Dare Me

by Stella Rhys

  Just like now. Fuck. I rolled my neck, trying to tell my body it was calm when it wasn’t. I did my best to neutralize my thoughts, knowing better than to walk into a formal dinner with a racing heart and throbbing cock. Alright, Callum. I inhaled deep, exhaled hard.

  You’re good, I lied to myself.

  And then I went in.

  *

  “Why so damned serious, Cal?” Colleagues asked the same question all the time and I never had an answer for them till now. I had a poker face. I was guilty of being stoic. I was told it came off as unfriendly but it certainly came in handy for moments like these. Not that I had these moments often and thank Christ for that because laying eyes on Lake DePalma for the first time after six years clean felt like being hit by a concrete wave.

  The second I walked in, her big eyes locked on mine from well across the room. A little glimmer in that pool of hazel and I was done for. My senses sparked. They heightened to take in her every move. Twitching at my side were my fingers aching to run over her skin. I used to crave that soft skin. There were nights, whether we were studying or watching TV, that I found myself mindlessly running my mouth along her bare shoulder, up the curve of her neck. She had been candy to me and I was already craving the taste again.

  Christ.

  Shaking hands with old friends, I obliged the social instinct that fought through my lust, multi-tasking the way Lake was. She had turned back to the guy she was talking to – someone whose name I should’ve probably remembered – but I knew her attention was still on me. We watched each other while looking at others. We always had. So as I carried on small talk, I continued taking her in. I eyed that hair I used to bury my face in. It was longer, darker than I remembered and it fell in loose curls around cheekbones that hadn’t been so pronounced last I’d seen her. Every feature on her gorgeous face was accentuated, every dip and curve on her body exaggerated. Pinched and flared for my viewing torture.

  I was losing it, hyper aware of every little thing about her. But it was the wrinkles across the tits of her dress that were getting me particularly hot. Six years later, her body was still giving a hard time to every piece of clothing she stretched over it. Might as well walk around naked. I imagined her doing it. The second my brain gave me a moment of weakness, my dick pounced.

  Yeah, fuck it.

  I gave in. I needed to put my hands all over her. I needed a break. That was what I told myself at least. I’d been working hard so I deserved to indulge in something as irresponsible as forgiving Lake and riding the high that came with being simply near her. I needed some real gratification. Go ahead. Take her back. The mental whirlwind rocked inside me but I didn’t show it. I casually adjusted my cufflinks, revealed my plans for Labor Day. I’d gone secretly to Hell and back while chatting about the weather with old friends and now I was ready. Fuck it, I was going to forget that Lake had ever left and just thank Christ that she was really back. I was ready, relieved with my decision.

  But then she flashed me the look and my pulse spiked.

  That old signal. Holding her gaze, she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. My shoulders went rigid. The switch flipped in my brain and I was ready to swing the fist I’d already made.

  “Callum, I’m sorry – I’m so sorry.”

  I went back to the first time Lake used the look on me. Her boyfriend was spitting words an inch from her face when I caught the signal we’d devised. If she gave it, I’d rush over and that was exactly what I did that night. Minutes later, I had a split lip and a dozen shards of broken glass in my back but at least I was conscious, still standing. Theo couldn’t say the same. As best friends, not our greatest night.

  But it was downright peaceful compared to what happened a few days later.

  “Earth to Callum. Babe! Are you okay?”

  Snapping me back to reality was Cass, the hot but slightly crazy-eyed blonde who always ended up at these dinners. I blinked at her and said something in reply but then went back to pinning a hard stare across the room at Lake. I glared at her, forcing my body down from the high alert she’d reeled me right into. The fuck, Callum, I cursed myself. I was still her dog. Still trained to perform her tricks. Lip curled, I held my ground, unclenched my abs. I wasn’t about to save her from whatever harmless guy she was talking to. She didn’t need to be rescued from their dull conversation.

  She was just testing to see if six years later, she still had me broken in.

