7. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
“Um, yeah, just precautions to keep me safe,” I said easily, like I wasn’t mentally setting everything on fire.
“Do they think…someone is watching you?” Lena asked. “Do you have a stalker? I mean, beyond the dean-mandated ones?”
“No,” I said. “It’s nothing like that. But if you’re uncomfortable…”
She shook her head and laughed. “The only reason I’m uncomfortable is because I’m uncaffeinated.”
“Yes. Sorry. I’ll be right back.” But before I got those espressos, I paused in the living room to slip off my shoes, and then I tiptoed down the hallway.
Malcolm’s and Kade’s doors both stood open, their rooms empty. Same with the bathroom.
Outside of Connor’s closed door, I held my breath, pressed my ear to the wood…and jumped away like it had scorched my skin.
The sounds coming from inside…
Unmistakable groans.
Connor was jerking off.
Holding my breath, I pressed my ear to the door again.
“Unnnnnh.” This one came through gritted teeth.
An image of him popped into my head, unbidden, but every cell in my brain welcomed it, coming alive to sing like a whole damn church choir feeling the spirit for the first time. It was as vivid as if I actually had X-ray vision and could see through the door.
He was lying on his back, his black jeans around his thighs as if he hadn’t had the patience to get them all the way off.
Fisting his rock-hard cock. Hips raised ever so slightly off the mattress.
His face beautifully contorted in a way only passion could do.
A sheen of sweat on his forehead. The first drop of pre-cum…
I swallowed hard, squeezing my thighs together.
Then I could see what he was seeing behind his closed eyelids.
Me.
My naked torso, my tits bouncing, nipples pebbled…
What the fuck? I didn’t usually picture shit like that in full HD.
Somebody has quite the imagination, and that somebody is me.
I couldn’t see through doors, and I certainly couldn’t see someone else’s heat-soaked fantasies.
But damn, it had looked so real.
And now I couldn’t unsee it.
Fuck.
“Tuesday?”
At the sound of Lena’s voice, I scrambled away from the door, whipping around to plaster on what I hoped was an innocent smile for her.
She’d come into the hallway, too.
“I went into the kitchen, and you weren’t there, so…” She shrugged, making her red ringlets bounce around her shoulders.
She was probably thinking something like, So…I came to find you and found you eavesdropping on your roommate who’s practicing his wrist exercises for the World Wanker Olympics.
“I was just checking to see if Connor wanted an espresso, too,” I explained.
Her brows lifted an almost imperceptible notch. “And does he?”
I pressed my finger to my lips as I walked back to her, past her, and gestured for her to follow me to the kitchen.
“I didn’t ask. He was snoring already. The dude does like his naps,” I lied.
Was it true? Hell if I knew, but she didn’t know either.
Unless…
Lena and Connor could know each other, I reminded myself. They could be a happy couple pretending to be strangers, for all I knew. My literally crashing into Lena could’ve been pre-arranged, orchestrated by Xander or Connor or both.
We returned to my room with our espressos. I offered Lena first dibs—bed or desk—and she proclaimed she was more of a sprawl-out-on-the-floor type of girl, so we sprawled out on the floor.
“Should we actually work on the assignment?” she asked skeptically.
I nodded. I needed to think about something that was not Connor jerking off. “Might as well. Hey, do you think I could borrow your notes from today? I was so lost.”
Mostly because I couldn’t pay attention, given my overcrowded thoughts.
I glanced up to see an expression flash across Lena’s face…an expression like I had just asked if I could borrow the underwear she was currently wearing to scratch and sniff.
“Uh… Oh…” She took a long sip of her espresso. “I… I didn’t take any notes today. I was lost too. So lost.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing. “I was going to ask you to borrow yours.”
But…
I pressed my lips together.
I saw her scribbling like mad in her notebook.
Maybe she just had terrible handwriting or wrote in shorthand and was embarrassed about it or something?
The memory of her clutching her pen was immediately replaced by my mental picture of Connor gripping his cock.
“Well, maybe we both need to reread the chapter Ellis was lecturing on before we proceed?” I asked.
Nothing like dry-ass academia to chase away the vision of Connor working his cock like he was getting paid by the stroke. Right? Right. Totally gonna do the trick.
“Let’s do,” she said, and we both cracked open our textbooks.
I flipped to chapter fifteen and read the first paragraph.
Where had Connor disappeared to, though, and why couldn’t I pinpoint exactly how many days it had been since I had seen him?
And why the fuck did I care?
