by Hart, Callie
“I didn’t even know you painted,” I whisper.
He arches a dark eyebrow, canting his head to one side. “Didn’t you?”
“Urgh, yes. I did. I don’t even know why I said that. I just…”
“You don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to feel. You’re scared of the truth and what it could mean. Down is up, and up is down…”
He makes it sound so confusing. It’s as though he’s reading my mind. “Yes. All of that,” I agree.
He enters the room, approaching with slow steps that seem designed to give me time to react and escape. I remain rooted to the spot, not daring to breathe as he gets closer and closer. He stops, close enough that his arm brushes up against mine as he comes to stand in front of the painting, his sharp green eyes assessing his work with a cold detachment. “I don’t like painting people,” he says quietly. “No matter how well I capture their likeness, I always end up projecting my own emotions onto them. They always end up angry and ready for a fight.” He touches his fingertips to the deep furrow he painted in between my eyebrows, rubbing them as if he might be able to ease the tension he created on my face.
“You shouldn’t have come here, y’know,” he says tightly. “This isn’t exactly a safe place for someone like you.”
“Someone like me? God, I’m not some weak, pathetic, defenseless girlchild who can’t look after herself. I think Pax’s esophagus will attest to that. And this is your home, anyway. What the fuck do you get up to here? Am I supposed to be worried for my safety?”
“Yes!” He sounds so exasperated. Looks it, too. Dragging his hands back through his hair, he wheels away from the painting, stepping toward his bed. “I can’t spell this out for you, Elodie. It’s too…it’s fucking complicated, and I should never have pursued you the way I have been doing, but I’m a prick, all right? I’m not known for doing what’s best for other people.”
Biting down hard, clenching every muscle in my body, I gather up what little courage I have, and I ask the question I came here to ask. “You disappeared, Wren. You vanished for three whole days without any word of explanation. Are you gonna tell me where you’ve been?”
He shakes his head so slowly, looking down at his hands. “No. I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
Wow. He’s really not going to tell me? “Were you—were you hooking up with girls. Is that why you won’t say?”
A small smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Would you be jealous if I had?”
It kills me that I let myself ask that. It kills me that he looks so damn pleased with himself now. I just revealed a soft, vulnerable part of myself; I bared my neck, exposing myself to him, and now he has all he needs to rip out my throat. “Just answer the question, Wren.”
Still glowing with satisfaction, he sucks on his bottom lip, shaking his head again. “No, Little E. There were no other girls.”
Relief should be the very last thing I feel, but it surges up inside me nontheless. “Okay. So, what? You’re just done with me now? Because normally guys don’t make you promise to spend time with them and then just disappear into thin air.”
He goes still. Doesn’t look up. Not really. Just turns his head slightly toward me, his eyes half-closed, turmoil written on the lines of his face. “That’s what you wanted, right? What you’ve wanted this entire time. For me to leave you alone?”
Yes. It is all I’ve wanted. I’ve waded through thigh-deep frustration and anger in my attempts to distance myself from him. But now that we’re here, he’s giving me this out… I’m pretending like this is some new revelation, striking me out of the blue, but that isn’t the truth. I’ve wanted him since the moment I set eyes on him, smoking that cigarette outside the academy, waiting for me in the half-drawn shadows. Even with his shitty attitude, and his sharp tongue, and his suspect history, I’ve wanted him. And that kiss we shared on Friday night made me unravel in a way that thrilled and terrified me.
“Who did you pay to find the bird?” I demand.
“What?”
“The bird. My mother’s bird. You left it for me outside my room. Who did you pay to sift through a filthy vacuum cleaner and collect all of the pieces?”
Wren’s head jerks back; his brows hike up his forehead, crimping together. “Who did I pay?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t pay anyone. And the pieces were a lot more difficult to come across than that. The janitor had emptied the vacuum into the dumpster by the kitchen. It was empty otherwise, but it was still an unpleasant task.”
