“Yes. Just kiss me.”
He studies my face for a beat, maybe to see if I mean my words, and when he’s satisfied, he gives me what I want.
He kisses me.
In the exact opposite way of how he entered my body, breached my virgin hole.
He kisses me softly and tenderly and wetly. And hungrily too.
And I shiver in his arms, suddenly all achy.
All restless and hungry, just like him, and I’m the one who makes the next move then. I’m the one who shifts on his lap because I want more. Because I want him, and of course he senses that.
He gets that my pain is slowly receding and to help me along, he brings his fingers back to my clit. He rubs it in slow circles, all the while kissing me as he moves under me as well.
He starts with slow, gentle pumps, languid and lazy. They heat up my blood and my skin. They fog up the windows with my gasps and moans.
They make my pussy leak too.
She cries for him like he told me she would and eases the way for his cock.
Suddenly his pumps have become shorter. His thrusts have become faster and so freaking good that I push back against him.
I moan into his mouth, fist his hair and twist my hips, rock them in time with his pounding cock.
I can feel the air growing hot, growing musky and thick. I can feel his abdomen bunching up and tightening under me, feel the muscles of his thighs.
I can even hear them slapping against my butt as he kisses me and plays with my clit.
And the fact that we’re moving so fast, that I’m humping him and he’s giving it to me, is causing his Mustang to shake, to move as well, puts me on the edge.
It actually pushes me over the edge.
The shaking car, the foggy windows, the rain, his kisses and him.
And I come.
My pussy convulses around his cock and a feeling the likes of which I’ve never experienced washes over me. I arch my back and throw back my neck as I grab hold of the roof and moan so loudly.
Even in this mindless moment, I know what it is.
I know what this feeling is as I rock my hips in his lap. It’s relief.
It’s more than relief. It’s euphoria.
It’s the feeling of being in his arms as I burst, after two long years, and I whisper, “God, Reed.”
The moment I say his name proves to be his tipping point.
That proves to be the push he needed to jump off the cliff and he comes as well.
But instead of being all relieved like I was, he grows even more alert. He jerks away from me. He even pushes me up and over him so he can whip his dick out.
As soon as he does, I feel lashes of his warm cum on my trembling pussy and my thighs. I feel his entire body shuddering and trembling around me and I hug him like he hugged me when I needed his warmth.
I hug him tightly.
I hug him goodbye as he finishes what he started two years ago.
And he kisses me. On the forehead, tenderly, gently as he comes down from his high.
Like he also did two years ago.
There’s blood on my thighs. On my dick.
Dried and brownish.
Only a few small spots, nothing big. Nothing that would draw my eyes to them.
But I’m looking at them now.
Back at my hotel room, as I step into the shower, I’m looking at these spots as the water washes them away. As the water swallows the dark red color. As it goes down the drain.
For a second I don’t get it.
I don’t fucking get it.
But then I know.
Like a jolt to my system, I fucking know. I fucking remember.
Her impossible tightness, the struggle to get in, her shocked breaths and jerks. Her tears.
That burned my skin when they fell on me.
She lied.
She lied to me tonight. She lied.
And that burning, that pain I’d felt when she cried because of me, because I’d physically hurt her with my callousness, comes back.
A severe, massive pain. The likes of which I’ve never experienced before.
And I’m quite adept at dealing with it.
It comes with the territory of being an athlete. You spend most of your life hurting, nursing one injury after another. Icing, bandaging, elevating, walking it off.
Just because I don’t play soccer anymore doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten.
But there’s not just pain, there’s anger too, and I’ve never felt this kind of an anger before either.
Anger at my own fucking self for not figuring it out sooner, for not figuring it out in the moment, and I’m quite an expert in handling anger as well.
Asshole father, remember?
I wasn’t lying to her when I told her that yes, it hurt like a mother when he asked me to give up soccer in exchange for her freedom and come work for him. It made me angry too, furious, that I was so close to winning, so close to showing him once and for all that he wouldn’t control me.
But it didn’t make me as angry as I was when I found out my father’d got his evil clutches into her.
And it didn’t make me as angry as I am right now.
As angry as I get when I think of something else.
I didn’t have a condom on me.
She pissed me the fuck off, made my blood burn with jealousy and I wasn’t thinking straight, all right?
I wasn’t thinking about anything other than getting inside of her body, erasing that goddamn son of a bitch, and it didn’t occur to me that I was bare. Not until I was already inside of her. Not until I was already coming and I pulled out.
I know I pulled out. I fucking know that but…
But what if that wasn’t enough?
What if…
Jesus Christ.
The whole drive back from St. Mary’s, I kept thinking that that was it. That tonight would be the last time. That I’d give her what she wanted. It didn’t even make sense, me going there. The video is done.
If she wants to fall for someone, she can fucking fall for someone.
And she better pray that I don’t ever find out who he is.
Because if I do, I will murder him. I will kill him just for breathing the same air as her.