  Fury ripped through me but I hid it well as I tore my stare off of Lake and gave my full attention to Cass Vaughn in all her bubbly, blonde glory. I knew who she was because she’d been greeting me with “I bet you don’t remember my name” since we met in senior English. I rose instinctively to challenges so she’d effectively mindfucked me into knowing who she was, which I figured she deserved some credit for. That and the fact that she’d been chasing me since high school. Logan used to call her Queen Groupie for figuring out my schedule every year. I found that shit completely off-putting but tonight, I didn’t care. Lake was back and she’d effectively pissed me off without saying a word because of course she had. That was just what she did.

  So Cass was a welcome distraction. Especially wrapped in something too small and short to be called a real dress. She gabbed excitedly at me, higher pitched with every word she spoke. Her voice reminded me of a child pinching her nose but I trucked through it, half because I knew it wouldn’t last long. Lake was never one to stand and stare either, so I waited for it – for her to lose what little patience she ever had for being ignored, especially by me. Cass was pouting for a Friday night reservation to The Pike when I finally heard it.

  “Excuse me.”

  There it was. Her crisp but raspy voice. I stiffened to the sound, the pitch lower, mature, but still completely familiar. When I turned around, I was slapped in the face with a close-up view of Lake’s head-to-toe beauty. Jesus. I kept a straight face despite feeling my muscles wind so tight it hurt. She had become a woman in the years she’d been gone and I was fighting my primal instinct to just grab her. Take her. In that half second I’d already pictured her up on the wall, dress down, nipples nice and hard in my mouth. I was so fucking turned on it was brutal. Still, I managed to return Lake’s cordial smile. Her eyes were pinned fiercely to mine but she was outwardly casual because we both knew better than to show real emotion. Not in front of this audience.

  “Callum, it’s so good to see you again.” Her words were formal and measured. It wasn’t the way we spoke to each other. Still, my name off her tongue drove me fucking wild.

  “It’s been awhile.” I gave a short chuckle as if this were something I found lightly amusing. For Christ’s sake. She leaned in to kiss my cheek. Her lips on my skin had a rush of blood threatening me below the belt.

  “God, Callum, you look…” She trailed off and pulled away to study me. A tilt of the head and her hair was tumbling over her bare shoulder. Suddenly, I was fantasizing about watching her get ready, helping her zip the back of a dress. “You look like a man, Callum Pike.”

  Cass cut in with a big laugh. “That’s because he is a man!” She slapped a hand on my chest. Lake’s cat-like eyes flicked to it. “And what a man, right? Like, this six-pack? Oh my God.”

  Lake blinked at her. “Yeah, girl.” She lifted her gaze from Cass to me, flashing me a little laugh that I refused to return. I wasn’t going to join her in ridiculing Cass. Even if Cass couldn’t distinguish pecs from abs. I’d seen Cass about a hundred times in the past few years and Lake a good zero. Cass found her way into every party I threw to raise money for the Scotch distillery. I spent years renovating a family business abandoned decades ago. I revived the Pike name to world recognition and built my own business from the ground up. Cass had some crazy in her but she’d spent the past several years throwing all her support into the biggest project of my life that Lake didn’t even know existed. If anything, Cass knew me more at this point.

  And by the middle of dinner, in the bathroom, she was getting to know

me even better.

  She white-knuckled the sink and held on for dear life as I fisted her waist. I gnashed my teeth, trying my best to fuck Lake out of my head. One brush of her bare leg against mine and I was turning into a fucking menace at the table, remembering every inch of how good I once felt inside her. “I need to talk to you in private at some point.” She murmured the question to me and every soft word seeped into my skin like venom. It didn’t help that she was touching my knee. She looked at me like I’d spit on her when I said “sure” and removed her hand. It was cold of me and I knew it but I didn’t want to feel her touch. It was all I needed for it to start all over.

  And I couldn’t let her take over my entire life again.

