Chapter Thirteen Rhys
For once, I’m not thinking. Not as I blindly followed her upstairs. Not as I let her lead me into an empty bathroom. Not now, as I grab at her shoulder to stop her from leaving and spin her, easily pinning her small body against the door.
“This is what you want?” I ask, making sure that this time, she can feel me entirely. Every bit of my body is pressed completely to hers, connecting like a perfect puzzle piece.
She’s so much smaller than me. In our previous interactions I’ve mostly been on the ground looking up at her like some deity coming to save me, so it’s something I only really notice now that I’m towering over her with my hand broad against her trim waist.
“I just…” she starts, but fades off again. Her pupils are blown, and the red light somehow only highlights the freckles beneath her eye, the angular shape of her face.
“Tell me,” I nearly beg. Maybe it’s the too-loud music giving me a massive headache, or the red light that makes this almost like a foggy dream, but I can’t make myself shut up. “Because I’ll tell you. I can’t stop thinking about the locker room, and I—”
She shuts me up by slamming her lips onto mine.
I’m all too eager to reciprocate, tilting down to wrap my arms around her little waist and lift her closer to me, pressing her back into the panels of the door.
Her muscular legs twine around my waist in return, holding herself up with ease while grinding lightly down my stomach, chasing friction like a fix.
Sadie’s like a goddamn drug, the effect just as immediate, my mind relaxing and something good chasing the dark out of my veins until I feel like Old Rhys again; even my headache dulls to an ignorable level.
I gulp down her presence like air after breaking the surface from drowning.
I soak it all up, knowing from my experiences with her before that the switch will flip.
This won’t be enough for her, and I understand it. There’s barely enough of me left to make a complete human. Why would I be able to hold her together when she’s becoming the one keeping me intact?
My lips take their time, slowing from her frantic beginning.
I sweep my tongue across her mouth. My teeth lightly graze her lip, pulling the plump bottom one to suck between my own, before releasing it and heading south.
Two kisses to the corner of her mouth, a drag of my tongue down the underneath of her chin, before I press harder, slowly sucking kisses into the skin of her neck.
The moan Sadie releases is soft and light, so opposed to the intense scratch of her nails on my arms and the back of my neck beneath the light shag of my slightly-too-long hair.
My stomach is swirling, nausea from my headache mixing with intense lust and my anxiety about doing this here, with her, in this damn bathroom.
I pull away to talk to her, to ask her to follow me home, to beg her to talk to me ; but she latches on to my neck, sucking and licking against the skin so fast my vision blurs and I stumble into the wall, hands gliding underneath her dress to grip her upper thighs to maintain some kind of hold on her.
She’s so strong, I feel like I could let go entirely and she’d hold tight, keeping herself up easily.
There’s a knock at the door, to which Sadie quickly offers, “Fuck off!”
I smile into her neck, feeling almost high off her.
But the person on the other side is insistent, shouting through the crack in a high melodic voice. “Sadie Brown! You can get off with Sean later.”
A wave of frustration rolls through me, as if I have some automatic claim on her, like a fucking third grader. I licked her so she’s mine .
“What do you want, Victoria?” Sadie calls.
“Ro is jumping off the high dive like a psycho!”
That makes her pause. She drops from my arms entirely, pulling her dress down just as a flash of black peeks at me. Not giving a second thought to her reddened neck, swollen lips, or loosened ponytail, she rips the door wide open and takes off at a near sprint.
I’m frozen for a moment, watching her escape me like she’s on fire. My eyes flick to the mirror, the light of the room half glowing from the overhead bulbs in the hallway, half red, cutting me nearly down the middle. My collar’s looser now, shirt askew, with marks from Sadie’s mouth across my neck.
I can’t help the warmth that radiates up my spine and turns my cheeks slightly dark.
I think I like what the aftermath of Sadie Gray looks like on me.
Victoria stares from the doorway, eyes wide, with a pretty smile across her face.
We’ve crossed paths before—both captains of our sports in our junior years, both communications majors with a few classes together. I’ve never dated or slept with her, but she was my type before. Perfectly put together at all times. Intelligent, kind, elegant, blond.
“Rhys,” she finally manages to speak. “I didn’t know you were here…
with Sadie?” She says it like a question, and if it were anyone else, I might refute the claim.
