Chapter 42 #2
“What the fuck kinda game is this?” Jackson removed the blindfold, irritated, and then looked at the brunet.
“Tiff?”
“No.” I giggled.
“Um.”
His milky white cheeks were tinged with red, and he stared at my mouth with an odd expression.
“Damn it, James,” he said, shoving me.
“What, you didn’t like it?” I provoked him, aware of the fact that he didn’t seem remotely irritated during the kiss. Even after finding out it was me, he looked enthusiastic.
The girls didn’t say a word.
“Everything okay?” I asked when I saw them staring at us.
I waved my hands in front of their vacant stares.
“It’s been . . .” Tiffany swallowed, unable to complete the sentence.
“Nice,” answered Taylor for her.
“All right, I’ll let you get back to your bullshit. I gotta go.” Jackson stood up and threw the blindfold on the ground.
“How are you getting home?” I was suddenly worried.
“Will’s picking me up. June’s with him. Actually, they’re waiting for me in my car outside,” he added, reading a text on my phone.
“Oh, okay. Are you sure everything’s okay?” I raised my voice a bit so Jackson would hear me since he was already at the door.
“Yeah. See you at school.”
“Oh man, and I was just starting to have fun,” whined Tiffany.
She pouted and hugged a pillow, pushing her boobs farther up in her bra.
“I’m still here, what are you worried about?”
“What’d you bring, Jamie?”
I let her put her hand near the button flap of my jeans to dig in my side pockets.
“Be . . .”
The sound of Taylor’s footsteps made her back away immediately.
“Go, get dressed please,” Taylor, the head of the house, reprimanded her.
Tiffany snapped out of it, but instead of getting her jeans she headed to the TV hutch. She plugged her phone into the sound system.
Taylor took that moment to straddle me again.
“You’re all mine tonight, right?”
She tried to kiss my jaw, but I didn’t even have a moment to relax before she started to bite my earlobe with her incisors, hurting me. I threw my head back brusquely, but she didn’t care.
I was still wearing my leather jacket when her hands went under my T-shirt, lifting it up my chest. I felt her long nails snake and scratch the sensitive skin of my abdomen, causing me to cry out.
“Fuck, give me a second.”
I still wasn’t ready, and if she put her hand between my legs she’d realize that too. Taylor didn’t listen to me; she was too busy kissing down my stomach as if she’d just taken a brand-new toy out of its packaging.
“What’s the rush? Are you sure your dad’s not coming home?”
I let Taylor take my jacket off without many comments as a Billie Eilish song came on.
“What are you still doing here?” I asked Tiffany, who kept staring at us instead of going home.
“I’m just here to have fun, I told you.” She sighed, licking her lips before twisting a lock of dark hair between her fingers.
“Cut it out, Tiff. Don’t break anything!”
Taylor flew into a rage when she realized her friend was dancing on her crystal table. Seeing a half-naked girl dancing on a table while her best friend left a hickey on my neck should’ve turned me on, but it didn’t. I started laughing.
“Can that table hold her weight?”
“She always ends up like this when she’s drunk. She takes off her clothes and starts in her underwear.”
Taylor insisted on searching for my lips. I kissed her sugar- and tequila-laced lips while staring at Tiffany dancing suggestively to the music.
Maybe, for a night, she could be my something more.
There was nothing wrong with going to bed with someone I’d been with a thousand times, because sex in its most classic form was a sport just like any other, similar to boxing or football.
It was a routine that let me burn off calories and blow off steam.
I ended up sweaty and without energy, but fun, that was different.
I preferred to go head-to-head with that dick Austin, crush my soul with those damn prescription drugs, or drive until I felt the thrill of death.
That made me feel alive. Will and I agreed on racing, but he definitely didn’t share my opinions on promiscuity.
He’d always start with that bullshit about love.
It’s just because you’ve never been in love, James.
Why? If you sleep with someone you love, isn’t the sex better?
I never got an answer to my question, maybe because he even he didn’t know why.
I loved Will more than myself, but his lines sounded like bullshit that only someone who’d never gotten laid said.
“What’d you bring?” Tiffany’s velvety voice brought my swirling thoughts to a grinding halt. I smirked at her then took a dime bag out of my pocket.
“Just this?” she whined.
“Look, cut it out. You smoked and drank a lot tonight.” Taylor told her off and then switched to a more docile tone with me. “Jamie, want a drink?”
I nodded robotically.
“Come on, Tay. Just for tonight,” I heard the brunet beg.
