Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
Colin
18 Years Old
“Do you ever just lie on the floor?” Colin peeked up from where he was sprawled out on the carpet in Scarlett’s bedroom. Scarlett fastened the hooks to her bra and shimmied it back into place. He indulgently watched her breasts jiggle before they were trapped again by fabric.
“I used to when I was younger,” Scarlett said, reaching to pull her shirt over her head. “But why not just lie on the bed instead?”
“It’s not the same. The ground is nice because it’s hard. Sometimes I don’t want things to be so soft,” he said and scooted closer to her when she came to lie down beside him. “Also, your bed currently smells like sex.”
“It does.” She giggled.
“There is one soft thing that I always like, though.” He wiggled along the floor so his head lined up with her chest and leaned his cheek into her breasts with a sigh as she played with his hair, massaging his scalp and drawing a groan from low in his throat. He could have sworn he wouldn’t like physical touch so much with a sexual partner, but Scarlett had proven that wrong time and time again. As long as she was touching him with solid and ungentle hands, everything she did felt like his version of heaven.
“This is nice.” Scarlett hummed.
Colin lifted his hand, and she tangled her fingers with his. “I feel like we opened up a can of worms.”
Her chest stopped expanding and retracting under his head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m insatiable now. All I can think about is sex,” he explained. Her chest resumed breathing with a laugh, only to stop again when he started his speech. “I want to fuck you on every surface in this room. I think about skipping class and dragging you out into the parking lot to fuck you in my car when we’re at school. When I’m at home I just want to sext you or pull up the pictures you sent me last time so I can pretend I’m fucking you. I can’t stop. I know it’s hormones and whatnot, but it’s becoming a problem. How on Earth am I ever going to do anything else when all I want is to see you naked? Even now.” He briefly looked down at her body and licked his bottom lip. She couldn’t see his face, but her fingers in his hair gripped him harder, and her body tightened against him. It didn’t take much to get him going, even ten minutes after their first round. He had memorized the way Scarlett looked naked at this point, and if he wanted—and he pretty much always did—he could conjure up an image of her without a stitch of clothing on with his mind alone. “Even now, I’m thinking about what new thing we could try next for our experiment.”
“I feel the same.” Her breathing was shallow as he turned his head a bit, angling his face toward her chest. “I’ll be in class, and the seam of my jeans will hit just right, and then I’ll be stuck thinking about how badly I want you.” Untangling her hand from his, he palmed one of her breasts, stretching his fingers to get more. His hands were large, but never big enough to hold her completely in one hand. “Colin, I just put my clothes back on,” Scarlett chastised.
“I can take them back off for you.” He dragged his hand down her stomach, and she arched into him. “Do you want to try something new? I’ve read a few new romance novels, and I have a few ideas.” His fingers deftly flicked at the button holding the top of her jeans together.
“What time is it?” Scarlett gasped, wiggling under him and angling her hips toward his hand. The small laugh she let out when he burrowed his face into her breasts was infectious, and he smiled against her chest, feeling the vibrations of sound in her body.
“Twenty minutes till.”
“That’s cutting it a bit close to when my family will be home,” she breathed as his hand traveled under the band of her underwear.
“I can accomplish a lot in twenty minutes,” Colin promised. The tips of his fingers found her clit and started to circle and press just the way he knew she liked it.
“What were you thinking?” Her body responded with a flutter of eyelashes, her hands in his hair circling and massaging at the same pace.
“You know that time I went so deep that you said it hurt a bit? But like a good kind of pain?” The question came out hoarse, he was already so hard again. He wanted to go that deep now. Rut into her from behind and pin her down the way she always wanted.
Scarlett’s head bobbed in acknowledgment above him. “I have a belt you can whip me with if you want to try the pain route.”
Colin’s head popped up from the floor in alarm. “What? No, I was going to suggest something gradual, and if we end up liking it, we can move on to whips.”
“Oh.” She blinked. “That makes sense.” He was always a little shocked by how willing she was to try new things with him. As far as he knew, there hadn’t been a single time she didn’t want to try something from a book or online forum, which felt like a home run given that, at some point, everyone was uncomfortable around him. “What’d you have in mind?”
