26
There Are Worse Problems to Have
Nash
The window is still dark when I open my eyes, and I stay exactly where I am.
Kylie is turned away from me with her back against my chest and my arm over her.
Her hair is everywhere, some of it on my face, and it smells like soap.
Her leg is hooked back between mine, one hand curled under her chin, and she’s out cold, breathing slow, and the whole left side of me is warm from her. She stayed.
I lie there and try to figure out how fucked I am.
I’ve done this before: let a girl stay and regretted it in the morning, spent the first hour of the day working out how to get her out.
That isn’t happening right now. I close my eyes and breathe in her shampoo and let her keep me warm.
I don’t reach for my phone, because I don’t want to wake her.
What I want is for her to wake up so I can see her eyes, and it’s so far outside anything I recognize that I lie there with my face in her hair for a while.
This is bad.
There’s a strip of skin at the back of her neck where her hair has fallen forward, and I kiss it without thinking.
She’s fucking precious asleep, all that attitude at rest. I kiss her again and let my tongue drag.
Wake up and look at me. My only regret about the night is sleeping in my jeans, which is its own kind of torture right now.
She makes a small sound without fully waking and pushes back against me and stays there. That about finishes me. I kiss her again, lower, where her neck meets her shoulder, and this time, she stretches and her hand comes back and finds my forearm.
“Mm.”
“Morning,” I whisper, and glance at Rafe’s bed. Empty. Perfect.
“What time is it?”
I check my phone. “Three fifty-four.”
Her voice is wrecked from sleep, her eyes are still closed, and her thumb is moving on my arm.
“Do you want me to stop?” I ask, and set my teeth lightly against her skin, then kiss it.
She stretches again and presses back into me, and then she rolls over in my arms to face me. I push her hair out of her face, and she smiles when she sees me.
“No,” she whispers.
I go to kiss her and get her cheekbone, because she’s still moving, and she laughs, low and rough against my jaw. “That’s my face.”
“I’ll kiss you wherever I want.”
She puts her hand on the side of my neck and kisses me properly, slowly, and I’m not ready for it. Last night we went at each other like animals, but this is tender. She’s in no hurry, and I let her set the pace, and I’m about to lose my mind.
“How’s your head?” I murmur.
“Just a headache. I don’t feel sick.”
“Good.”
She hooks a leg over mine, and her hand slides up my back over my shirt, all the way up my spine, and I shiver.
She explores me over the fabric and never once reaches under it, and she doesn’t ask.
I said two words to her about it last night with my hand around her wrist, and she remembers.
I kiss her like I’ve got something to say about that, and I don’t say it.
I don’t do anything slow, though. It’s all or nothing with me, and right now, it’s all.
I reach between her legs, and she’s soaking.
She says my name into my mouth, and that’s it for me.
She laughs, knowing exactly how impatient I am, unbuttons my jeans, and pulls my dick out, and I kiss her while she strokes me.
Then she slides her thong off and turns and presses back against me, and I’m gone.
I don’t even think about a condom until I’m already inside her, and she moans.
“Nash,” she says through her teeth. “You feel so fucking good. Don’t stop.”
I take her chin and talk into her ear. “You like feeling all of me?”
She arches to take me deeper. “I’m on birth control.”
I lick the shell of her ear. “Don’t say that to me, baby. I’ll fill you up.”
“Do it,” she says, and reaches back and pulls my hair.
I get up on my knees behind her with her hips in my hands, and she stays pressed into the pillow while I drag my palm down her spine.
The front of my shirt keeps getting in the way, so I gather the hem into my teeth and hold it there.
She can’t see a thing with her face in the pillow, and I can see all of her.
She starts moving back onto me, and I have to close my eyes.
“Are you gonna want to fuck me all the time?” she moans, still half asleep.
I push all the way in and hold her there. “Is that what you want?”
She nods into the pillow.
I smile and run my hands down her thighs. “I’ve never had morning sex before. I think I get the hype now.” The shirt drops because I’m talking, and I leave it. “And you’re so fucking pretty in the morning.”
“I want to see you, Nash,” she whimpers.
