Chapter 36
Jonah
I stood alone by the snack table with a new drink in my hand, taking a moment of silence before making my way back to where Oli now stood.
Unfortunately for me, Aaron approached, interrupting my solitude. “Jonah, man!” He dropped a heavy arm around my shoulders. My body solidified. “Oh. You don’t like to be touched, do you?”
I didn’t answer. He didn’t move his arm.
When we shook hands on arrival, his palm almost swallowed my digits whole. For a moment I was nervous his strength would snap them clean off. Probably better. Then I wouldn’t be tempted to further defile my friendship with Kai. Either way, his presence was downright suffocating. He was impossible to escape.
He continued speaking. “Check this out.” He pulled out his phone and navigated to his music app. A tattooed thumb clicked through his profile until a playlist titled Gym popped up on the screen. He scrolled down, stopping over a set of songs I was quite familiar with. A set of songs I’d written myself.
Excellent. This asshole was listening to my music, which I had written about the love of my life, as he spent two hours daily with her grunting in tight clothing.
“You guys are awesome,” he said. I still hadn’t said a thing. He might as well have been conversing with the off-white paneling on the side of the house. “Seriously. I hadn’t listened to you guys before Kai showed me but now I’m, like, a fan, dude.”
“Thank you,” I said quietly. No matter how angry I was, I was always grateful to the people who listened to my whining. They were the ones who made this all possible for Oli, Noah, and me.
“You don’t like me, do you?” He put his phone in his pocket and ripped straight through the tension between us.
“Not particularly.” There was no point in lying.
Aaron laughed, finally removing his arm from my shoulders though replacing it with a hand on each one as he turned me to face him. “I know, I know. It’s kinda hot. But don’t worry. I don’t want Kai any more than I want every other fucking person on the planet. You know she’s not into that, and I’m not into breaking you two up.”
“We’re not together.” I clenched my jaw until it hurt, considering escape routes. Perhaps if I ran, I could work up enough momentum to hop the tall fence surrounding the yard.
“Just shut up, dude. Seriously. Drop the act. From man to man, I like you, and I like you for her. From what I’ve heard, you balance her out. And she needs that. She wants that. But you stay cold for too long and you’re only gonna make her act out. You know how she is.”
I glared at him. “She knows what she needs, and she can do whatever she wants. She’ll accept this eventually.”
“Yeah, she might, but you’ll be shit outta luck. Don’t act like putting up this front makes it any easier for you, dude.”
“It was never easy for me, dude. Not for one second during the last twelve years. But it was for her, and it should stay that way.” My hand scraped behind my head as I looked around myself, anxiously waiting for this interaction to end.
“You’ve been after her for twelve years?” His face stretched with disbelief.
Shit.This was exactly why I didn’t socialize. Kai was such an enveloping part of my world, that I’d forgotten entirely that my love for her wasn’t common knowledge. Oli knew, June knew, Noah knew, and Tiff knew. And I knew that keeping the secret from Kai ate away at them. June especially. I had a feeling Kai’s parents knew too, as they alluded to it on many occasions. My parents knew too, obviously. My mom had seen every pathetic attempt I made throughout high school to get her attention. And that was it. Those were all the people I interacted with.
So now Aaron knew.
“I’d appreciate it if you kept that to yourself,” I mumbled.
“I already assumed, man, and I felt sorry for you because of it. Hearing the confirmation is a heartbreak for the entire male species, to be honest. I mean your whole…” He circled his hands my way, gesturing to my general presence. “Just… Sorry, dude.” He wasn’t apologizing for making assumptions, but rather because he could tell I was the saddest piece of shit in human history. How empathetic of him. “But what if she feels the same way?”
A scenario I hadn’t even considered. An impossibility. My love for Kai was something uncontrollable, something overwhelming, something I knew perfectly well was madness but, still, I felt it. There was no way my beautiful girl was as crazy or desperate as I was. She did just fine living her own exciting life.
I ignored his previous question and used this momentary lull in our rivalry to warn him. “You shouldn’t get too close to her without asking. She doesn’t always respond well to it.”
