That Infuriating Feeling: An Academic Rivals to Lovers Novel (Chasing Feelings Book 2)

Chapter 23

June, Tuesday

Oliver didn’t bother to show up for class today, and I was fucking pissed at him for it. First, he got in my pants. Then, he sent me on my way. Then, he didn’t even care enough to show his face? Fucking asshole. I would’ve bet everything I owned that this was his plan from the beginning. Make me hate him, break me down, watch me come, and then disappear. By the time I stormed into the library for our session, I was absolutely fuming. My heart bubbled in my chest, my skin flaming hot.

I smacked my books on the table where Oliver was already seated, his notebook open in front of him. With a page between his fingers, he looked up at me and said the stupidest possible thing he could’ve said. “Did you get some rest?”

Did I get some rest? Did I get some fucking rest?

“How dare you do that? What you did to me on Saturday.”

His face straightened out in an instant, the pages falling from his fingers as he offered me his full attention. “I— I’m so sorry, June. Had you changed your mind?” He looked like he might’ve just shit his pants.

“What? No, I…” His reaction wasn’t what I’d expected. He looked incredibly apologetic. Worried. Terrified, even. It provoked something in me, as if a hand was reaching up from my stomach and grabbing the anger from my throat, dragging it down so it didn’t exit my mouth along with my next words. “It’s not that.”

“You didn’t feel good?”

I averted my gaze. There was no way I was going to admit aloud how fucking good it felt. “It’s just that you saw everything.”

“I didn’t,” he said quickly. “I didn’t look.”

“No. You—” Fuck, this was going to be hard to admit. I paused, taking a deep breath before simply spitting it out. “You took that from me and then just sent me away. Did you just do all that to assert dominance or what was that?”

His face softened, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was a faint smile forming in the middle of his beard. He was fucking smiling. I was going to fucking murder this guy.

“You didn’t want to be sent away?” he asked calmly.

My eyes gaped at the realization. Here I was, so angry about my own ego that I hadn’t even noticed I was outright admitting I’d wanted more from him. “No! I mean, yes! I did. Because I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.” He smirked as he looked back down at his notebook, continuing whatever work he’d been tending to when I arrived.

“Yes. I do.”

He shrugged. “You seemed to like me quite a bit on Saturday.” My fists curled, my nails digging into my palms, reminding me not to scream or kick the air as my chest heated up. “What was it you said to me?” He looked up and pretended to think. “Oh, right. Just that you, Juni, wanted me, Oli, to make you come. And then you proceeded to—”

I ripped my chair away from the table, falling to my knees in its place.

“Juni?”

I wouldn’t have been surprised if my eyes had drained of their brown color and refilled with fire. Furious didn’t even begin to describe what I was feeling. I crawled under the table and grabbed Oliver’s legs, ripping at his trousers to get them undone.

“Juni,” he repeated quickly, all amusement evaporating from his tone. “June, someone could walk by.”

“Oliver,” I whispered from between his thighs. “I want you to look me in the eye while I say this to you.” I peered up at him until his gaze locked on mine, his stare full of fear. “I do not care.” I tucked my fingers into his waistband and undid the button on his pants. “You’re going to come in this very spot. Consider it my revenge.” His eyes widened, and he glanced up, checking our surroundings. I dragged his zipper down and began moving his clothes. He reached into his pants to help me pull him out, but I smacked at his fingers and trapped his wrists in my grip. “On my terms.”

His head fell back as his breathing increased. I released his wrists to pull his cock out and stand it up straight in front of me and...holy shit. I hadn’t seen one in a long while, and I’d forgotten just how much I loved that vein up the bottom and the different ways they curved. I immediately wanted to sink my lips over it, but I wasn’t here to make Oli’s life more pleasurable. I was here to take my power back and, if possible, torture him in the process.

I placed my finger at the base of his cock to keep it from tipping over as I ran my tongue up the underside of it as slowly and as lightly as I could. Just a touch. That’s all he was getting for now. His eyes rolled to the back of his head, and I’ll admit it was beautiful. It was as if his senses turned off, his brain shut down, and all he could do was let his vision go as his face fell slack. Like all his energy had abandoned his body and pooled right between his legs.

