7. Verona
7
VERONA
I woke up to the sound of the television echoing down the hallway. Head splitting and still wearing the same clothes I went to the clubhouse in, I rolled out of bed and rubbed my eyes, deciding to change into something more comfy. As I slid underwear up my legs, I wondered where I put the panties I had on last night. My brain hadn’t fully woken up enough yet to process that, so I hit the bathroom and stumbled down the hallway to the living room.
Castor sat on the couch next to Wheels, both of them spooning cereal into their mouths and watching cartoons. At least Wheels had an excuse. He lived here.
“What are you doing?” I grumbled to my brother.
“What’s it look like?” Castor asked, wiping milk off his chin.
“Looks like you’re eating my food and stealing my cable.” I narrowed my eyes while I poured myself a cup of coffee. Thankfully, one of them had been thoughtful enough to leave some for me.
“What’s yours is mine,” Castor called. “That’s the older brother code.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I poured cream and sugar into my delicious brew and trudged back to the living room, murmuring to myself at how much I’d had to drink last night.
“What’s on your schedule for the day?” Wheels asked, taking a sip of water as he leaned back in his seat.
“You’re looking at it.” I shrugged, rubbing at the ache in the center of my chest. My scar always hurt in the morning, but especially after a night of drinking. I blamed dehydration and a lack of caffeine. “I was going to do yoga and meditate for a bit, but eventually, I have to go by the hospital to visit Pollux. I might as well hit the clubhouse to check on Dad.”
“I’m heading to the hospital around noon when visiting hours start.” Castor gulped down big swallows of his milk, reminding me of when we were kids. “We can go together.”
“Sounds good.” I rubbed at my eyes. “Fuck, why did I drink so much.”
“Good question.” Wheels flashed his devilish grin. “I have a better one. What were you doing in the side room with the door locked at four in the morning?”
Last night rushed back at me: playing poker with Hollywood, losing, making a bet to dominate him, losing again. And then ... what came after ...
Holy shit.
It had been one of the most intense experiences of my life, and it had happened with my big brother’s best friend, the MC’s heartbreaker, the one that rode through hang-arounds like the club rent-a-car.
“Uh-oh,” Castor teased. “What’s that look?”
I cleared my throat, my cheeks suddenly burning, the weight of my bad life choices suffocating me.
“There’s no look,” I said, my voice entirely too squeaky to be believable.
“Who were you in there with?” Wheels asked, his smile widening.
“It could have only been Lore or Hollywood,” my brother added, narrowing his gaze at me. “But I saw Lore leaving with Cassie later in the night, so ...”
“Hollywood is on a celibacy streak,” I quickly added. “I kicked him out after he won the pot.” My phone buzzed, drawing my attention, and thankfully , Ru’s name appeared across the screen. “I have to take this.” I got up and walked down the hallway to my room to answer it. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Hey, any chance you came come by the Beacon later today? We’re finally picking out marble, and I want to make sure I get the one you said to get last time.”
“Sure.” I clenched my eyes against the barrage of images assaulting my hungover brain. Hollywood whacking off. The sound of his deep moan. The way his lips formed around my panties.
I gasped. My panties!
He still had them. Either that or they were in the side room, lying on the clubhouse floor.
Fuck, this was a mess, an utter disaster. It could have been anyone in the club , and it had to be him ?
“V?” Ru asked. “You still there?”
“Yeah.” I brought my attention back to reality and finished the conversation with my friend before hanging up and leaning back against my door to slide down to the ground.
Fuuuccckkk ...
I didn’t know what to do now. Should I text him? He hadn’t reached out to me. Did he even remember? Did I want him to? I might be better off leaving well enough alone. If he didn’t bring it up, I wouldn’t ... just like last time.
My cheeks flamed harder as I remembered the fifteen-year-old version of myself—young and naive and sheltered by three older brothers that hadn’t let a boy so much as look at me, let alone date me. I’d gone to my first house party as a freshman. The juniors and seniors were already drunk by the time I got there, but I’d gone to school with most of these people all my life, so it wasn’t the first time I’d seen them wasted.
I’d spotted Hollywood as soon as I walked in. At seventeen, he hadn’t prospected for my father’s MC yet, so he went by his given name, Matt Hudson. He was already the most attractive person anyone in Madison County had ever seen, so he got spoiled by any woman he met. No one said no to Matt Hudson, and anyone on his arm was a lucky bitch.
Of course, I knew better. He was my brother’s best friend, the one that fucked girls with little abandon, the one that bragged about his exploits at our dining room table like it was celebrity gossip. I’d heard stories about the asses he’d fucked and the mouths he’d destroyed, and I wondered how much of it was hubris. But to see the way the most popular girls hung over him, he’d probably been telling the truth.
Sometime later in the night, after I’d had a lot to drink, I agreed to play Seven Minutes in Heaven. This was my first party, so I wasn’t sure of the rules. In the first round, I ended up blindfolded and stuffed into a closet in one of the upstairs bedrooms with promises that Teddy, a boy I’d been crushing on since fifth grade, would arrive soon.
Time dragged agonizingly by, and my heart pounded while I waited for him to join me, panic ripping through my veins. Perhaps he didn’t want to spend time with me. Perhaps he didn’t even know who I was.
Why did I agree to play this stupid game anyway?
After what felt like a year in that tiny space, I decided they must have been playing a cruel joke on me. No one was coming. They were all standing out there laughing at me, the idiot freshman who fell for their?—
The door opened and I gasped, straightening as I jumped back.