The words swam in front of my eyes, refusing to keep themselves in their sentences, while a perfectly clear mental picture of Connor’s hand skimming over his glorious abs formed instead.
Unh. Unh. Unh.
I blinked and glanced over at Lena, who seemed to find chapter fifteen absolutely enthralling.
I didn’t want to interrupt her if she was truly absorbed and concentrating, but if I sat here thinking about Connor’s sex sounds, I was either going to need to change my panties or go to the bathroom and rub one out myself or both.
“Out of all the colleges in the world, what made you decide on Whispering Ivy?” I asked.
She looked up and then rolled over onto her back, flinging her arms wide. “Oh, thank God. I was hoping you would interrupt. And actually, I wanted to ask you the same thing.”
Flipping back over on her stomach, she propped herself up on her elbows and smiled at me. “Why did you choose Whispering Ivy?”
So, yes, I could go juvenile and play the whole I-asked-you-first card…or I could just tell the truth and hope she did the same.
But I hesitated.
When Lena first told me about the project she was working on for a class, researching the Vitae Sovereign and Seven Forces of Life, I’d had two thoughts.
The first, did the supposed secret society of gods she was digging into have anything to do with the Lifewell Mom sent me to Whispering Ivy to find out about?
The second, was it possible that she was a mole sent to befriend me and trap me into mentioning the Lifewell, to see if I would, after both Connor and Xander had warned me to never say the word again?
But now I wondered if it went deeper than that. Maybe she was on a whole fact-finding mission to get all the info from me she could for Xander about why I really came to Whispering Ivy and what I was doing here?
“My mom wanted me to come here,” I answered.
It was the truth. Was it the whole truth? No, but even I didn’t know that. Yet. It did, however, line up with what our beloved Dean Bennett already knew, though, just in case she was taking my every word back to him.
“And you?” I asked.
“Same,” she said.
Oh, I doubt there’s anything the same about our paths here, I thought.
“So. How’s that project on the…what was it called? Sovereign Verity?” I asked, intentionally flubbing the name. “How’s that coming?”
She laughed but not harshly. “Vitae Sovereign,” she corrected. “It’s going okay. Thankfully, we have the entire semester for the independent study because it’s going to take me that long. The information is… Well, let’s just say not everyone wants it to be found.”
“Oh, that sucks,” I said.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Count to five. Ask her. Hope you don’t regret it.
One…
If you know what’s good for you, you will forget you ever heard the word Lifewell. And if I find out that you’ve even thought that word? I will make you fucking regret it.
I pushed away the memory Connor’s threat, which somehow my mind had chosen to hold on to, verbatim, and trot out to me right then, while I couldn’t recall a single thing Ellis had said in class an hour ago.
Two…
Geulia, this is an order. Do not ever say the term Lifewell again. Do not write it down. Do not think it.
Oh, goody. I had a perfect memory when it came to Xander’s words, too.
Three…
I could say whatever I wanted, and they weren’t going to do shit.
I didn’t know how I knew, but I fucking knew.
Still, my heart beat like a wild animal in my chest.
“Lena, does your project have anything to do with the Lifewell?” I blurted.
This might be a slight exaggeration, but about a million micro-expressions flitted over her face in the span of a nanosecond. The sum total of them? She absolutely had heard the term Lifewell before.
Her eyes darted towards my doorway. “Dammit, I wish you had a door right now,” she whispered. She sat up and scooched so close to me that our knees almost touched. “How do you know about the Lifewell?”
Yeah, I’m never telling you that, like, ever.
“It has something to do with your research.” I stated it as the fact it had to be.
She bit her lip, peeking at my doorless doorway once again.
Huffing out a big-ass breath that told me she’d had eggs for breakfast, she closed her eyes. “The Lifewell is—supposedly—the very reason the Sovereign Vitae exist.”
Blood pounded through my veins, hammering every pulse point, roaring in my ears.
Also, the Lifewell had something to do with gods. She’d told me herself in the coffee shop. What the actual fuck was my life?
I glanced over my shoulder, sprang up, and tiptoed to the hallway, doing another check. No Malcolm. No Kade. I pressed my ear against Connor’s door, and this time, thank god—er…the gods?—there was snoring.
“We can talk,” I said to Lena when I came back to my room and sat down again.
“Can we?” She looked around, taking in every nook and cranny. “How do you know this place isn’t bugged? There could be surveillance cameras or…”
That thought gave me the heebie-jeebies for damn sure. I swept my gaze over the room as well. I didn’t see anything, but if there was anything to see, I knew damn well it wouldn’t be anything that could be spotted by the naked eye.