She falls forward, and I slip out of her, and I miss her immediately. She rolls onto her back and opens her thighs for me. I slide back in, and my shirt is covering everything it needs to cover when she looks up at me. I kiss her, then put my thumb in her mouth. “Suck.”
She does, and my whole body tightens. “I’m not wearing a condom,” I say.
She hums. “That’s why it feels so good.”
“I’m going to come inside you. Are you okay with that? Because I can’t take it back.”
She works her tongue around my thumb, and then she says, “Come inside me.”
Our eyes stay locked while I use my wet thumb on her clit. Her back comes off the bed as I rub faster circles, and the sweetest sound comes out of her. “Just like that, Kylie. Come with me.”
Her body jerks, and every muscle in her goes tight, even her grip on me, and then she lets go, whimpering, and I come with her. I kiss her through all of it until she goes limp. I clean her up with the towel off my chair, and she arches her back and says, “Can we go back to sleep?”
“Yeah.”
I button my jeans and get back in beside her.
She rolls onto her stomach almost immediately with one arm shoved under the pillow and her face turned toward me.
Her hair is spread across my side of the bed, so I run my fingers through the ends of it.
She makes a quiet sound in her throat. I stop.
Her eyes don’t open. I do it again, and she makes the same sound, and I keep doing it until her breathing changes.
I should sleep. I barely got enough last night.
Instead, I lie there with a piece of her hair wound around two fingers and watch her while the room gets lighter.
She still has most of last night’s makeup on.
Her lashes are stuck together in little black points.
The shiny stuff on her lips is completely gone, which is probably my fault.
Her top lip is fuller than the bottom one.
Her eyebrows are darker than her hair, and the left one sits a little higher when she’s about to argue with me.
There’s a freckle near the end of her nose, and then another, and another, so light I don’t think I’ve ever noticed them, running across the bridge of her nose and disappearing into her cheeks.
I touch one with the tip of my finger, and she scrunches her nose in her sleep and turns farther into the pillow, and I smile before I can stop myself.
I’ve had girls sleep here. I’ve had them stay late enough that we got breakfast because we were both hungry. I’ve never watched one sleep until the sun came up. That’s new. I should get up; I’ve got shit to do today. I don’t move.
Eventually, she pushes up on one elbow, and when her eyes find mine, she closes them again.
“Okay,” she mutters, and hauls herself out of bed.
“Where are you going?”
She turns around with her eyes shut. “I have to shower, Nash.”
“Shower here.”
“I don’t have any clothes.”
“Wear mine.”
She opens her eyes, and then she smiles, and I don’t know what’s happening. She starts laughing. “I live three doors away, Nash.”
“So?”
She comes back and looks at me a second longer than she needs to, then leans down and kisses me. She finds her thong at the end of the bed and puts it on.
“I’ll see you later,” she says, and leaves.
Five minutes later, I’m still looking at the door when it opens and Rafe comes in, sees me in the same clothes as last night, and shakes his head. “Finally. I slept at Koda’s. His futon smells like a fucking lake.” He throws his phone on his bed. “You deadbolted me out.”
I laugh. “Didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Shut up. Did you hit?”
“Fuck you.”
“I can fucking smell it. Open the goddamn window.”
Practice that afternoon is a good one. The line is clicking, and it doesn’t even feel like work.
Koda cheats his first three steps without being told, Rafe moves the puck a half second earlier than he used to, and the three of us move like one thing.
I win nine of eleven draws and don’t miss a pass in ninety minutes.
In the small-area game, I come out of a corner with two guys on me and put it through both of them to Koda without looking.
Koda scores, and Berwyn stops the drill and makes everybody watch it again.
Rafe skates over during the reset. “Pussy must be good.”
I grab him and put him into the boards. “Talk about her again. I fucking dare you.”
He smiles in my face. I let him go, and Koda glides over and slaps his stick between Rafe’s legs. “You’re next.”
Rafe hits him back.
Koda grunts and skates off. “They come in threes, Waleska. Me, him, you. Tick tock.”
“Barnes,” Berwyn says. “Get to work.”
“Yes, Coach.”
Forty minutes in, Berwyn stops me on a rush. “Kennebeck. You’re drifting high again on the entry.”
Same shit, different mouth. “Yes, Coach.”
