Chapter 14 #3
“You’re spilling,” she tells me, stepping back just an increment to avoid the splash zone.
Warm, sticky beer slathers my hand, thin rivulets convening beneath my wrist and dripping in one long stream onto the already-stained floorboards. Humiliated, I instantly flip the nozzle, and I reach for a conveniently placed stack of napkins to mop up my gaffe.
“Shit. Sorry.”
What is wrong with me tonight? Where’s my game? I’m making a fool of myself, and the clock hasn’t even hit eleven yet. I can’t fucking think straight when Staten is around—I especially can’t when she’s wearing black like the color was made for her.
“It’s okay, I—” She cuts herself off, allowing her epiphany to steep before her expression transfigures into giddy amusement. “Wait a second, are you nervous?”
Hands of fire band around my throat, pruning all the saliva in my mouth and shrinking the opening of my airflow to a needle’s point. Dizzying hypoxia is quick to strike me, and despite having a dictionary of words at my disposal, I can’t decide on a single one that would absolve me.
“Me? Nervous? Pish, what? Why—why would I be nervous? That’s ridiculous. I just…zoned out a bit. Yeah, that’s it. I don’t get nervous, Ace. I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much,” I prattle, handing off her comically full, semi-tacky cup.
She accepts it with raised eyebrows, and I can feel her gaze boring a hole through my goddamn skull while I pour myself my own drink, more than ready to down the entire thing.
Staten takes a dainty sip from the rim. “I didn’t realize that the Knox Mulligan got performance anxiety.”
I—the walking hot mess that I am—down at least two-thirds of my beer, doing my best to ignore the way my belly lurches in protest. When I come up for air, I wipe the back of my mouth with my forearm. “I don’t. Never have.”
“Wait, that’s right. You clearly didn’t have any qualms during our last tutoring session.”
I prickle. She’s talking about my dick. She can’t be talking about my dick when she looks like that right now.
“That was just a normal bodily response.”
“Oh, really?”
“Haven’t you ever taken a biology class before?”
“If you’re so adamant, maybe we should test that hypothesis.”
Not only do I reek of lies, but my body is starting to respond to every subtle lick of her lips, the way her cleavage heaves slightly when she breathes, the murky well water in her eyes that urges me to sink into manganese sediment and stay.
“What do you—”
We weren’t standing far apart before, but now Staten slinks closer to me, marching her fingers up the length of my bicep. A dogfight of innocence and lust taunts me to bite like the glowing lure of an anglerfish in the bathypelagic zone.
“I mean, if I touched you there again, would you swear not to feel anything?”
I think I’m being punished. It was mortifying enough to get a hard-on in front of Staten, but to try and hide one in front of an entire party? My junk would make headlines before dawn broke.
Fuck, she smells so good right now…but I want her to smell like mine. A marriage of citrus and lavender, scratching an itch in my olfactory senses that I didn’t know I had. A scent so inebriating that people stop us just to get a trace.
There’s pressure ballooning in my groin—a precursor to the breakneck desire that’s about to take me for a tailspin—and I have to resort to biting my tongue in case any embarrassing whimpers slip out.
I’m expecting her fingers to fall lower—to get back at me for all the times I’ve made her life a living hell—but her posture locks up as if she’s caught in the line of a hunter’s bow.
She’s looking at something over my shoulder, and I can’t really explain it, but the green-eyed monster inside of me stirs with a growl.
I don’t need to turn around to know who has stolen her attention.
“Leif is here,” she whispers, panic underscoring her tone. “He’s looking right at us.”
Of course. Stupid Leif. I’d attach his foreskin to a goddamn Prius and hit the gas if it wasn’t illegal.
Surprisingly, hesitation makes itself scarce, and the confidence that I pride myself on kindles like the rebirth of a flame in a hearth that hasn’t been tended to in years.
“Then let’s give him a show,” I mutter beneath my breath.
I spin Staten around so her back is facing Leif and her front is close to mine, my fingers gripping her sides in a harsh flare of territorialism. “Nuzzle your nose into my neck.”
“What?”
“Just do it. Really get up in there. Act like you’re all over me.”
Her nose is already centimeters away from the target zone, and I can feel her breath caress the delicate stretch of my throat.
I know this is all some poorly constructed ploy to make Leif jealous, but I ache for her touch more than I thought was humanly possible.
Then again, what I feel for Staten is anything but human.
We’re like the sun and moon dancing around each other, never destined to fully collide.
“I think you overestimate my acting abilities,” she grumbles.
“Jesus Christ, do you want to make lover boy jealous or not?”
With a whiny huff, Staten nudges her nose into my neck, barely brushing the flesh as she makes a strange sweeping motion back and forth. There’s way too much space between our bodies to make this convincing, and she’s halfway to recoiling like she’ll contract some contagious skin disease.
“You’re not convincing enough,” I growl.
I can practically hear her roll her eyes. “Oh, sor-ry that I don’t want to make out with the side of your sweaty neck.”
“It’s not sweaty.”
Tension—and not the good kind—hovers on the horizon like a thunderhead intent on breaking, waiting to shower the scorched earth in vicious sheets of rain. She doesn’t proceed with the nuzzling.
“Why am I doing all the work? You’re the man in the relationship.”
“That’s a bit outdated, don’t you think? I thought you were a feminist.”
Staten glares daggers my way, finally taking control of the situation and pressing her boobs flush against my chest. Her soft body against my hard one is the best thing I’ve ever felt in my twenty-one years of life, and my fucking dick is about to break through the seam of my pants if the hem of her dress rides any higher.
