CHAPTER 2
Monique lay flat on her back, her bare shoulders pressed against the stiff, starch-heavy cotton of her fitted sheet.
Her body felt impossibly heavy, weighted down by a deep, bone-settling exhaustion that had nothing to do with tiredness and everything to do with muscle memory.
Every limb was loose, humming with the low, persistent vibration that lingers in the body after a long, brutal bout in the ring—or after a night spent giving up ground she had spent six years defending.
She had crept out of Denise’s bed just as the first cold, blue light of dawn was beginning to bleed through the cheap aluminum blinds of Denise’s third-floor room.
She had moved like a ghost, gathering her dark Levi’s, her crop top, and her leather boots off the floor while Denise lay fast asleep, wrapped in a tangled nest of yellow blankets, her chest rising and falling in deep, untroubled rhythm.
Monique had paused at the threshold, her hand resting on the icy brass doorknob, watching the smooth, dark rise of Denise’s shoulder in the gloom.
Her heart had knocked against her ribs with a sudden, terrifying panic—a sudden, animal impulse to turn around, crawl back under those covers, and hide inside Denise’s skin forever.
Instead, she had fled.
She had slipped back down the silent, echoing stairwells to her own room on the second floor, locking her door behind her with a sharp, frantic twist of the deadbolt.
Now, she lay on her own mattress, her gaze locked onto that water stain on her ceiling.
Her room smelled of stale air, cold air from the window, and a thick, unmistakable musk that belonged entirely to Denise Richards.
It was trapped in the weave of the single pillow tucked under Monique’s neck—a blend of Irish Spring soap, raw shea butter, and the sweet, dark, slick heat that had flooded between Denise’s thighs while the campus slept outside.
Monique didn’t move. She didn't shift her heels against the sheet, terrified that the slightest movement would break the thin glass of the morning and force her back into her own head.
Behind her closed eyelids, the night kept playing itself back in vivid, merciless high definition.
She felt the cold, hard bite of the white subway tiles against her shoulder blades in the gym shower stall where it had started after hours.
She heard the wet, desperate rise of their intense moans straining over the roar of the showerhead—a sound so raw, breathless, and uninhibited that it had made her jaw tighten until her molars ached.
She saw Denise—her chocolate skin dripping with water, her dark locs slicked back over her broad, athletic shoulders, her brown eyes wide and completely unreadable—kneeling on the wet concrete floor between Monique’s thighs, her face slick with steam and spray, looking up with an unholy hunger before saying those eight words that had stripped Monique down to her marrow:
I want that pretty pussy in my mouth.
She had said it like an invoice. Like a simple statement of fact, as natural as asking for a glass of water on a hot July afternoon on Seven Mile. And then she had taken it.
And then Denise's dorm room.
The space had been tiny, claustrophobic, illuminated only by the orange glare of the sodium-vapor streetlights spilling through the blinds.
They had tumbled onto the narrow bed, legs tangling, fingers tearing at wet cotton and damp denim, until the mattress groaned under their combined weight.
Monique remembered the slow, brutal grind of their hips—thigh against thigh, wet friction against wet friction—until every piece of armor Monique had forged since her father walked out the door when she was seven years old had simply crumbled into dust.
She could still feel the phantom pressure of Denise’s tongue.
It hadn't been clumsy. It hadn't been timid. Denise had worked her mouth with the ruthless, practiced precision of a master craftsman, circling the swollen pearl of her clit, sucking it into the wet heat of her mouth, using her thumb to drag across Monique’s inner lips while two long fingers worked deep inside her, finding that soft, swollen place that made Monique’s back arch completely off the bed.
Monique had screamed—a low, broken, desperate sound that had torn out of her throat, a sound she didn't recognize, a sound that belonged to a girl who was soft, needy, and completely undone.
A slow, unmistakable throb began between her legs now, sharp and persistent in the early morning air.
Monique pressed her knees together, squeezing her thighs tight, but the movement only amplified the swollen, tender ache.
Her clit was puffy, raw, and exquisitely sensitive, inflamed from hours of Denise’s tongue, fingers, and the heavy friction of their bodies scissoring together until the sun began to turn the sky gray over the Detroit River.
God.
