31. Maverick
Maverick
Seven months later…
I clamped a hand over Carey’s mouth. “We have to be quiet,” I muttered.
She nodded, but a tiny moan escaped her lips anyway, mostly muffled by my fingers. I gripped her left hip with my other hand, then slid it down over her ass and between her thighs to feel the wetness there.
My cock was harder than granite, but footsteps were echoing in the hall outside, getting louder and louder by the second.
We shouldn’t be here right now. Shouldn’t be doing this.
“Fuck me,” Carey urgently whispered through my hand, arching her back. Her hands were firmly planted on the desk in front of her. “Please.”
Jesus. I couldn’t resist for another second. I pressed my hand down tighter on her mouth so she couldn’t make another sound. Then I adjusted my hold on her and slid inside her, grunting as her muscles clenched around me.
The footsteps in the hall grew louder still. I leaned forward and bit Carey’s shoulder through her graduation gown, using the thick fabric to mask my harsh grunts as I began to move, thrusting in and out of her with powerful strokes.
I tensed and froze when a shadow appeared at the closed door. “Just a second, Sadie,” Professor Giamatti called out. “I think I left my phone in here earlier.”
“Shit,” I said hoarsely, cock still buried to the hilt inside Carey.
We were so fucking busted.
Carey looked at me over her shoulder, expression still hungry for me. My hand dropped from her mouth and slid down to rub her clit, nice and hard. Just the way she liked it. If we were going to get caught fucking in a classroom, I could at least make her come first.
A key turned in the door, and it slowly started to open. Carey bit her bottom lip, but then her head lolled and her mouth dropped open in a low whimper.
“Oh, never mind!” Professor Giamatti said chirpily. “It’s right here in my left pocket! I usually use the right, you see.”
The door closed again, and the footsteps faded away. Fucking finally. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief and started moving again, fiercely pounding inside Carey as my finger worked her clit. Her orgasm hit a moment later, pussy squeezing my dick as she gasped and moaned. The sensation was enough to send me over the edge too, and I stopped inside her, groaning as I came.
We stayed like that for a minute, her ass pushed back against me with her hands splayed on the desk for support. I cupped her jaw and turned her head to face me again, leaning down to kiss her.
“That was fun,” I said when I finally pulled away. “I’ve been wanting to defile this desk ever since Giamatti gave me a shitty mark back in eleventh grade.”
Carey snorted with amusement, one hand reaching for the tissue box on the side of the professor’s desk. She passed one to me before taking care of herself, hitching up her gown and the skirt beneath it with her free hand.
“God,” she murmured, still panting to catch her breath as she cleaned herself. “I can’t believe we almost got caught.”
“Well, fucking in a classroom is a dangerous game.” I grinned and lobbed my tissue in the wastebasket. “Luckily we’re used to much more dangerous games, huh?”
“No shit,” she said, eyes flashing as she hiked her underwear back up. She straightened her shoulders and smoothed her gown. “Anyway… shall we?”
“Yup.” I hitched one arm under hers and reached over to adjust her lopsided cap. “Let’s go and graduate, baby.”
We left the room and headed down the hall, arm in arm. When we stepped outside, we saw Jasmine, Zach, and Brooke standing by a fountain, faces harried.
“Oh my god!” Jasmine said when she spotted us. “We’ve been looking for you guys everywhere!”
“You know the ceremony starts in ten minutes, right?” Brooke added, wide-eyed gaze flicking between us.
“Yeah. It’s fine.” I grinned. “Plenty of time.”
“Where were you?” Zach asked.
“Um…” Carey lowered her eyes and rubbed her chin. “Just walking through the halls. Reminiscing.”
Zach’s brows lifted. “Hm. Okay.”
“I saw two people sitting in the chairs with your surname on them. Is it your parents?” Brooke asked.
“It must be,” Carey replied. “They told me they’d come, but I wasn’t sure they actually would.”
“That’s good. That they’re finally trying with you, I mean.”
“Yeah. All it took was me almost dying in a murder mansion last year,” Carey replied, rolling her eyes. “But you’re right. It’s good.”
I dropped my arm so I could squeeze her hand. Her parents weren’t the greatest people in the world, but ever since we escaped Icarus Hall last October, they’d started making a serious effort to improve their relationship. Her father had even managed to last seven straight months without getting arrested for whatever dumb shit he usually got up to back in Oakfield. As for her mother, who usually got through ten bottles of wine per week, the devastating realization that she’d almost lost her only child had shocked her into near-sobriety. She’d barely touched a drop of alcohol since all the shit went down, and she’d started calling Carey once a week to talk and catch up.