I stared up at him as I placed the tip between my lips, letting my tongue flick a little circle over it until his hips were grinding in his seat. I wanted him so desperate he couldn’t even fathom it.

I finally slid my lips over him, down to the base, as I reached between his legs and gripped his balls tightly. He groaned and keeled over in pain. It was awesome. For a moment, I forgot what I was doing as I released his balls and sucked him up and down, becoming lost in my own delicious passion. I hated how much I loved his cock, and I hated how much I could feel its contact with the back of my throat in between my legs as well.

When he finally took on that familiar swollen hardness, that particular rigidity that told me he was about to come, I gathered my senses, popped my mouth off, and folded my elbows on his knees, staring up at him with a self-satisfied smile.

He whined, rolling his hips as he held my head between his hands and looked down at me.

“Evil little thing,” he whispered.

“I am not little.” I returned my hand to his balls and clamped down hard.

He groaned, his fingers stiffening in my hair.

“Tell me you want it,” I ordered. “Tell me you want me to make you come.” I squeezed tighter, hoping it would be enough that he wouldn’t be able to verbalize an answer.

He nodded frantically, the veins in his neck filling up as a breathy “Yes, June” escaped his throat.

I shook my head. “That’s not what I asked you to say.”

His hands began gripping my head hard, and he removed them to claw at the table, stomping one foot on the floor in pain. “I want you to make me come, June,” he forced out.

I released his balls and sank my lips back over his shaft, sliding up and down him. He sighed, his breathing turning to gasping, his release on the tail end of his pain. A little squeak sounded from deep in his throat, and he slapped a hand over his mouth, moaning into his palm. That sound hit me between my legs. I wanted to swallow it as I sat on him. I wanted it injected directly into my ear canal as I bounced on his incredible cock.

I sucked down every last bit of Oliver’s pleasure before licking him clean and tucking him back into his trousers. He sat there, looking lifeless, as I unfolded myself from beneath the table. I was going to put my chair back in its place and sit down on it, but he reached a hand toward me, begging me closer with his eyes. I rounded the table and took an admittedly comfortable seat on his lap.

He hugged me and kissed my shoulder, then my neck, bundling me up in a strangely intimate embrace. Catching sight of his water bottle on the table, I reached for it to wash down his cum. He realized what I was doing and immediately snatched it away from me, laughing tiredly, nuzzling his forehead into my collarbone.

“Oliver!” I fought to grab hold of the bottle. “Can’t a girl wash down a blow job?”

“Absolutely not,” he said, kissing my jaw and jerking the bottle further away.

In a frustrated flurry, I moved my ass off of his lap and onto his knee, reaching my hand to his sensitive dick to grab it through his trousers and torture him some more, but he grunted and folded around me. “Oh, no, no, no.”

“Then give me the water,” I said. “Or I’ll tie you to this fucking chair and beat your perfect dick into oblivion.”

The sides of his mouth tugged down thoughtfully as he pondered it, his face expressing that he really didn’t think that was such a terrible idea.

I corrected myself. “I’ll tie you to this chair and refuse to touch you again for the rest of your miserable life.”

His gaze caught mine as a smile crinkled his cheeks. He shoved the water bottle into my chest. I took it, flicking open the built-in straw and sucking from it.

“So you’ll touch me again?” he asked as the cold liquid spilled down my throat.

I pulled the bottle away from my mouth, breathing heavily from my vigorous sipping. “If you’re good.”

“And you think my dick is perfect?”

My eyes snapped to his. “I did not say that!”

He grinned and took the bottle from my hands calmly, returning it to the table as I caught my breath. I leaned into him, observing his face which was set comfortably in a lazy, pleased expression. He really did have nice eyes, and the structure underneath that beard wasn’t half bad. I quite liked his eyebrows and the soft pink tint to his cheeks from our recent activities.

My god, he was…very pretty.

