Just A Small Town Girl: A New Adult Romantic Comedy Read Free Page B

belonging.
     "Is it that obvious?" I said.
     "Very. Can you even walk in those shoes?"
     "Not really," I confessed. "I should probably go find my friend..."
     "Is she gonna miss you?"
     I glanced back through the doorway. I would rather have walked into the gates of Hell than gone back inside. All that bare, skinny flesh - it was like a Hieronymus Bosch drawing with added Jimmy Choos. And yet despite high school being years behind us, these were Courtney's 'people' - rich, famous, beautiful, thin. I felt bad for even thinking it but part of me wanted to text her and say I was going home.
     "I can't ditch her," I said.
     "You don't have to," he said. "Wanna go blaze one in the parking lot?"
     He pointed to a white Honda parked behind a clump of trees. My mother’s voice came back to haunt me – “Don’t get in cars with strangers,” – but I’d been seven years old at the time. What was the alternative? Finding Courtney and bursting into tears as I admitted I wanted to go home because I felt fat? What was I? Thirteen?
     “Okay,” I said.
     

 Chapter Two
     
    Clayton
     
    It was all Bog's fault. Every damn bit of it.
     Okay, so maybe not all. This morning wasn't directly his fault, although he'd been talking about MILFs and 'cougars' for weeks after he allegedly scored with some bored housewife whose hedge he was trimming. ("No pun intended - she didn't have a hedge, if you know what I mean.") We'd listened to this shit for all of about five minutes before Steve said "Bog, are you sure this wasn't a porno you watched?" since Bog and reality had swapped phone numbers back in maybe 2005, but reality had lost its phone or switched to a better plan and they'd since lost touch. One time he woke up with the munchies and swore blind that I'd eaten the last of the cheesecake in the fridge, even though our fridge had never contained much more than beer, mustard and some expired hot dogs that nobody dared touch because the package was getting kind of bloated.
     "It was there," he'd said. "I was eating it last night. It was cherry or something. And the base was just the right kind of crumbly and the cheese was the good kind - none of that gross lumpy cottage shit."
    He'd dreamed the whole damn thing; there was never any cheesecake. But that was Bog for you; he spent so much time rattling around inside his own weird little mind that the lines between dreams and reality were apt to get blurred. By some bizarre extension, the wild yabberings of his twisted Id were strangely contagious. Just like his description of the dream cake had made me crave cheesecake, his obsessive MILF monologues had led me to wrong thoughts about thirtysomething wives who sublimated their sexual cravings with yoga until their thighs were fit to crack walnuts.
     That's how I wound up with Cadence. She said she was thirty-six but later let slip that she'd been born during the Nixon presidency, which put at least two extra years on her if my High School history served my correctly. She winced when I said Bush Senior had been president when I was born. "I guess it could have been worse," she said. "At least I wasn't old enough to vote in that election."
     She ordered up another couple of Cervezas.
     "So when did you?" I asked, after a while, long enough to catch her on the hop.
     "What?"
     "Lose your cherry?"
     She blinked at me. "That's kind of a personal question."
     "No, sorry - I mean your voting cherry. Which election?"
     "Oh, I see." She sighed and picked at the label of her beer bottle. "Nineteen ninety-two," she said, turning wistful. "I lost my voting virginity to one William Jefferson Clinton."
     "He'd probably get a kick out of that."
     "True," she said, and giggled. "Is it sad that I look at him nowadays and think 'I still would'?"
     "Nah. Bill looks good for his age. Since he lost the weight and all."
     "He does. Although did you hear Monica Lewinsky turned forty this year? Talk about feeling ancient."
     "I wouldn't know,"