7. Jax
7
JAX
I left my most recent study session with Waverly, a stupid damn grin creasing my face that could have been mistaken for a flytrap for the way my mouth gaped open. A sesh with her was always entertaining, but more than that, she was quiet .
So different from the chaotic and undiluted cacophony of the rest of campus. The hours I spent with her each week quietened my cluttered mind that so often fragmented into random tangents.
That never seemed to happen with Waverly around, and her bees.
But mostly it was the girl I couldn’t get enough of, tangling my fingers in her hair, drawing her close enough to inhale her sweet honeydew scent. Christ, screwing with her was a mistake. Kissing her was worse. But I still couldn’t stay away.
This time she opted to ignore me mostly, teaching as though she spoke to nobody and nothing at all.
She was so damn stunning it hurt like hell to be ignored, but I was there for it. Waverly was all the things I couldn't claim about myself. Soft, open, innocent. That last most of all. Untarnished, and I was terrified the moment I touched her that I’d stain her unblemished skin with the sins that roiled beneath my own. And yet, I couldn't stop myself from craving more of her.
And more, until she became the addiction I couldn't resist. Not that she understood that part of me, and never would.
My smile dropped away as I headed back into Rippton’s social center, and everything I hated about this place most, yet thrived in all the same. Usually all I wanted was to get back to my studio and avoid the rest of the campus' floating student population. Socializing was my bane, a front designed to do what a facade did best–keep the rest of the world at bay.
At least, that was supposed to be how it worked. Throw up a please fuck off anti hero cape, and all the pretty ones would run away screaming.
Instead, in this twisted world, it brought them crawling forward for a taste of what their daddies with the world’s deepest pockets denied every single one of them.
Waverly, alone, seemed to neither notice the facade nor the horrors that roiled within me.
I strode across the quad with my shoulders pulled back, actually managing to enjoy the walk through the darkest shadows, right up until a flock of freshmen erupted from an adjacent lecture hall, flooding my path with inane chatter.
Lowering my head, I lifted one shoulder in a shrug that doubled as a battering ram and pushed my way through the flurry of students, bringing up an app that let me draw on my phone. I’d photographed some of Waverly’s sketches when she wasn’t looking. None of them were half as bad as she believed. Lacking a little heart, perhaps, but the essentials were there in essence.
The drawing wasn’t a pretense this time, but the activity held me apart from the movement around me until I was clear of the mob, free of body odor and a plethora of perfumes that could have created their very own Candy Shop of Nightmares .
Why people needed to cover their own scent with something that smelled like it had been manufactured in a power plant with a ton of sugar added, I would never know. Waverly didn't wear any, from what I could tell. Maybe a plain sports deodorant or the like, but nothing overwhelming. That sweetness of hers was all Waverly, just the way I liked her. In fact, nothing about her was overwhelming. Not to me.
Entertaining and peaceful. Weird combo for a weird girl, but she was growing on me. Teasing her was still my favorite pastime, and I wasn’t about to let that change. Watching her turn a pretty shade of pink was just too tempting in every way.
Picking her up on it when she asked if we were flirting…well. I'd relive the shock in her dark blue eyes, the ones the perfect shade to match her name, for nights to come. My cock twitched at the thought, straining against my tight jeans that constricted my blood flow by design when I didn't palm myself, content with the pain that urged me on. Maybe I could teach her something about pain, and how much I liked it.
Maybe, or maybe I’d keep myself this way and never tell her, just watch her, and suffer alone.
Fuck, I was a sick puppy.
And her light drew me back to all the beautiful parts of her that I didn’t have, was born without. Watching her sketch her bees might have been the secondary highlight of my week to date, or maybe it was drawing over her sketches and watching her face when she realized what I’d done. To be kind, I made the insect’s path a whole lot more credible and I hadn’t even felt the need to improvise on the work she provided as a pretty backdrop. Inspiration.
That was a miracle in itself.
My muse. I could be cruel or kind to those, and I loved, more than anything, to play with my muse. Twist and torture her until she cried. Then maybe I’d smile and kiss her and paint her.
