Chapter II
That first time, after, nothing else happens.
I don't know what I expected — maybe nothing, maybe everything, maybe some version of the world tilting permanently off its axis.
What actually happens is Jake sits back on his heels, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand like he's just remembered he's a person and not whatever he was a second ago, and says, "Right.
Okay," in a voice that's still not steady.
He gets me a towel. He doesn't look at me while I get dressed, which I'm fairly sure is the first considerate thing he's done in four weeks, and then he goes to class like it's a normal Monday, and I sit on my bed for ten minutes just breathing.
That's day one of whatever this is. He drinks from me. He leaves. That's it.
Three days later, it's become a routine now.
I don't know how it happened so fast… except I do, really.
My body doesn't negotiate, and Jake turns out to be disgustingly efficient when he wants to be.
Every morning, ten minutes before his alarm, before practice.
He's usually half-dressed already when he comes over — in his shorts, hair still sleep-flat, eyes barely open, like he rolled the six feet from his bed to mine before he's properly conscious.
I sit in the chair. He kneels in front of me, and even kneeling he takes up most of the space between my desk and the bed, shoulders blocking the early light from the window.
His hands find my breasts before I've even finished settling, thumbs working into that same steady rhythm, and every morning my body gives the same way — nipples tightening hard under his mouth, the ache building fast and then letting go all at once, milk spilling almost the second his lips close around me, like it's been waiting for him specifically.
It's become so normal that I barely register the absurdity of it anymore.
Jake Edmund, on his knees, mouth on my breast, drinking like it's breakfast, while outside the window the rest of Whitmore is still asleep.
What's strange — what I notice and then immediately don't want to have noticed — is that he's different.
Not soft, God, not soft, he's still exactly the kind of insufferable that makes me want to throw a textbook at his head — left his trainers in the dead centre of the floor again this morning, exactly where I'd trip over them, didn't even pretend to apologise when I did, ate the last of my granola bars yesterday and left the wrapper on my desk like a crime scene.
He's still cocky. He still takes up too much space and knows it and uses it.
But something's shifted in what he calls me.
Scholarship used to be a weapon — careful, scholarship — like knowing where I came from was the whole joke.
He still uses it, mostly when he's being a brat, mostly with that same edge.
But cupcake is new. Cupcake comes out in the mornings, low and half-asleep, right before his mouth is on me, and it doesn't sound like a weapon at all.
The bully thing — the cold, deliberate, careful, scholarship thing — has gone quiet, at least the worst of it. He hasn't said anything actually cruel since that morning. He doesn't look at me like I'm a mere mortal anymore. He looks at me like —
I don't finish that thought. My skin does it for me… a full-body flush that starts low and crawls up through my chest, the kind I can't explain away as just the milk.
By the third morning it's just what we do.
Five-fifty, the chair, his knees on the carpet, his mouth on me, and the rest of the world hasn't started yet.
The first time it felt like the end of the world…
my whole life cracking open, both of us undone, his hands shaking as much as mine.
Now my nipples are already hard before he touches me.
My body starts getting ready the second I hear him rustling out of his bed, milk building fast, breasts heavy and tight, like it knows.
Like he's who it's been waiting for. He takes his time about it now — tongue circling slow, drawing it out, making me squirm in the chair before he even seals his mouth around me — and I've stopped pretending the sounds I make are just relief.
I've started watching him instead — the flex of his jaw, the sounds he makes low in his throat when the milk comes, the way his hands tighten on me right before the second stream is milked out, like he feels it coming before I do.
— and telling myself that's nothing. That's just getting used to a roommate.
I'm getting very good at lying to myself. I have weeks of practice.
It doesn't last.
***
It happens on a Thursday, which feels like it should mean something, except nothing about this has ever cared what day it is.
I'm settling into the chair, still half-asleep, my sleep shirt already in his hand because we've done this enough times now that I don't even flinch when he reaches for the hem.