On their way into her bedroom, he thought he had spotted a candle on the dresser in the back corner, but his memory was a bit foggy as he was busy with peeling all of Scarlett’s clothes from her body and backing her toward the bed. They barely had the front door to her house open this time before they were making out and trying to make it up the stairs. His memory was confirmed, however, when he rose to his feet and found it, plucking it off her dresser. A delicate sniff of the candle confirmed that he really hated overly fragrant things, but the smell wasn’t what he was after this time, and he would suck up his distaste for the smell for Scarlett’s sake.
“I read a romance novel the other day where the guy dripped candle wax on his girlfriend. and apparently that’s really erotic? I hadn’t thought to try that, and I was curious, so?—”
“You researched it,” Scarlett finished his sentence with a smile as she got up off the floor.
“Of course I did,” Colin confirmed. “I read a few Reddit threads on wax play, and it seems people like it because the hot wax is a bit of a painful sting, but then it cools pretty quickly, so it’s a good way of testing out if you like pain during sex. What do you think?” Colin held the candle up . He was sure he would hate this if the wax was being dripped on him, so if she declined, he could move on pretty easily. Scarlett stared at it for a moment before slowly nodding her head once.
“Okay, let’s try it. There’s a lighter on my dresser.” She pointed, and Colin found it easily enough, lighting the wick and scrunching his nose at the floral smell that immediately wafted into the air.
“Get undressed,” he directed. She always liked it when he was a bit more demanding during sex, so he opted to get right to the point this time. The pink coloring her cheeks like her watercolor paintings flushed into a deeper red as she did as told, pulling her underwear and jeans down her legs and kicking them off while she removed the rest. The urge he always had to pick up her clothes came back, but he batted those thoughts away, trying not to ruin the moment. Everything he read on the internet about testing pain said to be connected with your partner and to make sure you were watching their face for any discomfort beyond what they could tolerate. He made a point to meet her eyes and count to five in his head for an appropriate amount of eye contact, then had to drag his gaze over her body to focus on something more comfortable. By the time she was naked and lying on the bed and he had prepped her by rubbing her clit until she was grinding against his palm, the wax in the top of the candle had melted into a pool of hot liquid, ready to use. “Open your legs more. I’m going to drip it on your thighs.” Again she took his direction and parted her thighs like the red sea—red in the literal sense of the word because the tuft of ginger hair between her legs was his favorite fireplace. Her knees tipped out, and the pads of her feet pressed into the mattress. Carefully, he brought the candle toward her and sat back on his heels between her legs.
“Colin…” Her voice was faraway-sounding, so he figured it was the same as the way she said his name during sex. Like a prayer or a plea for him to continue. He tipped the candle toward her and let the hot wax drip over the edge. Her body tensed when the wax made contact, muscles contracting as Scarlett let out a small sound he had never quite heard before. He tipped the candle over on the other side and was met with the same sound again. The wax still drying on her thighs, he moved the candle over her entrance, toying with the idea of dropping wax there, too. “Colin,” she said again as she squirmed back toward the headboard. He followed, chasing her in the playful way they always did, grimacing a bit from the awful scent he had now painted her thighs with.
When he aimed the hot wax right where he wanted it, he watched in devout interest as her body went rigid and shrunk away from him, pulling away so forcefully he glanced up, expecting to find Scarlett giggling or beckoning him forward, to tell him to take his clothes off, too. He wasn’t sure he wanted sex after he had ruined his favorite place with a painfully fragrant smell, but he was doubly sure he no longer wanted to when he saw Scarlet’s face.
Hypothesis and predictions normally came easy to Colin because facts led somewhere concrete. Scarlett had said his name, she had writhed below him like she did every time before when he pinned her down. Except this time, he had never been more wrong about an outcome in his life.
Everything changed in an instant, and his heart dropped into his stomach. Tears were rolling down over Scarlett’s face, and she was shaking her head repeatedly in the universal sign for ‘no.’
“Scarlett? What happened?” Colin’s eyes widened in alarm. Her hand shot up from the comforter and waved around, pressing on the glass candle jar and jerking upright so her knees were tucked into her chest in a sort of fetal position. “What?—”
“I don’t like it,” she whispered. Colin backed away from her in bewilderment and set the candle on the nightstand.
