Tania huddled against me in the back of the rather chilly sanctuary of St. Mark’s United Church as the minister droned through a Bible reading. Resting her head on my shoulder, my girlfriend lightly stroked my thigh with her fingers. As the reading ended, the congregation stood for a hymn and, a bit reluctantly, we joined them. Candles and dim lights were the only illumination as the congregation celebrated Christmas Eve....

It's summer and I'm seventeen. I have never been to summer camp. Sometimes it feels as if my mom has a noose around my neck. I fear that she will control my life all the way until I graduate college. I want breathing room. I need to be assertive, so I give my mom a choice if she wants me to go to college. She can either let me go to summer camp or I will go to an out of state college. My mom decides that this is a good id...

Emily Smith raps on my back sliding glass door. Emily is a freshman in college. She is modestly dressed in a green long sleeve sweater, a white blouse, skinny fit straight leg pants and sneakers. She is five feet tall and maybe ninety-five pounds soaking wet. She has a great hourglass figure with a perfect hip to waist ratio. Her bright red hair is tied back in a ponytail. She has brilliant, piercing green eyes and a ligh...

It had been a long, hard day and Haley was looking forward to the weekend. Not that she had any major plans; her social life was that of a single mom. Her two BFF's were the dishwasher and the vacuum cleaner, and her love life generally consisted of a hot bubble bath, a glass of cheap wine, and a set of fresh batteries. Life was not bad; sure, she could have had a lot more, but at the end of the month she always seemed to...

Stepping out of the lecture hall, I took a deep breath and then yawned. Two hours of political science with Dr. Tom Evans was a very good way to bring on the afternoon yawns. The guy could probably make sex boring. “Hey, Ross. How goes it?” sang out a cheerful female voice beside me. I turned with a smile to see my friend April standing there. “I need caffeine,” I groaned. April chuckled. “Me, too. Was it just me or was E...

Before we could find a place to get undressed, Charlie came up behind us. “You two are actually staying, huh?” He seemed almost as surprised as I was. I nodded. “I guess, at least for awhile. Where’s the best place for us to leave our clothes, and where do we find towels?” “Come on, I’ll show you.” He passed us and led the way down the hall. He had shed his hood and his manacles, although I’d noticed he still wore his nip...

Nobody bothered to get dressed as we all sat down around the coffee table to finally get a taste of that long-promised dessert. The cake wasn’t anything fancy—lemon sponge cake with buttercream frosting—but Claire was an excellent baker and whatever secret ingredients she snuck into that recipe made it easily the best piece of cake I’d ever eaten in my life. As Claire went to cut us all a second slice, Tami casually turne...

I turned twenty nine on the same day as my ten year high school reunion. Fit, confident, and still pretty good at math; financially successful and madly in love with my beautiful wife. With the big three-oh looming on the horizon, we were even finally starting to think about kids. But no matter how much time passed, and no matter how drastically my life changed, memories of my senior year never felt too distant. Me, Liz,...

The ugly truth of any long-distance relationship is, it sucks. Much as your young heart may try to romanticize all the effort and the sacrifice involved, at the end of the day you’re still miserable. Eventually, you start to feel a bit like the widow who lives out her days celibate, still in love with her dead husband. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Liz and I poured every meager cent we earned into long-distance...

The days were already getting longer. It was nearly eight o’clock at night, and the sun was only just now dipping below the horizon. The California sky turned tangerine. It was stunning. But not as stunning as Elizabeth. I heard approaching footsteps and looked up to see her dark, wavy hair caught the wind. She was dressed casually—just faded jeans and a simple zip-up cotton hoodie. No makeup that I could see (not that sh...

I deflected Amy’s question with some joke about showing up “like a pimp” with all three of them on my arm. She’d laughed at that and dropped the subject, but I already knew it was going to be a problem. Sure, I had more than a month until prom—time enough to figure it out—but a nagging worry nevertheless crawled into the back of my mind, made itself comfortable, and refused to leave. Obviously, my joke about bringing all...

It took us forever to find her bra. Corrine hadn’t thrown it far, but it was pitch black on that beach, and we spent a good fifteen minutes crawling around on our hands and knees in the pouring rain, blindly groping at the grass before I stumbled onto the damn thing. On the way back to her house, I told Corrine that I wanted her to come back to Rachel’s cabin with me, to be with the rest of us for the week. “But I wasn’t...

“And you turned her down?!” Amy sat bolt upright, her jaw hanging open in shock. I just nodded, glancing around the room to take in the equally disbelieving reactions of Talia, Stephanie, and Elizabeth. Reeling from what had just transpired, I’d called the four of them over to my house immediately upon getting home from my fight with Corrine. While the others assaulted me with questions, Elizabeth calmly scooted over to m...