Baby steps, but it was better than nothing. Carey deserved it. Deserved a real family who loved and cared about her. And hey, even if her parents never managed to fix their shit and make up for all the years of neglect, she’d always have a family with me, because she wasn’t just my girlfriend.
She was my whole world.
“So, um…” Jasmine looked down, briefly gnawing at her bottom lip. “Does this mean our little survivor’s club is over and done with? Seeing as we’re all heading off to different parts of the world?”
Zach patted her on the shoulder. “We can still do Zoom meetings, right?”
Jasmine’s shoulders sagged with relief, and a rare smile lit her face. “Sure. That’d be great.”
She’d changed a hell of a lot since the Garrick family imprisoned us and forced us into those fucked up games. She was no longer the school Queen Bee, ruling the girls of Babylon with an iron fist and venomous tongue. Instead, she’d mellowed out and thrown herself into her studies, raising her GPA to a level no one ever thought she could achieve. She’d also organized weekly meetings for the Final Five—as the media had annoyingly dubbed us after our rescue—so that she, Zach, Brooke, Carey, and I could talk things over and help each other out with the mental trauma we were left with after our time at Icarus Hall.
I knew she and Carey would never be best friends, given Jasmine’s toxic treatment of her in the past, but everything our little group went through together had forged an unbreakable bond between us, so they treated each other with respect and even smiled and waved whenever they spotted each other on campus. Sometimes they even shared exam notes or texted each other funny stories they read online.
Zach glanced at his watch. “We should really get going now. We’re down to eight minutes,” he said.
He was doing okay, too. He’d lost a ton of weight from depression in the weeks after our rescue, but the weekly survivor’s club meetings had really started to help him after a while. By spring break, the weight had come back, along with the color in his cheeks.
After graduation today, he was hopping on a plane to Singapore. An international university had offered him a place there, and he’d snapped it right up, telling the rest of us that he needed to be as far away from California as he could possibly get for the next few years. Maybe even forever. We all understood, and we were happy for him.
Brooke nodded, lips turning upward in a sad half-smile. “Yeah, I guess we should head off,” she said, looking around the courtyard. “Never thought I’d miss this place, but I think I actually will.”
Brooke’s life had been hit the hardest in the aftermath of the now-infamous Garrick Games, because everything that had been revealed in our time at Icarus Hall had instantly become public knowledge when the media got wind of the case. From there, the Babylon staff found out about her past exam cheating, along with the drug-cooking operation she’d shared with Tate.
In any other case, she would’ve been charged by the cops and instantly expelled from school. However, the police decided not to file any charges over the drugs, figuring the suffering she’d endured at Icarus Hall was punishment enough. The school was much the same, allowing her to finish off the year with the stipulation that she could never be alone in any of the chemistry labs. On top of that, none of the teachers were allowed to write her recommendation letters for college, and the mark she received for the big exam she cheated on was changed to a zero, lowering her once-sky-high GPA.
It didn’t matter too much in the end, though. Now that we were all household names because of the Garrick Games, colleges all over the country had been champing at the bit to convince us to pick them, leaving Brooke with multiple offers despite the lack of school support. She was going to be just fine.
Carey smiled at her. “I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “I hated this place when I first started here. But now I really think I’m going to miss it. Weird, huh?”
The others nodded and murmured their agreement. I squeezed her hand again and leaned down to plant a kiss on her forehead. “Ready?”
She nodded, and the five of us headed over to the Babylon auditorium and made our way to our seats on the stage. Jasmine was the first of us to graduate, and we all cheered our lungs out as she walked across the stage to accept her diploma.
Carey was the last to go. As soon as they called her name, I let out a loud wolf-whistle, followed by a whooping cheer. Pride swelled in my chest as I watched her take her diploma. “That’s my girl!” I shouted before whistling again.
She laughed as she stepped off the stage, shaking a finger in my direction. Breaking all the rules, I jumped up and sprinted over to her, engulfing her in a bear hug before lowering my face to hers for a fierce kiss.
“I love you,” she murmured as she pulled away, eyes shimmering with tears.
“I love you too,” I replied, throat clogging with emotion as I stared down at her.
I never knew I could be so fulfilled. So happy. Especially after everything that went down in those games last year. But that was what love did. It made everything better, even if the rest of the world was a total shit-show.
It was the one game Carey and I would never lose.