Chapter 8 Connor #2
All that comes up my throat are heavy breaths laden with words unspoken as Dane’s wet hand smooths across my cheek and through my hair. He turns my head so that our noses brush, and his lips kiss the air between our mouths.
“Baby,” he whispers.
My tongue reaches for the word, claiming it as I trace Dane’s lips.
He kisses my tongue, capturing the tip between his lips as my hands capture his waist. With eyes shut, our mouths mold together in slow smooches.
Our bodies shift in a different sort of dance, and to a different sort of beat.
More purpose and intention. Hands roaming, crotches grinding, and tongues taking swipes at each other between our wet lips.
Dane is the first to break our kiss, a line of drool tethering our mouths together as he dips around to my ear. “Let’s go somewhere,” he says. “I wanna take your boy-virginity.”
I’m breathless, wiping my wet mouth across Dane’s shoulder and wondering if I’m ballsy enough to let Dane take me some place private.
But then I remember his tongue in another man’s mouth.
His hands in another man’s hair.
His dick in another man’s throat.
“No.” I shove him away, head throbbing and skin crawling. “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you trying to ruin my life?”
“Connor—” He reaches out, but I smack his arm away and make a run for it before he can catch me.
I dig my phone out of my pocket, tap the Uber app and let it find my location. My hand is shaking, eyes filling with fresh tears as I wonder how the fuck I’m going to explain this to Thalia.
“Yo, dude, watch out!” someone hollers in the moment before my front foot finds air, my knee buckles, and gravity pulls my body weight down. With nothing to grab onto, nothing to stop my descent, I wail as I hit the pale blue surface of the lighted infinity pool.
Chlorinated water floods my ears and mouth, and my shoulder hits the concrete bottom. I twist until my shoes are on the floor, and I push off until my head breaks into open air. Hands tug at me as I flail. They drag me across the pool and guide me to the steps.
“Connor!” I hear his voice. Dane’s voice. Not Connie or baby, but my name the way it’s intended.
Still, when his large hand clamps around my forearm, I shove him off me so hard that the counter momentum nearly knocks me back into the water.
“Don’t touch me!” I crawl onto the patio, spilling water from my clothes and body. The cool nighttime air chills me to the bone.
“Are you okay?”
“No. I wanna leave.” I climb to my feet, and they squelch in my soaked sneakers. “Fuck, my phone.”
“I’ll get it,” Dane says. “Is it waterproof?”
“No!”
“I’ll take you home.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” I shoulder past him and trudge off to the opposite side of the house where there’s a swinging gate hanging open.
“Then how the hell are you gonna get home? You’re ten miles from the house, you’re soaking wet, and you don’t have a phone. Just let me drive you.”
Someone running in the opposite direction crashes into my shoulder, shouting something about someone calling the cops.
“Shit,” Dane hisses before grabbing my arm and telling me to run.
Like a whisper in the wind, I hear a siren in the distance. In sodden shoes, I race after Dane until we make it to his car. He already has the trunk open by the time I stop myself against the passenger door.
“Put this on.” He chucks a ball of clothes at me.
We really don’t have time for a wardrobe change, but I can’t show up at the house like this either.
“Turn around,” I tell him, and his eyes roll along with his body until his back is to me.
After a quick glance around to make sure no one’s watching, I huddle close to the shadowed side of Dane’s car and replace my wet clothes with one of Dane’s muscle tees and a pair of joggers.
I take my soggy shoes and socks off, too, and stick those in the trunk before Dane snaps it shut.
Barefooted, I hurry into the passenger seat while Dane slips into the driver’s.
Dane winds us through the neighborhood a while before merging onto the highway, but he pulls the car over a mile shy of his house and shifts into park.
For minutes we idle in silence. I can’t look Dane’s way—too pissed off and ashamed—but I look at him through the side mirror, angled to show his profile staring at the windshield.
Part of me is itching to get this over with, but the other part wouldn’t mind sitting here all night, pretending nothing exists outside this dark interior.
When Dane finally speaks, his voice is low and husky. “Connor, I swear—”
“Don’t.”
“I only wanna say—”
“No.”
“I’m—”
“Dane.” I snap my head sideways, forcing myself to look at him, if only to show him how desperately I cannot have this conversation right now. “I mean it. Just don’t.”
The last words survive my failing resolve, making it up my throat in a barely there mutter as the pain in Dane’s eyes fills my heart with sorrow.
He rolls his lips together, fidgeting and groaning like it hurts just to keep silent.
But he has to. Because I know what he’s going to say.
It’s the same thing I want to say, but saying it is even more wrong than hearing it.
Risky, dangerous, and wrong. As wrong as everything else I’ve done tonight.
The only safe option is for neither of us to say anything and to pretend it never happened.
I can do the former, but I don’t know if I’m capable of the latter.
Not when I’m sitting next to Dane in a dark car, wearing clothes that smell like his skin.
The urge spills over soon enough, and Dane sucks in an inhale before saying, “Connor, I—”
“Please.” I hike my feet up onto the edge of my seat and hug my knees. Speaking into them now, I beg him, “Please. I just wanna go home and go to bed. Please?”
Not too long ago, Dane told me he liked it when I said please. I’m not sure he likes it so much now, but he does finally shift his car into drive, and he doesn’t speak another word.
When I slip back into mine and Thalia’s bedroom, I’m queasy but too afraid to go into the bathroom, in case Dane’s in there. So I swallow down that churning feeling and crawl into bed without even cleaning my feet or changing out of Dane’s clothes.
Behind me, the covers shift, and Thalia’s groggy voice asks how the party went.
Staring at darkness, I answer, “Fell into the pool.”
“Are you okay?”
“Waterlogged my phone. Gonna have to replace it.”
She hums sleepy sounds and rustles the covers some more. “Wouldn’t have to worry about it if you’d stayed home. Just saying.”
“I know.”
I roll my face into my pillow and submit to my racing mind as I pretend to fall asleep.