Yeah, fucking sick all over. I shouldn’t be anywhere near a girl as sweet as Waverly yet we were paired together for the semester.
Listening to her talk calmed and unraveled me at the same time. She was a fascinating little conundrum that I wanted to hype up for shits and giggles and soothe after I was done playing with her just to watch the light return to her eyes, all liquid honey, like that mouth of hers. And those damn clothes. Not that I wanted to tell anyone what they could wear–hell, my family showed me how to tough that one out before I hit my teenage years. But…Waverly, that girl was hiding.
From the world, from herself.
Fuck knew why, because she didn’t need to.
Her hair, the way it hung around her face, the skirts she tucked around her knees in a protective bubble and those damn turtlenecks. Sure, she was cute, in a geek-girl sort of vibe but her body language told me otherwise.
More than anything I wanted to strip her down to who she really was and reveal that to herself. Waiting to find out what the world wanted from her? Fuck that. She could be taking on the world, rule it and shatter it apart, and she didn’t even know it. That brain of hers was sexier than it had any right to be.
I might tease the ever loving shit out of her for a warped sense of humor, but I’d do anything to break her out of her sheltered little beehive bubble she existed in.
Then watch her take on the world, just to see her break it.
Just for giggles, because her high and mighty cover up attitude still annoyed the shit out of me.
I headed directly for my accommodation on the other side of campus from our study session. Frat houses popped up between strategically placed copses, the thick greenery the perfect distraction and deterrent for many a student, and cover for others. When I turned up at Rippton, my father’s approach was to throw his Kingsman old frat house at me in the form of a mentor, rather than me at it, and hence here I stood.
But in a sense it worked, allowing me to have the camouflage that protected me from everything I didn’t want by giving me a freedom I otherwise couldn't claim alone.
I approached the large house from the side, my key in my hand to slip in through the mostly unused entrance.
The thought of living in a fraternity house initially crippled my artistic sense, but at least I wasn’t technically a part of the group. My head couldn't deal with that. I was the freaky artist in residence with cheap rent I didn’t care about and oddly enough, a solid gym buddy.
I leaned one hand on the glass door still covered in marker doodles from the last time I locked myself out. For a single, memorable, and frigid night I slept on the threshold, too drunk to find the front of the house but still conscious enough to hold a pen and create a collage of penises complete with hairy balls shaped like lemons.
Who knew how the creative mind worked when picked in black vodka.
Not me, that was for sure, because I still didn't believe the shitty artwork was mine until one of the boys showed me my signature–sloppy, sideways and barely legible–but mine all the same, cramped in the bottom corner of the door frame.
And so the citrus-flavored dicks stayed, ala a tribute to A Clockwork Orange.
After that, I’d passed some sort of invisible test and been somewhat accepted into the household. The arrangement suited me just fine. I got an attic space to work in, and their weekly parties didn’t bother me. Their superfans, however, did.
Some of the hanger-ons were fucking madness I couldn’t shake.
“Hi, Jax!” a too-happy, forced, over-girly, I’m-annoying-as-fuck voice chattered at me from behind.
Stepford wives in training, behold your next generation kin.
Another reason I didn’t share the frat-boys appreciation for said shrubbery. A man was as like to be accosted within the scratchy depths as use them for a little strategic concealment. I shot a quick glance over my shoulder. A head of too bleached hair, thinly plucked eyebrows, and a fake as fuck smile gleamed back at me.
“Mindy.” I groaned internally. She’d been after my roommate for the better part of a year, and gave dodgy guys a bad rep for her tenacity alone. “He’s not home.”
She pouted, and it sure as shit wasn’t pretty.
I winced.
“Going my way?” She wiggled the lines above her eyes—to call them eyebrows was an insult to hair follicles the world around—and shook her low cut, white tee covered plastic tits at me.
Pretty sure Waverly’s tits are the real thing.
A test I needed to put into practice, because curiosity killed the cat and I was up for a game of castration. I knew without reserve that’s what the girl would do the moment I touched her again, even if i promised her more pleasure than she could handle
And I wanted to see her shatter under my touch again so damn bad I’d barely been able to sleep for the last nights. Not that she’d let me. Still, I saw the way she looked at me, like my brand of pain and addiction might somehow speak to something within her…
My fantasy was ruined by the creature in front of me who was most definitely not Waverly.