“I know.” Part of me hoped he didn’t. It would’ve made it easier to hate him. “I grabbed her by the waist once as a joke and she turned right around and pushed me. She’s only okay with upper arms and upper back and only hard contact, like a hug or fist or maybe flat palms, and only when she’s not hot or sweaty or tired. No soft touching. No fingers. I got it. Don’t worry. Can we be friends now?”
“We have nothing in common.”
Aaron laughed. “I like you.” He wrapped me in an enormous hug, shifting me back and forth on my feet. “We’re going to be friends.”
“Where’s the bathroom?” was all I managed in response.
He chuckled once again as he directed me inside the house and up the stairs.
◆◆◆
Kai
Over the years, a position in which I frequently found myself was bent over; two hands on the sink, two feet on the floor, leaning in as I stared at my reflection in the mirror.
Fitting, for someone getting railed by life.
Though, today, the tears that usually rolled off the end of my nose didn’t come. I had no concept of how long I’d been standing in the private upstairs bathroom. I only knew my body was frozen.
The door opened abruptly, jerking me from my position and freeing me from my mind’s hold. Jonah’s reflection appeared in the mirror. He stopped immediately when he saw me, and I stared him down in the glass. “The door was cracked. I thought…”
“There’s a bathroom downstairs,” I said sharply.
“Aaron told me upstairs to the right.”
“Fucking asshole,” I muttered. Aaron had done it on purpose. He knew I came up for a quiet moment.
Jonah’s hand still gripped the door handle. He refused to step into the bathroom fully but didn’t retreat either. How metaphoric.
“Why are you up here?” he asked.
“That’s a stupid question, Jo.” I turned around and crossed my arms, leaning back on the slick, white countertop. His eyes were a dead giveaway as he ran through options of what to do next. Stay, go, speak, shut up. He had no clue, and so he did nothing. Shocking. “I’ll go.” I launched off the counter to pass him.
“I don’t need the bathroom, I just wanted to hide,” he said quickly. Like I didn’t already know that. His stare was firmly on me as he spoke, and I could see right through it. Such a fine line he teetered on. As did I.
“Then I’ll leave you to do so.” I made to exit, but he still didn’t move from the doorway. He remained planted half in the bathroom, half in the walk-through laundry room that separated the bathroom from the hallway. “Aren’t you going to move so I can leave you to brood in peace?”
“I’m sorry for touching you in front of them.”
My gaze welded itself to his, catching that guilty glimmer in his eyes. It hurt to see, but my body and my brain were too blocked with energy for me to care. Rage, frustration, pain, helplessness. “You’ve done many things that have hurt me these last few days, Jo. Touching me is the least of them.”
He sighed and tilted himself to allow me to brush past him. I knocked his shoulder rudely as I did. He didn’t like that. Good. He immediately grabbed me and spun me toward the drying machine in the dark laundry room, pressing my back to it. We stood in that dim middle space, staring, breathing, only a gasp apart as I found myself trapped by him. Faint light trailed in from the partially open bathroom door, illuminating his shadow.
“I’m trying to apologize. The least you can do is drop the attitude,” he said, his nose millimeters from mine.
“Maybe you should just fuck it out of my system,” I mocked.
He came closer still, his tone and expression hard as stone. “I asked you to drop the attitude.”
My hands fell to his chest, bunching his T-shirt in fists before I launched him away from me. “You’re getting awfully close for someone who doesn’t want me.”
“I never said I didn’t want you.”
“No, but you did imply that fucking me would be a burden, and I was able to extrapolate.” I slit my eyes and lifted a hand at him. “It’s fine, Jo. Not your fault. I’ll get over it. It won’t be hard to find someone else who knows how to touch a fucking rib cage.”
“I never said I didn’t want you.”
“Well, that’s odd, Jo.” I put my hands on my hips and pretended to think. “If you want me, and I want you, I wonder why nothing’s happening. I mean, I’d probably know if you bothered to have a fucking conversation with me about it.”
“I tried to talk to you this morning.”
“After forty-eight hours of bullshit! I wanted to talk the very next day after you…you…” Ugh!
He splayed his hands in front of himself, questioning the air. “Can I not make a decision without consulting you first?”
“Not one that involves the both of us.”
“I am allowed to say no to you.”
“You are allowed to do whatever the fuck you want, except get close to me and then leave me in the dust, harboring me with mixed signals and half-excuses!”
