Seduction and Snacks (Chocolate Lovers #1) Read online

  Holy hell he smelled good. Like boy and cinnamon and a tiny hint of cologne that made me want to rub my nose in his shirt and take a deep breath. Okay, so that might have thrown me back into creepy territory. I didn’t want him to start calling me the shirt sniffer. That’s a nickname that just doesn’t go away. Like vagina hand.

  His hands flew out of his pockets and grabbed onto my arms to steady me while I was busy trying not to motorboat his tee shirt and flee the scene in mortification. I heard the sound of cackling laughter behind me and turned to see that one of the Heathers was responsible for my graceful entrance into this guy’s life. It turns out slamming into someone is hilarious and her equally offensive twin joined in on the finger pointing and laughing.

  What is this, a bad teen movie from the nineties? Did they expect me to cry and go running out of the room while dramatic music played over my exit?

  "Jesus, what's your damage Heather?" a masculine voice said irritably.

  Their laughter immediately stopped and they looked behind me in confusion. I whipped my head around and stared at the guy in awe, noticing that I still had my hands pressed against his chest and that I could feel the heat from his skin through his thin t-shirt.

  "Did you just quote 'Heathers'?" I whispered. “That is my favorite movie ever.”

  He looked down at me and smiled, the piercing blue of his eyes boring a hole right through me.

  "I had a huge crush on Winona Ryder before the whole shoplifting thing," he said with a shrug, his hands still wrapped around my upper arms.

  "My name isn't Heather," a whiny voice protested behind me.

  "Wow, Winona Ryder," I stated with a nod of my head.

  Jesus, I had absolutely no game. Being in close proximity to a guy this hot turned my brain to mush. I just wanted to hear him speak again. His voice made me want to take my pants off.

  "I kind of have a thing for quirky, intelligent, dark-haired chicks," he said with a smile.

  "Why did he call me Heather? He knows my name is Niki," came the shrill voice from behind me again.

  I'm a quirky, intelligent, dark haired chick! Me, me, me, pick me! And who the hell keeps whining and ruining my perfect moment? I will cut a bitch.

  "Um, hellloooo!"

  The man of my dreams broke eye contact with me to look over my shoulder. "Niki, your voice is making my ears bleed and killing my buzz."

  I heard her huff and storm off. At least I think that's what she did. I was still staring at this guy and wondering how soon was too soon to drag him into a spare bedroom. He looked back at me and removed one of his hands from my arms to brush my bangs out of my eyes with his fingers. The simplicity of the action and the ease in which he performed it made it feel as though he’d done it a thousand times before. I wanted to slyly give Liz a big cheesy grin and a thumb’s up but she was busy talking to this guy’s friend a few feet away.

  “You want to go refill your drink, maybe play a game of beer pong or something?”

  I want to reach in my pants, pull out my virginity, wrap it up and put a bow on it. Or maybe stick it in a gift bag from Target and give it to him like a present with a nice card that says “Thank you for being you! Just a little virginity to show you my gratitude!”

  “Sure,” I replied with a shrug, totally playing it cool. It’s probably best to play a little hard to get. You don’t want to look too eager.

  ***

  "Oh God, don't stop," I panted as he kissed a trail down my neck and fumbled clumsily with the button of my jeans. After five rounds of beer pong and hours of talking, laughing and standing so close to him that it soon became impossible to refrain from touching him, I forgot the meaning of "hard to get". With a boldness I could only achieve through copious amounts of alcohol, I wrapped a hand behind his neck after losing the last round, pulled him to me, and kissed him with everything I had in me in front of all the people still left at the party that hadn't yet passed out in a pile of their own vomit. I grabbed his hand and dragged him down the hallway and shoved him into the first room we came to. I hoped Liz would have been close by to give me some sort of encouragement or last minute pointers about what I was about to do, but she disappeared after I announced to the room that she would be giving free PAP tests at the end of the night with her lesbian approved hand.

