Chapter 6 Seth
SIX
Seth
“I’m going, I’m going,” Silas said. He circled the room, checking under his pillow, rummaging through drawers, walking in and out of the bathroom. “Who is he, though? Is it the big hockey guy again?”
“You are sworn to secrecy,” I said.
“Girl, I know how to keep a secret,” Silas said, snapping his fingers.
“Name one secret you’ve kept,” I said.
Silas flipped me off. “I can keep a secret.”
“Why am I not convinced?” I asked myself aloud.
“Have fun. If you need any, er, supplies, check that drawer,” Silas said.
I most certainly wouldn’t. My stomach was hollow, and my heart was thundering like it was the end of the world. I had all I needed and more, except for any kind of certainty that I wanted to go through with this.
If playing with fire were a person, his driver’s license would say Damon Pierce.
And I wasn’t very good at playing with fire at all.
I swear. I was usually a pretty tame person.
Bland. Boring. A vanilla nerd you wouldn’t look at twice.
But Damon drew something out of me, made it present above all the rest of me, and I loved the person I was around him.
I loved being what he saw. If only I didn’t confuse that self-loving feeling with something else.
And there, right there, was the spark of the fire I was playing with.
If I didn’t keep myself well guarded, I would fall for the worst guy you could ever fall for. I would go soft for a guy who didn’t do this kind of thing.
So when Silas left the room, I wrung my hands and wondered if I should text Damon to call it off.
We didn’t need to start fucking in each other’s rooms. We could just, I dunno, talk dirty over the phone and deal with the business separately.
It was less risky. I’d identified the areas of risk long ago.
Damon’s touch was the worst of them all.
He had that way of his, hypnotic and incredible, touching me until I was willing to be his everything. And that was when we were dressed.
What the hell I was getting into tonight was unfathomable, really.
I made up my mind. It would be better if we didn’t see each other tonight. He would have enough time to go out and hook up with someone else. There was no shortage of willing people. And I could stay here and regret it. So what? I’d survive.
My phone was on the charger on the nightstand. I walked over and picked it up, but the knock on the door made my heart leap higher than it had any reason to leap.
I hurried back to the door and opened it, voices in my head yelling to stop, to be silent, to let him think I was out, and to just bail on this ridiculous plan.
When the door opened and my gaze landed on Damon, left arm lifted high above his head, leaning against the doorframe, hoodie lifted high enough to reveal an inch of his flesh, the voices went silent.
Stillness came over me.
Since Wednesday night, I had let Damon visit me in my fantasies when Silas was out and the room was mine.
The blunt way in which he set out the plan and proposed some fun times we could share was equally appealing as it was repulsive.
Didn’t he have a single clue what these things did to me at the end of the day?
I wished I could be like him, waking up in the morning and not caring at all whether the person next to me was interested or not. Life had to be easier that way.
“Hey,” Damon said. “You look like you just opened the door to the poltergeist. You good?”
“Better than good,” I said, voice quiet and airy. “Very good, I dare say.”
Damon cracked a grin. “Giving me shit about that, and look at you. Copycat.”
“I thought about it. It’s a funny joke.” I moved aside to let him in.
Damon stepped inside, a backpack hanging from one shoulder, baggy black pants with countless pockets hanging low around his waist, and a black hoodie with a paint splatter across the chest covering what little of his abs I could see once he lowered his arm.
I bit my lip, then released it quickly so I wouldn’t look desperate. Be like Damon. Look like you could take it or leave it, I reminded myself.
“Nice room,” he said. His gaze swept it, then landed on the desk, where the broken compass was. He chuckled. “I’m surprised you’ve kept it.”
“Couldn’t sell it. Nobody wanted it,” I said. It made him laugh.
As I shut the door, I wiped my hands on my sweatpants. I’d picked casual clothes deliberately so he wouldn’t think I was getting ready for this. Even so, my stomach felt like I’d swallowed a flutter generator. “This your bed?” Damon asked.
It wasn’t going the way I’d hoped. If he expected us to just jump into the bed and get to it, he had another thing coming. Still, I nodded.
Damon dropped his backpack gently on the bed and sat down, stretched his arms above his head, then planted his hands on the mattress a little behind. He kicked his shoes off, revealing black socks, and pulled himself a little back on the bed so he could lean against the wall comfortably.
“Would you like to drink something, Damon?” he asked in a terrible impression of my voice. “Why, yes, kind man. Good of you to ask.”
