Once Upon a Time, There Was You Read Online Free PDF Page A

although occasionally he did ahumor piece that was actually really funny. He hung with the arty crowd, she with the jocks, but then one day early in May she was behind him in the lunch line and they started talking and she thought, Whoa! She knows the line “Where have you been all my life?” ranks right up there with the cheesiest of clichés, but that’s exactly what she felt, that day. She doesn’t even remember what they talked about, but something he said or the way he said it made her really see him for the first time. Her best friend, Meghan, says it’s pheromones, that that day in May was the first time Sadie had been close enough to Ron to smell him. “You can’t fight pheromones,” Meghan had said. “Or if you were together in a past life, you can’t fight that, either.”
    Whatever accounted for Sadie’s instant attraction to Ron, it was mutual, and they’ve been together ever since. She hasn’t told her mother about him yet; he’s too special to her. Sadie doesn’t want anything her mother says or does to ruin things for her—Irene can be wonderful, but she can also be really strange. And Ron seemed in no rush to meet her mother anyway, or for Sadie to meet his. Sadie likes this, the way that what they have together belongs to them alone. Meghan covers for Sadie when she goes out with Ron, although she’s starting to get tired of it, Sadie knows. The last time she’d called Meghan and said, “Ron and I are going out tonight, okay?” Meghan had sighed and said, “How much longer, Sadie?” And Sadie had said soon. Soon she’d tell both her parents about him. But not yet. Maybe when she’s in school and Irene’s hand isn’t in every one of Sadie’s pies. She can’t wait for that kind of independence, which seems impossible to achieve when she’s living under the same roof with Irene. She’s heard that single mothers can do this—take helicoptering to a whole other level—but she’s had enough. And it was Ron who helped her realize that. Not in a cruel way. Just in a matter-of-fact way. Like pointing to a kid who’d had trainingwheels far too long and saying, “Want to try to ride without those?”
    So much about Ron is so different from any boy she’s ever known. If this is love, she hates it and she wants more. She wants to hook up with him, but so far he won’t. He won’t! And he’s not a virgin—he told her once he’d had his first sexual experience with a much older woman, when he was sixteen. She was a neighbor who lived next door to them for only a few months, a twenty-one-year-old whose husband was at war and who, after their encounter, stopped speaking to him, though she was the one who’d initiated everything.
    Sadie is a virgin, though not inexperienced in oral sex. When she was a junior, she was at a party and someone dared her; and she’d gone into the bedroom and done it with the guy she was going out with at the time, Gary Stevens. She’d found it odd: maybe slightly erotic, but mostly odd. She’d told Gary that, and he’d offered to do the real thing, but she’d said no. She didn’t see what the big deal was about either thing, actually; she thought of sex as a lot of fussin’ and cahn’ on about not much.
    But now she thinks she understands what the big deal is, and she wants the real thing with Ron, she wants him inside her because she wants that closeness; she wants to say something to him that she cannot say with words. Once, when they were on the phone intentionally driving each other a little crazy, she said, “Honest to God, Ron, if we don’t do it soon, I’m going to explode.”
    He made a sound she couldn’t quite interpret, and she said, “Don’t you want to?” The question made her blush to the roots of her hair, even on the phone; she instantly regretted asking it.
    But then he said, “Of course I want to,” and she felt better.
    She made her voice low and soft. “Okay then, so why don’t we—”
    “It’s complicated ,” he