My heart fluttered without my consent, and we fell into another kiss. Not an angry library hookup kiss. A slow, intimate kiss that involved his tongue trailing softly over mine and my hands wrapping around the back of his head to comb my fingers through his hair. I broke my lips away, but my nose hovered over his still, less than an inch of air between us. I needed to say something, anything, to keep me from feeling what I was feeling at this moment. “Get back to work, Oli.”

◆◆◆

Oli, Friday

It was time to tell my father I was dropping out. I thought twice about simply texting the family group chat, but that seemed childish, so I mustered up all my strength and dialed my mother’s number which, ultimately, had been a mistake.

My mother was concerned when I told her, less for my future and more for my relationship with my father. After reminding me that she loved me but that this was going to be tough, she finally called my father into the room with her. She offered to tell him herself, but I took responsibility and blurted it for him to hear.

He yelled for a long while. So long that I think my mother might’ve simply left her phone with him and gone to another room. I sat on my bed, my phone to my ear, staring blankly at the wall as his insults came through the line. One after another, disappointment after disappointment, let down after let down. Eventually, it just sounded like noise bouncing off the side of my head. I didn’t even have the energy to be sad about it. The days of playing catch with Dad were long gone. The last thing I heard before finally hanging up washomosexual dropout.

Jonah had kindly left for my call, letting me know he needed to pick up cigarettes from the upperclassman who sold them anyway. I found myself alone in our room, drowning in the swirling silence that was the aftermath of that phone conversation. My head might’ve detached from my body, simply floating between two shoulders. I gathered enough consciousness to dial Kai’s contact for a video call, praying to the universe she wasn’t on the line with Jonah as she usually was. I needed to talk to her alone. She was the only one who could make any sense of the feelings whirling inside me.

She picked up, but…fuck. I forgot it was 8:13 p.m. on a Friday and she worked at a bar. It must have been like 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning for her. I watched her move through a crowd of people, my ears screaming as shouts and music distorted through the speaker. I turned the volume down on her until it seemed like she was outside.

“Are you leaving work?” I asked. She typically worked until five-ish, and while I wasn’t exactly sure what time it was for her, it seemed a little early.

“Forever,” she said, flipping her hair over one shoulder and shrugging into her puffy jacket, her breath visible against the black night. “Apparently, I hooked up with my boss. Now she’s being a jerk, so I’m done.”

“Jesus, Kai.” My forehead fell to my hand. I really did not need to hear that.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I was wasted so I don’t remember, and she was on another fucking planet, so I don’t believe it actually happened. I genuinely think she’s confusing me with someone else, hence her being an asshole about it. Anyway, I’ll figure it out.”

I nodded, unable to even process all the implications of what Kai was saying.

“What about you?” she asked, her nose bright pink in the cold.

She probably shouldn’t have asked me that, because the floodgates opened wide. I rambled, and vented, and complained about my father for so long that by the time I was finished, she’d already walked back to her apartment. I told her I’d probably never speak to him again unless it was an inevitable side effect of maintaining a relationship with my mother, and I even rattled off some of the nice insults he used on me. To top it off, I added in how stressed I was about Jonah’s ever-declining state, how much I worried about her abysmal financial situation and her tendency to surround herself with trash people, and the fact that I felt like I was failing everyone. I hadn’t made Jonah better, I hadn’t followed through with my plan to graduate, I hadn’t convinced my father I was still his same old son… The only good thing I had right now was June, and she hardly even liked me.

“Ouch” was about all Kai could manage in response. She dropped her jacket somewhere in her living room and sat down on her couch to clean off her makeup with a wipe, both of us remaining in silence while she processed what I’d told her.

“You know, Oli…” she finally said. “I know it sucked when your dad found out about Alan, and—”

“That has nothing to do with this,” I snapped. Why would she even bring that up? It was well over a year ago. All I did was hold the guy’s hand and go out on a couple of dates with him. So fucking what? It was completely irrelevant.

She shrugged. “It kind of does. That’s when things started going downhill with your father, and—”

“Kai, please.”

