by Eva Chase
It was more of a risk, shedding clothes. More when I unbuttoned his shirt. He didn’t make a move to stop me, though. He just kept devouring my mouth, his tongue slicking over mine so teasingly I gasped as I explored every solid plane of his brawny body. How dare he keep this much deliciousness so tightly under wraps.
He wanted me. Even when it was dangerous, even when I’d shown I was willing to lead him straight toward that danger. He thought having this was worth whatever the consequences might be.
Maybe that would change if he knew everything, but for now, for this, that knowledge was enough.
I didn’t have much patience to draw this out now that I had him so eager. He trailed one hand down my shoulder and under my shirt to caress my breast, and I reached for the button of his slacks. My gasp at the flick of his thumb over my nipple was echoed by his groan when my fingers grazed his erection. Fuck, he was big there too.
I was abruptly grateful for the skirt. While I freed his impressive cock from his slacks and boxers, all Elias had to do was slide his hands up under that length of plaid fabric and tug my leggings and panties down. As they dropped to my ankles, I spread my knees. He dipped his fingers between us to stroke my clit and then down over my opening.
The pulse of pleasure he summoned made me twice as desperate for release as before. A demanding growl slipped from my throat.
He chuckled with a stutter of breath and pulled me even closer to him, right to the edge of the desk. My ankles hooked behind him. He kissed me again, hard, as he thrust inside me.
The sudden heady friction sent a wave of bliss through me to the top of my head. I kissed him back and swayed to meet him. As he plunged in and out of me, his fingers gripping my thigh to hold me steady on the desk, the throb of need inside me only expanded. I soared higher and higher, my mouth colliding with his again, my hands charting every inch of his bared chest.
It felt right, like that burst of passion in the gazebo with Jenson and Ryo, like nothing had before. Was it possible I’d found something true with all three of these guys after all, no matter what Cade said?
My mind slipped back to Professor Hubert’s comment about love or selfishness, and then spiraled away into a deeper haze of pleasure. Elias shifted his hand to tease over my clit as he sped up his thrusts, a sharper spike of bliss joining the rest, and I came apart against him, moaning and clenching and feeling him tumble into his own release a moment later.
If this counted as love, who the hell wouldn’t choose it?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Elias
Trix sagged into me, her legs still wrapped around my hips. I held onto her as the aftershock of the orgasm washed through my body. Holy fuck, I didn’t think I’d ever had one quite that intense.
Whatever she’d done, whatever power she had, no one had interrupted us. Thank God for that. I brushed my fingers over her hair, and she nestled a little more securely against me, but I could already feel a hint of tension starting to collect in her muscles, preparing to pull away.
No. Whatever had gotten into her today, whatever had changed her mind and brought us to this point, I wasn’t sure I’d find a better chance to get through to her. She needed to know I wasn’t in this just for my personal satisfaction—that her happiness meant more to me than my own. That she could turn to me no matter what.
I eased away from her just far enough to pull my slacks back up and then help her squirm back into her leggings. As I rebuttoned my shirt, she slid off the desk, looking ready to leave. I paused and caught her arm.
“Come with me?” I said. “There are some things I think I should tell you that I haven’t yet.”
Trix considered me, the conflicted apprehension I’d seen on her face this morning creeping back in, but she stayed as I tugged on my suit jacket. I led her out of the math classroom and, to her obvious surprise, around the landing to the stairs to the guys’ dorm. As I headed up, she balked.
“Is this really a good idea?” she said.
“It’ll be fine. We’ve got a system. I’ll show you.”
I offered her a reassuring smile, and curiosity seemed to win her over. She followed me up.
As I’d expected, my bedroom was empty. No one generally hung out in the dorm during the day. I grabbed a sock from my under-bed chest and rested it over the outer door knob.
“We have a sign to let the other guys in the room know we need privacy for a while,” I said. “There’s a sort of unspoken agreement not to monopolize the room for more than an hour or so, but—people are going to want to hook up, even in a place like this.”
Trix arched an eyebrow at me. “We did already get the hooking up part over with.”
“I know. But my desk isn’t exactly an ideal spot for an after hook-up chat. I want a lot more with you than just to get my dick wet, Trix.”
I sat down on my bed. After a moment, Trix sank down next to me. When I slipped my hand around her waist, she lay down with me, tucked close so we could both fit on the narrow bed, face to face. Her hand came to rest on the side of my chest.
I tucked a few stray strands of her bright hair behind her ear and hugged her close. It took a few minutes, but her body gradually relaxed into mine. Her fingers curled into the fabric of my jacket as if she wanted to hold me in place. As if I had any intention of going anywhere as long as she wanted me with her.
“Do you remember much about what I’ve told you before about my life outside Roseborne?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“You told me last time about how focused you were on developing a business, getting ahead,” she said. “That you screwed over people to give yourself a leg up. And I remember a few bits from before that… Your grandfather encouraged you a lot?”
