Brielle really made him feel good. This is what love felt like and Damon decided that he really liked the feeling. It was different than with Sasha. With Sasha, he’d felt only mild liking for the girl herself and a compulsion for her body. Or maybe, if he was honest, a compulsion for the way his body felt when he was inside her body. He wanted to be with Brielle anytime and anyplace, no matter what. And although she made him hot, he was content to take things slowly with her. Whenever he was with her she outshone every person around her with her smile and grace and kindness and soft lips. When he wasn’t with her, all he did was think about her.
David continued to tease him.
Even Jada had softened her position and wasn’t giving him the death look about Brielle anymore. His parents just smiled at him indulgently. His grades were going to be off the chain. Mr. Tally had given him the recommendation for the Bill Gates scholarship along with a congratulatory handshake. They’d done the application together online and it had been a grueling process because the application was about thirty pages long. Damon got his first acceptance letter from a college back. He had some new books to read and Brielle was his girlfriend. Damon figured that his life was just about perfect.
Damon didn’t answer the home phone often, but his mother had fussed at him just this morning for not getting the phone when he was near it, so when it rang he picked it up without thinking.
“Hello,” he said.
“Damon,” said the voice. Damon sighed. He’d had nearly six months of peace.
“Sasha,” he said, in a bored tone. “I told you not to call me again.”
“Damon,” she said, sounding desperate. “I really need to tell you something.” Damon sighed again and hung up the telephone. Holding conversation with Sasha was futile. She never got the message that he wanted her to get.
He had thought that Sasha was different. Besides being fine and well built, she’d acted smart, like she cared about what was happening in the world. When he’d first met her, she’d talked about going away to college and being something. She had even read some books that he hadn’t read. He was sixteen. Sasha had just turned eighteen. He’d thought that she knew everything. He’d walked her home from school. It was on his way home and she was hot to look at and easy to talk to. He’d drop her off at her door and she’d reach up and pull his head down for a luscious kiss, with lots of tongue. Damon had really enjoyed the kisses.
In March, she’d invited him in, saying her mother and step father weren’t ever home and she got lonely. The next thing he knew, they had their clothes off. She’d even provided the condoms. For a few weeks, he was enthralled with the sex. But Sasha seemed to think that having sex with him made him her property or something. If she saw him in the hall talking to another girl or sometimes even one of his boys, she’d come up to him and twine her arm through his and sort of rub herself against him.
He’d soon grown bored with her constant demands for attention and started avoiding her in school. Then she’d stepped up her campaign, constantly calling him on his cell phone. He stopped answering and blocked her number. Somehow, she got the house number and started calling him constantly, until his mother told her not to call anymore. Then, she’d lay in wait before and after school. He changed the route he took to get home, varying it so that she could leave him alone. And still she persisted in writing him notes and leaving messages on his voice mail, until he’d finally been brutal.
He waited until they were in front of about five of her girls and several of his boys and he’d said, “Look, don’t call me anymore.”
She had been shocked.
“What? Why?” she’d asked, all stunned and pitiful. Like he hadn’t told her that same thing four or five hundred times in the last month.
Damon had felt a little guilty, but didn’t back down.
“I want you to leave me alone,” he said. Their audience snickered. He dropped his voice so that only she could hear what he said. “You bugging me.”
“You didn’t think I was bugging you when you had your hand down my shirt,” she said, loudly, forgetting about their audience.
“And we both know how easy that was, right?” he said, with a smirk that he wasn’t really feeling. “Been there, done that.”
Sasha’s eyes filled with tears.
“I don’t know why you’re being this way,” she said.
Damon was feeling hunted. He looked around and his boys looked back at him and shrugged.
“Look, Sasha,” he said. “I need some space. You crowd a brother.” And she’d burst into tears and run away. He had felt terrible the entire day but when he’d seen her after school, she approached him like they hadn’t had a conversation and he hadn’t treated her like trash in front of his friends.
“Walk me home,” she said. So he did, because he was still feeling guilty.
“One last time,” she said, when they got to her house. “For old times’ sake.” Damon thought the comment was stupid since he wasn’t old enough to have any old times, but he went ahead, anyway, because it felt good.
“See,” she said, after they’d finished their