◆◆◆
Jonah
I didn’t want her to think I was rejecting her. I didn’t want her to think I disliked her or dismissed her. But I… What the fuck was I supposed to do?
I tried to protect myself. I tried to protect our friendship. And for what? For this? It seemed the only way out was to do it. To give in to what I wanted most and do my best not to off myself after. To bury myself in the memories of her once she finally left me and act like it hadn’t destroyed our entire friendship and my entire life.
No. I couldn’t give up just because she had an attitude today. Just one more week, maybe two, and she’d cool off, this would blow over, and everything would go back to normal. I just had to stick to my decision. That’s all I had to do.
I turned to walk out the door without answering her.
“When you see Aaron, send him up.”
I stopped dead in my tracks, my hand half extended toward the closed door of the laundry room that led to the hallway. My chin lined up with my shoulder as I peered back at her, damning myself for getting sucked back into this. As an indescribable fury bubbled through my gut, I turned around fully to face Kai. She stood with her arms crossed, leaning on the dryer, giving me a little shrug as if that was supposed to tell me everything I needed to know.
I took two slow steps in her direction. “Do you want to say that again, Kai?” I was going to get very ugly if she did.
She pushed off the machine and took three steps toward me. “I said...when you see Aaron—”
I bent her over the washer before she could even finish that sentence. My hand weaved through her hair as I leaned over her, my nose by her ear and my groin pressing into her ass. Staying away from the girl was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and she was just fucking hellbent on making it even more difficult. “Do not provoke me, Kai, I am hanging on by a fucking thread.”
“You don’t say?” Her body trembled beneath mine, her legs shaking as she stood on her tiptoes to keep her hips aligned with where we were both folded. I couldn’t have fucking cared less. All I could see was blind rage, a feeling which, lately, was bursting from my seams day in and day out.
For a moment, I just held her there, both of us breathing into the silent dimness of the room. But my cock grew behind my jeans, filling in the spaces of her perfect backside, and I knew she could feel it too. Her sweet whimper told me as such.
“Jonah.”
My mind switched off. I was no longer in control. I turned her back around and pressed her into the machine, taking a bite from her neck, still having the decency to at least hold off on the kiss that would end my life.
She slipped her fingers under the hem of my T-shirt and ran those hands all along the skin of my back, my sides, and my front as I licked thick lines and circles over her neck, looking for the little spots that elicited the biggest reactions from her. My lips ripped away from her skin as her nails trailed down the center of my abdomen. A sensation shot from my cock right up to my throat and I released a groan beneath her ear.
“Neck, shoulders, disobedience, abdomen…” she whispered. She took my earlobe in her tongue as she worked the button on my jeans. Oh, shit. My conscience screamed at me to come back. To stop this. To remember what would happen if I lost her.
I pushed Kai into the bathroom and pulled the door shut behind her, forcing us to separate. What other choice did I have? I stood alone in the laundry room, gripping the handle as tightly as I could. “Lock the fucking door, Kai.”
“Is this really necessary?”
“Yes. Yes, Kai. Lock the door. Please.”
“Why can’t you lock yourself in here and let me out?”
I pointed one finger as if she could see me, rage and pressure fogging every inch of my good sense. “Because I’ll just unlock it, and I know you will stay out here waiting for me.” I don’t know why I trusted her not to unlock it more than myself. She was just stealthier with these things. She played the game much better than I did, which was very concerning.
“True.” I could hear the amusement in her voice. She thought this was funny. God, my cock was beating at my fucking zipper, begging me to do something, anything. I couldn’t handle it anymore. I couldn’t handle this fucking girl.
“Kai, for the love of god, just lock the fucking door.”
I finally heard the lock click and dropped my hands to the dryer in front of me. I breathed heavily, thinking about how I could possibly get out of this. There was no way I could leave this tiny room with the world’s most ridiculous erection stiffening my every move.
“You need to fix it,” she said quietly from the other side, taking a kind tone as if she were helping me. “I felt it through your jeans. I wanted to do it for you. Just fix it and you’ll feel better.”
Minx. Witch. My bitter end. I could see the look on her face on the insides of my eyelids. “I am not doing that. We’re at a fucking party.”
Was there even a point in resisting anymore, or were we already finished? We’d never be the same anyway. Not after this.
