Kendall #3
“I’m sure you made a lovely Tinkerbell,” he remarked, and a shocked laugh tumbled out of my mouth.
He’d always been quick with the banter, way smarter and wittier than a jock had any business being.
But he’d never been like the other braindead jocks at our school.
There’d always been this intensity about him I couldn’t sense in anyone else.
It was cliché to think, laughably so, but… He wasn’t like anyone else.
“You’re funny,” I conceded, not able to stop the grin from carving itself across my mouth. “I’m glad your ex didn’t take that from you, at least.”
The silence was sudden and deafening, my eyes widening in mortified horror as I realized what I’d actually let come out of my mouth. He slowly looked up from his phone, his brows raised in shock.
“I-I’m so sorry,” I managed to stammer out, a hot blush rushing up to my skin.
I could feel it burning me all over, even down my neck.
He was the last person I’d ever want to make feel like shit by being careless with my words.
But I’d gotten so comfortable, and so relaxed in his presence, that it had just slipped out.
“That was totally out of line. I didn’t mean it. ”
He stared at me for another few moments, while my stomach hardened into a ball of ice inside me. What the fuck was wrong with me?
“Ah, no,” he finally said, then cleared his throat a bit awkwardly. “It’s okay. You’re, uh… You’re right. She really fucked me over.”
“I… I don’t even know her,” I said quickly, my brain still not quite blinking back to a fully functioning state. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s okay,” he said again, this time with less shock and more amusement. “You’re the only one. Everyone else is dancing around it.”
“Still,” I insisted, but relief was starting to trickle in. I hadn’t totally pissed him off. “I… I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it.”
He took in a deep breath, before opening his mouth, then closing it again, like he couldn’t decide what he actually wanted to reveal.
“Not exactly,” he admitted. “But it’s kind of nice. That… Maybe…”
My pulse quickened as I waited for him to keep going, my heart melting into a gooey puddle in my chest at the rare flash of vulnerability on his face.
“Maybe someone doesn’t think it was my fault,” he finally finished, his dark brows furrowed a bit. The sticky pile in my chest, formerly known as my heart, bubbled up to a boil as anger bloomed to life inside me.
“I would never think that,” I snapped. He looked surprised by the sudden shift in my tone, but only blinked. “She… She’s…”
“Keep going,” he invited lowly.
“I just don’t get how she could do that,” I said, pushing myself off the stool to stalk across the kitchen. I huffed, crossing my arms as I finally settled against the counter. He stayed perfectly still, but his eyes followed my every move. “Especially not to someone like you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah!” I said, not even caring if I was starting to reveal how painfully perfect he was in my eyes.
He actually thought it was his fault he’d been cheated on!
? Didn’t he know how fucking happy some of us would be to end up with someone like him?
“She’s so lucky. And… I mean, god. Who fucking does that, anyway?
It’s just so… Gross. And to you, of all people. ”
When I finally glanced back up from the floor I’d been glaring at to see how intensely his eyes were locked on me, I couldn’t suppress my gasp. Tingles raced over my skin, concentrating in my lower stomach just before I felt my cock twitch and start to swell up.
This was wrong. I was so fucked. Having an obvious crush was one thing, but… Rhys had never led me on or encouraged any sort of delusion that I might have had about his preferences. But the way he was looking at me… Had I finally lost it? Pined for him so long that I was hallucinating?
He swallowed hard before speaking again. The eye contact between us felt heavy and impossible to break.
“I think maybe being married to me wasn’t all she thought it would be, Sparkles.”
“It would have been for me,” I responded, before I could decide it was a bad idea.
“Yeah?”
“If I could find someone like you, I…” I paused, my legs forcing me back over to the island he was seated at.
Closer to him, which was the absolute last place I needed to be going toward.
I needed to walk away and convince myself this entire conversation was the result of black mold poisoning from the duck room.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. “I would be so happy.”
“You sure about that?” His voice had gotten softer as I’d gotten closer.
“Very, very sure,” I promised, leaning in so my body was practically splayed over the countertop.
The scent of his soap from the shower he’d taken the night before, sharp citrus, clung to his skin and flooded my mouth with saliva when I breathed it in.
“If I had you, I would never look at another guy. I wouldn’t even think about another guy. ”
Through my peripherals, I saw his hand twitch on the countertop, his fingers clenching briefly as he shuddered out a ragged breath. That wasn’t a normal reaction for a straight guy to have. It wasn’t normal, but it was happening.
“You just think that because you don’t know what it’s like to be around me all the time.”
“You’re wrong,” I informed him. “I know what I’m talking about, Rhys. If I had you, I would…”
His eyebrows raised a bit, his chin tilting down like he was gesturing for me to keep going.
“If I had someone like you…” I watched his eyes finally dart away from mine to flicker down to my body.
I wished I was wearing something other than a ratty shirt I’d painted my bathroom in two years ago that didn’t even fit me that well.
“I would be down on my knees every day, showing him how much I wasn’t thinking about other guys. ”
Him. I’d said him. I hadn’t said you. At least I had that to cling to as a defense if Rhys suddenly remembered I was a guy, and that he’d known me since I was, like, eight and decided to flip the fuck out.
If he had a problem with what I’d said, he didn’t show it.
He swallowed again, so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, and opened his mouth to tell me just what he thought of my confession.
But before he could get a single word out, the doorknob on the front door of the cabin rattled, and then it swung open.
I scrambled back up onto the barstool and snatched up my fork, trying to look as normal as possible.
I was just an innocent guy eating his breakfast.
Dad sailed in, whistling the very recognizable jingle from the grocery store they’d gone to, his arms full of plastic bags.
“Hey!” He greeted us when he saw us. “You guys are finally up! Rhys, why don’t you go help your mom with some of these bags, huh?”
“Yeah. Okay,” he answered gruffly, trying to clear the rough edge from his voice. He stayed seated, and I watched him try to subtly adjust something under the countertop.
He was hard. I couldn’t see it, but he was trying to hide it before getting up. I’d actually made Rhys Kensington’s cock hard.
“Good morning, sleepyheads!” Mom came in next, and ran a hand affectionately over my hair as she passed me. “Did you like those? The pancakes?” She prompted, when I only stared blankly at her.
“Oh! Yeah,” I said, remembering I’d eaten two of the three she’d left for me.
“You want to know a secret?” She asked, leaning in auspiciously. The thick tension in the room that had developed between Rhys and I was clearly invisible and undetectable to anyone but us.
“What?”
“I used that healthy pancake mix to make those! You know, with the organic coconut sugar and all those extra nutrients and protein! I bet you couldn’t even tell, could you?”
“Nope,” I said honestly. They could have been made of fucking fiberboard and I’d have had no idea.
Rhys cleared his throat again, and finally rose from his seat, hurrying out of the room and outside to where the car was waiting.
“Uh, let me help you with those,” I said quickly, springing up from my seat as she started unpacking the bags.
Family vacation. Family vacation. We were on a family vacation and I’d imagined some insane scenario where Rhys had gotten turned on by me not-so-indirectly informing him that I’d be swallowing his cock on the reg if we ever happened to be in a relationship.
I’d made all that up in my head. Rhys was straight. He liked women. Women only. There’d never been anything to indicate otherwise, recent concerning hallucinations aside.
Anything I happened to imagine that suggested otherwise was just that. My imagination. And that was that.