“She’s already in there,” someone said before shutting the entry.
Teddy’s scent hit me next—deodorant, cologne, cigarettes, and whiskey. Musky. It wasn’t what I associated with him, and up until that point, I didn’t know he smoked.
“Are you here?” he whispered, and I thought I recognized the voice as his.
“I’m here,” I whispered back, relieved he’d come at all.
A hand grabbed my shoulder, sliding down my arm to my palm, where rough, callused fingers intertwined with mine and lifted to his mouth. He kissed my knuckles, softly ... tenderly ... like he knew who I was and wanted to worship me. A tremble shot down my body as I raised my palms to his face, touching the cloth around his eyes. He, too, had been blindfolded, but he grabbed my hands and brought them back to his shoulders, taking a step closer to me, backing me up against the bare wall at the end.
“You’re shaking,” he murmured.
“I’ve never kissed anyone before,” I blurted like word vomit. I hadn’t meant to say it. Now he’d think I was some naive virgin who hadn’t even had the nerve to kiss someone, let alone spend seven minutes in a closet with a blindfold over their eyes.
“Now, I know that’s a lie.” He chuckled, and the sultry laugh sounded familiar ... too familiar. Not like Teddy, but perhaps deeper. I ignored those suspicions, trying not to psych myself out. “But it’s okay. I’m good at that part.”
With no other warning, he cupped my chin and connected his lips to mine. They were soft and demanding, and oh, a delicious sensation shot down the back of my legs and up my spine. I was fifteen and I had never really kissed anyone, so I had nothing to compare it to. Our connection escalated to making out, his big palms massaging my tits, and eventually, he kissed his way down my throat and over my chest, kneeling in front of me.
“If you’ve never been kissed on your mouth, I doubt anyone’s kissed you here.”
Quaking and hardly able to hold myself upright, I let him go down on me, licking and kissing over my sensitive parts, even going so far as to finger-fuck me. I rolled my head back on my shoulders at the twinge of pain mixing with pleasure. It was amazing, and I thought I’d never get another opportunity to be a normal girl with a normal boy doing normal teenager things without the prying eyes of my older brothers. I ran my hands through his hair, tugging and pulling in just the right ways to make him moan against me.
It had been the most erotic experience of my life until that point. Just as I was about to crest into the first ever climax given to me by another person, someone shouted on the other side of the door.
“Hudson! Anyone seen Hudson?”
“Fuck,” Teddy growled. “Just when I was getting to the good part.”
What?
“Teddy?” I whispered, shock dousing my arousal and impending orgasm like an avalanche. No ... No ...
“Shhh. It’s okay, Becs.” He pressed his lips to mine for one last kiss before whispering, “I don’t have to tell you to keep this between us, right? If Jess found out ... Fucking yikes.” He disappeared and closed the door behind him, leaving me alone in the closet, confused and bewildered.
Hudson? Becs? Jess?
Oh. Fucking. No. He’d gone down on me. He’d almost made me come. He thought I was someone else. I thought he was someone else. He wasn’t Teddy at all. It was fucking Hudson? Matt Hudson?
All that time ...
My body revolted and I curled in on myself, suddenly too vulnerable to go back to the party. I’d let him do things to me I’d never let anyone do before. He’d handled my body like he had every right to. Ripping the blindfold off my eyes, I took steadying breaths to collect my wild emotions before pushing to my feet and storming out of the closet.
By the time I made it downstairs to look for him, he was already doing a beer shotgun with another group of seniors while Jess McCreedy wrapped her arms around his waist. I looked for Becs, Jess’s best friend, and found her sitting on the couch at the far end of the room, shooting daggers at the lovebirds.
I didn’t want to get involved. I wanted to pretend the whole thing had never happened, so I went home and that was exactly what I did. I never told Hollywood that story, and I wasn’t sure I ever would.
He’d broken my hymen that night, and not that I’d ever given stock to the social construct of virginity, but I did believe in magic. My mother had believed in magic. He’d made me bleed, and he’d licked up the results, and for the next ten years, I told myself that had no power over me. It was a mistake, he didn’t mean it, and neither did I. Wasn’t it the intention behind the magic that mattered most?
After that, I’d made it my life mission to break him down. Women spoiled him. Men spoiled him. Because of his beauty and charm, he lived the type of life where he could publicly date one person and fuck their best friend on the side. I refused to let him get away with that shit.
So, when I tore him to pieces, I did so with the humiliation of that night in the back of my heart. I’d never let him forget not everyone wanted him and he couldn’t have everything he wanted, either.
Coming back to the present, I sat in my bedroom and clutched my head, running my fingers back through my hair. Last night shouldn’t have happened, and as I slumped against the door with my brother and bodyguard down the hall, I promised myself it wouldn’t again. Besides, we hadn’t really crossed any lines, right? Like he’d said, he could go online and watch the same thing anytime he wanted.
No, the taboo lay in his relationship to my brothers and my father, and how devoted he already was to them. I would expect the same devotion to me, and I wasn’t sure either of us was ready for that kind of commitment.
Nope. Don’t think about it. Don’t mention it.
Deciding I could use my yoga session now, I grabbed my mat from my closet and unrolled it next to the bed, stretching into downward dog while I ignored the churn in my stomach.
Inhale ... Exhale ... Go to your safe space ...
Once I was done, I’d say a prayer to the Goddess for direction, perhaps do a repairing spell to reset whatever Hollywood and I used to be. In the end, I suspected nothing was stronger than the blood we’d shared, and perhaps I had just been waiting for that to catch up to me all this time.