Friends with Benefits Read Free Page A

Lydia couldn’t actually tell if the guy was
totally
naked; unfortunately, the photo ended at their waistlines. The woman faced him, her head thrown back as if she was in the throes of a very passionate moment.
    The title:
Secrets of the Kama Sutra.
Talk about your must-borrow.
    From the women’s magazines that had been air-dropped to her and her parents, Lydia knew that the
Kama Sutra
had something to do with certain ways of having sex that supposedly led to overwhelming pleasure. Articles in
Jane
and
Cosmo
such as “Tantric Sex: Make Him Yours Forever” had taught her that much. Lydia wasn’t particularly interested in making any guy hers forever, but the notion of overwhelming pleasure interested her a lot. Here she was, nearly seventeen years old, with pale blond hair choppy from the makeshift haircuts her mother had given her in Amazonia, startling green eyes, skinny but curvy figure, and an allover tan. Guys were sniffing around her all the time, letting her know how hot she was.
    As she lay back on her chaise, she admitted to herself that “all the time” was a bit of an exaggeration. Said attention had only been ongoing for the past two and a half weeks, since she’d moved from the rain forest to her aunt’s guesthouse in Beverly Hills to care for her aunt’s two children. Back in the Amazon, local guys had found her a pathetic excuse for a female, being much too pale, and unwilling to pierce her lower lip with a stick.
    Lydia hadn’t always lived in South America. She’d been born the pampered princess of wealthy Texas parents. She should have lived happily ever after, moving into her teen years with a walk-in closet full of designer outfits, and boyfriends who picked her up in Porsches and Ferraris and Jensen Interceptors. That was exactly what would have happened if her damn parents hadn’t developed their damn saints-on-earth complex. Her surgeon father had a heart attack at age thirty-seven, which had somehow led to a spiritual epiphany and their subsequent move to the Amazon basin. There, he worked as a medical missionary whose only mission was to improve the health of native Amarakaire tribesmen. Lydia’s mother was his assistant. Princess Lydia, then age eight, was shit out of luck.
    When the lifeline had come from Aunt Kat—a job offer for Lydia to be the nanny to her young cousins—Lydia had said yes faster than a giant Amazon leech could suck the life from a peacock bass.
    During all those years in Ama-land, Lydia had held on to her sanity by begging and pleading for American fashion magazines from every do-gooder doctor about to come to the bush. Most obliged, packing two or three into their knapsacks. Hence, her entire knowledge of sex, pop culture, and
life
came from devouring Cosmo and Glamour, Vogue and InStyle.
    But the truly sad thing was that Lydia, a hands-on girl, had zero hands-on experience. As in: still a virgin. Oh, the humanity! It was one of the reasons she’d pounced on
Secrets of the
Kama Sutra.
She’d found her perfect first-time partner-in-crime. His name was Billy Martin; she’d met him at a nightclub in Los Feliz. Lydia had taken one look at Billy, who bore a decided resemblance to Tom Welling (she’d torn a shirtless photo of Welling out of
Star
magazine the year before and stuck it to the mud-caked wall over her straw-mat bed), and knew he’d be the one. He was also nice, funny, smart, and interesting, not to mention straight (though Lydia had misjudged that one at the outset). His parents were State Department Foreign Service officers, so he even had some sense of what it was like to be American and still feel like a foreigner.
    But that first hands-on experience hadn’t happened yet. It was all because of their damn schedules. Billy had just finished his freshman year at the Los Angeles Art Institute, where he was studying film and scenic design. For the summer, he had an internship with Eduardo