“You need to fix it,” she said again, her voice unfairly sultry. “No one’s coming in, Jojo.”
“I can hide it.” Untrue. This one was not of the hiding kind. I gripped myself hard, trying to force my body to relax, but instead, my hips pushed into my palm.
“No,” she begged. “I’ll stay behind the door. I promise. I want to hear you fix it. Please.”
“Oh my fucking god.” I dropped to my knees, leaving one hand on the dryer for support. I couldn’t believe what she was asking of me. What she was tempting me to do. And knowing how weak I was at this moment. I pulled recklessly at my jeans, doing everything I could to adjust myself. It was no use. I couldn’t help it.
“I’ll fix it with you,” she murmured.
Had there been a single drop of blood left in my brain, it raced straight down to my dick at that offer. Kai’s siren song whisked me away. I listened to the sound of her zipper pulling as my hand did the same to mine. My jeans popped open, and I pulled my cock out, a pathetic, defeated man kneeling on the piercing hard floor.
I cursed as I began to stroke myself. The wretched, untapped energy that had built inside of me these last few days, these last twelve years, begged to be released over and over again.
A groan escaped me, and I heard Kai’s breath hitch. Those precious sounds began to leak through the space beneath the door. I could hardly handle the sensations running through me. My body stiffened into my hand as my mind went blank, save the bit of focus that remained on her presence.
“Kai, you little bitch.” She had coaxed me to do this. She had broken me time and time again. And I wanted to make her pay for it in the best of ways.
A high-pitched laugh surged from behind the door followed by a euphoric moan. “You’ve heard me finish. It’s only right you return the favor.”
“You’d consider this a favor?”
“God, yes…” I listened so closely to what she had to say that my hand slowed, willing the entirety of my being and the space around me to utter silence. “I need to know what you sound like, Jonah.”
My beautiful girl was such a fucking asshole, tempting me with those desperate words, trying to convince me she was even half as obsessed as I was. I flicked my finger under my tip. “It might be hard to hear me over yourself.” I knew she was loud and I hadn’t even slept with her.
“Then perhaps I’ll hold off until later. Besides, if I finish, you’ll owe me anoth—”
“You are going to come, and you are going to let me listen.” She squeaked from behind the door. “Good.” My fingers wrapped me fully and tugged up and down, her noises filling my ears just as they did that evening in our room. “Touch yourself in all the places we found together.” The yelp that came through the door let me know that she did. I eased into those sounds. Into us. “I’m right here with you, beautiful girl.”
Our moans twisted with each other. My hand sped up. I could only imagine the way she looked, sprawled out on the floor next to me, thinking about me, listening to me. God, I wanted her to show me how she rubbed her clit. I wanted to burst through the fucking door and watch her shove her fingers inside herself, wishing they were mine.
She moaned with a prolonged “fuck” that made me believe she might already be close.
“Do not,” I said quickly, buying time so I could enjoy this just a little longer. “Fuck, do not come yet.”
“Yes, Jonah.”
I groaned. “I love it when you say my name, which is so painfully often.”
She began repeating my name as she continued to touch herself. Such a good fucking girl. I could hardly hold it in, and I knew if I stayed like this I’d be done for soon. My supporting hand grabbed a towel off the top of the dryer and pulled it into my lap. My ministrations on myself did not stop as I positioned it under my cock.
Kai was far past close, judging by her whimpers. She was probably squirming on the floor, forcing herself to hold back, forcing her body to wait as I’d asked of her. I didn’t need to see her to know that. I could hear it very clearly. “Not yet, beautiful girl.”
“Ffffuck. I hate you so much.”
“Close enough,” I murmured.
“Please, Jonah, please.”
A sinister laugh that hardly sounded like mine erupted through me before I surrendered, letting my forehead fall to the surface in front of me. “I’ll give you anything you ask for. Come with me. Fucking come with me.”
She did. Her gasps fueled the deepest parts of me, everything spilling out as if my body were wrung dry. This was my fucking dream, to have the honor of listening to her, to have the honor of taking even the smallest part in her pleasure. Cum coated my hand, and I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what it would look like leaking down her thighs.
