Chapter 41 – Waylon
chapter
forty-one
Waylon
I figured out I was in trouble sitting in the tutoring center, smelling burnt coffee and waiting for the sound of her key card at the door.
I’d gotten there thirty minutes early and been counting down ever since. We’d barely seen each other all week, just a hand brush in a hallway and a voice note at two a.m. Thirty minutes early was the soonest I could do something about that.
This morning, the only sound had been a few guys who’d hauled themselves into the hot tub before noon, beers cracking, somebody’s speaker going. I cut across the back lot with my hood up and nobody looked twice. That was the whole point of living back there.
The door beeped. I knew her walk before I saw her. I didn’t even have to look up.
She came around the cubicle wall with her hair up. That was the first thing. She almost never wore it up, and the back of her neck was right there, bare, and I couldn’t think straight.
She set her bag down at the front table and looked at me. The center was empty except for the hum of the vending machine and a printer warming up somewhere.
I crossed the floor and caught her hand. “C’mere.”
I pulled her into the supply room and shut the door behind us.
It was the size of a coat closet. Reams of paper, a mop bucket, a shelf of toner that had probably expired. It was dark, and she put her palm flat on my chest like she meant to push me back. She didn’t.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” she whispered.
“You come here often?” I whispered as I held her close.
“Waylon.” She giggled it more than said it.
“I just needed to hold you. I woke up missing you.”
She went soft against me, and I felt her chest rise under my hand.
“Me too,” she said. Then she pulled back an inch, and her voice changed.
“Okay, but you know what was weird? Marcus was outside when I went out for my run this morning. Just — standing there. Across the street. Like he was waiting for me.”
My stomach dropped.
Good thing I left at one, I thought. Good thing I’d started parking the truck three streets over and walking the last block. I’d been planning routes and timing and which porch lights stayed on, and I’d quit pretending that was an accident.
“Huh,” I said, which was a hell of a thing to say. “That’s weird.”
“Right? He doesn’t even know what time I run.” She shivered then, and it had nothing to do with Marcus, because I’d dropped my head and put my mouth against the side of her neck. I wasn’t kissing her so much as breathing her in.
Coconut and clean sweat and the warm-skin smell that I’d started dreaming about, which was embarrassing all on its own. I just held her with both arms, her cheek against my collarbone, her pulse going under my lips.
“Fuck,” I said into her skin. “I’d kill to wake up with you in my bed.”
She tilted her head, baring more of her throat without seeming to know she was doing it, and I kissed the spot just behind her ear. She shivered hard, a full-body thing, her fingers fisting in my shirt.
“I wish,” she breathed. “That’s — that’s a little dangerous.”
It was. The draft, the pact, whose girl she was supposed to be.
Aaron’s voice in my head telling me to stay clean.
And still I kissed her, slow and soft, just her mouth and mine.
My chest pulled tight, and the only clear thought I had was that I wanted this all the time, every morning, not just stolen moments in the dark.
Christ. I knew I was falling. I’d known it for weeks and told myself I could still pull back. I couldn’t. I was already gone.
And I was so damn tired of hiding her.
I meant for the kiss to stay sweet. And it did, for about four seconds.
Then her mouth opened under mine, and my hand found the back of her neck where the hair was up, and the skin was bare, and that was it. I tilted her head and went deeper, and she made a sound, a small one, half surprise and half want, and it went straight through me.
I backed her up until her shoulders met the metal shelf. A box shifted somewhere above us. I didn’t care. She tasted like the coffee she’d had on the way over and the mint underneath it, and her hand had come up to my jaw, and she was kissing me back like she’d been thinking about it all week too.
“God, you are so sexy. You’re torturing me,” I murmured against her mouth, and felt her laugh under my lips, breathless.
“You’re the one who pulled me in here.”
“Worth it.”
I kissed the corner of her mouth, the line of her jaw, and back to her mouth. She made that sound again, lower this time, and I felt it in my dick.
I caught her bottom lip between mine, sucked gently, and her knees buckled the tiniest bit.
I felt it because I had a hand at the small of her back keeping her against me, and the second she swayed, she pressed full against me, hip to hip, and there was nowhere for either of us to hide what that did.
