The Virgin’s Bucket List Episode 2

📖 The Story Continues

The dare followed Lindsay out of the classroom and spread through Maple Hill Academy faster than any truth ever had. By lunch, students she had never spoken to were whispering about her promised boyfriend and laughing over where they planned to stand during her naked run. Lindsay crossed the cafeteria with her shoulders straight, pretending their eyes did not burn. Accepting the challenge had protected one fragile scrap of pride, but now she had to find a way to survive it.

Alyssa caught up with her near the doors and offered one final piece of public advice. “I’d get a boob job now if I were you.” Her friends dissolved into laughter, already treating Lindsay’s defeat as a scheduled school event. Lindsay forced herself to meet Alyssa’s gaze. “Just wait and see,” she replied, praying confidence sounded more convincing than it felt.

She had no secret admirer, no flirting experience, and no miraculous list of athletic boys waiting to date her. What she did have was Kyle, her best friend since middle school and a student at another school. He knew every awkward secret she possessed and had never made her feel ridiculous for any of them. If he agreed to pretend for a few minutes, nobody at Maple Hill would ever discover the difference.

Lindsay found him after school and delivered the plan as though it were perfectly reasonable. He would wear a fitted shirt, stand beside her long enough to be seen, and help her create proof that she had a boyfriend. Since he attended another school, there would be no classmates around to expose them. She was not asking for romance, only a favor from the person who had always promised to protect her.

Kyle stared at her as if she had requested a felony. “Do you want me to commit social suicide?” he asked. The refusal stung, but the nervous way he avoided her eyes hurt more. He had always enjoyed being needed by her; now he could barely finish a sentence.

“We’re supposed to be best friends,” Lindsay reminded him. She pressed him to explain why one harmless performance was impossible. Kyle mumbled that he could not be her fake boyfriend because there was something she did not know, and a terrible suspicion stirred before he could complete the confession.

Phoebe appeared beside him with the guilty expression of someone arriving too late to keep a secret. Kyle reached for her hand. The small, intimate gesture explained every canceled plan, every strange excuse, and every conversation that had ended when Lindsay entered the room. Her two closest friends had been dating behind her back.

“Are you kidding me?” Lindsay demanded. Hurt stripped away her usual caution as she looked from one of them to the other. She did not resent their happiness; she resented being treated as too foolish or fragile to be trusted with it. While she had confided every fear to them, they had built an entire relationship behind a wall of lies.

Kyle apologized without offering any reason that made the secrecy less painful. Phoebe reminded Lindsay that it was her eighteenth birthday, as if a celebration could erase the betrayal. They produced a small cake and encouraged her to forget the argument long enough to make a wish. Lindsay wanted to refuse, but the candle’s lonely flame looked as uncertain as she felt.

This was supposed to be the day adulthood began. Instead, her reputation had become a schoolwide joke, her impossible deadline had started counting down, and her friends had revealed how easily life moved forward without including her. Lindsay closed her eyes before either of them could see the tears gathering there.

She did not wish for Alyssa to disappear or for the humiliating dare to be forgotten. Those miracles seemed too large. “God, please send me a hot boyfriend,” she whispered beneath her breath. More urgently, she added that she did not want to run around school naked.

The candle went dark when she blew, carrying her ridiculous prayer into the air. Kyle and Phoebe laughed uneasily, assuming she was joking. Lindsay managed a smile, thanked them for the cake, and left before their pity could become another thing she had to endure.

By the time she reached home, the house was quiet. Her father was absent, which was hardly unusual during football season, and her older sister Julie was working late. Lindsay climbed the stairs alone, feeling that even her birthday had become an afterthought in everyone else’s busy life.

She paused outside her bedroom when she heard movement within. The door was not fully closed, though she distinctly remembered shutting it that morning. For one hopeful instant, she imagined Julie had arranged an elaborate surprise to make up for missing dinner. Then caution reminded her that surprises did not usually breathe.

Lindsay nudged open the door and froze. A young man lay sprawled across her bed, apparently asleep, with nothing but a towel secured around his hips. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and sculpted with the exact kind of stomach Alyssa had declared impossible for Lindsay to obtain.

Every sensible instinct told her to scream and run. Yet nothing about the room looked disturbed, and the stranger appeared far too peaceful to be a burglar. His presence was so perfectly aligned with her birthday wish that fear collided with stunned disbelief.

Lindsay stepped closer, studying the dark lashes resting against his cheeks and the defined lines of his bare torso. No real boy could have arrived this quickly, and certainly not one who checked every item on her newly infamous list. There had to be another explanation, although her overwhelmed mind could not find it.

She stared at the impossible gift sleeping on her sheets as her birthday wish echoed through her head. A hot boyfriend with eight-pack abs had appeared in her bedroom only hours after she asked the universe for one. Lindsay swallowed, then whispered the only conclusion that made any sense at all: “My wish came true.”