“Hold it. Let him turn.”
“Yes, Coach.”
I do it again, and I hold it, and the D turns, and the lane opens. “Good,” Berwyn says, and skates off to yell at somebody else.
My heart is going. My blood pressure’s up, and I look around the rink like I need to check where I am. Ice. Skates. Pucks. No dad anywhere.
At the far end, Greeley is on the circle with an assistant and a bucket, taking draws by himself.
He’s been there twenty minutes, and he’ll be there twenty more.
He does it after every practice now. He watched Berwyn correct me; I know because when I look down the ice, he’s already looking back.
He doesn’t say anything. He drops back into his stance and takes another one.
I look for her when I come off. I look at the stands, and she isn’t there.
I come out of the tunnel with my bag and scan the hallway outside the locker room, where people wait, and she isn’t there either.
Why would she be? I didn’t ask her. I check my phone, and there’s nothing, and I’ve never once in my life cared whether somebody texted me.
I’m out in the parking lot with my bag on my shoulder when I type it.
Me: Where are you?
The dots come up immediately, and something in my chest lets go.
Kylie: Why?
Me: Answer the question.
Kylie: Kidnapped again :(
Kylie: It’s a whole thing.
Kylie: Library. 2nd floor by the printers.
Kylie: I have 40 pages left and a will to live that’s fading fast.
I don’t answer. I get food from the place downstairs and go up to the second floor of the library instead of back to my room.
I find her at a table by the printers with her laptop and her hair in a ponytail.
That ponytail is a dangerous thing. I put the food down next to her, and she looks me over, then looks at the food.
“You,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
“Sitting,” I say, and take the chair across from her.
She watches me in disbelief. “Are you staying?”
“Yeah.” I pull out my laptop.
“You have homework?”
“I have a lot of homework, Kylie.”
“I just didn’t—” She stops. “When you asked, I thought you were going to make me leave.”
“You’ve got forty pages.”
“I have thirty-one now.”
“So do those,” I say.
We don’t talk for twenty-five minutes. She eats about a third of the food without looking at it and pushes the rest back toward me.
She highlights something. She rolls her eyes at her screen.
Somebody prints ninety pages on the machine behind us, and she turns around and glares at them.
I get through six problems, which is more than I got through all week.
At some point, she takes her shoes off and puts her feet on my thigh under the table and keeps reading.
I don’t know if she’s doing it on purpose.
I put my hand on her ankle and rub my thumb over the bone.
We stay like that for another forty minutes, my foot hooked around the leg of her chair.
Every so often she says something about her reading out loud that isn’t directed at me.
Once she reads a whole sentence in an outraged voice, and I smile at her.
She starts packing up.
“What’re you doing later?”
“I’ve got to shower, and then Kenzie’s doing a whole thing with her group project, which I’m not in, but I’m there for emotional support. And tomorrow night I’m busy.”
I look up. “Doing what?”
It’s out before I’ve thought about it, and I hear it, and so does she.
“Kenzie and I have a thing.”
“What thing?”
“A girl thing, Nash,” she says sweetly. “There will be food, and The Bachelor, and Bianca’s bringing something in a crockpot that I hear is really good.”
“Until when?”
“I don’t know.” She’s looking at me strangely now, head tipped. “Late? Eleven, maybe.”
“Text me when you’re done.”
She zips her bag. “Why?”
“Because I want to see you.”
She blinks and doesn’t say anything for a second. Her cheeks go pink the way they do, and she looks down at her bag and back up at me. “Okay. I’ll text you.”
She leans down and kisses the side of my head, fast, like it’s nothing. I grab her hand, and she stops, and I look up at her and pull her back slowly. “Do you remember this morning?”
She looks at my mouth.
“Do you?”
She takes my face in her hand, and I lean into it and kiss her palm.
“Nash,” she teases, leaning down until her nose touches mine. “You were inside me this morning. You can manage waiting.”
I kiss her, and she’s so thrown that she just watches me. I keep my eyes open, looking right at her, until she finally closes hers and kisses me back.
“Okay,” she says. “I need to go.”
She ruffles my hair and laughs at me and walks away, and I chew my thumb and watch her go.