Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

I know about how we get pregnant and all that, Cassie.”
    “You know nothing,” she said sharply. “You’ve never been fondled, kissed passionately, touched, and driven toward an orgasm. Yes, you’ve read about it in your textbooks or those silly romance novels onyour shelves there. My God,
The Taste of Love, The Deepest Kiss, Under My Secret Heart?
Give me a break. None of those books will tell you the absolute truth, help you to understand yourself.”
    “What is the absolute truth?” I asked.
    “Simply this, Semantha. No matter how nice Kent Pearson is to you or any boy is or will be, he wants only one thing: to satisfy his own need.”
    I nodded. Should I tell her what Gloria Benson had told me about herself and Donald Marcus, how they had agreed not to do it but she satisfied him a different way? It had shocked me when I first heard it, and despite what Cassie had just said about us being best friends, I couldn’t get myself to share it with her and describe it.
    “So,” she said, “you can go to the party with Kent. I’m sure he’ll try to get you to go to a private place in the house, and then he’ll kiss you and touch you and try to get you to let him insert himself inside you, and if you’re not careful and if you don’t have the willpower to resist, you could be very, very sorry. It could ruin your whole life!”
    I shook my head. “Don’t worry, Cassie. I’m not going to do that.”
    “You say you won’t, but when you’re there in the darkness, alone with him whispering all sorts of things in your ear and touching you, and you’re thinking about your fantasies … it could happen. I won’t be there to protect you. No one will.”
    “It won’t happen,” I repeated more firmly. “Don’t worry.”
    “Because you can ruin yourself for moreimportant things, Semantha,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “You’re a Heavenstone. You have a major obligation to our family, our heritage, to all Daddy has been building for our family.”
    I nodded, but I wanted to ask her why she didn’t think of her own obligation, too. She told me before I could ask.
    “Just as I do,” she said. “Why do you think it is that I’m so particular about whom I see? I have control of myself, and I want you to have control of yourself. Do you understand me? Do you understand the things I’ve told you?”
    “Yes, Cassie.”
    She pulled herself back and tucked in the corners of her mouth as she looked at me. “I wouldn’t have to do this if our mother had done her job with you,” she said again.
    “She’s done her job. She’s told me about sexual things, Cassie,” I said.
    Her eyes grew colder, darker, as her cheeks sank. She turned in her lips so tightly that little white lines ran above her top lip and below her bottom lip. “Mother told you? What sexual things?”
    “Things. When I got my first period, she spoke to me about what was changing in my body and what I had to think about and what not to worry about.”
    She relaxed again. “I’m sure. That’s Mother. Always looking for things not to worry about, instead of facing the things that we should worry about. Did she tell you what not to do with boys? Well? Did she? Because, as I said, she never did with me.”
    “Not exactly,” I said. She had suggested some ofit, but I didn’t want to tell her that or say anything that might make her jealous. “Not the way you just told me.”
    Her face softened even more, and she smiled.
    “Of course not. Anyway, I want you to come right to see me when you return from the party Friday night. You come to my room, no matter how late it is, understand? And you tell me exactly what you did, what he did, what happened between you. You’ve got to trust me, trust and believe that I will help you. Okay? Will you do that?”
    I nodded, but I couldn’t help the way my forehead folded as I imagined telling her every nitty-gritty detail of what went on with Kent.
    “I don’t want you to be unhappy, Semantha, and I don’t want to stop you from having fun. I care about you, about us, about our family, that’s all. All right?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Good.”
    She stood up and looked at me for a long moment, so long that it made me nervous.
    “You’re prettier than I am, Semantha, so all of this is more important for you than it is for me.”
    I started to shake my head. I had always believed I was, but I never wanted to say it or have anyone else say it in front of us.
    She smiled.