But that interaction in the locker room comes to mind too quickly, the hurt defensiveness from Sadie that makes me want to protect her—even if I know she wouldn’t let me if she were here.
“Yeah, I’m just here to pick her up.” Literally and figuratively, I guess, since her ass was just in my hands. “I should go see if she needs help.”
Victoria smiles at me, even if her eyes look a little less sparkly, and I edge around her and head downstairs.
Thankfully, the music is quieter on the large back porch, only two speakers blasting “Wasted” at max volume. I spot Sadie easily, crouched over the lip of the pool on her knees with only two inches between the hem of her dress and her bare ass.
It’s that sliver of pale skin that has me launching down the small set of wooden stairs to stand behind her, blocking her from the small audience forming at our backs.
Only then do I realize that Sadie’s friend Ro isn’t the only one in the pool; Freddy is right behind her, a few feet away but close enough for me to know, whatever this situation is, my winger was involved.
I eye him quickly, shaking my head and pressing my thumb backward over my shoulder, desperately trying to remove him from the situation.
He only shakes his head, crossing his arms like a pouting child and casting a quick, hesitant glance toward a very wet Ro, her curls now pulled high atop her head in some crazy knot that looks like it’s tied with—a shoelace?
I try to pay attention to the whispered argument between the two girls, but I’m far too distracted by my stupid friend getting closer and closer to the duo.
Sadie falls back from her whispered conversation, her ass tapping against my shins. It doesn’t seem to startle her—far from it, so it seems, as she grabs on to my jeans and starts to heft herself back up.
Instead, I grasp her biceps easily and set her on her feet.
“Can you find a towel?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I agree without hesitation, despite knowing I have no idea where I could get one.
As I spin away, my foot taps against the two sets of shoes sitting perfectly by the pool: one set of flopped-over cream boots, the other a pristine set of white-and-navy Air Force 1s with a missing shoelace.
“Don’t touch my shoes,” Freddy barks, close behind me, and I’m seconds away from shoving him back into the water for getting snippy with me right now. He walks right past me after barking out the order, heading for a wicker dining set beneath the overhang of the porch where two bath towels lie.
“Planned this one, did you?”
Freddy smiles that same stupid smirk that’s etched nearly permanently on to his face, and grabs a towel to sling over his shoulder, taking the other one back to the girls heading toward us.
A quick, “Sure,” is all I get from him before he’s handing the towel to Ro. She fumbles with it for a moment until a concerned Sadie grabs it and circles it around her shoulders like a blanket.
“Thanks for watching out for her,” Sadie says, albeit reluctantly, as she guides Ro toward the wooden staircase. Freddy nods, swiping his towel over his hair and letting it rest around his shoulders as well.
“Not a hardship to get a beautiful woman soaking wet,” he quips before I can elbow him in the gut, or tape his mouth shut, or find a way to rewind time and never let him become my friend.
Sadie and I both jump in simultaneously, barking over each other.
“Jesus, Freddy.”
“Back off it, Freddy.”
But a loud hiccupping laugh bursts from the nearly-drowned girl, cutting off every reprimand sitting on my tongue.
“That was a good one, Freddy,” Ro agrees, dropping the towel and stumbling as she attempts to pull on her boots. “At least, I thought so.” She nearly falls again, but Freddy wraps a hand around her arm to steady her while she gets her shoes over her wet calves.
My gaze finds Sadie immediately. With her arms crossed and lips pursed, she looks altogether much smaller than she did mere minutes ago, straddling me against a dingy bathroom wall.
“Okay, Gray?” I ask again.
The question seems to jolt her, her eyes snapping to mine with such sharpness that a shiver rolls down my spine. She bites down on her lip, and my hands tighten inside the confines of my pockets, keeping myself from reaching to pull it loose.
“Yeah. We just need to call an Uber.”
I’m shaking my head before she can finish. “Don’t. We’ll take you back to…?”
“The dorms,” she finishes. “Not far. Honestly, we could walk—”
Freddy shushes her, making that little divot form between her brow again as he passes by her and taps on her head like a child.
“Rhys is an overprotective crazy person, and Ro here is walking like a baby giraffe, so let us drop you, yeah?”
It’s clear she’s battling her agreement, but there’s no way in hell they’re walking home alone. If she won’t take our offer, I’ll just have Freddy drive slowly alongside them until they get back to the dorms.