That’s what I do in my thoughts. When I picture her with someone. When I torture myself with the possibility that she might’ve moved on. That she’s giving her sweet smiles to someone else. That she’s fucking dancing for someone else.
But fuck it all now.
Fuck what she wants.
If she wanted me to stay away, she shouldn’t have lied. She shouldn’t have angered me, made me furious enough to hurt her like that. To make her bleed over my dick, my thighs.
To not only hurt her but to get inside her all bare, all thoughtless.
So fuck what she wants.
I’m seeing her again.
There’s something wrong with me.
For the first few days I try to deny it.
I try to deny that I’m sad. I try to deny that I cry in my pillow at night. That I can’t sleep or focus. And that I’m just bone tired.
I try to deny that all of this is because it’s over.
Because I’ve had closure now and because I’ll never see him again.
Because it’s crazy.
That I’m sad about that. That I’m sad about never seeing him when I didn’t want to see him in the first place. When it upset me so much that I saw him at the bar and that he was back in my life.
When I asked for him to promise me.
I asked him for closure. I told him that I wanted this to end, that I wanted to forget him.
But somehow, despite everything, this closure thing has become the most painful experience of my life.
Even more painful than a broken heart.
So much so that it’s hard to even get out of bed and go to classes. It’s hard to muster up the energy to sneak
out to Ballad of the Bards when Friday comes.
My friends think I’m acting strange but I deny it to them too.
Besides, my friends have their own problems.
Especially my one friend.
Salem Salinger, and her problem has a name: Arrow Carlisle, our new soccer coach.
Yes, we have soccer here at St. Mary’s.
It’s more or less a team-building exercise that every student has to participate in. We get a choice to pick from a couple of sports. We play those sports as a team and learn how to live in a society.
Anyway.
With his dirty blond hair and blue eyes, that guy is a sun god. All the girls at St. Mary’s are crazy for him and his good looks. He started at the school right around the time Salem did and it’s been pretty apparent that she’s crushing really hard on our new coach.
She hasn’t said anything about it to anyone but I can tell; I have boy problems too, after all.
I’m not interested in soccer at all but even I know who Arrow Carlisle is.
According to my brothers, he’s one of the best pro soccer players in the country, the star of the L.A. Galaxy team. He was the reason why Galaxy won the championship trophy last year and they were on track to win again this year.
Until Arrow got injured and was told to sit out a few games as a precaution.
He’s here to recuperate, and meanwhile, he’s coaching our sort of lame soccer team as a favor to his mom.
Who also happens to be the principal of this reform school and Salem’s guardian who sent her here in the first place.
As I said, problems.
Salem has a lot of them.
And so instead of worrying my friends, I decide to go out with Wyn when the weekend arrives. Just to prove to them and to myself that things are okay.
That closure is a good thing and I got exactly what I wanted.
Freedom from him.
Only it backfires when I see him at Buttery Blossoms.
With a girl.
To be fair, that girl — Teresa — works there and I know her. She’s pretty easy-going and fun. And hence super popular with the patrons. And from the looks of it, she’s super popular with him too.
Because he seems very engrossed in what she’s saying.
Which is probably why he can’t see me.
Again, to be fair, I’m not inside the shop yet. I’m across the street from it and I was about to cross when I saw him, his dark head and his white hoodie.
That shines when the rays of the sun fall on him.
I’m never going to see that hoodie again, am I? I’m never going to touch it or feel it. I’m never going to touch his hair, smell his scent.
I’m never going to taste him or feel him.
Or dance for him.
No one’s ever going to watch me dance like he does, like I really am a perfect ballerina.
No one’s ever going to call me Fae…
Despite explaining this to myself for the thousandth time, a great wave of sadness grips me. It grips my heart and my body starts trembling. I tell Wyn that I can’t walk. I tell her that I need to get out of here.
To her credit, she doesn’t ask. She simply goes with me.
God, I love her and I hate that I’m making her skip out on her favorite brunch place. But I can’t. I can’t go when he’s in there. With a girl.
When he’s moved on.
This is him moving on, isn’t it?
So it worked then, what we did. What I made him do. All my lies and misdirection worked and he’s done with me. He’s fucked me out of his system and as I’ve been saying, it’s a good thing.
I just don’t know why I feel so angry.
Why I want to go in there and punch him in the face. Why I want to cry and sob and curl into a ball.
So for the next couple of weeks, I try my hardest to get rid of this anger, this pain, this sadness. I try to distract myself and stay busy.
Busy, busy, busy.
With classes, with homework, with school activities, with gardening and counseling sessions. Days are easier to pass because there’s always something to do and I have my girls.
But nights are harder.
I have a solution for that as well though. Wyn’s stories.
When I can’t sleep, I ask Wyn to tell me stories. Especially that one story that I love.
It’s about a man she met one night.
The one she calls her dream man.
We don’t know who he is. All we know is that a year ago when Wyn came here for the first time, that summer, she met a man. She says he was older than us, like in his late twenties or something. And somehow, crazily enough, that man became the reason why she came here to St. Mary’s.