Do I believe what he’s telling me? He not only didn’t force someone into doing his dirty work, but that he did that really, disgusting, unbelievably gross dirty work for me? I’m having trouble conjuring the image of him vaulting over the side of a dumpster so he can pick through grime and muck in order to do something kind for another human being. I get as far as seeing him there, beside the dumpster, but the rest of the image won’t materialize. In my head, he lights up a smoke, leans against the dumpster, curling his lip up in an arrogant, smug way as he tells me to go fuck myself.
“You were gonna ream me out for bullying someone into putting it back together for you. I’m right, aren’t I? That’s why you came here?” Wren asks. He sits down on the edge of his bed, waiting for me to answer. I don’t know that I can, though. Now that I’m here, and he’s acting weird and vulnerable, I’m at a complete loss.
“Yes,” I confess reluctantly. “I was. I figured you’d had a friendly conversation with Tom or one of his friends and suggested they do you a little favor or wind up with a black eye.”
Something doleful and unhappy plays out across his face. He studies his hands, picking absently at a chip of black nail polish. “I might have done that. Another time. But not for something I planned on giving to you, Little E. You seemed cut up over losing the thing, and…I don’t know,” he says, “I wanted to make it right. I wanted to make it right. Not coerce someone else into doing it for me. So, yeah. After the night of the storm, I went and found the janitor. He pointed me in the right direction, and I spent a couple of hours every night sticking my fucking fingers together with Gorilla Glue, trying to make it whole again. I had to use clay to fill in the parts where pieces were missing. And that was it. I fixed it. I gave it back to you. No need to make a big deal out of it.”
I’ve never seen him look more uncomfortable than this. He looks like he’s simultaneously being bitten by thousands of fire ants and having bamboo spikes shoved underneath his fingernails.
“I don’t understand you. How can you look so wound up and miserable over the fact that someone found out you did something nice for them?”
“Because I’m not nice,” he grinds out. “I don’t do nice things. I don’t know how to…be nice.”
This is not the Wren Jacobi I know. That Wren is confident and so sure of who he is. This Wren is tense, it feels like he’s going to blow any moment now. I sit down next to him without considering the consequences—how his close proximity might affect my breathing, or how the heat from his leg resting against mine might make my head spin like a top. “You didn’t answer the question,” he says.
Indecision has me by the tongue. I did avoid answering the question he posed to me, yes, but I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to reply. Carina would tell me to run like the wind, get away from this as quickly as possible and thank my lucky stars that I escaped unscathed. But, then again, Wren was right. I haven’t seen him do anything unforgiveable since I arrived at Wolf Hall. I have no reason to think he’d do anything to hurt me.
“You asked me to trust you,” I whisper, afraid of the words even as I’m saying them. “And I’ve been scared to. I know that wanting to be with you, in whatever capacity, is probably the stupidest thing I can possibly do, Wren. But I do. I do want you, and…the answer’s no. I don’t want you to be done with me. I feel like there could be…”
“More,” Wren supplies. “A lot more. Between us.”
“Yes.
”
The points where my body is making contact with his—my knee, my thigh, my hip, my shoulder—all feel like they’re pressed up against a vat of boiling water, and that vat has been growing gradually hotter and hotter as I’ve been sitting here, so slowly that I haven’t noticed that it’s too, too hot until the contact is suddenly scalding me. I want to pull away, but Wren angles his head, looking sideways at me, and I’m staked to the spot, unable to move a muscle. “I can’t promise I’m not gonna hurt you, Little E. But I can promise that, if I do, it won’t be on purpose. I can also promise that I’ll do everything in my power not to.” He swallows thickly, his throat bobbing. “Do you think that might be enough?”
The air’s so laden with tension that it feels syrupy as it trickles down into my lungs. His muscles lock up, his shoulders rising a fraction as he waits for my answer. Aware of how idiotic this whole thing is, I slowly nod my head.
