Trick-or-Treat #3
After the trick-or-treat event, we all vetoed going to any of the later parties.
One overcrowded event is enough for one night, regardless of how amazing it was.
Marcus and Tristan have an away game they have to get up early for, and Qi is one of the cheerleaders approved to go with them.
However, he was granted a special exemption to drive to the game with me rather than ride in the van with the rest of the squad.
Qi and Tristan disappeared as soon as we got home, and I’d wager a guess that they are currently snuggled up tight in their preferred state of existence in the bathtub.
Marcus and I have both showered and de-Halloweenized ourselves, and are curled up on the couch watching some movie I haven’t paid enough attention to even know the name of.
I can’t pretend that one of the highlights of the evening was watching Marcus’s eyes pop when I came down in my wrap-around shirt and matching shorts pajamas just as hard as they’d popped when they saw my costume. I don’t even have to dress up for him to appreciate my aesthetic.
And he isn’t exactly hiding how often his eyes stray to my bare legs, slowly traveling the length of exposed skin, with a gaze so heated that it’s like a physical touch that burns straight through me.
Luckily, I’m curled up in a way that hides the very visceral reaction my body has to his blatant attention.
Overall, the night would have been fun if not for the glaring conundrum of seeing Imani with someone else.
I mean, on the one hand, if Marcus finds out, then that’ll make him free again, and maybe this time I could try without making an absolute mess of everything.
But the fallout, being Marcus getting hurt in a way that is both cruel and disrespectful, sucks all the joy out of that hope like a popped balloon.
In fact, it makes it so heavy that I feel like a shitty person that the thought of her loss being my gain speaks volumes about how heinous a person I am. Sorry, Grant, not swapping that one out; it’s deserved.
Marcus’s arm drops to the back of the couch behind me, and he leans his head towards mine.
“You know, sometimes I have the most unhinged desire to simply crawl inside your head and ferret out the thoughts that make you purse your mouth like that.”
“I don’t purse my mouth,” I huff in response.
Marcus huffs in amusement and reaches over with his spare hand.
“Then why are there creases around your lips here?” he says, touching the edge of my mouth and sending electricity all the way down to my toes.
“Here,” he continues, touching the bottom of my lip, and making my heart stutter in my chest.
“And–ouch!” he hisses as he drags his finger up, and I bite the tip of it, more to maintain some control over myself than anything else, because really, if he continued, I might have just lost it and jumped him.
“Such a feral little kitten,” he teases while shaking out his finger.
I arch an eyebrow over at him. “Did you seriously just call me a feral kitten?”
Marcus arches a brow back. “Did you seriously just bite me like one?” he asks, matching my inflection.
“Marcus!” I hiss at his infernally irritating ‘pain in the ass’ self.
Marcus just leans back and laughs, his head tipping the same way now as it did earlier when I saw him with Imani.
The turmoil I’ve been running around in circles with all evening comes back around, but I know I have to tell him what I saw. Even if it hurts him for a little while, he can at least move on and heal from it.
Something tells me he’d probably do better in the whole ‘letting go and moving on’ department than I ever did.
Marcus huffs, pulling me out of my thoughts and back to him.
“What?”
“You’re still doing the lip-pursing thing that says you’re upset,” he says, motioning towards my mouth.
“I’m not pursing my lips!” I argue back, not even sure why the insinuation that I would have such a ridiculous habit bothers me so much.
Maybe because there is nothing attractive about lips being all wrinkled and pursed up. Or the fact that it’s the expression most pearl-clutchers have whenever they judge me based on nothing more than a glance and their own assumptions and outdated opinions.
“Ah! But you didn’t deny that you’re upset about something,” Marcus points out unhelpfully, or helpfully, I guess, depending on which way I look at it.
Setting aside my internal thoughts about people’s ridiculous notions that other people’s forms of self-expression somehow affect them in any way, if ever there was gonna be an opening for the conversation I actually need to have with Marcus right now, it was that right there.
“No, I guess I didn’t.”
Marcus nods and searches my eyes. “Did I do something to make you mad?”
I roll my eyes at him because only his ego would have him automatically assuming that whatever bothers me somehow comes back to him. I mean, this particular time it does, but dammit, “Not everything revolves around you, Marcus,” I hiss the rest of my thoughts out loud at him.
Marcus’s brow furrows in confusion. “So it’s not about me?”
And I really wish it wasn’t about him. Not only because the subject sucks and it’s gonna hurt him, but also because his ego needs to find a corner to sit in and realize not everything is about him, even though this time it really is. Gawd, he’s so fucking annoying.
“Why would you think it’s about you?” I huff out, knowing I’m being irrationally irritated.
Marcus shrugs. “Because you’ve been side-eyeing me all night, and as much as I’d like to think it’s cuz you’re checking me out, the unhappy lip-pursing thing tells me I’m not that lucky,” he points out.
While part of me wants to kick myself in the ass at the realization that it was me, and not his ego that had him jumping to conclusions, the lip-pursing thing has me bristling again.
“I swear on your life, if you accuse me of pursing my lips one more time–” I start to huff out before Marcus barks a laugh at me.
“You’ll what?” he challenges me. “What will you do?”
I roll my eyes and flop back into the couch. “I’ll fucking think of something,” I grumble.
Marcus laughs and shakes his head. “I knew you had nothing, all bark and no bite.”
I raise an eyebrow. “No bite? Ask your finger about the no bite!”
“Touché,” Marcus snorts with amusement.
I roll my eyes, and we both grow quiet for a moment before Marcus leans in and nudges me with his shoulder.
“So–”
I sigh again and close my eyes while throwing my head back against the couch.
“I saw someone making out with someone else who is definitely not the first someone’s boyfriend.”
“Oh. Well, that’s pretty shitty,” Marcus responds in a tone that makes it obvious that he was not expecting that answer.
“Right?!?” I articulate emotionally. “And the boyfriend is a really amazing guy, and he doesn’t deserve that at all.”
Marcus nods slowly, his eyes locked on mine. “So are you going to tell him?”
“Well, I kind of feel like I need to because it would be shitty to keep it from him. But I really like him, which means I have a personal stake in it, so I feel like it’s shitty coming from me, you know,” I explain, watching his face to see what he thinks.
I don’t even know why I’m beating around the bush because there’s no way he could magically unencrypt that to know I’m talking about him and Imani.
His eyes flash, and his mouth dips down into a frown as he sits up and looks at me with confusion and frustration. So, maybe he did somehow encrypt it, and he realizes what I’m trying to say.
“You like him? Like like like him? Who the fuck is he? It’d better not be fucking Cade! I swear on my life, Qiang, everyone knows he has his sights set on someone else,” he grates out angrily.
I guess he didn’t get it after all, but his frustration has him moving to get up, and I haven’t said what I needed to yet, so I push forward and throw my leg over him to keep him here.
His eyes widen as I push him back to the couch. We’re almost nose to nose with me straddled over him, and in all the ‘way closer than we ever had any reason to be’ positions we’ve been in before, this is by far the most intimate.
But my frustration at him turning this conversation down a completely different road than where it was supposed to go has me frustrated.
“Oh my god, do you even realize it can’t be Cade if everyone suspects that he has a crush on someone else, which means he’s not in a relationship, therefore can’t be in a position where he’s being cheated on?
If you’d try to not act like an overbearing, jealous asshole for thirty seconds, then you’d get that I’m trying to tell you Imani is cheating on you!
” I hiss out, my frustration taking away every attempt I was going to make to cushion the blow.