Read Online If I Lose Her by Greg Joseph Daily - Free Book Online

nineties, and I had a loop in one ear
in my left ear.
     I smiled.
“Damn, I was planning on getting a couple of more piercings just to meet your
parents. Maybe a tongue stud or a septum ring.”
     She shook
her head and started laughing. “That’s nasty.”
     “What about
a labret?” I asked laughing and poking the skin on the bottom of my lip.
     “I’ve never
even heard of that. A what? A labret?” She said with a frown and a chuckle.
     “Yeah I can
take out the piercings. No problem. How should I dress?”
     “Well, we’ll
all be dressed up for the portraits so you should probably at least wear some
slacks and a collared shirt.”
     “Stop by the
Goodwill on my way home. Got it.”
     She shook
her head knowing that I actually liked dressing decently and had an assortment
of casual dress clothes. I even owned a couple of decent suits, but you might
not have believed it if you met me on the street.    
     She took my
hand.
     “Alex,
there’s something else I need to talk to you about,” she said as I pulled into
the school parking lot. “I’m not sure how to bring it up because I don’t want
to upset you so I’m just going to come out and say it.”
     “Okay?” I
said turning off the car and turning to face her. There was a long dark hair
caught in her lip-gloss that I brushed away.
     “You know
the other night, after the game?” she asked letting go of my hand and starting
to pick at her chipped nail polish.
     “Yeah.”
     “It was
really nice…what we were doing, but I just don’t think I’m ready for that yet.”
     I’ll be
honest. I was a bit disappointed at this. We hadn’t done anything else together
like that since that night because I didn’t want to rush her, but I was getting
excited about the possibility that our relationship was moving to the next
level, whatever level that was.
     “Okay,” I
said.
     “I love
kissing you, and I don’t think it’s a problem when you tickle me. But, I’m not
sure I’m ready for the rest of it. Not yet. Is that okay?”
     I sat back
in my seat.
     “Yeah, no
that’s fine. We were both caught up in the heat of the moment. I hadn’t really
thought about it much since then anyways,” I told her, but it was a lie. 
     This was the
first time I could remember really lying to her, and I hated doing it but there
wasn’t anything else I could think to do. There was no way she would understand
what it was like for me to wake up in the middle of the night with my bed
soaking wet from me sweating through the sheets or how I got aroused every time
I kissed her goodnight or how I started getting turned on by the underwear
commercials on the television when I was ten or how I was in the same boat as
all the other assholes in school who were only trying to sleep with whatever
girl they could but that I actually gave a shit about the girls around me or
how sometimes I would wake up after a dream and my penis would be so hard that
it hurt or how this all drove me so crazy that all I wanted to do was go to the
doctor and get him to give me some pill to help calm me down or how I wished to
God that somehow she could understand all of this but that there was no way I
would ever be able to tell her.
     “Are you
sure you’ll be okay?”
     I forced up the
best smile that I could. “Of course. We should probably head to class.”
     We hugged
and kissed each other in the hall where we parted ways each morning, and I
watched her walk around the corner. Then I left. I didn’t have anything else
going on in class the rest of the day that I cared about, and my time at the
yearbook was up since all of the books had gone to press a couple of weeks
earlier, so I dipped out for the rest of the afternoon to absorb what Jo had
told me and went and saw a movie. I was back on campus in time to give Jo the
usual ride home, so she never knew a thing.
     
     Saturday
evening I pulled up to Jo’s house ten minutes before five o’clock, feeling like
I