“You didn’t like it?” He was still so confused. Everything she outwardly said confirmed she did like it. She hadn’t said to stop, and yet the fat tears rolling down her face immediately made him feel guilty.
Her voice cracked with her responding, “No, I didn’t. You didn’t see that I was trying to back away from you?”
Colin’s mouth opened and shut several times. Surely that should have been something he should have noticed, but he had been so focused on the words. The breathless way she had said his name. The new sound he elicited from the new experiment. A sound he now realized must have not been one of pleasure like he had assumed. “You… you didn’t say the safe word.”
“I…” Scarlett sat up and wiped at the tears before hugging herself a bit tighter. “Sorry.”
“Sorry?” All he could think to do was repeat everything back as a question because he simply could not wrap his mind around it. “Why didn’t you? If you don’t like something, you need to tell me to stop.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t. I just… my brain short-circuited, and I figured if you looked up for two seconds instead of being so focused on my body, you’d see that I was uncomfortable.” Her face was twisted in a new way he hadn’t seen before, and there was a pressure rising in his chest that he knew all too well.
“We agreed, Scarlett!” Voice bitter, he pulled himself angrily off the bed and found her clothes on the floor. “You have to use the word ‘stop’ when you don’t fucking want to do something.”
“ You’re mad at me?” she shouted back.
“Of course I’m mad,” Colin fumed, angrily tossing her clothes onto the bed.
“ Wow .” Scarlett snatched her underwear from where they had landed on the mattress and started to aggressively wipe herself down with a baby wipe from the nightstand, peeling off the remnants of the wax as he paced the room, unable to watch her wince through it. She was making a lot of noise, huffing and puffing as she aggressively shoved all her clothes back on. Colin ran a hand through his hair, trying to calm himself, but to no avail. Before he knew it, his body started to shake from emotion just in time for Scarlett to land another blow. “I never thought you’d be someone who was mad I didn’t have sex with you.”
“Are you serious right now?” He whirled on her. “I’m not mad we didn’t have sex. I’m mad you didn’t fucking say anything when you didn’t like it!”
“I said your name twice and tried to get away from you, what more did you want?”
“The fucking safe word, Scarlett! Tell me to stop!” Colin snapped. The angry way he started to list off the appropriate ways to reject advances ramped him up even more. “The word ‘no,’ ‘please stop doing that,’ ‘ouch, I hate this,’ literally any one of those would have worked. I’m not a damn mind reader. I can’t clock your facial expressions. I have no idea what you’re thinking. You say my name all the time when we’re having sex.”
“I don’t say it like that ,” Scarlett argued.
“Like what?” He didn’t know what to do with his body anymore. All of his limbs felt like they wanted to fly off in different directions, and he could feel his heartbeat thrumming in his ears. “Please enlighten me, because I can’t tell the fucking difference between you begging for me to touch you and you telling me to stop when you use the exact same word.”
“I said it like I was scared you were going to hurt me. You just wouldn’t look at me because all you care about is sex.” Her voice cracked, and more tears spilled down her face.
Colin’s breathing was so heavy now that he was starting to hyperventilate. What exactly was he supposed to tell her? That he didn’t like staring lovingly into her eyes? That it made him deeply uncomfortable? Every time he forced himself to look directly, it felt so aggressive. But that was what couples did, right? They stared into each other’s souls and got lost there. In every romance novel he had ever read, including the one that had provided this stupid candle wax idea, the couples always looked at each other. Really looked . They wanted to look. There had to be something deeply wrong with him to have to focus so hard to make eye contact with someone he loved. Scarlett’s eyes were beautiful, and yet he felt like his skin was crawling when she looked back at him at the same time. All of that would prove what she said, that all he cared about was sex, when that didn’t feel true in the slightest. What he hated was feeling innately perceived by anyone’s eyes.
“I don’t—I—” His chest heaved, and he sat abruptly on the edge of the bed, sucking in short breaths that didn’t give him nearly enough oxygen.