Wren’s eyes come alive. “Thank fuck for that.” Twisting, he grabs me, holding my face in his hands, and his mouth is on mine before I can even react. Heat roars up from the very soles of my feet, flooding my body until it’s burning at the very crown of my head, and nothing, nothing feels stable anymore. The bed tilts, the floor shifts, my mind capsizes, and I’m moving, scrambling to get closer, climbing into his lap like some wild animal, trying to wrap myself around him.
This is no slow burn. We’ve already done our little dance, our back and forth with each other over the past few weeks more than enough foreplay for either of us. His tongue drives past my lips, tangling with my own, tasting me, licking me, exploring my mouth with a frantic urgency that has me panting and whimpering like a needy fucking dog. Wren’s hands move to the small of my back, pulling me to him, and I arch into him, crushing myself up against his chest, wanting so badly to be even closer. Wren lets out a groan, breathing heavily into my mouth, and hearing it, hearing him coming undone, ignites fireworks in my head.
This is happening.
This is really happening?
“Elodie,” he pants. I wind my fingers into his hair, relishing the thickness of it, gulping down breath after breath as I try to master this crazy, out of control feeling that’s whipping around in my chest like a hurricane. “Elodie,” he repeats. He pulls back a fraction, tugging on a handful of my hair hard enough that I have to tilt my head back to look up at him. “This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that we should stop if you’re not… if you… if you don’t…”
“Shut up and fuck me, Wren.”
His eyes flash a green so vivid and intense that they steal the oxygen right out of my lungs. “As you wish.” In one swift, powerful move, he flips me over and throws me down onto the bed, grinning like a demon as he kneels over me, eyes roaming the length and breadth of my body without a lick of shame. “For every filthy thought you’ve had about me, Stillwater, I’ve bested you ten times over. You’ve no idea how many times I’ve wrapped my hand around my cock and made myself come to you here in this bed. How many times I’ve almost bitten through my own fucking tongue, aching for you as I’ve shot my load all over my own stomach. I’ve always been a depraved and dirty thing, Elodie Stillwater, but the idea of you has corrupted me to the point of insanity.”
Oh…my…fucking…god.
The thought of it. The very idea of him lying here in this bed, touching himself, stroking his dick, closing his eyes and painting himself pictures of me as his pleasure mounts…
It’s just too fucking much. Want burns between my legs, so urgent and demanding that I have to press my thighs together to prevent my hips from bucking of their own accord. Wren takes me in; he can see how glazed over and hungry my eyes are, and it only seems to urge him on.
“I’ve painted you on canvas, Little E, but it hasn’t been enough. All I’ve wanted to do…” He takes hold of the bottom of my shirt, fisting the hem of the thin material. “All I’ve been desperate to do…” He rents the material in two, tearing it from my body, exposing my stomach and my chest. “Is paint your entire body with my come.”
He isn’t shy. He reaches out and palms my breasts through my black, lacy bra, growling through his teeth in an animalistic, possessive way that has my back arching off the bed. He bows himself over me, huffing down his nose, kissing and licking at the skin of my neck, and down, down, down, until he’s hovering right over my chest. How many times have I stared at that cruel, beautiful mouth of his and worried about how much damage it was capable of inflicting? It was too dangerous to imagine how much pleasure he could deliver with it. And now, here I am, spread out for him on his bed, finding out firsthand just how capable he is…
He rubs his jaw against my breasts, then clamps down over the thin, sheer material, pinching my nipple between his teeth, and—
“Fuck! Wren!”
Pain lights me up, brilliant and blinding, and a wicked smile spreads like sin across his face. With painstaking slowness, he slides his hand up my body, starting at my hip, moving over my stomach, my ribs, my shoulder, briefly taking hold of me by the neck, though not closing his fingers tight, and then continuing upward, until his palm is pressing down, featherlight, over my mouth.
“Believe me, Little E. You do not want them to hear this.”
He’s talking about Pax and Dash, of course. His asshole roommates are probably lurking out there in the hallway, slapping each other and acting like dicks, straining to hear what’s going on in here. Wren’s expression is all warning. “I can fuck you, Elodie. I can take your breath away. I’ll make you come around my dick so fucking hard, you won’t be able to walk straight for a week. But you cannot make a sound. Do you understand? If they hear…”
He doesn’t complete the sentence, but I can see that he’s being serious. Gravely so.
