Amy Inspired Read Online Free PDF

I’d ever loved, a line of boys parading back to elementary school where I’d first felt that nauseating swell of hope and anxiety every time Bryan Holmes walked into the classroom. Holmes was the James Dean of the sixth grade and the notorious nemesis of Mrs. Mallarmy, meanest teacher in Rosewood Elementary. He wore pants on his hips, greased his hair with Vaseline, and sat in silent protest while the rest of us stood to pledge allegiance to the flag.
    In the seventh grade Bryan moved away. I mourned his leaving for a week then replaced him with Luke Warden, son of First Fundamentalist missionaries. We stayed after church to help fold tracts for the youth group to leave on restaurant bathroom toilet paper dispensers. He insisted we not kiss as it would lead us down the road to temptation so we held sweating hands with discretion—we spread the Gospel with more passion. He hoped to win his entire lunch table to Christ by the end of the school year, by which time I’d moved a table over to better study the way Jimmy McCreight’s loose auburn curls fell over his forehead. Jimmy, the track star and homecoming king with whom I spoke twice, both times to invite him to church camp.
    High school was similarly unsuccessful. First came Aaron Borke, chess club captain, talented swing dancer, homecoming date, and my first kiss. Then Charlie Smith, who led prayer around the flagpole every fall and spent the rest of the year in a state of borderline hedonism for which he would repent the following year back at the flagpole.
    Twelfth grade was Seth Rieder, aspiring musician who was forever endearing for claiming that I had the knees of a supermodel, yet forever disappointing for liking breasts better. He stayed with Tiffanie Lewis who had breasts.
    My college love affairs comprised a disappointing succession of altogether unattainable men: Leonard Brown, professor of literature, freshman year; Lawrence Green, roommate’s boyfriend, sophomore year; Barry Jones, philosophy major and gay, junior year. After graduation, there was Dylan Jones, lead singer of the church band and my cubicle neighbor with whom I flirted for eight months, dated for six. I spent my twenty-fourth year of life in love, my twenty-fifth recovering from the break-up.
    And then Adam Palmer, a relationship doomed from the start, made impossible due to problems of faith—in other words I had one, he didn’t.
    Of all the men I’d loved, I had relationships with four. That was an average of one relationship for every four years (if you only counted the court-able decades). Adam was the first I’d dated who neither believed in God nor made a front of being interested that I did. What had inspired me to think a relationship with a man who held every one of my beliefs in contempt could possibly be healthy?
    Adam had been intriguing, his swagger a welcome change from the exhausting self-deprecation Dylan mistook for humility. And Adam made no attempt to hide his attraction or to keep his hands at bay. At first, it was exciting to be touched so boldly by a man who had none of the reservations that tortured the Christians I’d dated. I tripped along breathlessly, mistaking his flair for rhetoric for superior intellect and his sexual advances for romance. I ignored the growing conviction that I’d stepped out of line and suppressed the guilt in favor of the pleasure, a pleasure that grew more fleeting as Adam became more insistent.
    At night, lying in bed alone, I relived the embarrassment of telling Adam I was a virgin, a fact I had revealed while standing in my panties and bra in the middle of his living room five seconds away from the worst mistake of my life. I told him I couldn’t; he put his pants back on. This had only been two weeks ago.
    I hadn’t told Zoë. She only spoke cryptically of her own experience—or inexperience. While she and Michael did not sleep over at each other’s places by rule, I had no idea what they did when alone. Sex for Marriage was