  As soon as we got into the dark room we attacked each other. Sloppy, drunken kisses, hands groping all over the place, slamming into random furniture as we stumbled and laughed our way to the bed. I tripped over something on the floor that may or may not have been a person and fell backwards, luckily onto the bed, dragging the guy right along with me. He landed roughly on top of me and it felt like the wind was knocked out of me.

  "Shit, sssorry. You'kay?" He slurred as he pushed himself up on his arms, taking some of his weight off of me.

  "Yep, good," I wheezed. "Now take your clothes off."

  I was so buzzed I almost laughed when he dragged himself off me and took his pants and boxer briefs off. The moonlight shining through the bedroom window provided just enough illumination for me to see what he was doing even though the alcohol coursing through my veins made him look like he was on a tilt-a-whirl. He pushed everything down to his ankles without bending his knees, then stood up and shuffled back to the bed. Thankfully, the miniscule part of my brain that hadn't yet been taken over by beer and tequila shots reminded me it was never a good idea to laugh at a man when he took his pants off. It was just so funny though! I've seen plenty of penises before, just not in living color and two feet from my body. That thing stuck straight out and was pointing right at me. I swear, in my head I could hear the penis talking.

  "Aaarrrggg, ahoy me matey, thars a great grand vagina over yonder."

  Penises talk like pirates when I'm drunk. Probably because Liz calls them one-eyed snakes. And pirates wear patches and only have one eye and...holy shit, Captain Hookpenis was coming closer.

  I should probably focus.

  He crawled on top of me and kissed me, his scallywag bumping into my leg. This time I did laugh, pulling my mouth away from his and giggling until I snorted. I was drunk as shit, thinking about walking the plank and there was a penis smacking against my thigh in a strange bedroom that may or may not have a dead person on the floor. How can you not chortle like a schoolgirl at that shit? He was oblivious to my convulsions of laughter as he moved his head to the side and kissed my neck. And Jeeeeeeesus if that didn't sober me up long enough to realize how good it felt.

  "Ohhhhh yesssssssss," I moaned out loud, surprising myself that I’d actually vocalized the words that were sloshing around in my fuzzy, beer-addled brain.

  His lips moved up to the spot right behind my ear and when his tongue slid lightly against the skin there, it shot a tingle right between my legs that surprised me. My hands moved up to clutch onto his hair and hold his head in place. I didn’t really think anything about this night was going to feel good. It was all about getting this crap out of the way, enjoying myself was a small perk I didn’t expect. After a few minutes of fumbling with my jeans, he finally got them unbuttoned and yanked them down my legs, taking my underwear with them. His hands slid up the sides of my body, taking my shirt with them until it was pulled over my head and tossed in the general direction of my jeans. The liquid courage reignited long enough for me to take off my bra and fling it to the side, the sound of the material smacking into the wall making me realize I was now lying on a bed completely naked with a guy kneeling between my legs, staring down at all I had to offer.

  Oh my God. This is really happening. I’m naked in front of a guy. Am I really going to do this?

  "Jesus, you're so fucking beautiful."

  Yes, the answer is yes! If he keeps talking to me like that he can stick it in my ear.

  He let his eyes roam over my body and then quickly yanked his shirt off and threw it across the room. My hands automatically reached up to his chest so I could touch him as he sunk back down on top of me. His chest was hard and his skin was smooth. I t
ouched every inch of him I could reach. I wrapped my hands around the back of his neck and pulled him down to me and kissed him. He tasted like tequila and sunshine. Despite our inebriated states, I was enjoying his kisses. Now that we were naked and in bed, they weren’t so frantic. They were actually soft and sweet and made me sigh a little into his mouth. He pulled one of my legs up and wrapped it around his hip and I could feel the head of his penis right at my opening.

  Oh shit, this is it. This is really happening. And why am I talking to myself when I have my tongue in someone's mouth and he's getting ready to stick his penis in me?

  Oh my God …

  Even though I was drunk as a skunk at the time, I still remembered what happened after that. Less than two seconds later he was inside me and I was waving good-bye to my virginity. I wanted it to last forever. I saw stars, came three times that night and it was the most beautiful experience of my life.