“Not if I can help it.” I forced bile back down my throat at the thought of touching anyone other than my cautious little beekeeper, shoved the key in the lock, and marinated my current obsession of bees and the girl who I wanted to tease again soon.
Opening the door for a space only large enough for myself and my laptop to slip through I closed it in Mindy’s face, the glass rattling in its frame with the force of my panic to shut her out. I sucked in a deep breath, inhaling the memory of honeydew, and waved to Mindy from the safe side of the glassed, doodle-covered door.
Mindy wrinkled her nose. Her eyes flashed in my direction as she dropped the pouty act–the first true expression she gave me–and turned on her three inch strappy heels to flounce down the path, no doubt heading to the next frat house where she kept a sorority-grade harem or two for horny day emergencies.
The Cheerleaders of Death tribe hung about the Allstars campus sports teams like a bad smell that never left the locker rooms. She wasn’t my taste; none of them were. I worked on pushing my own couldn’t give a fuck persona when all I wanted was a girl with a creative brain who took the time to understand how I saw the world.
To say my tastes were eclectic was…pushing it in a building where tits and ass constituted a main course and a national salute all at once.
Pushing the ache in my heart aside, I slipped through the door keeping my footfalls silent to avoid as many of the players as possible. By eight on a weekday afternoon most were already on fourth beers.
Crush waved as I passed through, though he glanced over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow. His silent question went unanswered, but I appreciated the gesture. He alone seemed to get my need for silence, and I was glad he was the mentor my father opted for me as we found neutral ground fast that didn’t impinge on each other’s bad habits too frequently.
The rest of the Kingsmen hadn’t read that memo yet, it seemed.
“Hey, Art Freak! Wanna drink?”
I managed to keep my expression stoic, despite the retort that lingered beneath my tongue. Arcing up against the teammates of the man who’d given me a place to live and helped me create the vibe I survived off by the end of my first year seemed to be a shitty way to repay his generosity.
Yelling back to the team only ended in misery, a fist planted somewhere on my body I wasn’t willing to return in case I actually injured one of them, and a beer upended over my head. That shit stank and it took an age to get out of my leather jacket, like the itching powder trick I pulled on Waverly. But that had been worth it in its own way.
Besides, I had a reputation to uphold that kept the other crazies at bay.
I shook my head to Crush and made my way up the stairs toward the third floor, cutting my gaze away before he tried to convince me yet again to socialize. He’d helped me form my own PR campaign of leave me the fuck alone and given it the edge of I’m arty and unavailable. That alone had guaranteed a sort of weird popularity I'd never earned and hated…but it had the desired effect I craved on rare occasion, grabby hands and shitty, undesirable sex appeal for Stepford Wives in training aside.
The captain of the Rippton Hails ice hockey team helped me out upon arrival during my first year when I was nothing more than a too-skinny, wannabe artist with a sketchpad stuffed under one arm and hand drawn tattoos across my knuckles. Bullied, frustrated, and blessed with the self-esteem of a slug, I’d been a pathetic waste of creative energy, and blocked to boot. With no space to free up my hyperactive mind, I created crap. Worse, I knew it.
Crush inclined his head, watching me ascend. While he never pushed me, I enjoyed competing with him in the early hours–or later at night when the gym was empty and everyone else was pissing it up or sleeping it off–until I could match his pace. I might not be able to bench as much as him but I could run him into the ground any day. That was a miracle in itself.
By the end of my first year he’d helped me develop who I wanted to be seen as, though I knew he wished I could just be me all the time. If only my head was that monochrome, the way his morals ran. Straight and clean without all the dark edges closing in. Simplicity wasn’t in my nature, and no matter how I tried to push that concept, I knew Crush didn’t quite get how I saw the world.
A concept I was familiar with by now.
I still sought the eternal fool’s dream of finding a girl who did understand my world, who’d talk to me through the quiet hours of the night but have her own projects and life to share, something so totally different but still connected to me.
