Chapter 20 – Reese
SHUT UP AND KISS ME, ASSHOLE
REESE
He was still holding my arm.
I couldn’t stop glancing down at those long fingers wrapped around my forearm in a firm grip as we walked down the path toward the cafeteria.
I liked that he always wanted to feed me. That he worried about whether I’d eaten or not. That I was on his mind at all.
I liked so many damn things about him, about how he made me feel, that it was terrifying.
I knew this was dangerous, but I was done ignoring my feelings. It was pointless anyhow.
My first impression of him was so off because I was seeing him through a cracked lens.
Now I knew he was the kind of person that I hadn’t known in a long time. Someone genuine and honest, someone dependable and kind. Playful and irreverent, yet never in a cruel way. Someone who wanted my attention and would do anything to get it.
Someone I’d been looking for without even knowing it, who’d found me when I needed him most.
I was so lost in thought that when Dakota grunted and stumbled forward, taking me with him, I had no time to react.
I fell hard onto my knees with a startled cry, catching myself on one hand and trying not to let my violin slam into the ground.
Dakota dropped his violin, and the case burst open on the path in front of us.
Everything inside scattered across the pavement.
“Damn it,” he muttered, helping me back up to my feet. “You okay?”
It felt like I’d scraped up my hand a bit, but it didn’t hurt much. “Yeah, I’m fine. What happened? Are you okay?”
Loud snickering behind us had me whipping around, and there were three guys watching us, laughing and whispering to each other.
“Dang, big tree fall hard. You okay, Dakota? My bad, my bad,” one of them called.
An ugly flare of intense anger sparked through me, a nasty meanness taking over that wanted to lash out and hurt them.
This asshole had tripped him?
These utter pieces of shit just walked around doing whatever the fuck they wanted without consequences—just like Timothy fucking Hatford.
They thought they could hurt Dakota? They thought they could humiliate him and destroy his property and think it was amusing? How long had they been doing shit like this? How long had he been putting up with this kind of treatment?
Rage bubbled and frothed through my veins, and a roaring started in my head as I set down my violin and balled my hands into fists.
“It’s fine, I just tripped,” Dakota said, his tone flat and hard.
Resigned.
I hated that.
He shouldn’t be resigned to this kind of treatment.
I was going to fucking kill them.
Dakota didn’t turn around and look at the guys, just went and picked up his violin and bow and tried to put them back in the case, but now it wouldn’t shut because the clasps had broken. “Shit. I’m gonna need a new case.”
The intensity of my anger boiled over into something completely unmanageable, and all my thoughts shut off. I was just a seething ball of rage now.
The three guys were about to turn around and walk away, so I charged toward them.
The one who’d taunted Dakota paused when he saw me, looking down at me with a raised brow. “You—”
I drew my arm back and punched him in the mouth. His friends cried out and grabbed onto him before he could fall on his ass, the shorter one looking at me like I was insane. He shoved me back and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you, are you crazy?! Do you know who we are?”
“Do I look like I give a fuck who you are?” I snarled, reaching out to grab the asshole’s shirt. “You think you can just—” I grunted when two strong arms wrapped around me from behind, dragging me back and lifting me off the ground.
“I look away for two seconds,” Dakota rasped in my ear. Shivers racked my body, but I squirmed and tried to get out of his hold.
“Put me down!”
“Okay.” Dakota set me on my feet, and before I could pull away from him to go beat those pieces of shit into the dirt, he forcefully spun me around, bent down, pushed his shoulder into my stomach and lifted me like a sack of potatoes.
I grabbed the back of his shirt for something to hold onto, then tried to push myself up and look over his shoulder. “What the fuck, Dakota! Let me down!”
“No.”
“Just wait ’til my dad hears about this,” whined the guy I’d punched.
I twisted and glared at him over Dakota’s shoulder.
Seeing him only made me want to punch him all over again.
He was holding his jaw as his two lackeys tried pulling him away from us.
He shook them off and kept talking. “I’ll fucking sue you, you—”
God, someone needed to slap him. “Fucking do it, you little—”
Dakota’s hand came down so hard on my ass that the immediate and intense flash of pain made my mind go blank. I sucked in a breath as the sharp sting faded slowly into a torturous pleasure, heat spreading across my ass and between my legs until all I wanted to do was rub myself into him.
Oh, fuck.