Jake's kneeling in front of me in the grey shorts he always wears for this — the soft worn-out ones, not his practice gear, the ones he's clearly rolled straight out of bed in every single morning this week — and that's the only reason I notice.
Because there's nowhere for him to hide it.
He's hard.
Not a little. Not the kind of thing I could talk myself into not seeing.
The fabric's doing nothing to disguise it, straining thick along his thigh, throbbing in a rhythm, and for one long second neither of us says anything because I'm staring and he's watching me stare and the whole room goes very, very quiet.
"Don't," he says, low, before I can get a single word out. Not sharp. Almost embarrassed, which is a tone I didn't know Jake Edmund's voice was capable of making.
"I wasn't going to say anything." I was absolutely going to say something.
"You were thinking it so loud I could hear it." His hands are already coming up, finding my breasts like this is just a normal morning, like his cock isn't tenting his shorts six inches from my knee. "It's not — this isn't about that."
"Sure."
"Chelsea." His thumbs press in, and my body answers before my brain does, the ache flaring hot and immediate. "It's just what happens. Don't make it a thing."
"I'm not making it anything. You're the one who brought it up."
"You were literally staring at my dick."
"I was staring at the evidence , there's a difference—"
His mouth closes around me and the rest of the sentence dies somewhere in my throat.
He drinks like he always does, slow at first and then not, and I can feel him hard against my knee the whole time, can feel the way his hips shift like he's trying to get comfortable and failing, like having me in his mouth and nowhere to put the rest of it is its own kind of punishment.
He doesn't touch himself. Doesn't so much as glance down.
Just kneels there and takes what he came for and lets the rest of it tighten and ache and strain against denim he's clearly regretting wearing this morning.
I should look away. I don't. I watch his jaw work, watch the muscle in his throat move when he swallows, watch the way his fingers dig into the soft skin under my breast like he's holding himself somewhere — and the whole time I'm aware of him hard and ignored and right there, three inches from my hand, like a question neither of us is going to ask.
When he finally pulls back, his mouth's wet and his eyes are darker than I've ever seen them, and he doesn't wipe his mouth this time. Doesn't say right, okay and bolt for class.
He looks at me. Looks at me like he's doing the math on something and not liking the answer he's getting.
"This is getting complicated," he says.
"You think?"
"I didn't ask for it to get complicated." He stands, and the shift in his shorts is impossible to miss from this angle, and he doesn't bother hiding that he sees me notice. "I asked for milk. That's it. That was the whole deal."
"And now?"
He doesn't answer that. He grabs his shirt off my desk chair, and at the door he stops, hand on the frame, not looking back at me.
"Tomorrow," he says. "Same time." A pause, like the next part costs him something. "Wear the other shirt. The thin one."
Then he's in the bathroom, and the lock clicks behind him, and I sit there listening to the shower not start for a full thirty seconds — long enough that there's only one honest explanation for what he's actually doing in there — before the water finally turns on.
I should be embarrassed for him. I'm not.
It takes me a full minute, sitting there with my heart going stupid and fast, to understand exactly what he meant by the shirt — and exactly how much worse this is about to get.
I don't see Jake again until almost ten that night, and I spend every hour in between completely unable to think about anything else.
I sit through a three-hour seminar on case law I will not remember a single word of.
I tell myself I'm going to the library to study, which is a lie so transparent I'd call myself on it if there were anyone around to call myself out to.
I stand in front of my closet for four straight minutes, holding the thin shirt — the one he meant, the one that hides nothing once it's wet, the one I haven't worn since any of this started — and I put it back.
Then I take it back out. Then I hang it on the hook by the door where I'll see it and have no choice about it later, because some decisions are easier to make for past-me than for the version of me standing here right now.
By six, my chest is already aching in a way that has nothing to do with how much I've leaked today, which is its own new and unwelcome category of problem.
I tell myself it's the milk. It's always the milk. The milk doesn't care what time it is or whether Jake Edmund is in the building, it just builds and tightens and reminds me it's there, and today it's reminding me harder and earlier than usual, and that's all this is.
That's all this is.