Damnit, I was a soppy romantic at heart. A lover, not a fighter. Hater, not a rioter.
I had no love of crowds and making my way up to my own space freed up some of the accumulated weight that tried to bow my back. I straightened, rolling my neck until it cracked on both sides, taking the steps at a slow pace and left the opinions of others on the ground floor.
Taking the last few steps at a run, the burst of speed sending a shot of adrenaline through my body I’d need the moment I picked up my brushes, I pushed open my bedroom door. The large canvases I’d painted a solid black then varied the light until I had a rainbow of grays from dove to charcoal leaned against one wall in a collage of muted mist.
A heap of clothes I hadn’t left there was piled on my bed in an uneven heap. I squinted at the unusual shape, picking out the blue-and-white cut varsity sports colors, the skin tones layered in between with an artist's critical eye.
The pile let out a ripper of a snore and I shook my head. “Oh, hell no.”
Whatever game the boys downstairs thought they were playing, it wasn’t going to work. Maybe I needed to do a drunk streak through the campus—something they’d see as hazing but didn’t mean a damn thing to me. Hell, I’d pierce or ink my own dick if it stopped them shoving random females in my nest. Not a bad idea, and I kept that thought aside for later. Maybe one of Waverly’s bee trails.
The drunken contingent shouldn’t give a fuck how I spent my damn time or which who. They were all headed for drafts or corporate jobs to pay their lifetime of accumulated bills after their parental next eggs ran their course.
An artist got credit for being motherfucking weird. I was all in on that score. What I wasn’t in on was what looked like a drunk girl in my bed—a bed I doubted she’d come to the house to find herself in.
Swearing softly, I tossed my bag on the floor with too much force. It rolled over and a phone, text books and my graphites rolled out. I frowned, already kneeling to collect my kit when the girl flinched—a delayed reaction from the sound of me entering my own fucking room—and rolled right off the edge of the bed.
She hit the floor with a muted whump and lay there, still snoring.
“Fuck me.” I rubbed my hands over my face. She had to go. But go where?
Backtracking to my door, I opened it and peered out. Through the bannister, I got a bird’s eye view of the front door where Crush leaned against the frame, his bulk blocking out who he spoke to. It could have been Mindy, but it could also have been one of a hundred other psycho team stalkers.
“Crush,” I shouted.
He straightened, called out something cheerfully to the frat boys I couldn’t see, and shut the door. “Yeah, man?”
“Got a…little problem up here.” I winced. That was coming back to bite me.
“Want someone to hold your dick while you wank?” A disembodied voice yelled through the house loud enough to be heard by the next fraternity over. “You could use it to spray your next art feature.”
Someone snickered and the room broke up.
I groaned and wanted to bury my head in my hands. “This is all sorts of fucked up,” I muttered. “I’ll spray your motherfucking Cheerios,” I yelled back, and the common room fell blessedly silent.
“Get your head out of your ass, Max.” Crush glared at someone I couldn’t see. He looked up at the stairs via the barrister I peered at him through, but made no move to come up. “What’s up?”
There were a hundred ways to call this one but I didn’t have the energy for more bullshittery. “Drunk girl in my bed. Not mine. Help me get her home.”
“Fuck me.” He started up the stairs.
“That’s what I said.” I stepped aside when he made it to my attic and let him in.
His gaze flicked to the grayed out canvases, and back to the female lump in my bed. “In a mood?”
“Always. Thought I’d paint cotton candy next for giggles.”
“You should. Then hang it in Jase’s room.”
“This is his handiwork?” Maybe I could just paint his room, period. Something bright, pink and lary. Then spray it, as per the suggestion from earlier. Fuck it, he’d probably like that.
“Yeah. All right. Fuck. Do you know her?” Crush ran his hand over his hair, pushing it back from his forehead.
I glared at him, offering him a silent rebuke for the assholic words that fell thoughtlessly from my mentor and friend’s mouth.
He snorted. “That’s fair.”
“Can we put her in one of their rooms?” Even as I said it, I felt like an asshole for spitting the comment out and passing her around like a party favor.
