17 #3
"Davis?" She was a brunette smoke show we’d met back at school. She’d gone into modeling after graduation.
"Yup, Stevie D."
All the hairs on the back of my neck stood in unison. The temperature in the room must’ve dropped. I watched unseeingly as he opened his phone to read a few texts from the source. He had bad hangnails along his thumb. One was on the brink of bleeding.
"Heard he's sort of gone and lost it for her. They've been at it a few weeks now, mate. Nate supposedly got her number for him, like, last month, I think. That's where it all started."
Nathan was sat in the lounge finishing off what must've been his fifth slice.
I knew he would regret it later. He always ate more than his fill and had stomach issues after.
Levi must've said something idiotic because both Rome and Nathan burst out laughing in unison.
Now I glared at them both in disgust. Nathan for his role in securing Stevie's number for Rome, and Rome for his role in desiring it.
Alex continued, but I couldn't hear anything. A high-pitched ringing had overtaken my brain. I was devastated that Rome might’ve been texting her the entire time.
Right beneath my nose. Probably every night before we fooled around.
Had he only settled for me because she wasn't here?
Was I just a bedwarmer? A glorified placeholder for better people he had in mind once he left? Her?
I grew sick imagining the things we’d done. The places we’d touched. The places my tongue had roamed. I’d put his cock in my mouth. His fat, dripping cock in my mouth? And all this time he’d been planning on humiliating me when we left here.
I tried to control my rage, but it boiled up the back of my neck and the flesh began to blister. If it weren't for Alex standing nearby, I would’ve screamed until my throat ached and punched something to alleviate the pain. Tears sprang into my eyes, but I blinked them away, transfixed.
"So yeah, that boy is whipped," he made the motion with his hand and the sound effect.
"Why're you so sure?" I retorted, at a loss for anything else to say.
"He fancies her way too much. Mate, they've just started talkin’, yet he met up with her nearly every night before we came here.
He's locked in, y'know? We're all mad at that stage, right?
Same with me and E. And even think of you with Carley?
You couldn't shut up about her the first few weeks, and you hadn't even kissed yet. "
My rage abated when I thought of Carley, realizing only now she was sort of my Stevie.
How exactly could I be pissed when I was in a similar situation?
I was obsessed with Carley. She was insanely sexy, older—much older—experienced, independent, and the fact that she’d shown interest in me was a colossal ego-boost. While some ridiculed her for the unsightly age gap, I was praised by the boys and clapped on the back anytime I was spotted out with her.
We made headlines like clockwork, which she loathed.
Still, the pride I once felt over securing her number had long since faded.
This week had altered everything. With so little effort, Rome had reprioritized my affections and shoved her out of the limelight in my heart.
Where I’d once been curious about him, I was now lost in him.
Gone. Beyond the pale. Carley couldn’t compare in the least. Not to his mystique.
Or his maleness. Or the secrecy he’d entered with me.
Alex and I moved back into the lounge and he was decidedly more energetic than before our talk.
"Bagsey mine!" he screamed, lunging into the array of boxes to steal the last cheese slice. I was glad his mood had improved since I’d mended things with him, but now I was the brooding one, staring at Rome weirdly.
What had I done? Things were fucked. He planned on going back to Stevie the second we got home.
Back to normalcy. To decency. Of fucking course he did.
What he and I shared was nothing short of a depraved, fevered dream.
Something akin to an MDMA trip, except far more gross and unconscionable.
It had no place in the realm of the civilized. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
I thought he was mine. We’d made out so long, of course he was mine.
We were each other’s. The guy whose jizz I had to clean off my hand while he lay trying to catch his breath?
Mine. No one in this world or the next could say he didn’t belong to me.
The guy who'd kissed me non-stop, until my guts shuddered?
Mine. Him falling asleep against my mouth?
Mine. Him whispering that he loved me? Mine, mine, mine.
Now when I looked at him, all I saw was infrared.
It was to become the running dynamic of our anti-relationship.
A crazed, almost chemical polarity that would haunt us until the bitter end.
Untempered passion on either end of the spectrum.
Hate and love. Estrangement and enthrallment. Fighting and fucking. War and peace.