“Would you?” I asked, hiding my amusement well enough.
He unzipped the bag and produced a bottle of red wine. “I came prepared, if you have glasses.”
His easy smile relaxed something inside of me. “Let me check.”
He nodded and waited while I went into the kitchen for our floor and looked through the cabinets. I returned with two mugs when I couldn’t find any clean glasses. We lived like animals here, and I was okay with it.
Damon laughed out loud when he saw the mugs. “I love it. I fucking love it.”
“If you want it classy, it’ll cost you,” I said, shrugging.
He winked. “I want it cheap and dirty.”
I thrust the mug at him a little too hard. Honestly, it was only my jealousy that he could still be so relaxed despite everything. I wished I could do the same.
“Nervous?” he asked as he took a bottle opener from his backpack and screwed it into the cork. He pulled the cork easily and tossed it on the nightstand, then poured us a splash of wine each.
“No,” I said.
He measured me suspiciously. “It’s not your first time, is it?” A note of concern painted his voice.
“No,” I said. “What? Of course not.”
He shrugged. “Just asking. Wouldn’t do well if I were your first.”
“Well, you’re not,” I said. Not that the others were memorable. Damon had outshone them by little more than making out in the grass.
He didn’t ask me about the past again. He touched my mug with his, and we drank. The wine was fruity and light, refreshing in a new way and not at all depressingly dry.
I drank a bit more and exhaled with pleasure. This had seemed easier two nights ago, when we’d sat safely on the roof of the science building and the idea of really sleeping together was in the future.
“Got playing cards or something?” he asked.
“Um…why?” I asked.
Damon had that mischievous look on his face that disarmed me. “Oh, so I can beat you in a few games and lower your self-esteem,” he said.
I punched his shoulder. “I’ve got a deck of cards.”
“Good. Let’s play a game,” he said.
I thrust my mug to him to hold and got up, wiping my hands on my sweatpants again.
I opened the drawer of my desk and found the miscellaneous things I’d tossed in there, from rubber strings I wasn’t yet ready to throw away—you never know when you’ll need them—to the stubs of pencils that still had a sharpening or two left in them.
The deck of cards was worn and faded from many summers of playing games as kids.
Those were blurry summers in my mind. Nick had been there, as had Damon, so it must have been before high school.
I tossed them onto the bed and returned to sit near Damon.
“Are these the same old cards?” Damon asked, eyes full of wonder. “No fucking way.”
“I don’t throw things away if they’re still good,” I said.
“Yeah, I just saw your rubber bands,” he said. “But that you’ve never lost a card or two, that’s impressive.”
“What do you want to play?” I asked, quietly thankful that he hadn’t simply jumped into kissing and the rest of it.
It had been easier last weekend. Seeing him for the first time in a year had unlocked something wild in me.
Besides, we had met at the prologue to a frat orgy.
It wasn’t exactly the place for catching up and creating the mood.
This, though, was different. And that’s what made me nervous. This was just us, intimate, familiar, yet so foreign to one another that it seemed like an unbridgeable gap.
“Go Fish?” Damon proposed.
“Seriously?”
“Sure,” he said. He wasn’t kidding. “Here are the rules.”
“I know how to play it,” I said, taking the deck out of its worn pack and starting to shuffle.
Damon chuckled. “Extra rules, I mean. Each round, the loser takes something off.”
I pretended to be skeptical, but the truth was that it made my heart beat a little faster.
“Your blush says yes,” Damon said.
“I hate you,” I muttered, shuffling the deck and dealing the cards.
“Nah, you really don’t.”
He was right. I didn’t. I dealt the cards and put the deck in the middle. He picked a pair and set it down, then sorted the rest of his cards while I looked at my mismatched hand. “Got any aces?” I asked, wondering if socks counted separately or together.
“Go fish,” he said, his lips quivering on the verge of a smile. He could already see me undressing.
I picked up a card, and it was a seven.
“Remember how we used to pretend we were in Vegas?” Damon asked. “Got queens?”
I bit off a curse and handed him a queen. He paired them up and put them down. “But none of us knew how to play any of the gambling games.”
“So we played this instead,” I said, remembering it pretty vividly.
He drew another card and grinned, ridding himself of two more. The game went on with Damon pairing up two more queens and two more aces. I managed to get a pair of jacks, but Damon was leading by a lot.