“That’s one way of putting it.” I drew in a breath. This wasn’t my favorite subject, what with the memories that had become increasingly uncomfortable the longer Roseborne had forced me to delve into my past, but it was better we started out by talking about me rather than about her. She needed to know how well I could understand, how I could read the signs—that I wasn’t just speaking from a place of jealousy.
“My grandfather on my mother’s side had one of those stories they point to when they talk about the American Dream,” I said. “He moved here from Mexico with his family when he was a teenager, managed to excel in school and get scholarships, made connections with the right people and started his own business that started to take off when he was only in his twenties. He just kept building it and reinforcing his finances—I think he was always a little paranoid that the tide could turn and all he’d have left to rely on were his savings.”
“That seems understandable,” Trix said.
“Yeah. I can’t blame him for that.” I pressed a quick kiss to her forehead before continuing. “My mother was the only kid he and my grandmother ended up having, and he wanted even better things for her, but she had her own ideas… She ended up getting married pretty young to a guy from a blue collar family my grandfather didn’t approve of at all. When I was four, she died giving birth to my sister. My grandparents stepped in, offered our father a chunk of money to hand over custody to them and stay out of our lives, and he… took it. I haven’t seen him since.”
My throat tightened. I only had hazy impressions left of either of my parents, but my father’s abandonment stung deep down in my gut in a way I’d never been able to shake. He’d wanted the money more than he’d wanted his own children in his life.
Trix tucked her head closer to mine. “That’s awful.”
“Well, I guess it proved my grandparents were right about him. Anyway, my grandfather had very set ideas about how things should work. How we should behave. And he made his approval or disapproval very clear. He only ever let on that he cared about us, gave us any attention, if we showed off some kind of smarts or business sense. If we just acted like kids, he’d be cold and detached. It killed me when it seemed like I was disappointing him. So I worked my ass off, got the best grades I could, did everythi
ng I could think of around the house to show how industrious I was—anything to get a scrap of praise.”
I heard Trix’s grimace in her voice. “That’s pretty awful too.”
I nodded, my chin grazing her hair. “I’m sure he thought he was just molding my sister and I into the best people we could be. At the time, I didn’t know anything else. I thought I only deserved any kind of affection if I’d earned it—I thought any time he withdrew from me, it was because there was something wrong with me and I just had to do better. And as I worked harder and harder, made it to the top of my class and impressed my first employers and all that… I started thinking about everyone around me the same way. What they’d earned compared to what I had. Whether I deserved things more than them. Why should anyone have something I wanted if I’d proven I was better than them? And that was when I became a real prick.”
“Because your grandfather was a prick to you.”
My chest still constricted hearing those words spoken out loud, even though I’d come to terms with that fact a while ago.
“I can’t completely blame him,” I said. “I still made my own choices—the responsibility for them is mostly mine. But having someone I cared about and relied on that much treat me that way, going hot and cold depending on how well I lived up to his very specific expectations, making me feel I was always walking a tightrope between keeping his approval and losing it… It messes a person up. It messes with your ability to figure out what you really want for yourself and who you’d really want to be. I can see now that he wasn’t making me better or stronger, he was just making me more what suited his preferences. And that screwed up my internal compass so much that I made some horrible decisions.”
Trix was silent for a long moment. Had the parallels started to occur to her? Finally, she said, “You told me someone died because of one of those decisions.”
“Yeah.” My jaw clenched before I managed to force out the words. “My sister ended up going in the opposite direction from me. Instead of working hard, she defied my grandparents whenever she could because she hated how they tried to control us. It drove me crazy that she made our lives so chaotic, that she wouldn’t listen to them or me and see what she was doing wrong…
“When she was sixteen, she got sucked in by this older guy, almost thirty, and ended up moving in with him—I hardly saw her for months. I guess he liked it that way. She traded one dictator for another.” I paused and propelled the rest of the words out. “She came to me a little after her seventeenth birthday with a big bruise on her cheek, looking terrified, asking if she could stay with me at my apartment. Saying she was scared of the guy and needed somewhere to hide after she left him. She didn’t think our grandparents would take her back in.”
“What did you say?” Trix asked as I grappled with the next words. Her soft tone suggested she already suspected it.
“I told her she’d made her own bed and if she didn’t like it, she had to fix it herself, not come begging for help from someone who’d made better choices. I said if she was that worried, she should go to our grandparents and show how sorry she was so she’d deserve their forgiveness. And then I shut the door on her.” I closed my eyes. “She went back to him instead. A week later, he flew off the handle and stabbed her with a kitchen knife. The neighbors called the cops, but she’d already bled out when they got there.”
“He’s the one who killed her,” Trix said.
“Yeah, but I knew he might. She was my sister. I should have cared more about protecting her than teaching her some stupid lesson. And it wasn’t even for myself. Part of me wanted to help her, hated seeing her like that. But another part of me kept hearing my grandfather’s voice in the back of my head, kept picturing the way he’d react if he found out I’d supported her mistakes.”
