He was shocked to discover she was pregnant, but she wasn’t going to make things worse by marrying the wrong person. They had been close, childhood friends but not quite lovers. However, their old friendship was the basis for renewal. The pent-up lust and desire they felt for each other that was left over from years ago, quickly exploded into a sexual tension that begged for relief.
Excerpt One:
I had known Andrea Anderson for the best part of my sixteen years. We had been next-door neighbors since her parents moved to town fourteen years ago. She was eight, and I was six. Back then, she was cute in a freckly kind of way. She was thin. No, she was skinny. She had red hair, weird, green eyes, and she had tons of freckles. She always had a smile on her face, and the first thing I always think about when she comes to mind is that she giggled a lot. She was always happy.
She was into dolls, clothes, and sleepovers with her girlfriends. I was into GI Joe, war games, cowboys always beating the Indians, and camping with my dad. In other words, we had nothing in common except for a side yard fence. The one time my mom invited her over to play, she brought two of her dolls with her for us to play with. I preempted the doll thing by taking great pleasure in showing her my large collection of combat toys and stick figures. I was in the middle of explaining one of the battle scenarios that I knew by heart when she, rather demonstrably, cleared her throat.
She was looking right at me with her head turned down. Her eyes were staring at me from beneath her terribly wrinkled brow as if she were using some kind of death ray against me and all of my forces.
“Toby,” she said in an icy tone, “I just remembered something that I was supposed to do with one of my girlfriends. I’m sorry, maybe we can do this again sometime.”
With that, she turned, curtsied, said goodbye. For the most part, she walked out of my life, sort of. What I mean by that is that our parents didn’t set up any more play dates for us. I saw her almost every day, though. We rode the same bus to school, and occasionally, we even ate lunch together in the school cafeteria. But that was pretty much the extent of our relationship. We were friendly, but we weren’t exactly friends.
When she graduated from high school, she went away to college, and I didn’t see her again for nearly four years.
Excerpt Two: Several years later.
I watched her intently as I entered the bedroom and saw her beautiful body for the first time. The flickering light from the fireplace was casting an iridescent glow throughout the room. She was lying on the bottom sheet, and her beauty stopped me in my tracks. She was flawless with her creamy, white skin, glimmering in the reflected light from the fire. Her red hair looked as though it was ablaze in the glow of the reddish-orange flames.
“I’ve never seen anything more lovely,” I said as I stood there, looking down at her. My thoughts went back to our first, doomed playdate, and I began to wish that I had played with her dolls instead of trying to force GI Joe on her.