“Nah. Poor form, and fuck knows what they’d do to her. Not her fault she picked a shit day for a drinking match.”
“What happened?” I frowned.
The boys were raucous, and often crass, but rarely nasty or destructive. At least, not without a purpose or a well earned grudge match.
“They got their asses handed to them at training today. New coach, mid season change. I …might have had a little advance warning. I’d say she’s a baby sister or an ex of the new coach. This sure as fuck wont’ end well.” He sneaked a quiet look my way.
“Never does.” I reach for my back pocket for a smoke and come up empty. Fucking Waverly. I promised her I’d quit and it’s eating me already. I bare my teeth and focus on the problem at hand. Or in this case, my mattress. “Not your fault. If they can’t deal with change, then they need to be able to adjust to life. Fuck, what happens if the line up of next week’s game gets moved around?” Christ, what was happening to me? I sounded like I actually knew what I was talking about. “Man, I’ve lived here too long.”
“Nah, you’ve been listening.”
I huffed my derision. “What, become a fucking leader like you? There is no chance, my friend.”
Crush surveyed me with the quiet passion that made him infamous with the opposing team before he lived up to his namesake. “You fit in better than you think.”
“Not with this shit.'” I gestured to the body on my bed. Damnit, I bet she wore jellybean perfume or some shit. That ain’t coming out anytime soon.
“This is poor, even for them. Alright. Give me some better light.” He frowned, looking around at the gloomy shadows that danced off the walls as he moved. “How the hell do you paint in this?”
“I close my eyes and flick paint at the wall,” I deadpan. “Let me get my bag.” I hoisted my satchel across my chest and flicked everything back into it, snapping on the bright studio lights I actually used to paint as I went.
Crush winced. “Christ almighty, my eyeballs will never fucking recover.”
“You’re the one who stares at ice all day. Aren’t you used to shit looking blue?”
“That’s not how this works.” He peeled back layers of quilts and exposed the girl on my bed, pulling her skirt discretely over her thighs.
I turned away, seething internally. Until now, I’d gotten my happiness off taunting Waverly but if the boys wanted an all out war, I’d bring that shit to the yard. That rep of mine was there for a damn fine reason and while I had no problem inking myself up, it wasn’t my skin that would be honored with the next dick pic. Hell, I’d even add some lemons in.
I fished out all my graphics and grabbed the phone that was heavier than it should have been. I flipped it over to discover that the case wasn't mine. The tiny bee that decorated the back, drawn in a crude and familiar hand gave me a solid clue who it did belong to. I tilted my head to one side, weighing my options.
“Come on, man. She’s a dead weight.” Crush lifted the girl over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.
After a moment’s deliberation that he was doing fine on his own, I offered awkward support as we headed for his car once we hit the ground floor to a background chatter of snickers and catcalls.
Trying to keep the poor girl decent, we managed to get her laid out in the backseat.
“Where do you think she lives?” I frowned, pushing back bottle blonde hair to expose a pretty face.
“Chi Beta Pi.” Crush looked at me and laughed. “Sorority across campus. I’ll take her back,” He offered the words casually.
“You sure?” I narrowed my eyes. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“What, like coming home to a random in my bed? Sure, man.” He shook his head, turning the key in the ignition. “Besides, I got my own girl to worry about. JUst want to make sure she wasn’t hurt on the way to your bed, or someone’s going to have his head shoved up his ass and a police record for assault.”
“Fuck off.” I grinned at the barb, but inside I was relieved he took the alpha stance on protecting the poor girl who was in over her head with the frat boys.
Crush waved as I tapped the top of his car and I backed off to let him pull away. Knowing he’d get her home safe with no chance of being accosted helped, but the fact it happened at all still annoyed the shit out of me.
Slipping my hand into my pocket, I extracted Waverly’s phone, flipped it over in my hand, and headed back across campus to the dodgy little apartment in town she mentioned once in passing, and imagined a hundred ways to tease her on the way there.
Because her honeydew scent wasn’t the only thing addictive about her–but it was a damn fine start.