My answer was to pull off the Atari shirt. His answer was to drop his face into the cavernous valley between my boobs. His hair was thick and silky between my fingers. I liked how he looked. I liked how he smelled. I liked how he felt touching me, so when he kissed my neck, and then dropped my bra strap to nuzzle at my shoulder and squeezed my butt...

The humping was a natural progression. Drunk teenagers, a dark car, soft music, my ex about fifty feet away? It was all pretty inevitable. To Jack’s credit, he asked me if I was sure I wanted it before he pulled down my pants. I groaned a yes and my hand plunged into his boxer shorts. Gratuitous bouncing, sweating and groaning were a matter of course.

...for three hours. Not straight through. That would have chafed. But we went, stopped, went and stopped again. I never asked about a condom. He never asked if I was on the pill.

Mistakes, as they say, were made.

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

I woke up in Jack’s truck in my T-shirt and panties, my jeans and bra in a ball in the footwell. Jack was passed out cold beside me, his head tilted back, quiet snores rumbling from his throat. I slid from the truck’s cabin and into the driveway to wrestle back into my clothes, hoping nobody came along and saw me. Unfortunately, jumping up and down to fit my pants over my butt made my stomach flop. I puked into the Levitzs’ forsythia bush. Day-after wine burned like lava, and I swore then and there to never touch the stuff again. Two more hurls drove the point home, and I sagged against the side of the truck, my eyes trying to focus on the pale gray sky with the big ball of pain rising past the pine trees.

“Are you okay?” Jack asked sleepily from behind me.

“Yeah. I...gonna go find Devi. Think I need to pass out.”

“I’m tired, too. It’s not even six yet.”

Jack poured himself from the truck and limped to my side. He leaned down to kiss me, but I offered a cheek instead. Not subjecting him to my hurl-mouth was the least I could do. He seemed to understand, and patted me on the butt instead.

“I should go before my parents kill me,” he said. “Call me, okay? We’ll go out. I had a great time.”

“Sure,” I responded, offering him a thanks-for-the-bone hug. He smelled like stale beer and sweat and I reeked like vomit and Boone’s, but we got through it unscathed. I watched him drive away, my stomach all fluttery and not in the totally-going-to-puke-again way. Maybe Jack was my after-Aaron rebound. Maybe he’d be someone to hang out with over the summer when Devi went to visit her grandparents in Connecticut for what she called her yearly Jewish reprogramming.