She snuck across the football field almost every afternoon that week. John was always there, sitting against the backside of the concrete shed, smoking while waiting for her. Usually they sat against the building together, his arms around her as she sat on the grass between his legs, curled up so she could face him and lean against him at the same time. They laughed a lot, teased each other and occasionally talked about how badly their parents didn't understand anything.

But mostly they made out.

It was like a drug to Claire. The more he kissed her, the more he ran his hands over her body, the more she needed to feel it. Brian warned her about getting addicted to marijuana, that smoking it would make her feel so good she'd want to do it all the time. But her single experience smoking a joint was tedious compared to the addiction of John's touch. He'd kiss her and she'd want to be kissed harder. So she'd pull him in and he'd kiss her harder and now she needed his hands to roam across her skin. It felt deliriously overwhelming, the sensation of always needing more from him.

She never would have guessed, for instance, that him simply laying his palm flat against her stomach would produce the sensation it did. After a few days of making out, she'd begun to feel bold. She'd laid back in the grass, pulling him on top of her as they kissed. Without warning, his hand crept under her shirt and splayed across her bare belly. She'd moaned and writhed under the pressure of his fingertips, clutching his hair in her hands and pulling him closer until the tingling nervousness that had been growing in her belly violently exploded. The suddenness of it was so overwhelming she pushed him away, gasping to catch her breath, a little afraid of what happened. She tried it on herself later that night, tracing where his hand had curved around her bellybutton and wondering what he'd done to make the warmth trickle though her stomach and into her limbs.

The next day in school, all she could think about was John touching her. So she wasn't that surprised to find herself scoping out his locker just before lunch, watching from an alcove across the hall. He was with another boy, one of the kids Claire had always assumed must take shop class too, and when the kid showed no sign of leaving, Claire devised a plan.

Clutching her books to her chest, she moved from the alcove and approached John, shouldering him hard in the back as she passed.

"What the -," he snapped, his words slamming to a halt when he recognized her.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Claire gushed with a smile. "I didn't mean to bump into you." She dug into him with her eyes as she backed away, willing him to follow her. He watched intently, his gaze running from surprised to amused to hungry all within the time it took her to back a few steps away. Then he slammed his locker and told the friend he'd see him later.

His eyes burned into her back the entire way. Out the back door of the school, through the parking lot, under the bleachers. By the time she reached the broken section of the fence and squeezed through, he'd given up discretion and was mere feet behind her. She could feel how badly he wanted her - or maybe that was coming from her - and she had to force herself to keep looking forward, to not turn and smile at him, because if she did she wasn't certain she'd be able to wait until they were concealed to throw herself at him.

She never did get the chance to smile. As soon as they were behind the shed, she turned to face him and he fell into her without a word, taking her mouth like a man starving. They didn't even bother to sit or lay down, he just backed her against the wall and ravaged her. She'd never felt both consumed and sated at the same time.

Claire wondered why she waited until she was seventeen to allow herself to feel this way, wondered why she'd never felt even a glimmer of this with the boys she'd dated before.

Not that she was dating John.

She didn't even see him that weekend, just met with friends and worked on flyers for the prom committee. If she was dating John, they would have done something together over the weekend. That's just what boyfriends and girlfriends did. They hung out together on weekends and talked to each other in school. So she clearly wasn't dating him.

But the making out behind the shed continued the following week, too.

Friday she showed up behind the shed an hour after school had ended, desperately hoping John would still be waiting for her.

She'd had an incredibly shitty day. Mr. Vernon was her third hour teacher, and since he'd caught her skipping and thrown her in detention, he felt he now had something to hold over her. "Isn't your father a judge?" he'd sneered, shaking her Government paper in her face, the D+ clearly labelled in red at the top. "First you let Brian write an essay for you in detention – which frankly wasn't very good - and now you turn in this garbage? Is this the best you can do?"

Honestly, he was right. The essay hadn't been her best work. She was letting some things slip. But no one else in the class was singled out to re-do the essay over lunch. He was punishing her for not writing an essay at detention. He even mocked her while she worked, which guaranteed she wouldn't finish and would have to stay after school to get it done. She really wanted to disappear in John's arms.

Thankfully, he was behind the shed waiting for her. With sushi.

John Bender...with sushi?

"It's for you," he explained, stubbing out his cigarette and popping open the plastic lid as she sat next to him. "I didn't know what kind to get, it all looks disgusting to me, but the guy assured me this was the most popular one." His lip curled as he handed it to her. "I have to admit, I was a little surprised to find there are restaurants that actually serve this stuff. I thought it was just a disgusting habit of yours."

Claire blinked at the take-out tray in her lap. It was from her favorite sushi place.

"You must be starving," he said as he unwrapped the chopsticks and handed them to her.

"I am. How did you know?"

"I saw you stuck in Vernon's classroom over lunch. I'm just assuming you didn't get to eat at all." His eyes hardened as she told him the quick version. "That dick gets hard-ons from the littlest bit of power." He gestured to her sushi. "Anyway, eat up before it gets...well, I guess slimy dead fish isn't going to get cold, but eat up anyway."