“Grab my ass,” she demands brusquely, not bothering with saccharine supplication.
The limited brain cells ping-ponging around in my skull malfunction. “Excuse me?”
“Did I stutter? Just do it. I watched this once in a movie.”
“That’s the extent of your research? That you watched it one time in some crappy rom-com?”
“I’m giving you a free pass to touch my butt. Are you seriously going to decline?”
Fuck, she knows me too well. I think I need to attend some twelve-step program to get my horniness under control. No substance in the world compares to the blackout I experience post-Staten. Also, no guy in their right mind would ever say no to her, especially not under such dire circumstances.
I brace myself with an exhale, then slowly slide my hand down the length of her back until it rests lightly over her butt. No grip. No squeeze. Just a friendly…pat? Maybe?
Clearly dissatisfied with my amateur display of affection, her tongue is a blade halfway drawn, her voice vibrating at a low frequency that rattles through my bones. “Are you even touching it?”
“Of course I am,” I scoff. “I’m being gentle. I’m not going to randomly grope you.”
It’s a miracle my dick is behaving so well right now. I need to keep that monster at bay.
“Dear God, that’s rich.”
“What are you talking about?”
Like Mentos in a Coke bottle, I’m on the receiving end of the fizzle-to-spillover pipeline before I’ve even realized a chain reaction occurred. Except Staten’s anger is no diluted soda, and she channels all the light from the room with a potent shot of indignation.
“I bet you’ve slapped half of the girls’ asses here. Why am I any different?”
Ouch. I mean, she’s not wrong, but still.
I don’t…I don’t view myself as worthy to touch Staten, whether it’s in a platonic or romantic way. It’s going to sound cliché, but she’s different than all the other girls I’ve been with. She makes me want to be a better person, and I’ll be damned if I sink back into my old ways.
It feels like the butterflies in my belly all have miniature knives, and my heart is being quartered in four different directions.
I was never an overthinker before Staten, yet, as we straddle the threshold between two worlds—pretend play and its ugly, distant cousin, reality—my overactive thoughts run in the background.
A CPU overload; the crash of a computer.
“You just are,” I say gruffly, refusing to elaborate.
Staten sighs, a frown pulling at the corner of her lips. “Please, Knox. Can’t you just…squeeze it a little? I give you my full permission.”
Fuck me. The girl of my dreams is begging me to squeeze her ass. Whose balls did I suck to exist in this alternate timeline of all things hot and holy?
I take three minutes to weigh the pros and cons (the cons being nearly nonexistent)—all while Leif’s interest begins to waver—and I finally decide to swim with the backwash instead of against it. “For the fake dating scheme?”
“For the fake dating scheme,” she echoes.
With a throat clear, my reservations molt as I grab the curve of Staten’s butt hard enough to make her yelp, molding the entirety of my palm to her ass cheek. Then I add a few measured squeezes to really get Leif’s blood rushing.
She pitches forward a bit, catching herself on my arms. “Jesus, it’s not a stress ball.”
“You’re really bossy, you know that?”
“Wouldn’t have to be if you just did things right the first time.”
My fingers lighten up to knead in a rhythmic fashion, and I practically explore the entire surface area of her ass while her ex-best friend ogles us from afar.
“You’re slacking. Nibble my neck,” I command, slightly afraid of—and turned on by—the beast I might unleash if I keep telling her what to do.
Staten, surprisingly, follows through and rises to her tiptoes, slobbering all over my throat in some sloppy kiss session before taking a solid bite of my goddamn jugular.
No flair, no build up, no inclination that she has any sexual experience whatsoever.
If Leif were to look any closer, he could untangle our web of lies before our “relationship” even hits MU’s gossip circulation.
“I asked for a nibble, not a fucking vampire bite. I can’t show up to practice with a hickey on my neck.”
“You know I don’t have any experience doing throat stuff!”
“This is never going to work,” I murmur, my confidence piggybacking on the doubt that circles my head like ospreys waiting for their next meal to scurry out of a nearby thicket.
There’s a growl in her chest—one that shouldn’t sound as sexy as it does. “Shut up. Is he still looking at us?”
I glare through my lashes to pinpoint our stalker, and sure enough, he’s staring straight at us with a face redder than a fire hydrant, looking about ready to march on over here and actually do something about it. You know, he really should. That way I’d have an excuse to punch him.
Possessiveness clamps down on me. “Yeah, he is.”
“Good. Now slap my ass.”
“For fuck’s sake, Staten.”
“Trust me, it’ll work. It has to work,” she insists with equal parts guilt and gratitude—guilt for stringing her airheaded crush along, gratitude for picking one willing yet unfortunate soul to induct into her two-person crime league.
She’d never admit it, but I can hear the desperation tinting her words. I don’t know what hurts more—the fact that she’s trying so hard to be noticed by someone who doesn’t deserve her, or the fact that I’ll probably always play second fiddle to Leif Kennedy.
So, I slap her butt with enough force to bruise, and she expels a little gasp before clinging to me.
When Staten looks up at me, I hunt for some small truth that any of this is real—any of it at all—but I come up empty-handed as expected.
At the end of the day, we’re just two people using each other.
The only language we speak is physical, and I hate that part of my breakfast slingshots up my throat because of it.
Leif retreats to the shadowed margins of the party—disappearing amongst the bobbing heads of other invitees—and all I do is bring Staten into a hug, burying my nose in the crook of her neck.
I think getting pelted with a nail gun would be less painful than vying for the heart of a woman that belongs to another man.