She dragged both hands down her face, her palms rough against her cheeks. Nobody had ever touched her like that.
Not the clumsy, sweat-stained boys from her neighborhood in high school who thought fingering a girl was a timed race to see who could make her wince first. Not the boy from the track team who had pushed her against his mother’s washing machine during a house party in the eleventh grade, reeking of cheap gin and promising her the world while he tried to rip the zipper out of her jeans.
Not even that one girl—Kendra—from her senior year, who had pulled her behind the rusted metal bleachers after gym class, pressed a frantic, trembling kiss onto Monique’s mouth that had tasted of cherry lip gloss, and then spent the next four months pretending Monique was invisible whenever they passed each other in the hallway.
Denise hadn't pretended. Denise had touched her like she had bought the deed to Monique’s body weeks ago.
She had touched her like she knew every scar, every tight muscle, every hidden, guarded corner of her frame—as if she had been sitting in the dark studying a map of Monique Gray while Monique was busy pretending she didn't need a single soul on earth to survive.
Monique forced herself to sit up.
The motion sent a sharp, hot reminder through her core, her lower belly muscles tightening in protest. She swung her legs over the edge of the mattress, her bare feet hitting the cold linoleum floor.
The air in the small room was chilly. Her phone, resting on the small wooden desk next to a stack of untouched Criminal Procedure handbooks, lit up with a dim notification: 6:14 AM.
Introductory Psychology started at seven-fifteen in the basement of the Science Building. She had an hour.
She grabbed her black towel from the back of the single chair, gathered her plastic caddy of soap and cocoa butter, and padded down the long, silent hallway toward the communal bathroom.
Her bare feet made a soft, sticking sound against the linoleum.
The residence hall was dead quiet; most of the floor was still buried under heavy comforters, sleeping off the cheap draft beer from the Tuesday night house parties down on Forest Avenue or recovering from late-night cramming sessions.
The bathroom smelled of mildew, old bleach, and rust. Monique walked past the row of chipped porcelain sinks, stepped into the end shower stall, and shoved the deadbolt into place. The iron latch was cold against her thumb.
She turned the brass handles as far to the left as they would go. The pipes behind the wall groaned—a high, metallic screech that rattled through the tile—before a hard, stinging spray of scalding water burst from the showerhead.
She stripped off her oversized gray t-shirt and stepped directly into the heat.
The steam rose around her immediately, thick and white, curling up toward the cracked plaster ceiling and obscuring her reflection in the small square mirror mounted near the door.
Monique closed her eyes and let the hot water pound against her shoulders, her collarbones, her full, heavy breasts, and the flat, defined plane of her stomach.
The heat was sharp enough to turn her dark skin a faint, flushed rose, but she didn't pull back.
She wanted the sting. She needed something to ground her, something physical to pull her out of the suffocating slipstream of her own thoughts.
Without her consent, her right hand drifted downward.
Her fingers were slick with water as they brushed past the dark, neat patch of hair between her thighs, sliding down into the deep, hidden cleft.
The moment her middle finger touched the swollen pearl of her clit, a sharp, gasping breath broke from her lips.
The tissue was so sensitive, so thoroughly worked over from the night before, that even the gentle pressure of the shower’s spray felt like an electric current snapping across her nerves.
In the rising steam, the memory hit her with physical force: Denise’s mouth, heavy and wet; Denise’s locs trailing across Monique’s stomach; the low vibration of Denise’s throat against her inner thigh as she purred against her skin.
A soft, embarrassing whimpering sound escaped Monique’s throat, lost in the roar of the running water.
She wanted it again.
The realization hit her like a punch to the solar plexus, knocking the wind clean out of her lungs.
She didn't just want it; she craved it with an embarrassing, dangerous intensity that made her stomach turn. She wanted Denise back on her knees in this dirty shower stall. She wanted those wide, soft, chocolate lips wrapped around her, sucking her until her knees gave out against the wet tile. She wanted to come so hard her vision went dark, with Denise’s name torn from her throat, with nowhere left to run, nowhere left to hide, and no hard look left to protect her.
A single tear welled up in the corner of her right eye, tracked down her cheek, and was instantly consumed by the hot water pouring from the showerhead. Then another followed it.