Chapter I #3
I look at him — really look, maybe for the first time — and the stupid, inconvenient truth is that he's standing there in his tracksuit bottoms with his collar still damp looking at me like this is a perfectly reasonable conversation to be having at six AM.
Maybe for him it is. Maybe nothing is a big deal when you've never had to scramble for anything in your life and the most ironical part that I am self-aware enough to also know he looks like someone you'd make very bad decisions about, and I am apparently making one right now.
"If you tell anyone," I say. "Anyone. I will make your life very difficult."
The corner of his mouth moves. "How?!"
"I'll think of something."
He almost smiles. Not the cruel almost-smile from the first day — something different, one I haven't seen on him before. "Okay, scholarship."
I stand up. Cross my arms. "Don't make it weird."
"Wasn't planning to." His eyes drag down, slow, unbothered, taking their time over every inch he already had a preview of twenty minutes ago. He doesn't even pretend not to. "Take a seat."
"You don't have to look at me like that."
"Like what?" He says it easy, like he genuinely doesn't know — and that's the worst part, because he absolutely knows. "Sit down before you fall down, scholarship. You're swaying."
I'm not swaying. I sit anyway, because my legs have apparently decided to take orders from him now, and somewhere underneath the panic and the exhaustion and the absolute insanity of what I'm about to let happen, there's a low, traitorous heat that has nothing to do with dread and everything to do with the fact that Jake Edmund — Jake Edmund, who has spent four weeks making my life hell — is looking at my body like he's been thinking about exactly this for longer than twenty minutes.
I've spent six months treating myself like a problem to be hidden.
Nobody has ever looked at me like I'm something worth wanting.
I hate how much I want him to keep looking.
He crouches in front of me, slow, deliberate, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, and his eyes don't leave my chest the entire way down.
"Tell me if I do something wrong," he says.
"You'd better not."
His voice has dropped half an octave. "Actually, you know what — don't tell me anything at all."
I scoff in a failed mock.
He reaches up and his hands — big, warm, steadier than I expect — cup the underside of both breasts through the fabric of my sleep shirt, just taking the weight, and even that, just that, makes my breath go. He watches my face.
"Okay?"
I nod. I don't trust my voice.
He starts slow. Methodical, just like he said — both hands working in a steady rhythm, thumbs pressing in toward the centre and drawing forward, again and again, like he's done this a thousand times and has all the time in the world to do it again.
The relief is immediate, so much of it at once that I have to press my lips together and stare at the wall to keep from making a sound.
He finds a rhythm and settles into it, reading my body the way you'd read something familiar, and the first hot rush of milk lets go all at once — an actual physical give, like something finally unknotting after six months — and my whole body sags into the chair.
"There it is," he murmurs. Not smug. Just satisfied, low, like he's been waiting for that.
He eases the sleep shirt up over my head.
I lift my arms and let him, and the bra straps slide down after it, and then I'm sitting in his desk chair with my breasts completely bare and full and flushed, nipples tight and dark and already wet at the tips, and Jake just looks at them for a second — really looks, like he's cataloguing — before his hands come back, skin against skin now, and the first full squeeze has me biting down on a sound that comes out anyway.
"Easy," he says, quiet, almost soothing, and keeps going.
His thumbs circle in tighter and tighter and the second wave hits harder than the first — milk spilling from both nipples in twin thin streams, catching the morning light, running over his fingers, dripping onto his forearms — and the relief is so total it borders on something else entirely, something low and unfamiliar pulling tight between my thighs that I don't have the energy left to be ashamed of.
My head tips back. My breath comes out in something closer to a moan than I'd like to admit.
Jake goes still.
I lift my head. He's staring at his own hands — at the milk running over his knuckles, dripping from his fingers — with an intensity that makes my stomach drop in a completely different way than it did this morning.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he brings his hand to his mouth and licks it clean. His eyes never leave mine.
I forget how to breathe.
"Again," he says. His voice has gone rough, stripped down to something I've never heard from him — none of the easy cruelty, none of the charm, just raw want with nowhere left to hide.
He leans in, mouth hovering an inch from my chest, breath warm against my wet, aching nipple.
"Let me taste you properly this time. Please. "
Please. From Jake Edmund.
I should say no. I should say this is not what we agreed and get your mouth off me and absolutely not . I know exactly what I should say.
"Okay," I breathe instead, and thread my fingers into his hair, and pull him in.
His mouth closes around my nipple and the sound he makes — low, helpless, like he's the one being undone — is the filthiest thing I've ever heard, and milk floods into his mouth in slow, steady pulses, and he groans and drinks like he can't get enough, like this is exactly what he's been starving for.
My fingers tighten in his hair. My hips shift on their own.
I am soaked, and shaking, and completely, hopelessly undone by my own bully on his knees in front of me, drinking me down like I'm the best thing he's ever had.
Outside, the campus slowly wakes up. In here, nothing is the same as it was an hour ago, and we both know it, and neither of us says so.