“Colin?” Scarlett’s voice felt distant again, and when she reached out to touch him, he jerked away from her hand, fearing it was yet another way she said his name that meant something he didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry.” A panicked huff of air was all it took to tip him over the edge of lost control, and he started shaking his head repeatedly.
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” Scarlett came closer to his side, and he practically jumped away from her. “Shh, shh, shh,” she soothed, grabbing his hand and pulling him down to the floor with her. He followed until they were both lying back in their original position, her hands firmly stroking his hair and his cheek pressed into her breasts. It took a few minutes for his heart rate to slow and his speaking ability to return.
“I can’t tell the difference,” he murmured. “I don’t know when my name means stop or go. And I want to know, I really do. I want to be able to look at you and tell when you’re uncomfortable. I should be able to. But I can’t. I’m scared I’ll hurt you if you can’t say what you mean.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “I’m sorry. It was burning, and I could barely think of your name, let alone anything else. I’ll try harder next time.”
Colin wrapped his arm around her. “There won’t be a next time for that.”
“I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t start with whips.” Scarlett huffed out a laugh.
“This isn’t funny.” The world still felt like it was spinning a bit. He had crossed some sort of a boundary, and he didn’t know where to go from there.
Scarlett sighed. “I know. Sorry, I was just trying to deflect because I’m uncomfortable.” He appreciated how much she had been able to say things out loud to him lately, but the time for that would have been a few moments before when he was unknowingly hurting her.
“We’re not going near masochism again,” Colin said resolutely. “And I don’t just care about sex.”
“I know.” Her fingertips paused in his hair.
“But is that what you think?”
“Sometimes.” She shifted against him. “Everything you tell me and your actions say you love me, but your body doesn’t always say that. You never really look at me except on Prom night, and when you did, it was like you were staring through me. Maybe I’m just overthinking it.”
“No, you’re not. The eye contact, it…” Colin trailed off and restarted, frustrated that she had noticed that about him when he had tried so hard to fix it. “I don’t know why, but I can’t focus or pay attention to anything if I’m looking into anyone’s eyes. It feels unnatural and really aggressive, and I always have to do this thing where I count to two Mississippi so people think that I’ve really looked at them, when really I’ve just been counting in my head and staring off into space.”
“You do that with me?” Her voice was so sweet that he wanted to promise her it took no effort at all to look at her, that she was the one exception to the rule, that he could stare into her eyes all day long. The truth was a harder pill to swallow, but he said it anyway.
“I changed it to five seconds with you because everything I’ve read suggests that I should want to look into your eyes for longer.”
“Oh.” Her voice was so small, and he had the sickening feeling that he should have kept that to himself.
“You know I love you, right?”
“Yeah,” she murmured, kissing the top of his head. “And you know I love you?”
“Yeah,” Colin confirmed and swallowed down the rock in his throat. “I should be able to tell when you’re uncomfortable.” His mind was whirring and replaying everything his therapist had said recently. In the beginning, he had put hardly any stock into it, because there was no way that the people that loved him would miss that. The more he researched it, though, and the more his therapist requested that he stop pretending to look at him, the more he was starting to think that everyone was in the know but him. Everyone knew there was something wrong with him, and he was the only one in the dark.
Scarlett cupped the sides of Colin’s head and tipped his face up toward her. He attempted to look her in the eyes again, but she brought her hand up and brushed it down over his face, effectively closing his eyelids. The relief was instant, and he relaxed into her touch. “We don’t have to do everything the way it’s normally done. We get to make the rules. I love you because you’re exactly the way you are and you let me be who I am. I don’t have to be embarrassed when I go on a long rant or when I tell you exactly what I want.”
“I like your stories. I get a whole bunch of little pieces of your life that I wouldn’t know otherwise,” Colin said. “I like that I get to be the one to remind you to drink water. Speaking of which, when’s the last time you drank water?”
“Um…” she stalled. His eyes flickered open, and he rolled away from her, rising to his feet and holding out his hand. He needed to be useful again, and taking action with Scarlett’s water consumption was the best way he knew how to do that. It was proof that he loved her, because he didn’t like seeing her in pain from a headache or from something he did.
Scarlett took his hand, and the firmness of her grip settled the uprising in his chest.
“Water,” he directed. “Now.”