And then he pulls his face from mine and whispers the words that snap me back into focus.

“Should I get a condom?”

“What?” I whisper back, though I heard him perfectly. I don’t know what else to say. He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and says it again, his voice scratchy from lack of use.

“Should I get a condom?”

Yes. Isn’t that the obvious answer? Isn’t this what I was hoping would happen when I came to his house, when I went alone to his room? I think of Danielle’s warning from earlier in the night, an uneasy feeling churning in my stomach. If you tell him you’re a virgin, it could only go two ways: he’ll be weirded out and lose interest, or he’ll take your virginity and never speak to you again. I just doubt he wants to teach you how to have sex.

It’s a catch-22. I don’t want to be a virgin anymore, but I don’t want to scare Dean away by letting him take my virginity. What if he freaks out at my inexperience? Or maybe worse—what if he never talks to me again afterward, because he’s gotten what he wanted? I wish there was some way to just get it over with, some way to have already had sex. I don’t want Dean to have to teach me. I want to already know what I’m doing. I want this not to be a BIG DEAL.

Maybe Dean doesn’t have to know I’m a virgin. I know the basics. I could probably fake it. But what if it hurts? Hannah told me the first time she had sex with Charlie, it hurt so much she cried. They lay on top of a bath towel just in case, and she bled all over it. I can’t imagine the humiliation I’d feel if I bled all over Dean’s sheets. He would have to wash them right away, would have to take them into the living room where Cody might see them, and they’d both laugh and call me disgusting, and that would become my label: the disgusting high school girl who ruined Dean’s sheets. The lying virgin caught red-handed. I’d be an embarrassing blip on Dean’s timeline: a regretful mistake.