Chapter 19 Jonah - Past
nineteen
Jonah - Past
I LOVE THE WAY YOU HATE ME.
Dex Weller was a very, very dangerous man. Dangerous in ways I hadn’t anticipated and was entirely unprepared to deal with. He had the power to hurt me in ways I was realizing extended beyond split lips and broken knuckles. Ways that would take far longer to heal if I didn’t keep him out.
I meant it when I told him I hated him. What else could this possibly be?
These feelings so bright and intense. Like a blazing fire.
And yet I couldn’t let them go. I let them burn me because existing without them felt so cold.
I’d been so fucking cold for so long without him, and I hadn’t even known it.
Willingly, I clung to the embers he ignited within me, but I blamed him for the way they burned. Of course I blamed him. Blaming him was simpler.
It had been a week since I’d seen Dex at the party.
Since I knew what it felt like to have him touch me, so much more than the twisted fantasies I’d long given up fighting against. And although it was meant to be a one-time thing, a way to satisfy my fantasies so I could silence them once and for all, they had only grown more intense.
I still wasn’t ready to give in to him yet.
“You’re the devil,” I told him.
“Your devil,” he replied without hesitation.
“What?”
“I’m your devil.”
“What… what does that mean?”
He shrugged. This motherfucker.
“I don’t understand you,” I told him honestly.
“So ask me. Ask me anything, and I’ll tell you.”
Why did I believe him? Why did I trust him when I didn’t want to? When all the logic and reason inside me told me I shouldn’t.
Pale eyes locked onto mine—water on fire—like I was the only thing he could see.
And it did feel like he saw me, like he actually looked at me and saw everything that was inside me.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t want him to stop.
Only Becca looked at me so closely, and even that was different.
I didn’t know what to do with this. With him.
“Why am I drawn to you?” I thought out loud, wondering if he had the answers that I didn’t.
“Because something in you is the same as something in me. Feral dogs seek feral dogs.”
It should have been an insult. He didn’t know me. No one fucking did. But I felt like he wanted to, and that terrified me just as much as knowing that deep down I wanted to know him too.
“I hate you,” I told him again, like I could convince him it was the truth, like I could convince myself.
“I love the way you hate me.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Hate me more. Despise me, Rabbit. Loathe me. Detest me. Abhor me and let me feel it. Let me taste the hatred on your lips, let me drink it from your skin and feel the heat of it burning inside you. Burn me with it.”
People didn’t speak like that. Not to people like me. Like poetry. And yet he was. Offering up words as flowers. No—as fuel. Like oil to the flame.
My eyes fell to his lips, as if there was nowhere else they could have gone. Those lips had denied me once, and I’d promised myself I’d never seek them out again. I knew I should deny him now, but that felt like denying myself.
Incapable of answering him any other way, I used the hold I still had on his jacket and I pulled him into me.
His hands slammed against the wall at my back from the force of it, and our lips crashed violently.
An attack that he willingly fell into, that he forced back onto me.
Another first, and I was beginning to realize he’d have them all.
His kiss was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
A pull like a physical thing. A magnet. A tree that sprouted roots in my rib cage, the kind that grew too big under the pavement, causing it to crack open and warp from the force of its growth.
It took hold in the core of me and shattered everything in its path up my chest and throat, through my mouth, and it grew into him.
Tethered me to him. Tied me to him like he was another part of me.
A part I’d been forced to go without that had finally returned home.
He kissed me like he knew. Like he felt it too.
Lips gave way to tongues as we consumed each other. He tasted my fire, my hatred, just as he’d asked to, drank it down greedily like he’d said he would. In return, I tasted him, like smoke and danger. More. Like devotion.
I had only ever kissed him, yet I knew that no one else’s lips could ever compare to this. No other kiss would ever be as tender. Tender like a bruise.
He crowded me in, hands leaving the wall on either side of me to tangle in my hair, to grab me by the hip and pull me into him. And I answered in kind, releasing his jacket only to slide my hands beneath the leather, to claw at his sides, his back. He wasn’t denying me this time.
Dex Weller was the ocean, and I was drowning in him.
It pissed me off when we needed to come up for air, and our lips parted only long enough to fill our lungs with something other than each other before I was diving beneath his surface again.