“I guess it wasn’t too long after that you ended up here?”
“The same month. I got a letter offering this exclusive advanced business specialization—I should have known it was bullshit. But they probably put some kind of persuasive power into it to make the offer sound like something you can’t refuse.”
“Cade went on about what an amazing opportunity it was, even though he hadn’t been all that interested in college before.” Trix gripped my jacket harder, tugging it toward her as if it could encompass us both. As if she could take shelter beneath it from everything waiting for us beyond this bed. “Why did you want to tell me all this now?”
I had to tread carefully here. “Because the way you’ve reacted in certain situations, things that you’ve said… It reminds me of how I felt sometimes back then. Like I was being pulled in two different directions, and I was so scared of making the ‘wrong’ decision and losing the person who’d given me so much.”
Trix pressed her face to my chest. “It’s not like he’s trying to force me into anything when he gets into those moods,” she mumbled, so quiet the words were almost lost in my shirt. “He just cares so much he can’t help how he reacts.”
I wasn’t so sure about that from what I’d seen, but I could easily believe she believed it after the years she’d spent with no one else caring about her at all.
“I know my grandfather cared about me a lot too,” I said. “I loved him. But that isn’t enough. Someone can care about you and still mess with your head. No amount of loving someone will make them see they’re hurting you if they’re looking the other way.” I hugged her tighter. “How many times have you done things you didn’t want to because he made you feel like he’d pull away from you if you didn’t?”
She winced, her back going rigid. “He’s never said—he never made it like that.”
“But the way he acted, you still felt like you had to worry about it.”
“He didn’t have to do anything for me in the first place.”
“I know.” I knew that justification all too well. The sense that if my grandfather got too fed up with me, I’d have no one at all. “Trix, I’m not trying to tell you that you shouldn’t listen to him or be around him or anything like that. You know your brother a hell of a lot better than I do. I just—I do care about you too, and if there’s any chance that talking about this helps you figure out what you really want, then I’ll be happy. Even if what you really want is to back off from me and everyone else except him. That’s up to you.”
She inhaled shakily. “Okay. I’ll think about it. It seems like everything’s turned into such a shitstorm.” She let those words trail off into the quiet of the room, and then she sat up next to me. A determined expression came over her face. “You know, it’d be a lot easier to figure this all out if we weren’t stuck in this place with a bunch of psychos who are definitely out to make us miserable. I’ve got some kind of power—I’m going to use it.”
As she got off the bed, I pushed myself upright. “What are you planning to do?”
She shot me a tight little smile. “I’m not totally sure yet—but I’ve got an axe to sharpen.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Trix
The rasp of the sharpening stone against the blade of the axe scraped the scattered emotions from my head. As I rested the axe’s handle on my legs where I was sitting on the maintenance shed’s cot, my mind narrowed down to nothing but the task in front of me—and the uneasy question my talk with Elias had raised.
It was my fault if I’d let Cade talk me into doing things I hadn’t really wanted to, wasn’t it? How was it fair to blame him when I’d made the decisions?
I’d like to think that, but it was far too easy to remember just a few nights ago when I’d made a different decision than the one he’d wanted. Why hadn’t I said no or pulled back earlier when he’d tried to escalate the physical side of our relationship again? Why had I compromised on that position when I knew I didn’t really want to see him as more than a brother and friend?
Because I’d known he’d withdraw, like he had. I’d known he’d be hurt and angry, that he’d distance himself from me, that he’d blame himself as if he’d done some
thing wrong, and I hadn’t wanted to face all that. I’d put his happiness, his desires, ahead of my own. Just like I had a hell of a lot of times over the years if I let myself stop to consider it.
I’d always told myself I owed him. That supporting him and being there beside him no matter what direction he took us in was the least I could do after he’d had my back for so long. Maybe that was still true.
But my thoughts kept returning to the last thing Elias had told me—that he wasn’t going to tell me what I should do. That he thought my choices should be up to me, and if I got what I wanted, that was enough to make him happy.
So simple and yet so different from Cade the last time I’d talked to him—the way he’d warned me away from Elias and the others without reservation, telling me what I should want. What I could have. I couldn’t look back on that conversation without seeing all the ways he’d steered me in one specific direction, discounting any possibility that I had choices beyond the one he expected me to take.
How had I not seen it before? Had he always pushed me that insistently? I didn’t think so—but then, I’d never before pushed against him as firmly as I had the night I’d refused his advances. And I’d never had much to compare his behavior to. Until now, he’d been the only one I’d turned to in any way that mattered.
What was the truth, under all the confusion and the bullshit? I wanted Ryo and Jenson and Elias—all of them. I liked talking with them and the way they talked to me; I liked how they looked at me and how they touched me, how they made me feel. I liked how much feeling I seemed to stir in them. Maybe what we’d built between us wouldn’t mean much in the outside world, but why shouldn’t I find that out rather than throwing it away to avoid facing their rejection? I was braver than that, wasn’t I?
