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“Why would I be worried? What’s wrong with me talking to you? This is a party and I’d be delighted to have you as my girl—oh wait—we did that once before, remember?” He laughed and looked at me more intently. “It’s natural I’d talk to you here … we can’t pretend not to know one another.”
“Plenty is wrong with it. I’m with Bradley and you know how he gets. Besides, it was you who said no one must ever find out that I’m tutoring you in math,” I said with a sharp hiss in my tone.
“Tricia … I don’t see any textbooks, do you?” he asked, throwing his hands wide and chuckling. “I think we’d look a lot more suspicious if I totally ignored you. We’re nextdoor neighbors … if you exclude the pastures in between. I think your blushes will draw more attention.”
It was true, Donovan’s house was the next one down from ours, separated by a stone wall marking the start of my family’s eighty-acre parcel of land and his parents’ less substantial ten-acre plot of land.
“Draw more attention to what?” Alice asked, sticking her beak in at the worst impossible moment. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn she’d been taking private tutoring of her own from my nosey mother.
“To the fact that she thinks I’m the hottest guy here by a mile,” Donnie quickly chipped in and chuckled at his own joke.
Alice smirked sarcastically at him and laced her arm in mine. She shook her head as she turned me away from him. “In your dreams, Donovan Clark, this girl is lovesick for Bradley, so best you keep your grubby mitts off her or I’ll be forced to play snitch and give him a call. Brad may not be one of you jocks, but don’t think he wouldn’t be able to beat your ass. So scoot, I don’t really give much for your chances if he gets to hear you’ve been sniffing around his girl.”
Donnie played hurt, smirked wickedly, and winked at me before turning slowly and heading down the stairs to the poolside. “Later, Tricia, when your rottweiler puppy is otherwise engaged,” he shot over his shoulder.
“Cocky asshole, he could at least have called me a prettier dog breed,” Alice said, chuckling. “Honestly, between him and Brad, you’re hogging all the decent eye candy, Tricia. The way he looked at you as he left there …” She stopped and swooned with her hands clasped under her chin. “Best you don’t talk to him when that boyfriend of yours gets home, or Donnie really will have a problem. If only I could find one boy to look at me like that—I’d be in heaven.”
Intrigued by her comment, my curious eyes sought him out and I noted he was talking to a couple of boys from his football team. I knew their faces, their names… not so much.
Alice pulled me off in the direction of our other friends and it wasn’t until around an hour later that Donnie showed up again, when I’d left the others to get a drink.
“Beer?” he asked, gesturing a bottle toward me.
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. I’d already forced two beers down and four glasses of fruity punch and had hated the tastes of both. It had been horrible drinking them down, but by the time I’d forced myself with the last glass of punch I had a buzz inside my body that was like nothing I’d felt before.
“Want to try vodka?” he asked.
My eyes went wide in surprise that Mr. Lassiter had allowed his son, Gideon, to serve alcohol in his home to underage partygoers. My parents would have had a fit if Marnie and I had tried to do that.
“Sure,” I replied, trying to sound relaxed, but my head had begun to swim.
Grabbing the bottle, he filled a glass with ice and poured the clear liquid over it.
“Here,” he said, nudging the glass toward me and encouraging me to take it.
The moment he did that Kent’s warning rang in my ears about the drinks. I assessed who it was and figured it was safe. I’d seen him pour it out and it was only Donnie the boy I’d grown up with. I smiled and took it from him, sniffed it, and when I found it didn’t smell of much, I took a sip.
Sticking my tongue out I made a disgusted face.
“Don’t be so dramatic, it doesn’t taste of much. Here,” he said, leaning over and pulling a bottle of lime cordial with a measure on top.
How the cordial was measured and the harder alcohol was freely poured had seemed strange to me, since it was the alcohol that did the damage and made people drunk.
I’d never had alcohol before the party, not even a sip, so by the time I’d drank what Donnie had given me as well as the beers, I’d begun not to care about anything. I started to enjoy myself because the music the DJ played was fabulous and Donnie was attentive company.
It was the most liberated I had felt in months. I’d even thought it was fun chatting to other boys without Bradley growling and sneering at them like a rabid dog.
Donnie leaned over and whispered in my ear. A thrill of delight ran down my spine and my heart had begun to race when his hot breath wafted over my bare skin. “Dance with me?”
“I don’t dance,” I told him, sounding flustered because he’d already watched me dancing with Sandra and Alice, and then with Gideon.
When I thought back on that, I vaguely remembered Donnie going over to Gideon and talking heatedly with him, after Gideon had walked back to his group. It made me wonder if Donnie had warned Gideon off me because he knew I had a boyfriend.
Scanning the pool area again, I frowned when I noted my girls were no longer out there with me. My brain suddenly felt a little loose in my head as the alcohol I hadn’t been used to, made me feel light-headed.
As I was trying to clear the fog from my mind, Donnie took my drink from my hand, set it down on a nearby table and swept me into his arms before I’d had the chance to protest. Although I laughed, I had felt awkward, but the speed of his move set a swarm of butterflies fluttering in my belly at the same time.
I felt ashamed of myself because I knew it felt wrong to be in the arms of another boy, but between the alcohol and a long summer without Bradley, Donnie had made me feel wanted.