Letting the tide drag me deeper. Further from the safety of the shore.
Lips found each other again. Our hands grabbed more frantically as whatever this was between us continued to escalate.
I was burning up from the force of it. Dex’s leg found its way between mine like it was supposed to be there, and he swallowed the sounds I made in response.
I don’t know why my body listened to him more than it did to me, but in this moment I couldn’t bring myself to care, not when he rolled his hips against me again and I felt the evidence of how much he was affected by this too.
“Fuck,” I panted the next time we broke for air. His chuckle was deep and breathy in response.
“Fuck,” Dex echoed. “Let me have more, Rabbit. Let me have you again.”
My cock throbbed as if it could answer for me, and maybe it could. I rocked against him, grinding my hips into the obvious hardness in Dex’s jeans, and he groaned. He took it for what it was, his hands leaving my hair and hip to work open the button and zipper.
“What if someone comes up here?” I asked, a sudden stab of unwanted panic pulling me from beneath the surface of lust.
He looked at me for a moment before hands found my shoulders and he shoved me to the side, slamming me back again, this time against the door. “You’ll just have to keep that door blocked, won’t you?”
As if it were that simple.
Whatever further protests I had were lost as his fingers dipped beneath fabric to circle around me, stroking me so fast and firmly all I could do was gasp and moan and struggle to stay upright. “Fuck!” I cried, sounding pathetic.
“So hard for me, baby,” he cooed, sounding incredibly pleased.
“D-don’t call me—ah—baby.”
“Hmm, fine. For now. Rabbit. But you will be my baby.”
“Not yours.” My hands clawed at his sides.
“Not yet.”
His hands left me, and I let out a cry of protest until I saw where they’d gone and I knew what was about to follow. Dex freed himself, grasping his own cock in his hand before bringing our hips together, taking us both in his large warm palm and fingers and stroking.
Pleasure like an electric shock stabbed through me, and my head thunked back against the door with a loud thud.
“Careful, Rabbit,” he warned, voice breathy with lust. “I’ll punish anyone who hurts you. Yourself included.”
“What about you?”
“I won’t hurt you,” he told me. “Never again.”
Then he aimed and spat on our cocks, and the added slickness had me crying out again as he spread it over our lengths.
His hand felt so different from my own. So much more intense.
I thought maybe it was because he’d used his mouth last time that it had felt so fucking good, but now I knew it was just because it was him.
Lifting my head away from the door, I glanced down between us, at the obscene sight of his cock, thick and pierced, pressed against mine, tunneling through inked fingers.
I couldn’t look away. I wanted the image burned into my memory so I could revisit it in my dreams, in my fantasies, with the hope I could make myself feel even a fraction as good as he did.
“You gonna come for me, baby?”
There was that word again. Only now I had far more intense physical sensations that demanded my attention. Pressure built in my core, bigger and bigger, until I couldn’t focus on anything else. I couldn’t think about anything but the way he made me feel.
Words evaded me, so I attacked him instead—fiercely, violently—with my lips on his. This kiss was messy. Absolutely filthy. All open-mouthed and slick. His moans mingled with mine, sounding like us. It scared me how much I liked the sound of us.
“Come for me,” he demanded, words spoken into my mouth and swallowed.
Like a spell. Like magic. My body obeyed, and I tensed, my cock exploding in white-hot bliss, pulsing pleasure between us that he collected and used to continue stroking until it was too much. Then he was coming with a deep and primal sound, the evidence of his own satisfaction joining mine.
Lips traced against lips in a not-quite kiss, not ready to be apart from each other as we shared heated air.
It wasn’t until my heart rate slowed that I realized we had once again come all over each other’s clothing. Unlike last time at the party, I couldn’t just zip up my jacket the way he could to hide the evidence of what we’d just done. My dark purple hoodie was now streaked with both of us. Fuck.
I pushed him off me, tucking myself back into my pants quickly and retrieving my bag to look for something I could use to clean myself up.
Dex chuckled, clearly amused by the situation.
“It isn’t funny. How the fuck am I supposed to go back to class like this?” I scowled. All I had in my bag that could even slightly be of use was a notebook, so I tore out a page and attempted to use the paper to wipe up. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t very effective.
