RILEY
Chapter Seven
The house was oddly quiet on Sunday morning.
Last night, there had been another wild party at Alpha Kappa Phi and I figured everyone was nursing a hangover today.
I made myself a couple sandwiches in the kitchen, spotting Sawyer and Tyler napping in armchairs on the far side of the common room, arms thrown over their eyes to protect them from the early sunlight.
I made my way downstairs with the plate in one hand, chewing my lip and grasping meandering thoughts. My mood was funky as best, not least of all because he had started haunting my dreams, now, too. The night had been full of tossing and turning until I’d given it up.
As if skating back into my life hadn’t been painful enough, Cameron had torn the stitches that held my heart together with one brilliant moment of truce.
I’d been so stunned that I decided not to act at all.
I hadn’t a clue as to what the right reaction would be.
Should I have pushed him away? Should I have leaned in?
Should I stop wondering because nothing had happened in the end?
That was the only question I could answer.
Hell yes. I had to clear my head of Cameron and this stupid tightness in my chest. Even if Coach hadn’t walked in and stopped us from making that horrible mistake, what was there to hope for?
That we would kiss and…what? Live happily ever after?
Bullshit. Cameron Martinez had maybe reined his temper in, but I hadn’t halved my IQ just yet.
I’d been fooled once and it had been one time too many.
I sank into the sofa cushions and crossed my legs over the small coffee table in the basement. As I finished the first of the two sandwiches, I shifted restlessly, sitting on something hard. I dug under the pillow and snatched the wireless joystick that had been buried there.
Lacking any other entertainment, I fired my PlayStation up and let Fallen Order load on screen while I finished the other sandwich.
My mind returned to the conundrum of Cameron’s wet lips, his chiseled features, his torso still glistening after the shower, and the fact that we had been wearing nothing more than towels when something possessed him to offer me a kiss.
I would be a liar if I said that being slammed against the locker hadn’t woken something deeply primal inside of me.
Something was severely messed up with me, I was sure, but that didn’t alter the facts.
When Cameron pressed his arm across my chest and pinned me against the cold metal of the locker, I felt it in my stomach, my spine, my cock.
It made me fluttery with desire and fiery with rebellion.
Every shred of me wanted to fight back just so I could provoke his wrath.
Cameron was incapable of letting go no matter what he pretended to be like. He was smart enough and quiet enough to appear subdued, but he never stopped watching and he never stopped trying to outmatch me. I was just explosive enough to cut to the chase.
And when I did, he wanted to put me in my place, so to speak.
I lifted the controller and checked the recent game saves, almost choking on the last mouthful of my sandwich. Palpie_The_Man had saved a game just last night. Palpie, as in Palpatine. This was Cameron’s gameplay. I would have bet my ass on it.
My throat narrowed so quickly at the dusty memory of the long Sunday mornings from our senior year.
Whenever the doorbell rang, and my heart leaped, I would pretend I hadn’t been pacing my room in expectation for minutes and minutes.
I would open the door and find him leaning against the doorframe, darkness enveloping him, and locks of his hair falling over his brow and hiding his reddened eyes.
I never asked.
I had learned that lesson early on. Asking only made him agitated. It was better to say nothing and let him in, embrace him, and help him take his mind off of it.
Every Sunday, I extended my arm and waited until he took my hand, then pulled him inside and shut the door behind us.
He rounded on me before we reached my bedroom and I laughed, tripping over my own feet.
His arms would wrap around me and he would pin me against the wardrobe in my room, stare into my eyes with unrestrained lust, and purr the sexiest words I’d ever heard. “Have you been bad, Riley?”
Even now, I shuddered at the color of his husky voice. We’d known the meaning of his question. It had belonged to a language of our own.
“Have you played with yourself without me, Riley?” he was really asking.
And he could tell when I lied because I had the uncontrollable and freakishly annoying habit of turning red.
But I also had a habit of doing the opposite of what I was told because I learned early on that there was so much fun when you toyed with dishonesty.
So, I would deliberately lie and blush, just like I’d deliberately touched myself so I would earn the punishment.