  Yeah right. Are you kidding me? Have you lost your virginity lately? It hurts like a mother effer and it's awkward and messy. Anyone that tells you she had anything even close to resembling an orgasm during the actual event itself is a lying sack of shit. The only stars I saw were the ones behind my eyelids as I squeezed them shut and waited for it to be over.

  But let's be honest here, this is exactly how I expected it to be. It's not his fault it wasn't anything to write home about. He was as sweet and gentle as he could possibly be with me considering the amount of alcohol we consumed during the night. We were both drunk as hell and I lost my virginity to a guy whose name I didn't know because I didn’t want any distractions and I didn’t have time for a relationship. With the state of my virginity out of the way, I could focus more on school and my career and Liz would stop treating every party we went to like a meat market. It went exactly according to my plan. That is, until my period was a week late and I realized I ate an entire loaf of bread and seven sticks of string cheese while I sat at the kitchen table looking at the calendar and wishing I'd paid more attention to math in kindergarten because there was no fucking way I counted right.

  3. Have You Seen This Sperm Donor?

  Sometimes I blame my lack of desire to have children on my mother. She wasn’t a bad mother; she just didn’t really know what she was doing. She realized early on that living in a small town out in the country wasn’t for her and that sitting around day after day watching television with my dad and dealing with a sassy pre-teen wasn’t all that she wanted out of life. She wanted to travel, go to art shows, concerts and movies, she wanted to be free to come and go as she pleased and not have to answer to anyone. My mom told me once that she never stopped loving my dad. She just wanted more than he could give her. They divorced and she moved out when I was twelve to get a condo in the city about thirty miles away. I never felt like she abandoned me or anything, I still saw her all the time and talked to her on the phone every day. And it’s not like she didn’t ask me to go with her when she moved out. She did, but I think it was only because she felt like it was expected. Everyone knew I’d choose to stay with my father. I was and always would be a daddy’s girl. As much as I loved my mother, I felt like I had more in common with my dad and it just seemed natural that I should stay with him.

  Even though she didn’t live with us, my mother still tried to nurture me as best she could. Her parental skills weren’t all that great to begin with though, and after she moved out, they pretty much turned into one big train wreck. Regardless of what people might think, she really did love me; she just acted more like a friend most of the time than a mother. Three days after she moved out, she called and told me that according to something she saw on Oprah, we needed to do something life altering so that we could forge a stronger bond between us. She suggested getting matching tattoos. I reminded her that I was twelve and it was illegal. I have enough “Chicken Soup for the Mother/Daughter Blah, Blah, Blah” reference books she’s given me over the years to open my own bookstore and have been tagged in one too many photos of her and I on her Facebook page with the caption “Me and my BFF!”.

  People thought it was strange the way the three of us lived, but it worked for us. My dad didn’t have to listen to my mother nagging in his ear all day long about how he never took her anywhere, and my mother was free to do as she pleased while still having a close relationship with us. Some people just aren’t meant to live together. My parents got along much better when there was a twenty-five minute car ride separating them.

  Aside from the advice she received from bad talk shows, my mother used the “Parenting with Idioms” book to raise me. Every piece of advice ever given to me was in the form of a one-liner she read in a book or heard Paula Dean use on the Food Network. Unfortunately, they never made sense and were never used in the correct context. When you’re six-years-old and you tell your mother someone at school made you cry and she replies with, “Don’t pee down my back and tell me it’s raining,” you sort of learn to handle things on your own and stop asking for her advice.

  When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t immediately have dreams of being some independent, women’s lib, equal rights, “I don’t shave my legs because the man won’t keep me down” type of person, perfectly content to do things on her own without the help of anyone. I'm not a martyr. As stubborn and self-sufficient as I was, I knew I would need help.

