He’s a little less excited, but he still hasn’t budged. I think he believes he can pout his way to victory. “You have a choice,” I say, mimicking his mom and how she gets all calm and reserved when he tries to pull a scam. “You can either go inside and get a condom, or you can go inside and do your homework while I go home. Either way. The choice is yours, Matthew John.”

“Mark Conrad says Tonya lets him do it without a condom all the time, and she hasn’t gotten knocked up.”

“Well,” I say, “you’re not Mark Conrad, and if Mark Conrad jumped off a—”

“Mood killer.” He sighs so hard it makes my belly shake. “Pretending to be my mom is not hot.”

I snap the band of his boxer shorts. “Then you’re going to do homework?”

“I’ll be back,” he mumbles. He doesn’t make eye contact when he pulls his pants on and gets his keys out of his backpack. He walks funny going up to the house.

When he comes back, it’s over pretty fast, so I don’t think I killed the mood all that much.

What I don’t get about sex is why the actual doing it part isn’t as great as all the stuff leading up to it. I always want to do it, but then, after, I wish we could go back to the moment right before, when it feels like I’ll go out of my mind if we don’t. It’s like an itch you have to scratch, but then it turns out the itch felt better than the scratching, and it fools me every time.

I turn the key in the ignition enough to get the radio to play without starting the engine, and rest my head in Matty’s armpit. We share one of my glass-bottled Cokes. He talks about the job he’s going to get when he graduates in spring, and how Mark Conrad says the factory is paying three bucks over minimum now. He’s calculated how much we could pay for a trailer and beer money, and if he went hunting with his Uncle Barry, we could have deer meat in our deep freeze and save a ton. I stop listening when he starts in on the awesome venison burgers his Aunt Gloria makes and how she could teach me.