“Here,” Dex said, snickering as he shrugged his jacket off. “I’ll trade you.”
I halted my efforts, eyeing the offered jacket with suspicion. It had been unfairly spared from the event, unlike my hoodie and Dex’s shirt. “But then you’ll have the cum hoodie.”
“And I’ll wear it proudly,” he told me, and it really seemed like he meant it.
“This is my favorite hoodie.”
“This is my favorite jacket.”
I tried to find another excuse, mostly because the thought of wearing his jacket made something in my chest feel tight in a way I didn’t at all trust and couldn’t allow.
“Come on. Off with it. It’s fucking cold. We’ll swap back later.”
I gave him a glare, but I did what he wanted, pulling my hoodie off with its warmth and handing it over to him, taking his jacket instead. I shrugged my arms into the sleeves and was embraced by his lingering scent. Smoke and cedarwood.
Dex was slightly larger than me in build, but his jacket fit me well enough, and my oversized hoodie fit him like a regular one.
He truly didn’t seem to mind at all that he was wearing our cum as he stepped in close to me again. My heart rate, which had finally slowed, hiked up as his hands found my waist over the jacket. On instinct my eyes sought his lips. No, it wasn’t my waist he was going for, it was his pockets.
With a smirk that told me Dex knew exactly what I’d mistaken this as, he stepped back with his smoking supplies. I glared. “Roll me one,” I demanded, hating that I sounded pouty.
“Anything for you, Rabbit.”
This time when I took the first drag of his perfectly rolled cigarette, I managed not to cough. It felt like an accomplishment, and I glanced over at him to see if he’d noticed.
His own cigarette was lit, resting between lips puffy from the force of our make-out session. Dex wasn’t looking at me, though, his eyes on his phone as he typed.
“You know what year it is, right? Why is your phone older than you?”
“It was my dad’s,” he said, his eyes remaining on the ancient piece of mobile history.
Was. Just like the lighter was his dad’s. I wanted to know what had happened. Dex carried around pieces of the man in a way I could never imagine myself doing with my father. Did that mean they were close? Was his father a good one?
“What’s your phone number?” he asked, snapping me from my thoughts.
“Why?”
“’Cause. Just give it to me.”
“No.”
“Now, Jonah.”
I decided right then, even if I’d never admit it to him or anyone else, that I didn’t like it when he called me by my real name.
I liked the nicknames better, the ones only he called me.
I knew I should have fought him more, and I blamed my lack of mental faculties on coming too hard as I gave him my number.
Dex sent off a text and I stared at him for a few moments before my phone pinged with a message from an unknown number. I opened it to see… a test sheet?
“Why did you send me a test paper?”
“I didn’t. Bryce did.” He grabbed my phone out of my hands. For some reason, I let him.
“You gave my number to Bryce?”
Dex didn’t answer, just zoomed in on the image before he started typing.
He typed for a long time, and I just stood there waiting for him like an idiot, taking drag after drag of the cigarette until it was all burned out and my head spun from the rush of nicotine.
When he finally finished and handed my phone back over to me, the text thread was still open on the screen. He’d texted Bryce the answers on the test. Unable to help myself, I looked at the test paper myself and then at the answers he’d typed out.
“Number four is wrong,” I told him, a slight curve to my lips in the knowledge that I knew something he didn’t.
“I know,” Dex answered simply, and that triumphant spark extinguished.
“Then why did you send it?”
“You think Bryce’s professor is going to believe he got one hundred percent on a test?” Dex scoffed. “He’ll get busted for cheating. He’ll pass with that.”
I looked again and yeah, a few more of the answers were wrong but like, believably wrong. He’d even included the equations so Bryce could copy it down exactly and it would seem like he’d worked it out himself.
That spark of pride that came with knowing things others didn’t returned, only this time instead of knowing something Dex didn’t know, I felt like I knew something about him that most others didn’t.
Not that I’d thought he was stupid, but that seemed to be the general impression people held of him, grouping him with idiots like Toby and Bryce.
While I continued to stare at my phone screen, a new notification popped up.
Unknown Number
You look so pretty when you come.
Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I glared up at the man snickering in front of me.
“I’m going to block you.”
“No you won’t,” he said, sounding so confident about that.
I hated that he was right.