Then her hand slid down between us and found me through my jeans, and I forgot every reason to pull back. I groaned into her mouth, low, and she swallowed it.
Her palm pressed, then dragged, and my hips followed before I could stop them, once, then twice. She had me through the denim, just enough pressure to make my whole body go stupid, and I had to break the kiss to breathe.
“Josie.” Her name came out wrecked. I pressed my forehead to hers. “Baby.”
“Mmm?”
“If you keep doing that, I’m gonna embarrass myself in a supply closet.”
She did it again, slower. I felt her smile against my mouth.
“Evil,” I breathed.
“Mm-hmm.”
I caught her wrists, then pinned them above her head.
“There,” I said. “Safer.”
“For who?”
“Me.” I dropped my mouth to her throat. “Definitely me.”
Then I slid a hand up her sweater and palmed her full breast. Her breath hitched, and I grinned. “Turnabout is fair play.”
Her nipple was already hard under my palm. I squeezed her gently, my hand overflowing, before I rolled it between my thumb and forefinger.
“Waylon —”
“Shh.” I pinched, careful, just enough, and her whole body jolted against mine. Her wrists pulled against my hand above her head, but not to get free, just to feel it.
“That’s not fair,” she breathed.
“You started it.”
“I didn’t —”
I pinched again, a little harder, and she lost the end of whatever she’d been about to say. Her head fell back against the shelf.
I let go of her wrists because I needed both hands, sliding one into her leggings, past her lacy panties.
“Fuuuck.” My forehead dropped against hers, my breath shot to hell. “You feel so good.”
She wrapped her hand around me again, stroking, her wrist working in the tight space between our bodies, and I had two fingers in her and my thumb where she needed it. Her breath came apart against my jaw. Her hips chased my hand.
“God, I’ve missed this,” I breathed into her hair. “Missed you, Flash.”
“Waylon — I’m —”
I caught the sound against the corner of her mouth, soft, even as my fingers curled exactly where she needed them. “So wet for me. I love how you drip for me.”
She came on my hand and bit down on my shoulder to kill any sound, her whole body clamping, her grip on me going almost too tight. I held her through it, my mouth at her temple, feeling her shake.
Her phone buzzed in her bag on the floor.
We both froze. It buzzed again.
“Goddammit,” she breathed.
“Don’t,” I said, but she was already pulling her hand back, already easing off me, already reaching down. I slowly slid my fingers out of her, and she made a tiny ruined sound I would replay all day.
She got the phone to her face, and I watched her face fall.
“It’s Marcus,” she whispered. “He’s-he’s here. He’s at the front desk. He came to see me.”
“This is getting out of hand,” I said.
“Fix your face,” she hissed at me, fixing her clothes, smoothing her sweater, patting at the hair that was somehow still up. She opened the door, checked the hall, and went back out to him.
I gave it a ten-count with my back against the wall and my heart hammering.
I could hear them. Her voice going bright and careful the way it did around him, leading him down the hall toward the tutoring room. Marcus’s voice, easy and entitled, the voice of a guy who didn’t have a care in the world.
I heard that fucker ask, “Doesn’t Johnson work here too?”
Josie paused a beat. “I guess. Schedules change weekly. I don’t really keep track.”
I waited another five minutes for my hands to steady before leaving the closet and heading into the main room.
Marcus was leaning over her chair, one hand on the back of it, standing close enough that she’d had to angle away from him. He looked up when I came in.
“Kane,” I said and gave him a nod, nothing more.
I dropped into the chair across the table and started laying out my stuff — laptop, the chem book, a pen.
I took my time. And then, with Marcus’s eyes on me and Josie’s eyes on me and the whole room quiet, I lifted my hand and dragged my first two fingers slow across my bottom lip, into my mouth, and tasted her. I held it one beat too long.
Heat climbed Josie’s neck, and she stared very hard at her monitor. Marcus’s eyes narrowed, going from her to me and back.
I stood before he could put it together.
“Gonna hit the head before we get started. Let Coulter know I’ll be right back,” I said and walked out.