“Let me talk, Oli. Jesus. I know the last year or two have sucked. A lot. And now that you’re dropping out, I think you can get the life you truly want. But only if you learn to let go of things you can’t control for now, like your relationship with your father, Jonah’s mental health, and my life choices, which are perfectly adequate given my situation, by the way. We will all learn, and we will all be fine.”

“I can’t just let go of those things, Kai. They’re important to me.”

“I know, and I love that about you. But you’re putting your energy into everyone else’s buckets and there’s nothing left in your own. Dropping out is a good step. Now you get to make something of it.”

I sighed, letting my forehead fall to my palm. Obviously, that’s what I wanted to do, but easier said than done.

When she realized I wasn’t going to answer, she added, “Just keep it in your back pocket, Oli. You can’t do everything at once. I’m so sorry about your dad. Nothing he said is true, and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t get to keep knowing you because you’re awesome. I love you.”

“I love you too, and I’d like to be done talking about it now,” I said as kindly as I could.

“Okay.” I looked up to catch her expression melting into a smile. “So tell me about June instead.”

Yep. Should’ve expected that. But I couldn’t hold in my grin as I thought about what had happened just the other evening. I shrugged in response, my face in the little window in the corner of the screen making me look like a child with a goofy secret.

“Tell me!”

“I like her,” I admitted. I’d never said it aloud. Sure, I’d known how I felt about her, but I’d never truly articulated it to anyone. Not with those three simple words. “She’s so fucking cool, Kai. And smart. And weird.”

“That’s good, right? What’s the catch?”

Oh, the catch. Oh, the monumental, colossal, deeply concerning catch. “She’s got some of the tallest walls I’ve ever seen. I can’t even get her to admit she tolerates me, and I don’t know how to tell her about dropping out. I’m worried she’ll take it as a reason to stop speaking to me.”

“Oh, Oli. I don’t think that’s true.”

But Kai didn’t know June. She didn’t know how broken she was, and how perfectly comfortable she’d be moving on without me. “I don’t know. I don’t want to lie to her, but I don’t want the end of this semester to feel like a deadline. We’ll see. There’s still time.” I brushed the conversation off. I didn’t want to think about it quite yet.

“Just don’t let it snowball into something bigger,” she warned. “Now tell me about happy June stuff.”

I bit my lips together, trying to hold in my silly grin as I pondered the best way to tell Kai exactly what happened between June and me. Lucky for me, Kai had always been a bit of a mind reader.

“Did something gross happen? Oh my goodness. Don’t tell me, but do. But the PG version. The sister version. Tell me, tell me!”

Fuck, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way June downed me whole. The way she sucked the life right out of me. I was starting to feel the weight in my pants and suddenly grew very uncomfortable that Kai was here. Kai knew everything about me, and I wanted her to, but I never knew where to draw the line with…sexual stuff. “Uhm, well... You know... I was very nervous after…the finger event.”

“Yes, ew, continue.”

I paused. Fuck. “I don’t know how to tell you the details.”

She left her camera stacked on whatever it was leaning against on her coffee table and disappeared from my view. When she returned, she had a teddy bear in one hand and a stuffed dino in the other. She held them up in front of herself.

“Okay,” I said. “The dino and the bear are sitting in the library—”

“June performed oral sex on him!” Jonah projected as he walked through the door of the dorm room.

“Ew, Jo!” Kai screeched, burying her face in her toys. I sighed. That seemed like a good moment to leave my phone leaning on Jonah’s desk and back away from the camera so he could squeeze into the shot with me and appease some of the weirdness. I perched on the edge of my bed, and he stood just next to me.

“So that’s why you haven’t texted me back,” he teased, leaning over the camera with his hands on his hips. “You’ve been talking to this sexual deviant.” He almost sounded chipper. He’d been in a decent mood ever since I agreed to leave this place.

She giggled, lifting her black painted nails to her red cheeks. “Sorry, Jojo! I was hoping to get some gossip time alone with him, but now I don’t think I can look him in the eye ever again.”

“You asked!” I said. Though I understood her. I, too, wanted to hear though refused to hear details about her romantic life. In decent part for Jonah’s sake, honestly.