“You know what that means,” he would purr and I would melt away. In a heartbeat, I would discover that my ass was bare. He never knew this, but I’d intentionally untied the drawstring so he could undress me quicker. And when he did, finding myself bent over his lap was just a matter of seconds.
I loaded Cameron’s gameplay just to make sure. None of my teammates cared much about Star Wars or the sheer immensity of this game’s world. There was only one person other than me who played it as thoroughly and immaculately.
I didn’t touch his actual game. Instead, I opened his character Cal’s inventory. It stretched my lips into an unwilling smile to see that he had collected every single poncho along the way as well as all of the skins for his companion droid, BD-1.
“Is that my save?” His husky voice startled me and I threw the controller to my right, yelping as my heart skipped a beat.
“Jesus. Fuck.” I spun on the sofa and glared at Cameron. He wore a pair of black, cotton shorts and a dark gray T-shirt that revealed his muscular arms. The worst of all was the smug smirk at scaring me. “Maybe knock the next time.”
“I live here,” he pointed out lazily, tightening his smart watch around his wrist. “Anyway, are you messing with my inventory?” The white running sneakers with blue stripes drew my attention.
He was getting ready to go out. In all my mornings of running, I’d never once encountered Cameron. What the hell was up?
“It’s my console,” I said, sticking to one battle at a time.
“In the common room.” His words carried little emotion, leaving me to wonder where he was taking this.
Touché, I thought. “It never occurred to you that maybe I wouldn’t want you to mess with my stuff?” I asked, getting up from the sofa and taking a couple paces toward him.
He leaned against the soccer table and crossed his arms. “It occurred to me.”
“And you still touched my console,” I concluded. Fuck. The cocky way he made himself the center of everything really should have angered me more than it turned me on.
Cameron cocked his head. “Are you mad?”
Was I? Not at Cameron playing our old favorite, no. I was irked by his attitude far more. And yet, I was drawn to it.
In all these weeks of orbiting each other, lurking, stealing glances, and going head to head, we had never truly had an exchange like this.
He had never allowed himself to be the way he had once been.
Oh, he’d been close, at that party last week.
He’d husked out a few words of warning that had sent chills down my spine and made my cock hard.
“No,” Cameron answered for himself. “You’re not mad.”
I shook my head. “You could have asked.”
“Then you’d definitely say no.” He laughed mirthlessly and pushed himself away from the soccer table, crossing the distance between us like he had something to prove. “I might play some right now.”
“Aren’t you on your way out?” I asked, pointing at his attire as he passed by me, leaving me lost in a cloud of smoke and sandalwood.
Double fuck.
“Outside won’t go anywhere,” he said, not really paying attention to me at all, now. He lifted the controller and glanced at me over his shoulder as if daring me to stop him. “And you might lock this thing up by the time I’m back.”
I was silent, watching him as he turned back to the flat screen TV mounted to the wood paneling on the wall. I stared at the California tan he brought back to Michigan, the smooth skin of his arms and the back of his neck. I looked over the cowlick at the top of his head.
He must have felt the weight of my gaze on him because he never left the inventory in the game. He was just holding the controller and staring at the screen like it was the most interesting thing in the world.
A time later, he lowered his gaze from the screen and mulled over his words, then slouched. “What is it?”
“Yesterday,” I said, my voice so frail it sounded more like air than speech.
“What about it?” Impatience touched his tone and made all my nerve endings buzz. He dropped the controller and checked his smart watch for nothing, buying himself time. When he was out of it, he got up and faced me. “What do you want to know, Riley?”
“We almost kissed, didn’t we?” Heat rose to my cheeks as I bared myself so fully to the person who had a habit of hurting me. I aced all my courses and had an entire year of captaining experience; how was I so stupid?
“Did we?” he asked, his tone genuine.
I wasn’t sure which of us was moving toward the other. Perhaps we had moved at the same time. Regardless, we were standing much closer now than a heartbeat ago. “If Coach hadn’t entered, what would have happened, Cam?”
Cameron looked up, lips parting as he inhaled, then exhaled.
His minty breath tickled my nostrils before he returned his gaze to my eyes.
“I don’t know. I didn’t have a plan.” His words seemed carefully constructed and somehow dragged out of his throat.
When he inhaled again, his shoulders pulled back and his chest rose.