  So I peeled off Cass’s dress in the bathroom. It was a ring of elastic squeezing her thighs tight for me as I pounded her from behind, taking in her reactions through the reflection in the mirror. I got off on the untamed faces pretty girls made when I fucked them. That eyes-squeezed-shut but mouth-wide-open thing. Bonus points if she gave me those real, throaty noises instead of the exaggerated moan you get in porn. Cass was giving me all of that and more. She breathed jaggedly, made sounds I’d never heard before in my life. Her lip was still swollen from how hard I’d sucked on it and it quivered in a way you couldn’t fake. She was everything I loved to look at during sex.

  But it was doing nothing for me.

  Grabbing two handfuls of her, I pumped my hips so fast I could feel a deep burn in all my muscles. I’d gotten her to come but I still needed to. Badly. But no matter how hard I went, how deep I sunk, I felt nothing building and I knew she was getting self-conscious when she started giving me the porn moan. Fuck. I stared down at her insane body. Her ass was rounder than any girl I’d slept with, her waist smaller, her legs longer and easier to prop up on the sink so I could plunge every last inch of myself inside her. But it wasn’t doing shit for me and though it never happened before in my life, I knew I wasn’t going to come. Worse, I knew exactly why.

  “Wait. Please, Callum. I need to know… please just tell me, please…”

  It wasn’t long before I was squeezing the condom off my fading hard-on and dealing with a naked girl crying in front of me in a hotel bathroom, refusing to get dressed till I told her what was wrong with her. If only she’d asked what the hell was wrong with me. I could’ve given her a ten-page thesis with citations. Fuckin’ ass, I cursed myself, wishing I could muster up some sort of emotion in my voice or think of words besides “it’s not you” while getting dressed again. But I couldn’t and at this point, Cass was streaking her mascara and bawling beyond the point of consolation. Another few seconds of my silence and it was a full-on wail.

  And here we go. The mess was sudden and ridiculous but that honestly seemed about right because Lake DePalma was back and whenever she came around, so did the beautiful chaos that followed her everywhere she went like a stupid, lovestruck puppy.

  But who could even blame it.

  Chapter Two

  Lake

  I could feel the tears coming and for what would sound like the most idiotic reason when I finally told Isabel. She was hustling me out of the dining room and into the hallway for one of her signature pep talks, picking up right where our friendship left off, as if I hadn’t ditched her six years ago, right before our trip to Paris. She had, in distinct Isabel fashion, written out a sixteen-paged itinerary for the eight-day trip and bought an entirely new wardrobe. I disappeared the day before the flight and yet she was still pulling me aside tonight and saving me because she could still tell when I was two seconds from crying – and in front of a dozen people I hadn’t seen in ages, whom I really didn’t know that well. I’d lost most of my friends from high school before even disappearing, and it looked to me like Caroline had just invited people who she deemed the “nice” boys and girls.

  “It’s stupid,” I warned Isabel when she asked what was wrong.

  “I know what it is. The way he pushed your hand away.” She smirked when I looked at her with surprise for nailing it like that. “Lake, you act like I didn’t date Callum in high school. He can be rude without even realizing it. I remember. And you should remember, too. We used to sit in the kitchen with Caroline and bitch about it, just us girls.”

  “And she’d pour us a little bit of wine and pretend we were all drowning our sorrows.”

  “I don’t think she was pretending, girl.” Isabel cupped my cheeks when I frowned. “Oh, that was such a bad joke, Lake. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

  “It’s okay, it’s not you,” I murmured, still thinking about how much Caroline had been hurting even before I left her. “It’s just everything coming back to me at once.”

  “I know, girl. Just keep the waterworks to a minimal or I’m going to cry and I got my mascara so friggin perfect today.”

  I laughed. “Oh God, not the mascara.”

  Isabel wiped my tears and gave me something that was partly pout but mostly smile. “Seriously, Lake. You knew this was going to take time. You haven’t been back more than two hours and you’re already expecting Callum to get over the fact that you ever went away? I told you, girl. I don’t know if you read any of the emails I sent after you left but he was in bad shape for awhile. Really bad. Both him and Caroline. They missed you worse than any of us did and I missed you bad.” She stuck out her lip. “You’re my Buxom Buddy.”

