“Cocky much?”

He grinned.

“I could gaze at you for the rest of my life,” I said, my fingertips traversing the thorns and roses up his arms, my lips kissing each one tenderly.

“You can, you know.”

“What?” I said, forgetting the conversation in the wake of his magnificent body.

“Be with me forever.”

My heart stuttered. And I felt…I don’t know…altered. And in the middle of that thought, I decided nothing would come between us again. Not my nagging sense of doom or my jealousy. Because I could see I was the one holding us back. Me and my insecurities.

He loved me. He’d said so.

I had to let go and just trust.

Love is hard to define; it just IS. And, I don’t know why we fell for each other, two people from opposite worlds, but I knew I had to hold on to it, fight for it.

Just like dance. Yes. Like that.

His phone pinged again, and after staring at it for a few seconds, he turned it off.

Coming back to me, he kissed me more, his hands on my shoulders, moving me against his hardness, whispering in my ear that he loved me and how he couldn’t wait to be inside me.

“Make love to me,” I said against his lips, making his fingers dig into my ass. “I don’t need a bed of roses. I just need you. All of you.”

“Are you afraid?” he rasped out, searching my eyes. “I’ve never been with a virgin.”

“I’m not afraid of anything except losing you,” I admitted huskily.

He groaned as I pushed the rest of my inhibitions away and stroked his hard length. I sat up and eased him inside me, inch by inch. He helped me, his hand splayed out across my hip, guiding me. Our eyes connected as he worked inside of me, tentatively at first, but never wavering. He stroked up and stopped, gauging my reactions.

He eased out and came back in, and I waited for pain that never came. I’ve put my body through vigorous training for years, pushing it beyond normal limits, so it was no surprise my hymen was nonexistent.

“Okay?” he gasped.

I nodded, not able to speak.

He arched his back and I relaxed my body, letting the heat and sensation build up again. He shifted himself to get a better angle, pushing deeper inside, filling me up and making me utterly his.

Gazing down at my body pressed against his, he groaned. “You look good on me, Dovey. So perfect.”

Holding my dandelion pendant with one hand, I put the other on the roof of the car, my body not my own, feeling like it was there for him. He took my hips and plummeted me to the edge of the universe and then slowed and brought me back to earth, but then sent me reeling again to the top of the heavens until I crashed back down, feeling undone.

He broke apart, and I watched him lose his sense of where he ended and I began. And I could listen to a million heart wrenching love poems, and none would come close to expressing what I felt for him in that moment.

Not a single one.

“I love you,” I told him as we held each other later. He pushed the hair out of my eyes. “Dovey, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Never forget that.”

My heart sang.

Time crept by, and we must have fallen asleep, and the tap, tap, tap of the rain against his windshield woke me. I watched him sleep and thought about what we’d done. I’d given my innocence to him, the one thing I’d held on to. I waited for the heaviness to come, the worry that I’d made a mistake but it didn’t. Yeah, we hadn’t used a condom, but we could talk about his sexual history later. The thought of pregnancy didn’t scare me. I was on the Pill already because it helped keep my periods more manageable when it came to performances.

He woke up in gradual phases, stretching out as much as he could in the Porsche and then giving me a tight hug. We embraced without talking, until he checked his watch and then sat straight up.

“Midnight!” he exclaimed, reaching back and grabbing his clothes. “Fuck, I need to get home.” He jerked his shirt on and snapped his pants.

“What’s wrong?” I pulled my dress over my head.

He barely looked at me, his fingers scouring around for his phone. He tapped out some digits, but no one answered. He rubbed his forehead, and then tried again, dialing the number and getting nothing. He kept doing it.

“Your mom?” I asked, but he didn’t respond.

He cranked the car and started backing out of the parking lot.

“Cuba, wait,” I called out. “Let me out. I need my car.”

He came to a stop. “Sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” He brushed his lips across mine absently.

And fear began to grow. Was he done with me now that I’d slept with him?

No, I couldn’t believe that.

But here’s the thing, he didn’t call the next day. Nor did he call on Sunday.

I WENT TO school on Monday, angry and ready to confront him, but as soon as I got to my locker I caught snatches of the buzz.

Details were sketchy, but Cuba’s mother had died sometime over the weekend. Some said on Saturday and some said Sunday. It was hard to tell truth from fiction, and I wouldn’t piece it all together until later that day when I saw Spider at lunch.

Worried, I tried to call him, then text him, and then call again. But his phone was off. I kept picturing his face, the dread on it as he dialed his mom from the Porsche on Friday. And even though it wasn’t about me, I felt a load of guilt settle on my shoulders.

Swallowing my pride, I approached Emma in the halls. “Can you tell me anything about Cuba’s mom? I haven’t heard from him.”