“And you, Jojo? No oral sex happening over there?” she mocked.

“Yeah, actually.” Both Kai and I went silent, staring at him with full curiosity. There was absolutely no way anyone was getting anywhere near Jonah’s dormant dick. “I got this awesome new conditioner, and the mouth of the bottle is just wide enough—”

“Ew, Jonah!” both Kai and I screamed.

I smacked my forehead, and Jonah laughed. He actually laughed. He made a joke, then he smiled, then he laughed.

Kai rolled her eyes and returned her attention to me. “Oli, just ask June to hang out with you. Outside of your project. And pleasetake away Jonah’s shower bottles. He’s going to get stuck in there, and I won’t be around to point and laugh at him.” She stood from her couch and walked to the kitchen area of her apartment. “I’m going to make something to eat, so I’m out of here. Love you both.”

“Good,” Jonah said, snatching up my phone and looking closely to catch one more glimpse of her before she disappeared. “We’re going to talk about boy things anyway. Like skateboards and boobs.”

She scoffed. “Please, Jo. You wouldn’t know what a boob looked like if it smacked you in the face.”

“Want to educate me?”

My eyes rolled so much that my entire head leaned back.

“Schmoooozer,” she sang as the call officially ended.

“I love you,” he called after her with a chuckle, far too late. He then turned to me. “Man, I love her.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t tell her you have sex with plastic bottles and ask to see her boobs,” I said. “It doesn’t seem like the best way to get her to reciprocate.”

Jonah tossed my phone on the bed next to me before kicking over to his side of the room and falling onto his sheets. “Says the guy who’s scared of the girl he likes.”

“Am not!”

“Then ask her out as Kai suggested.” He stole a cigarette from his new pack and stuck it between his lips, lighting it as he leaned back with a smug look.

“Fine.” I grabbed my phone proudly. “I will.”

My fingers shook as I navigated to my messages to find June’s contact. What the fuck was I even supposed to say to her?

Typing… Hey June. Got any plans tonight? Let’s meet up.

No. That’s fucking lame. Delete. Delete. Delete.

Typing…Juni. Come over.

No. That makes me sound like an asshole. Maybe I should just be honest.

Typing… Hey June. Awesome head. Literally cannot stop thinking about you. Sex tonight?

I groaned. I didn’t even fucking know how to flirt. Especially not with someone as smart as Juni. When we were together, it just came naturally. But initiating it was a totally different story, and I had no fucking idea how she felt about me. Ugh. I gave up and said the one thing I could think of that didn’t make me absolutely cringe.

Me: Hey.

No more than two minutes later, she replied.

Juni Sucks: Hi.

Fuck. Now what? Think. Think.

Me: Jonah said that Somme was the greatest battle in history. Come debate him on it?

…

…

Juni Sucks: Funny. I was just going to tell you that Mary claimed communism is terrible both in theory and in practice. Be there in 40.

I immediately flew out of my bed.

“Put that cigarette out,” I said quickly, running to my closet to grab a bottle of air freshener before spraying it around the room frantically. I then scattered to grab my things and bolted to the showers, ignoring Jonah’s questioning about my sudden burst of energy.

She was coming. Juni was coming. No study session. No obligation. She wanted to come see me. My heart rattled in my chest as I scrubbed every inch of myself. I tried to keep my hands steady as I trimmed my beard, though they didn’t stop shaking until I finally got back to the room and took a shot from my bottle of closet whiskey.

After dressing myself, I pulled three solo cups from behind my stack of T-shirts and poured warm alcohol into them, carefully making sure they were all filled equally. The air was thick with Clean Linens freshener on top of smoke, so I grabbed a candle from the shelf in my closet and lit it as well.

Suddenly, I stopped, stepping away slowly from the desk where the candle and cups were lined up.

“Am I trying way too hard?” I turned around to face Jonah, who sat up on his bed, his back against the wall, writing what I assumed were lyrics or song ideas in his little notebook.

“Effort is a good thing,” he promised.