  As soon as I took eleventy-billion home pregnancy tests, after drinking a gallon of milk so I would have enough pee for all of them, I realized I needed to hunt this guy down. Of course, this was after I Googled "milk and pregnancy tests" to make sure I didn't just spend thirty-seven minutes of my life staring in horror at positive pregnancy tests littered all over my bathroom that may or may not be correct because pasteurization messed with the hormones in your body and created a false positive.

  It doesn't, just in case you were wondering.

  I was a twenty-year-old full-time college student, and according to my mother, “You don’t have two nickels to pull out of a duck’s ass with a penny in its name.” My dad, George, worked the same job he had since he was eighteen and made just enough to pay his bills and help me with my room and board. Thank God my dad’s best friend Tim was right all those years ago. I was smarter than I looked and received a full ride to the University of Ohio, so I didn’t have the burden of student loans or grants. Unfortunately though, that meant I went to school full time and worked my ass off, taking twice the course load as other students, leaving no time for a job and no money saved.

  In some ways I took after my mother. I wanted more out of my life than waiting tables at Fosters Bar and Grill where I worked all through high school. I wanted to travel, work hard and one day own my own business. Unfortunately, life doesn't throw curveballs; it throws an eight pound, one ounce infant at your face when you're looking the other way. Life is a vindictive little bitch. I was smart enough to know I couldn't do this by myself and wanted more than anything to keep the inconvenience of my mistake away from my dad for as long as possible. Any other woman would probably call her mother to cry and plead for help as soon as the stick turned pink, but at the time, I wasn’t in the mood for my mother to tell me that “Rome was not built with two birds in your bush”. That left me with the person who helped put me into this situation. Unfortunately, I had no idea who the guy was I slept with. I was too mortified by my actions that night to ever repeat the performance so I knew without a doubt Mr. Beer Pong was the father. I just had to find him. Who the hell gave a guy her virginity and never even bothered to ask him what his name was?

  Oh yeah, that would be me.

  The first day I decided to try and find him was spent talking to every single dumb jock that lived at the frat house where the party occurred. No one there had any clue who I was talking about when I tried to describe this guy and the friend he had with him that night. It could have been due to the fact that everyone I talked to smelled like a brewery and stared at my boobs the entire time I was there. Or maybe it was because I wasn’t fluent in stupid. Really, eit
her option was viable. On the way back to the apartment I shared with Liz, after my hunting expedition, all I wanted to do was kick my own ass. The morning after when I woke up, I felt silly admitting that the feel of his arm wrapped around my waist made me sigh a little. I should have stayed. I should have waited until he woke up, thanked him for a good time and put his number in my phone. But as much as I itched to run my fingers through his hair or slide my hand down his cheek, I knew I couldn't. At that point, I couldn't afford any distractions in my life and that's exactly what he would have been. If we were together, stone-cold sober, I knew I could have easily lost myself in him and forgot everything I had been working towards all my life. I found it was much easier to brush something off and say you did it because you were drunk than admit you made a mistake. I didn't think sleeping with him was a mistake really, just the way I went about it and my actions the next morning. Instead of sticking around, I slithered out from under his arm and the warmth of his body and thought about how bad it would have been if I woke up next to some ugly troll. At least he was hot as hell in the light of day, and I didn't have to perform a coyote ugly and chew my own arm off to get out from under him. I threw on my clothes as fast as I could and left him naked and sound asleep in bed. No one moved as I stepped over the lifeless bodies spread throughout the house and performed the morning-after walk of shame, out the door and into the bright morning light.

  I turned around a total of six times to go back to that house and wait for him to wake up. And each time, I talked myself out of it with the same argument. I used him to finally get rid of my stupid virginity. Did I really want to know why he did it? I was definitely not the best looking girl in that place. People tell me I’m cute and I guess I probably am, but what exactly did he see when he looked at me? Maybe he could just tell I would be a sure thing that night. I'd rather remember him as the sweet, buzzed, hot guy who rid me of my virginity and made me laugh. I didn't want to know if he was some skeezy womanizer that was sleeping his way through the student directory, and I was just lucky enough he finally made it to the M's.