“I’m gonna get something to drink. Don’t spill anything on the carpet, Tiff, or I swear I’ll strangle you.”
Tiffany wasn’t even listening to her. She waited for the blond to leave the living room to pounce on top of me.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a rectangular object on the table.
It looked like food, and I was hungry. Really hungry.
“Cupcakes Taylor got in a moment of weakness, then she felt guilty and didn’t touch any of them. But did you come here just to eat?”
“So what if I did? What the fuck do you want, I’m hungry.”
I stared at Tiffany’s tiny physique then licked my lip, tasting the sweet, manly taste of the kiss that Jackson and I had shared. Tiffany got up and bent down to the box. I drank in the view of her round ass covered by her black slip while she dipped her thumb in the chocolate frosting.
“Want one?”
“I already said yes.”
She came back to the couch and moved toward me, dying for me to put her thumb between my lips. I swirled my tongue around and sucked on it greedily. She closed her eyes as soon as my tongue grazed over it.
“How are you feeling?”
I squeezed her butt hard as she ran her hands lower and lower down my chest. My abs tensed when she got down a little lower.
“Depends on both of you,” I said.
“I don’t feel like it,” she admitted, without looking down.
“I bet you do. Tay would never do it.”
“How much do you want to bet?”
And to think that up until a few seconds ago, I thought about going home. Now it was a game . . .
“Let me see, then,” I challenged.
She looked at me expectantly, and I knew exactly what I was gonna do next. I knelt by the table, took out the baggie of white powder I had in my pocket, and divided it in two lines that we’d make disappear before the head of the house came back.
“I wanna have a nose like yours, James.”
Tiffany rubbed the tip of my nose with a finger, but was forced to move back when Taylor appeared holding a big bottle of expensive tequila.
“Did you just open up an eight-hundred-dollar bottle?” I scowled.
“My dad isn’t here, quit chickening out,” she answered acidly.
She treated me like an idiot; she always did. But then again, should she have to treat me differently? She knew I’d cheated on her a million times, but she could never let me go.
“Actually, he paid fifteen hundred because it’s a limited edition.”
“Because he’s a dickhead, you mean.” I groaned before helping her open the bottle.
I could barely get up after a few shots; all that was missing was that Jose Cuervo reposado that made me stumble even more.
“Where are you going?”
Taylor the control freak followed me with her eyes.
“I want to go to your dad’s cellar.”
I heard her anxiously behind me.
“Jamie.”
When I turned left, instead of into the wine cellar, she got even more agitated. The place gave me the shivers. It seemed like a war bunker. The number of rifles on the wall was astounding. A glass window protected them jealously, as if they were too precious to be displayed.
But I wasn’t interested in those guns, and Taylor knew that. I unlocked the second drawer of a steel piece of furniture.
At first glance, the empty space was barely noticeable. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to be in the row of well-organized pistols.
“I got to them once, so that it didn’t seem like he was missing one.”
“He’d never notice?”
“He uses his rifles more. You know that. But if he comes down here on a whim to disassemble them and clean them, then he would.”
“It’s been a year, and he still hasn’t done it,” I whispered, bemused. She tugged at me like she wanted me to wake up from that nightmare.
“Those losers should worship the ground you walk on. They’re ingrates, James.”
“Don’t talk about my friends like that.”
“I’m referring to that bitch Amelia and her brother. You know that.” The ground felt more slippery. I thought I’d fell.
“I better go home.”
For a moment, the ghost jumped out of my body and showed itself for what it was. Weak and defenseless.
Even Taylor noticed. She immediately softened when she saw I was shivering. She took my hands and tried to warm them up in her soft palms.
“No, James. Stay here. We’ll have fun, I promise.”
“Whatever you want.” I tightened my shoulders.
So we went back to the living room, where Tiffany seemed to be in her own little world full of music and unicorns. She smoked and kept dancing like nothing could touch her.
Fuck, I envied her.
“Why don’t you go dance too?” I urged Taylor.
I sprawled out on the couch and pulled everything out to roll a joint as Taylor closed her eyes and started moving to the beat. Taylor wasn’t like me and Tiffany. She never let anything get past her, but now, her glass was teetering a bit, spilling tequila on the rug. She didn’t even notice.
“Are we boring you?” asked Taylor, as Tiffany tried to get her attention again.
There was no question that Tiff had a weakness for Taylor, I was sure of that.
Taylor was the only one who didn’t seem to get it.
“Yeah.”