“Night, Tod! Have fun clickin’,” I called. If strokin’ is my thing, then clickin’ is hers. At least, that’s what I told myself, and I would keep doing so for the next…well…forever.

Even though I was answered with silence, I couldn’t help the smile that formed on my lips as I whistled my whole way home. All twenty feet of it. Just before I stepped onto my porch, I glanced back at her window. Her light had been shut off, but her silhouette watched me.

God, I wanted Sierra to watch me over…and over…and over again. What the hell was wrong with me?

Hormones, was what I told myself. Hormones and fucking Mandy Simpson. After my little party disaster with her, I hadn’t touched a girl. Hell, I was lucky Mandy seemed to have forgotten all about the night she’d walked up to me at a beach party, shoved her hand in my pants, and stroked my dick for a solid fifteen seconds before she said I was taking too long and she moved on.

Uhh, sorry, Mandy. In my defense, you did catch me a bit unprepared.

1.) No girl had ever touched my penis before that night. Hell, the only thing that’d ever touched it was me, and my hands are like my feet and my dick. Big. So her soft, little, drunk hands were…foreign to me. It caught me off guard. That’s all.

2.) If I hadn’t had six beers and hadn’t been suffering from immense shock, I probably would’ve nutted in about five seconds. Don’t judge. I was newly introduced to alcohol. Six beers was a lot at the time.

3.) Did she not see my best friend, Sierra, sitting five feet away from me, chatting with Chris and some other guys from the football team? I couldn’t get off in front of her if I’d tried.

Okay, so maybe that last part was a lie. We’d found that out tonight. But I hadn’t been able to do it with another girl with Sierra sitting right there. So Mandy had walked away, leaving me in a hard situation. I’d spent the next two hours with an ache in my balls that the Internet later told me was blue balls.

Blue Ball Mandy Simpson, I will never forgive you for those two hours of pure agony.

The worst part? I hadn’t even gotten a kiss for it. No making out or anything. Just a drunk chick sticking her hand in my pants for the first time ever. Couldn’t I at least have gotten some tongue action? Or, well, any action? Though, from what the guys said in the locker room, I wasn’t missing much. Blue Ball Mandy Simpson was also apparently Slobbery Mandy Simpson. I’d avoided a nightmare there, and in the weeks after, I’d had no desire for Mandy or any other girl to finish what she’d started.

So why was I now picturing Sierra’s pretty, pink lips and imagining running my tongue over them, begging for entrance so it could tangle with her own? Why did I want to press my lips to hers to see how they tasted? Why couldn’t I stop thinking about my hands roaming over her skin as we became more than friends? Just like I’d been doing since the first day of school when I’d temporarily lost my mind and almost kissed her before we were so rudely interrupted by Chris.

Yep. My problem was most definitely hormones. I needed to get a grip.

Wait. Wasn’t that what had gotten me into this mess in the first place?

“Dawson’s Creek over?” Dad asked as I walked in the front door.

I nodded and tried to move past him, but he followed me to my room. When he shut the door behind him and took a seat at my desk, I frowned. Something was off, and a sudden bead of sweat broke out on my brow as worry set in.

The corners of his mouth curled down while his round, bulging eyes darted around, looking anywhere but at me. His brows were knit together so tightly, I could practically see the tension it was creating. I had no idea what to expect when he cleared his through. “Okay, son. So…uh. I saw Sierra fly out of here earlier and then you going right after her. Apparently, in your haste…you uh…” His face reddened, and I held my breath, hoping like hell he hadn’t overheard what had happened.

“It’s no big deal, Dad. We’re fine,” I reassured him, wanting to get this over with and get him out of here. “She, um, she just caught me at a bad time.” It wasn’t necessarily a lie. In fact, it was pretty much the truth.

He nodded. “Right. Well, uh, the thing is… When you ran after her, you dropped your…um…towel in the hall and apparently didn’t notice it.”

My whole life, I’d never experienced humiliation, and that night, I was getting it in spades. God, could it get any worse? I hung my head and let out a groan before peeking back up at him. Fortunately, this was as embarrassing for him as it was for me.

“Like I said, she caught me at a bad time… If you get my drift.”

He nodded again, looking like one of those bobble heads that you get at a baseball game. He cleared his throat again and stared up at the ceiling for a moment before looking back at me. “Well, son. It made me realize we’ve never had the talk. I guess I was letting the school do it for me, but now that you’re experimenting and stuff, I figured we should have a talk. Man to man. You know. The birds and the bees stuff, even though I have no idea why it’s called that. Maybe because bees pollenate? But that makes no sense for the birds because they lay eggs. I mean, I guess, technically, a woman has eggs, but it’s a completely different type of reproductive system and process…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Where the hell does that damned saying come from?”

My face blanched. Birds and bees? What the hell? “I’m not experimenting, Dad. I swear it. I was just jacking off!” I protested.

The corner of his mouth twitched, curving into a half-smile as his eyes relaxed. “You’re not? I just… Well, I was hoping you were…” His crooked smile was quickly replaced a tight frown. “So you and Sierra aren’t…you know?” He started making hand gestures even I couldn’t interpret.

It was getting worse by the second.

I jumped off the bed and shook my head profusely. “No! Absolutely not. We’re just friends, Dad. Just friends,” I insisted.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to.

Holy shit. Where did that thought come from?

“And you haven’t…?” He raised an eyebrow as well as his hands.

Imagine a circle and a lone finger and an old man miming what apparently is a sex act. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen. For the second time, I was officially mortified. If I had to choose between that conversation and Sierra watching me come, I’d happily choose Sierra every freaking time.

“No! I’ve never even see a real, live boob before,” I admitted.

Almost instantly he exhaled a relieved sigh.

That was all I gave him. He didn’t need to know about Mandy. In fact, no one ever needed to know about her. I’d never even kissed a girl, let alone had a sexual experience outside of that, and I was more than happy to play the perfect innocent role. I mean, it was pretty much true.

That probably was weird for guys my age. In the locker room, I heard lots of talk of who had made out with whom, who’d given whom a blowjob, and there’d even been sex talk already. Crazy, I thought. Who the hell has sex at fourteen?

A lot of people, apparently.

I just wasn’t one of them. I guess I was what you could call a late bloomer, but it was more than that. Ever since the second grade, Sierra and I’d been inseparable. Where she went, I was right beside her. No girl had ever interested me enough to stray from her side. And, until just a few weeks ago, I’d never even considered kissing her. I was starting to realize, however, that I needed to do something. I needed to kiss someone, but there wasn’t a single girl I wanted to except for the one I couldn’t have.

Dad cleared his throat again, and I looked up to see him nodding happily. “Good. Good. You know, there’s plenty of time for all that. Boobs and sex, I mean. Both are great, beautiful things when you’re with someone you love. That’s the key to good sex, you know. You should wait until you love your partner enough to accept the responsibilities that can come along with sex.”