“Right.” I huffed a breath and rubbed my hands on my trousers nervously. I took one of the cups over to Jonah, who closed his notebook over his pen and set it to the side. Was he going to sit and socialize with us? I was impressed. I got the feeling he actually liked June.

I did too. I liked her a lot. A whole fucking lot. Something was going to happen tonight. I could feel it. Something big.

“There’s no chance you…uhm. You don’t have any condoms, do you?” I asked Jonah as I picked up my cup from the desk. Or maybe that was a stupid thing to ask. What if June didn’t want to? Fuck it. “Just in case.”

Jonah took a sip and swallowed. “Obviously not. Why the hell would you even ask me that?”

“I don’t know. You’re the only person I know who might…wear the same size.” His entire body fell limp in disbelief, his palm smacking the sheets and his head tilting to one side. “What?! It’s important to wear the right size. Otherwise, it’s not as effective—”

He held up a hand in my direction, cutting me off. “Yes, Oliver, I think I can understand the nuances of proper condom use, thank you.”

“You sure about that?” I teased. Jonah Alexander was nothing if not the least sexy person on the planet, and almost proudly so.

He pinned me with a look. “I have a perfectly normal-sized and very adequate penis. However, if you’re going to stand there and insinuate that it’s as large as someone of your…stature, the least you can do is wait until Kai is in the room to hear it.”

I threw a hand out in front of me as I sat down on my bed to face him. “She doesn’t care about our dick sizes, Jonah.”

“Still wouldn’t kill you to be a better wingman,” he muttered.

“And it wouldn’t kill you to have an outlet other than clinging to her. You do know you’re allowed to have sex, right?”

His eyebrows shot to his forehead. Oops. I might’ve offended him with that one. “I know what I want and I do not enjoy settling for less. I have my outlets.”

“Ah, yes. Writing heartbreaking music, smoking, sleeping, crying, and masturbating while also crying.” I lifted my drink to take a sip, snorting into it.

“Despite what you think, Oliver, I’m very sure of who I am.” I tried to interject to tell him that’s not what I meant, but I couldn’t get the whiskey down fast enough to produce any words before he kept speaking. “I feel everything and nothing, always and never. It’s not a very welcoming space for such superfluities. I’m very glad you’ve finally found someone you’re interested in having sex with. The parade in your honor will set off from the dining hall tomorrow at 9:00. But personally, I’m comfortable focusing my energy elsewhere. In conclusion, I do not have a condom.”

I groaned. “I hate buying them.”

Jonah flicked his chin to the far wall above my bed. “Ask the neighbors or something.”

I shook my head. They weren’t fans of our occasional song belting, and I wasn’t keen on having to hear about it. I checked my phone, seeing that June had said forty minutes seventeen minutes ago. I still had time. “I’ll text Kai and tell her you have a giant penis if you run out with me to buy condoms.”

He tutted. “Why do I have to go?”

“So it’s less embarrassing.”

“It’s not embarrassing to be sexually active, Oli.”

“No, but it is embarrassing that you’ve used both the phrases ‘performed oral sex’ and ‘sexually active’ tonight. And don’t even get me started on ‘superfluities.’ What are you, ninety? Just come with me.”

Jonah whined but ultimately swung himself out of bed. He would’ve done anything to help me get June, and I knew that. The second we were out the door and on our way to the store, I pulled out my phone to text the group chat between Jonah, Kai, and me, as promised.

Me: Hey, Kai.

Me: Jonah has a small penis.

Kai :P the bessst!: HAHA. I figured. Wearing skinny jeans throughout high school must have cut off all circulation to the dick, inhibiting its growth.

“Oli!” Jonah smacked me on the shoulder and began typing away. I looked at my screen eagerly to see how he’d save himself.

Jonah Alexander: Yeah. That’s probably what happened. It’s tiny.

I looked sidelong at my friend, furrowing my brows to ask what the fuck he was up to with that answer. He nodded confidently, silently telling me to just wait a second. Our phones dinged simultaneously.

Kai :P the bessst!: That’s hot.

“Nice,” I said, staring at the screen and lifting my fist to Jonah.

“Nice,” he agreed, bumping my knuckles with his.