4. Blaze #2
“Later,” I say to Zayden, waving him off. “I don’t care about rush week. You can figure it all out without me. Asch and I have a few things to talk about anyway.”
Zayden rolls his eyes, but he heads down without me. I breathe a sigh of relief and press my head against Asch’s.
“Thanks for saving me,” I say.
“From big bad Zayden?” Asch asks, sounding skeptical. “I’ll believe you need saving from him the day he’s the one to do the dirty work.”
“You saved me from paperwork,” I say, letting go of him.
I head upstairs, Asch behind me. He immediately sits down on the bed like he owns the place. With how much time he spends in my room instead of his, he might as well.
I don’t mind though. It’s just Asch, after all.
I sit in the desk chair, take off my shoes, then prop my feet up on the bed.
“Still can’t believe what a dumbass he was,” I say, shaking my head. “When you left Carly last night, did she seem like she actually remembered anything?”
Asch’s lips purse into a thin line as he thinks. Finally, he shakes his head. “No. Honestly, I would’ve thought she’d be more freaked out by Pandora pulling a fucking knife on me.” He huffs out a dark laugh. “Maybe Pandora talked her into reporting it.”
I groan in annoyance. “Seriously? What’s up with her? She really doesn’t know who I am?”
“Worse,” Asch says. “I don’t think she cares. ”
I’m about to say more, but Asch’s phone dings with the sound that means his mother texted him. I watch as Asch immediately pulls his phone out to respond to her.
There’s a twinge of annoyance inside of me at being ignored in favor of the phone, but I push it down.
While Asch is typing, I move from the desk chair to the bed and attempt to read over his shoulder. He blocks the phone with his body and only relents once he sends his response.
There’s nothing left to see, of course, just the usual scratches on the screen and the scuffed corners. The damn thing must be a few years old by now, and it wasn’t a new model even when he first got it.
“Just let me buy you a new phone already, Asch.” I say, reaching over to draw a finger over the deepest scratch. “You don’t need to use this old thing anymore.”
Asch stares unflinchingly at me. “Not everyone needs a brand-new phone every time a new model drops,” he tells me, his voice edged.
If he wasn’t ridiculously proud, I’d buy him one and be done with it, but he already gets prickly enough about me buying him anything — not to mention paying his dues for Kappa Alpha.
Sometimes I think that’s the real reason he almost dropped out last year.
He’d tried to claim it was because the pledging process had gotten to be too much, but I’d known it was bullshit the second he’d tried to throw that excuse my way.
I’ve known him too long for him to easily fool me, and while he can occasionally mask his feelings from me, that wasn’t something he could lie about.
For a few seconds, we stare at each other, the phone between us. My eyes linger on his lips, and the stubble on his chin. After only one day of not shaving, Asch already has substantial stubble, where it would take me a lot longer to grow a beard.
“So,” I say with a grin. “Today was hot, right? She looked great on her knees.”
“She would’ve looked better between us,” he says. Before I can argue that he could’ve had her too, he adds, “I wasn’t in the mood.”
That’s bullshit, too .
He’d been so pissed off at her that he should’ve jumped at the chance to fuck her mouth.
“Did you want her first?” I ask, confused. “I’d have let you. She wasn’t even all that bite-y, after we roughed her up properly.”
Asch’s phone goes off again, but this time he doesn’t instantly move to answer it. “I’m pretty sure someone was following us outside of the tunnels. I didn’t want us both distracted.”
“Following us into the tunnels?” I repeat. I try to remember if I’d noticed anything, but mostly I remember Pandora’s anger and her warm mouth. “If you say so.”
Asch takes in a deep breath, and I can see his lips move as he counts to five before he lets go of it. “One of these days, you’re going to believe me when I say something to protect you,” he mutters. “I knew you wouldn’t have listened.”
“I’m listening!” I protest. “But I’ve got you looking out for me anyway, right?” I smile at him, and I see him roll his eyes. “If somebody did see… not to pull a Declan, but so what? We fuck them up a bit or dump them naked in the woods or something.”
“You aren’t completely untouchable,” Asch replies, and his voice is quieter than it usually is. “There’s always someone bigger and badder, Blaze.”
There isn’t.
There can’t be.
My father wouldn’t allow me to cower in fear, so I need to be the strongest, the worst person in the room.
“It’s cute you think that,” I say to Asch. “Okay, we’ll take Pandora somewhere more private next time. Maybe we tie her up.”
I see a flicker of confusion on Asch’s face. “You want to fuck her again?”
“Uh, yeah? You haven’t had a turn yet,” I point out.
Maybe I don’t usually go for seconds with a chick, but most of them don’t do anything interesting .
Most of them don’t practically beg me to destroy them.
Most of them don’t hurt Asch .
“So you were serious about all of that? Her practicing her blowjob skills and all. I know what I said, but I thought we were just scaring her,” Asch replies slowly.
I can’t read his expression, but I watch as he licks his lips like he’s considering what I’m saying.
“Of course I was serious. It’s not a credible threat if we never go through with it.” I shake my head with a smile. “Don’t lie and tell me you don’t want to. I know you got hard. And if you weren’t into her, you wouldn’t have tried to fuck her last night.”
“I was into her before I knew she was insane,” Asch replies. He plays with his phone without picking it up to look at it, though I know by now he’s itching to read whatever reply his mother had sent him. “Now that I know I have to worry about being stabbed, it’s less appealing.”
“Or more exciting,” I counter.
Asch glares at me. “Remember that thing about me trying to protect you? I know what my future is with the Bouchards, Blaze. I’ll be there for you any time you need me, but you have to let me”
I don’t need his protection though.
He’s the one who’s self-conscious.
He’s the one who gets hurt.
He’s the one who’s bleeding right now.
“How about you tell me what you want to do to Pandora instead?” I suggest. “And you can add the detailed protection plan, if that gets you off.”
“Funny,” Asch says, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “Have you considered a career as a stand-up comedian?”
I give him a crooked smile. “You think I should crack jokes next time I beat down an idiot like Declan?”
He rolls his eyes. “All right, fine,” he finally relents. “I want her to blow me while you fuck her hard, so hard she can’t help but choke on my dick. I want to hear it, I want to feel it, I want to know she’s struggling to breathe .”
That’s more like it .
I listen while Asch spins out his fantasies for me.
They’re a lot tamer than mine.
In his version, Pandora still comes out the same.
We’ll play it his way first.
There’s plenty of time to grind her down into nothing.
And when I’m through, she’ll even thank me for it.