She hasn’t shared this with anyone else except me; she’s too shy, but I love hearing about this mystery man and making up theories about him.
With moonlight streaming through the barred windows and lying on my side on the bed to face her, I ask her one night, “Tell me about his eyes.”
In the same position from her bed, she bites her lip and says in her soft voice, “Um, okay. So his eyes are blue. Like yours. But I think a little darker. Like navy, maybe.”
“And his hair?”
“Dark from what I could see. It was night, way past my curfew. But sometimes I think there might be some light strands in there, I don’t know. Maybe dirty blond.”
“Like Coach Carlisle’s?” I ask, referring to Salem’s crush.
Wyn sighs. “Oh yeah, that would be awesome.” She puts her hands under her cheek and continues, “And well, he came out of nowhere. Like one second I was alone and the next, he was there. I was sitting on the sidewalk, crying because I’d had a fight with my dad and suddenly there was this huge man and his shadow covering me. And I got really scared but then he talked.”
I grin. “And what did he say?”
She smiles as well. “He asked me if I was okay and I told him that I was. And I thought that he would leave after that, anyone would have, but he didn’t. He stayed and I still can’t believe he stayed. And he didn’t even try anything with me, you know? He just sat on the other side of the road, opposite to me, and told me that he had a sister my age and that if I wanted to, I could talk to him. And I did. I told him about my dad and how he was forcing me to go to law school instead of art school and all that, you know? And then he said something.”
I love this part. “What?”
She looks at me and I know her eyes must be shining right about now. “He said that I’m a dreamer. And that I should keep dreaming and I should do what my dreams tell me to do. Because it’s important. For some reason, I felt like he didn’t, you know? He didn’t do what his dreams told him to do, so…” She sighs. “So yeah, that’s what he told me.”
“And so you drew graffiti on your dad’s car. Because he told you to follow your dreams?”
She chuckles. “Yeah, and all over the siding on the house. But also because he called me Bronwyn.”
I laugh. “And you let that happen, Wyn?! Come on.”
She laughs as well. “I know. How could I, right? I told him not to, actually. I told him that people call me Wyn but he didn’t listen. He walked me back to my house — I could barely look at him all through that walk — and as he was leaving, he said, ‘Good luck, Bronwyn.’ And I just stood there because I never thought I’d like it. I never thought I’d like someone calling me by my name. Bronwyn.”
“But you did like it.”
“Yeah.” She nods, her voice all dreamy now. “Because he said it. In that voice that somehow reminds me of summer days and cotton sheets, cut grass. Deep and lazy like Sunday mornings.”
“You should’ve asked him his name, Wyn,” I almost whine because I want to know his name myself.
She releases a mournful sigh. “I know. I’m an idiot. I told you I could barely look at him. He was just so…”
“Sexy?”
“Yeah
,” she agrees. “And big and masculine.”
I hum. “Maybe one day you’ll run into him somewhere. You can ask him then.”
Wyn gives me a look. “Yeah, because life is just that amazing.”
I want it to be.
For my dreamer, artistic friend at least.
I want her to see her dream man again. I want her to ask him his name, talk to him, tell him all the things she’s been feeling ever since she saw him that one night.
And I want him to fall in love with her. I want him to be a good guy. A guy who will care for her heart, for her feelings. A guy who won’t make her cry.
“He was a good guy, wasn’t he?” I ask Wyn after a while.
“I’d like to think so. He made me feel alive though. For those ten minutes he was with me.”
“I love that for you,” I say, feeling an overwhelming love for her as I blink away my own tears.
Wyn watches me for a few moments before she hesitantly asks, “What happened, Callie?”
“Nothing.”
“Something happened, didn’t it? With him.” She frowns. “Has he done something? Has he hurt you again?”
I swallow down a thick wave of emotions. “No. He didn’t hurt me. Well, not more than he already has.”
This time around, he didn’t do anything I didn’t ask him to. This time around, he didn’t do anything that I didn’t make him do.
You want to fall for someone else?
I do. I still do.
It hadn’t occurred to me until that night, until I said the words. But I do want to fall for someone else. Someone other than him. Someone like Toby.
Someone who’s at least capable of loving. Unlike him.
“So then what happened? Why have you been so sad?”
Sad.
Yeah, I’ve been that.
I don’t know how to stop being sad at the thought of falling for someone else.
“It’s just…” I bite my lip. “He gave up soccer and he’s working for his dad. That’s how he got me off the hook.”
“What?”
“Yeah.”
“But Callie, that’s like…”
“I know.”
“Huge.”
I sniffle. “Yeah.”
“Are you sure he’s not in l–”
I cut her off. “Yeah, I’m sure. This is what he does. He did all those sweet things before and I fell for them and…” I shake my head. “I can’t. Not again, Wyn. I can’t forget what he did. I can’t forget how he broke my heart. No matter how hard I try and… It’s just my stupid broken heart that still...”
A Gorgeous Villain Page 29