  We both snorted. I had first bonded with Isabel in high school when she took it upon herself to fix my bra strap and tell me that I didn’t have to wear those “chunky-ass bras” just because I had “big tatas.” Our boob comparison had been a completely genuine conversation full of good advice about well-fitted bras, but it had fascinated the boys at the lunch table so much that Isabel instantly recognized our power that day as a titillating twosome. We were juniors in high school and not yet immune to the lure of constant attention so from that moment forward, to Callum’s chagrin, we became inseparable.

  Sighing, Isabel pushed my hair back. “Pretty girl. It got even wavier.”

  “It did?”

  “Like beach hair. I pay like, thirty dollars for Bumble’s surf spray and you have this naturally? Fuck you.” I tried to crack a smile, knowing that Isabel was trying to get me to laugh. She shook my shoulders. “Lake. It’s day one. Give it time with him, okay? It’s gonna take awhile.”

  “I know. It’ll just hurt in the meantime.”

  “I say this with all the love in the world, babe, but you deserve to know some of that hurt.”

  I breathed out hard. “I know.” Whatever rejection I felt now was nothing compared to what I hit everyone else with that Sunday morning I left. But it hadn’t been some painless decision for me. I hadn’t wanted to leave Callum or Caroline. I just didn’t want them to get hurt. After my grandmother died, they were the only two people left in the world that I loved – Callum especially. We had a complicated relationship but no matter what, he was always there for me. He could tease me and argue with me, but no one else was allowed to. Growing up, he never took anyone’s side but mine. For all the times my biological mom tried to bring me down and remind me that I was nothing, Callum unknowingly confirmed my worth. I’d grown up strong because of him.

  Twisted but strong.

  And from the looks of it, he’d gotten strong too. In every kind of way. Callum was under six feet tall when I left him but now he looked about six-foot-two. He’d always been lean and defined but his body was now carved with beautiful lines that deepened with every move he made. His muscles were unreal. I’d felt them in the split second that I touched his leg and I could see them pulling his sleeve tight around his bicep when he reached for his whisky. But most of all, I could see in his face that he’d gotten harder. Colder. He used to be mischievous and at least smirk if not laugh, but now I didn’t even see that. His expression was severe, intimidating, and the angles of his face had changed to match that. His cheekbones were striking and his jaw was sharper than a weapon. I had forgotten how to breathe when he first walked into the room.

  But I wasn’t surprised. Of course he’d grown up to be devastatingly handsome. The kind of man who didn’t need to say a single word to convince a girl that they’d just had a full conversation. Callum had always been gorgeous. When we were younger, he’d been that all-American jock who wrestled, played football and looked way too cute in a backwards cap. His hair was dark blonde and long, grown out past his ears. Despite Mercer School rules, he’d worn it messy, surfer-like, and it drove the girls crazy.

  That boyish look was gone now. His hair was the same length, maybe an inch shorter, but now he wore it slicked back. It was a neat, clean look but to me, it made him look mean. Ruthless. Irresistibly sexy, too, but that might have also been thanks to the perfect amount of scruff on his sculpted jaw. That was definitely new. I couldn’t pinpoint which of the changes were best. But what I did know was that Callum looked painfully good and it was about to make my long fight back to his heart a million times harder.

  “Incoming,” Isabel murmured when we heard a door fly open. I spun around to see Cass Vaughn running out, her hair a mess and her makeup smeared. She stormed past us before we could so much as open our mouths to ask if she was alright. “I wonder what the hell that was abou – ”

  Isabel’s mouth snapped shut the second Callum came out of the same bathroom Cass had run from. My jaw dropped and tightened in a matter of seconds. Couldn’t wait till the end of dinner. Of course not. I had to shake my head. He was unapologetic, casually looping his belt when his eyes met mine. His stare was blank, remorseless and he kept it pinned so hard to me that even Isabel stammered.

  “I… I’ll let you guys, um. Yeah.”

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