm was bent, the bony pale long line of his hand shoved into his pants pocket.
He didn’t want to.
She pulled her eyes back fast and stared at the sidewalk in front of them. Her ears started to get hot.
She pressed her lips together. She was getting embarrassing. Her thoughts about him were getting out of hand.
—
The sky overhead was a sour grey. Wind came in low from every direction, brushing along her arms. Somewhere a car honked.
And then, with no warning at all, the sky opened.
Swssshhhhh —
The world in front of her blurred. A thick curtain of rain came down between her and the road, hiding the cars. There was nothing left of the traffic except a long row of brake lights, blinking through it.
“Rain,” Tate said.
She was a half-second behind on the reaction. He caught her wrist and started running.
There was a little neighborhood park just past where they were standing, and nothing inside it that would shelter them. They had to make it across the boulevard. After the boulevard there was a strip of storefronts that ran the next block — that was the closest dry ground.
He was running too fast for her. He didn’t want her soaked.
Halfway across she ran out. She bent forward, hand on her knee. She held on to his hand with her other hand. She shook her head at him.
“I can’t — I can’t run.”
He didn’t say anything. He scooped her up against him — one arm under her knees, one across her back — and kept moving.
She gave a small startled cry into his shoulder. Her arms went around his neck on instinct.
She could smell him through the rain. Clean. Boy-cologne and rain-wet cotton. Even running through rain his body was burning hot.
The world went sideways past the corner of her eye. After a few jolting strides, the rain disappeared from above her head.
He set her down. Her right foot found the sidewalk first.
“Doesn’t look like it’s stopping soon,” Tate said. He was standing in the slot of dryness under the awning, looking up at the wall of rain. Then he looked down at the soaked girl beside him.
He had been about to say let me get you an Uber. He had been about to say it. But his eyes caught hers, and then his eyes caught everything else, and the words got stuck in his throat. He couldn’t pull his gaze back.
Her thin uniform was glued to her body.
The lace of her bra was showing through the wet white cotton. She looked thin — small — but there was a long, dark, visible shadow of cleavage between her breasts where the wet shirt clung. Pressed flat. Outlined.
He could see how white her skin was underneath. The dip of her waist. The softness of her chest — softer than anything he’d ever seen on a real girl.
The Adam’s apple in his throat ground up and down once like an angular piece of ice.
He clenched his fists. Tilted his face up at the sky. Opened his mouth a little so he could let himself breathe in slow.
He moved his hand to the front of his pants, as if accidentally, and shoved the hard line of his cock to one side, pressing it against his thigh, trying to pin it down under the waistband of his briefs. It was so visible. So hard you could see it through the chinos. He’d barely tucked it under the elastic before it sprang back up out from under it.
He knew what this was. Eighteen-year-old hormones. Every guy in his year had it. Guys his age would chase a hole. Like dogs in heat.
He didn’t want to feel that animal way toward her.
They were still in high school. It wasn’t the right age. She hadn’t even —
If her dad found out he’d done anything like that to her, the man would come at him with a knife. If it was Tate, that was what he’d do.
“Achoo —”
The girl beside him bent her head and covered her mouth. She was shivering in the wind.
He realized he was a piece of shit. His head had been in the gutter for the last five minutes, and meanwhile his girl was standing soaking wet beside him, cold.
June sniffed. And then her body was being pulled into him. Her face landed against something warm and hard.
A hand on her shoulder pinned her there. She couldn’t move. She was wrapped up inside the body.
“Hug me tighter if you’re cold. I’m calling a car right now.”
She heard the voice from above her head. Low. Clean — with the soft thing underneath it, the way it had been in her dream.
Her heart started hammering against the front of her ribcage. She was nervous. But she wanted this. She slid her arms around his waist.
“Mm,” she answered, soft.
She had so few chances to touch him like this. She wanted to be closer. So she pressed in further — her lower belly came up against his body too.
And that was when she felt it.
Something hard. Sitting straight up against her stomach. Poking.
The piece of biology she’d been told about in tenth-grade health class drifted into her head out of nowhere, and once it was there, every other thought left her. Her brain went completely white.
She had no idea what she was supposed to do next.