I bit down on my bottom lip to stop the moan from escaping and squeezed his shirt as I shuddered against him. Every muscle in my body tensed up as I tried to stop myself from dry humping Dakota’s shoulder in the middle of the courtyard.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Don’t make me play the nepotism card. I’m not above anything, Delroy, so why don’t you back the fuck up. Tell your dad. I’d love to see what he says.” Dakota said, his voice way calmer than it should have been in this situation.
Calm and deep and gravelly and slowly scraping through me like another delicious point of pain. I started getting hard against Dakota’s shoulder, heat curling low in the pit of my stomach at the ruthless tone of his voice.
Fuck me, he was sexy when he talked like that.
“Fuck this shit, it’s not worth it,” the short guy said. “Let’s go, Chad.”
Chad? Chad?
A laugh slipped out of me, and I watched as the three asswipes walked away.
“Of course his name is Chad,” I muttered. “You can put me down now.”
“Nope.” Dakota turned and picked up my violin, slinging the strap over his shoulder, then grabbed his broken case and positioned it under his arm so it would stay closed.
“What? Why the fuck not?”
He started walking again, and people were staring at us now but I really didn’t give a shit. My entire being was attuned to Dakota and only Dakota.
His hot arm around my legs, his hair tickling my arm, the smoky sweet scent of him.
And he was so damn tall. Was this what being tall was like? The ground was so far away.
“Because I don’t trust you not to run after them and I’m gonna be really pissed off if you get yourself arrested or expelled for punching Chad Delroy. You can’t just hit people. Especially not these people. You’ll be in jail for life just for sneezing in their direction.”
“Well they can’t just trip you! Fuck that, I’m not letting those cockwipes fuck with you. They don’t get to do that shit.”
He choked out a laugh. “Cockwipes?”
“Dickballs. Asscocks. Shitfucks.”
He laughed again, and I felt it through his back. “Now you’re just combining random words.”
“Shut up.” I wanted to bite his neck, to slide his hair to the side and suck his skin between my teeth. To feel him buck against me like he had in the laundry room, to make him lose control.
He’d really liked that. I’d almost come as soon he started moaning in my ear, and I wanted him to make those sounds again.
“Why did you hit him?”
Why?
Because I have no self control? Because no one gets to hurt you like that? Because you were going to just let it go? Because I’m an unhinged, violent freak?
The fact that he was still here, still holding me, still talking to me, that I hadn’t scared him away with my awful behavior…had to mean something, right?
“Because…it really pissed me off to see someone treating you like that. You didn’t do anything to them. You don’t deserve that shit.”
Dakota slowed down for a moment, then started walking even faster. “You don’t have to do that for me.”
His voice was thick and saturated with something I couldn’t identify, and the arm around my legs tightened.
He was right, in a way. I didn’t have to do that for him. But fuck, I wanted to. I didn’t really care if people did that to me; I was used to it and had spent half a lifetime defending myself against ignorant assholes.
But there was no way, no fucking way, I was letting anyone treat Dakota like that.
I didn’t know how often that happened for him to be so unaffected, and I didn’t know why he just ignored it. His dad was the dean, it seemed like everyone around here knew that, and those guys still thought they’d get away with it.
I wanted to go find them and punch them all. Make sure they never fucked with Dakota again. If I had to stick to his side every second of the day to make sure—
“But thank you.”
I stared down at his ass, an image of me slapping it like he’d done to mine flashing through my mind. I wanted to touch it. Squeeze it. Bite it. Lick—
“You got a nasty little temper, don’t you?
” The amusement in his voice irked me, but I also didn’t miss the affection there.
That slid under my skin and curled around my bones like the sweetest, softest touch.
It sent an explosion of butterflies through my stomach and made me feel like I was weightless.
He made me feel like I was worth something, and that…
There was an ache in my chest, a painful tightness that was mixed with hope and a longing so profound that if Dakota wasn’t holding me, I didn’t think I’d have the strength to stay on my feet.
“You can put me down,” I said softly.
“Not yet.” He paused and hitched me higher, making me grunt. “So this is, what…the fourth time I’ve saved your life now?”
“Third.”
A sudden sharp pain in my thigh made me cry out, and when I realized Dakota had bitten me, I smacked his back. “What the fuck! That hurt!”
“Yeah but you like pain, don’t you, you little pervert?” He turned his head toward mine and said in a lower tone, “I’m not the only one who enjoys it. You know I can feel you, right?”