A nervous twist of pleasure stabbed through her, the type that made it impossible to hold back a smile. He remembered she liked sushi. And noticed she was having a bad day, even though they completely ignored each other in school and in theory, shouldn't be noticing anything about each other at all. "This is really sweet. Thank you."

He snorted at her and glanced away, as though he didn't care. "Don't be too thankful, I'm not going to kiss you after you eat that."

He did, of course. And though she hadn't thought it possible, she craved him more. The nervous pleasure she'd felt from him bringing her lunch morphed into a raging monster of new feelings, wonderful and completely out of her control.

Her hands, for instance, before so firmly outside his clothes, began to roam. The first graze of his belt against her palms felt too intimate, scared her a little, and she hesitated. But only for a second, only for the time it took her to embrace the new feeling before her hands pushed onto his skin, fingers digging into his sides. He stopped dead, lips frozen against her neck, and she almost pulled away in horror that she'd gone too far, even though he'd already done the same to her.

But before she could, he groaned and slid his mouth to her ear. "You're going to drive me crazy, Princess." He took her hands, shifting from their sitting position and lowering her to the ground, hovering over her with hungry eyes. "Put your hands there again," he demanded, softly. She squirmed in pleasure at the roughness of his voice and without hesitation, did what he asked. He flinched and stifled a choking sound, but never broke eye contact with her. "More," he breathed. "Your hands can go anywhere they want."

It was so much easier to touch him when she wasn't looking into his eyes, and she couldn't keep the nervous laughter from spilling out between her gasps. But even as she giggled, her hands traveled up, up all the way past his chest to his shoulders, then under his arms, her thumbs just barely brushing past his nipples before trailing down his back and starting at the front again. His breath caught repeatedly as her hands moved across him, his body twitching under her fingertips. Slowly, leaving room between their bodies so her hands could roam, he lowered his face to hers until there was nothing but a whisper of space between their mouths. She could taste desire on his breath.

"Go out with me this weekend," he asked twenty minutes later. They'd brushed grass off each other and straightened their clothes, and Claire had reapplied her lipstick and made sure it was thoroughly gone from John's face. She'd been about to walk away. "I can take you out tonight."

Go out? Like on another date? She liked what they had. She thought about him constantly, centered her days around getting behind that maintenance shed after school. She was happily obsessed. But his suggestion scattered her mind in a million different directions, and though she wasn't sure why, she felt relieved when she remembered she already had plans. "I can't. I'm going to my cousin's house with my parents. She just had her first baby."

He took it in stride. "Tomorrow then."

She'd already shook her head before remembering she had plans that night, too. "I'm supposed to go to the movies with some friends."

"Skip it."

"I can't, I promised Mike I'd go, and it's been months since I did anything with him."

John stilled, an almost dangerous calm. "Mike? Mike who?"

Claire took in his face. Now that she'd brought it up, she wasn't certain she wanted to tell him. "Mike Arlington," she mumbled.

"Mike Arlington," he repeated. His fists clenched for a brief moment before he shook them out. "Mr. Popularity himself, huh?"

"I don't think -."

"He's nominated for Prom King, isn't he? Could be the king to your queen."

Claire stilled. "You know about Prom Queen?" Of course he knew. Everyone knew. She'd been lying when she reassured herself that he hadn't noticed.

He snorted a harsh laugh while fishing out a cigarette and lighting it before answering her. "How stupid do you think I am? There's "Vote for Claire" signs all over the school. Us commoners are practically drowning in your name. Only the "I like Mike" signs seem more annoying."

"I'm not dating him."

"You just told me you're going out with him tomorrow night. Make up your mind, Queenie."

She bristled at the term. How did Queenie sound so harsh and condescending, but Princess rolled off his tongue like it was the sweetest sound in the world? "I'm only going out with him as a friend, a bunch of us are going."

He took a long drag of his cigarette, sneering and studying her as though trying to come to some decision. She wondered why she was bothering to explain any of this to him. She shouldn't care what John thought of her social life, he wasn't her boyfriend.

But as soon as the thought entered her mind, she couldn't look him in the eye anymore. She stared at the ground while listening to him inhale, then exhale. "I could do something Saturday afternoon," she offered to the ground before she had a chance to think it through. Would she really go out in public with him?

"I have detention, remember?" He drew the word 'detention' out into as many syllables as possible. "And I earned two more for skipping when we went to Great America. I think I'm in detention every Saturday until graduation." She peeked at his face. He looked irritated as he stared at her, his jaw working. When she didn't say anything, he pinched the bridge of his nose with the hand his cigarette held, squeezing his eyes shut as though exasperated. "Come see me."

"What?"

He dropped his hand, all irritation gone, just a resigned look on his face. "To the school. That Saturday you were in detention wasn't a fluke. Vernon always gets bored after lunch and stops checking on us."

"So?"

"So meet me at the door that goes to the football field at 12:30. I'll let you in. We can find a place to hang out for a few hours."

"Hang out?" she repeated, her voice sounding stupid and dull.

"Yes," he said, his voice turning velvety and promising as his eyes darkened. "Hang out. With me." She felt her pulse quickening again.

"Okay." God dammit! Was that her voice? Why was she letting this go on?

He smiled a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Okay." And he turned and walked away from the school, down the hill to the creek.