I stayed kneeling on the ground for a few long seconds as desire slipped away and clarity set in. Looking around quickly, I grabbed the towel, cleaned my lap and hand, and folded it into itself, throwing it into the open washing machine.
Sorry to whoever does the laundry next.
The lock clicked. I tugged my jeans up and stood as the door creaked open slowly. Kai revealed her face. She stared at me with such desperation. A desperation I felt too. As if we hadn’t just finished, but merely started.
She launched toward me, and I received her with two hands around her waist. She placed a palm behind my head and stuck her set of wet fingers in front of my mouth. I immediately closed my lips around them, sucking and pulling her body closer, relishing her taste as she nibbled at my jaw. Her nose brushed mine as she waited for her fingers to drop from my lips.
Oh, god. Oh, fuck.
We had gone way too far. I hardly had time to think about how I would deal with the consequences when she was tired of using me. The damage was done. We grabbed each other, and my mouth touched hers.
Sweet girl.
I savored the skin of her lips barely pressing into mine for a mere second when someone knocked on the door. My consciousness zapped back to me instantaneously, and I wrapped my hands around Kai’s shoulders, pushing her away. She stared into my eyes. We had come so close, and now she watched the gates slam shut once again.
“Anyone in there?” June asked from outside the door of the laundry room.
Oli snickered. “We gotta take a leak!”
Fucking assholes were sneaking away for a hook up and interrupting mine. Not that this was a hook up. Or… What the fuck did I know? I didn’t have time for semantics.
I kept Kai in my grasp, moving slowly toward the door to open it. She softened her eyes as she moved with me, shaking her head and whispering little begs at me not to open it. “No. Please, Jonah. Why? Just tell me why.”
Painful. It was downright painful to force her away.
With my fingers on the handle, I looked into her eyes and murmured the very tip of the iceberg that had been lurking inside of me for years. “I do not have the luxury of trusting myself enough to know that I would be okay after this, Kai. I would not know how to keep going. You’re too important to me to chance it.”
“Nothing will ever come between us. You know that.”
“I don’t. I don’t know that. You… You act now and you think later because you like to feel. I think that’s incredible, but feeling is very hard for me. I don’t have as much practice bouncing back as you do.”
“Do you think I’d hurt you somehow?” She looked as if she’d been cracked open, pain leaking through the crevices. “Do you not trust me?”
Of course, I trusted her. I trusted her to live for herself, which she did so beautifully. I trusted her to be happy and free and smart.
“All of this may be entertaining to you, it may be a safe way for you to try things out, but for me, it feels like crossing a very serious line. A line you don’t cross with friends.”
She slapped her hand on the door, pausing my movement to open it. “Whatever you’re trying to protect yourself from, you already took from me. Just remember that.”
With that, she took her hand off the door and stepped away, putting a cold distance between our bodies. My heart broke. She was right. I had already seen her in her most vulnerable state, pulled it out of her myself, and I was treating her like absolute shit. But she’d get over it more easily than I would. She didn’t have love to worry about.
It destroyed me to know I’d hurt her, but I convinced myself it would be best in the long run. Letting her go in this way was infinitely better than ruining what we had. Even if it meant she’d find someone else. Even if someone else was Aaron. I could handle it if it meant she’d be happy, and that she’d tell me all about that happiness at the end of each day, or each time she called, or every time we met. I had no choice but to release her, to release myself. And so, I did.
I pressed on the handle, allowing the door to drift open. Oli and June’s faces dropped when they saw both Kai and me inside. Ignoring the cacophony of random words and questions, I pushed past them and started making my way down the hall. Kai didn’t follow.
My foot had hardly touched the first step to descend to the party when I heard my name called. Oli wanted me to come back, and he didn’t sound happy.
Fuck. I cannot handle this conversation right now.
I made no move, stepping neither forward nor backward. A hand landed on my T-shirt, gripping one sleeve tightly. It was June. “Get the fuck back here. What the fuck did you do to her?”
“No.” I couldn’t. I couldn’t handle it. Too much had happened. My mind spun. “No,” I repeated. “I’m done with this.”
I stomped down the stairs and returned to the back yard, immediately realizing all my friends were upstairs in the bathroom. I was alone at this horrific fucking event. I called a car and went home, falling asleep next to a bottle of whiskey that hadn’t been touched in months.