Dipping down, he kisses me roughly, his tongue and his teeth and his raw desire crowding in on me, making me dizzy. “Can you do that?” he asks, nipping at my bottom lip with his teeth. “Can you be quiet for me? Can you do what I tell you, when I tell you, without screaming the house down?”
I nod. I’ll gag myself if I have to, so long as he keeps on kissing me, and his eyes continue to feast on me like I’m the most delectable thing he’s ever seen. His hands are calloused and deliciously rough as he runs them down my body. I shiver, completely at his mercy as he hooks his fingers into the waistband of my jeans and tugs at them suggestively.
“Lift your ass,” he commands. I do it without so much as flinching, planting my feet on the bed and hiking my hips up off the mattress. Wren unfastens my pants with quick, deft fingers, ripping the zipper down, then grabbing hold of the material and yanking it over my hips, tearing the denim from my legs. His eyes burn into me, devouring my bare flesh as he slides off the end of the bed and takes off his hoody. He does it in that lazy way that guys do, one hand reaching behind him, grabbing the material and tugging it over his head in a smooth move. His t-shirt goes with the hoody, both items of clothing dropping to the floor at his feet.
Then he’s standing there in nothing but his sweats, his thumbs dipping down below his waistband, smirking ruinously at me. There’s a dare in his eyes—something insolent and brazen that tells me he’s going to be naked if he pulls down those sweats.
“Wanna go back downstairs and drink more coffee?” he asks. He’s giving me an out. A chance to back away from this situation before it goes any further.
“I appreciate the offer,” I say breathlessly, “but I’m gonna explode if you don’t get back over here in the next three seconds and take care of me.”
Wren smiles, but it’s a humorless expression. He must feel it. This electricity between us must be eating him alive, the way it’s eating away at me. He takes down his sweats, and as I expected, his cock springs free from the thick material, standing proud as he steps out of the pants. A moment passes, where I dig my fingernails into my palms, so close to breaking the skin, and Wren stands absolutely still, allowing me to see him.
He’s hard as hell. And really fucking big. I
expected nothing less; Wren gives off mad big dick vibes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I just wasn’t expecting him to be this big. The heavy head of his cock bobs, and I feel like I’m sinking into the bed beneath me, disappearing into it, being swallowed up by the comforter and all the confusion of pillows.
Wren takes one step forward, palming himself in his hand. “Sure about that coffee?” He gives me an open-mouthed grin that almost makes my eyes roll back inside my head. Jesus wept, he’s fucking beautiful. I snuck a peak at him back at the gazebo, the night of the storm, but I didn’t let myself drink him in the way I’ve given myself permission to do now. His abs are ridiculously cut, his pecs standing proud from his muscled chest. And the defined vee that leads the eye down, down, between his legs, guiding me right to his erect dick…I can’t fucking look away. So, I look down instead. His balls are big—suspended, heavy and swollen between his thighs. Wren notices where I’m looking and moves his hand down, cupping himself, shuddering slightly when I let out a breathy whimper that’s embarrassing as hell.
“Is this what you came here for, Little E? Did you know this was going to happen? Were you thinking about my dick the entire way down the mountain?”
I swallow, trying to make sense of what’s happening inside me right now. I’ve never been so conflicted before. There are too many thoughts and needs and wants, all quarrelling with one another, screaming over the top of one another, begging to be heard. My emotions are like one of Wren’s stormy paintings—a swirling mass of color and light and darkness, all mixed together, blurring and surreal.
Is this even really happening? Am I even really fucking here? Is this a feverish, delicious nightmare that I’m going to wake from, panting and covered in sweat?
“No,” I whisper. “I didn’t let myself think…this.” I didn’t. Such a thought would have been far too dangerous. If I’d let myself for one minute think that this might happen, I’d have been running back up the hill like the very devil himself was at my back.
