Touching Stars Read Online Free PDF Page B

lashes as her fingers wove in and out of buttonholes. “I don’t know what would be the right place. Nobody’s going to see us out here.”
    “You want to lose your virginity in the back seat of a car?”
    She was silent. Okay, so maybe virginity wasn’t an issue. He snorted again. He had never asked, and she had never volunteered. “I get it.”
    She tossed her rumpled hair over her shoulder. “So who cares? It was only once, and the guy was a jerk. This would be like a real first time. If you’d let us get down to it.”
    He felt as if he were going to explode, and not just sexually. For weeks now he’d felt as if there was a stranger living inside his body, somebody trying to claw his way out. “The timing sucks,” he said.
    “Why? I got it before. You were worried about your dad. I could see why maybe you didn’t want to make love. I mean, why should you feel good when he was, like, you know…But he’s home now. You’re going to have a whole summer with him. What’s the problem?”
    “Guys usually have to talk this up. How come you’re in such a freaking hurry?”
    “Jared!” She sniffed and turned away.
    He was contrite, but not very. He was crazy about Brandy. Just the sight of her in the halls of their high school turned him into a jabbering moron. Once he’d been talking to his physics teacher about a test score, and Brandy had come in to wait for him. And right in the middle of the conversation, he couldn’t remember one thing they’d been discussing. He was that far gone.
    “Look,” he said, “I don’t like this, either. But my life just feels up in the air or something. I don’t want to make a mistake.”
    “Oh great, so now I’m a mistake!”
    “How come you don’t get this? I mean, how hard can it be? I just don’t want to do it right here and now.”
    “You sure seemed like you did a minute ago.”
    “Part of me’s always ready, you know that.”
    “I don’t know why the rest of you isn’t!”
    He opened his door and swung his legs over the seat to step outside and adjust his jeans. So far June had been surprisingly cool, but the afternoon sun was warming the air, even through the fully leafed branches of the hardwoods in the forest just below her house. Apparently she’d decided she needed some air, too, because he heard her door slam.
    He didn’t get back in behind the steering wheel. He crossed his arms and leaned against his mother’s sedan. He wasn’t sure what Brandy would do, maybe walk back to her house in a huff, but in a little while she joined him.
    “Where were you before you came to get me?” She leaned on the car beside him and folded her arms, too, as if she were imitating him.
    “I had graduation practice. I told you already.”
    “It was supposed to be over at two. It was after three by the time you got to my house.”
    “It just took longer, that’s all.”
    “Marijoe called me when it was over. She was already home by two.”
    “I had some extra stuff to do. And stuff for my party.”
    “You’re late a lot these days, like you’ve got something going on the side. Is there another girl? Is that what this is about?”
    “No!”
    “So were you hanging out with Cray?” “Cray” was Creighton Green, who had been Jared’s best friend since elementary school.
    “I told you what I was doing,” Jared said.
    “Maybe it’s been a hard day for you. Maybe that’s all this is.”
    He wondered if every woman thought she was some kind of emotional detective. If every single one looked at somebody she loved and thought she understood, by osmosis or something, at least a part of what was wrong.
    “My dad looks like a skeleton.” He glanced at her. “Do you know what that means?”
    “That he’s sick? Or maybe that taking care of himself when he was trekking through the mountains wasn’t much of a priority.”
    “He says he’s not sick.”
    “I bet it’s hard to see him that way.”
    “It makes me furious.” Jared punched the air in