Then she realized we weren’t at the top of the kiddie run.
“Hold on a minute.” She walked out of my grasp, scanning the hill in front of us and the belt we’d just come up, obviously realizing she’d been tricked. “No way. Not a chance. I’m not going down that.”
“You’ve been fine all day. Why suddenly get cold feet?”
“Because this run is twice as long!”
“Three times as long, I think.” I wasn’t helping myself. “Which means you have three times the fun.”
“I don’t think it works like that.”
“It works exactly like that. Longer run just means extending the thrill.”
“I was happy with the length of thrill before.” She gave a tight smile to someone behind me. “Go ahead! We’re not going down.”
“Yes, actually, we are, but please go before us. We need a second.”
The teens behind us grinned as they stepped around us, a blunt contrast to the glare Jolie gave me. “I’m not going down that hill, Cade. You can do whatever you want, but I’m not going down.”
“I have news for you, sweetheart. There’s not another way down.”
She spun around to see if I was telling the truth, which I might not have been. It was possible there was a pathway that could be walked, but it wasn’t obvious if there was.
Realizing that she’d have to ask, she stepped toward the attendant at the top of the run. “Excuse me?”
The kid—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—answered with what he presumed Jolie wanted to know. “Sitting in the tube is all that’s allowed. No belly rides. You can get in place here, and I’ll get you started down the hill.”
While he’d given his rote delivery, I’d taken the opportunity to pull a hundred out of my wallet and slapped it in his palm before Jolie could correct him with her real question. “Take care of this, will you?” I handed him my tube and took Jolie’s from her.
She relaxed, assuming I was helping her find another way down the mountain, but instead of handing the man her tube as well, I plopped it on the ground and sat down, pulling Jolie in my lap. “Don’t struggle if you want this to stay safe, and hold on tight.”
“What are you—?”
I pushed off, sending the tube down the mountain, and her question turned into a high-pitched squeal.
“No lap riders over forty-four inches tall!” The attendant called after us, too late.
Seriously, what did he think the hundred had been for? Like I’d pay that much for him just to return my tube for me.
Whatever he thought, he’d lost his chance to stop us. We were tearing down the run at full speed, the wind whipping, Jolie screaming and laughing and screaming again. She clung onto the handles, and I clung onto her and tried to ignore her ass in my lap, and the way it rubbed against my cock whenever the tube took a little bit of a jump. I hadn’t quite expected how bumpy the ride would be. Turned out the difference between the kiddie runs and the regular runs really was more than just length.
But God, it was fucking thrilling.
Because it was always thrilling to soar at a wicked speed through space, but we could have been sitting still, and I would have been just as thrilled because she was in my arms, and she was happy, and once upon a time that right there had been The Dream.
I wished the ride could have gone on forever.
At the bottom, after we scurried to our feet and rushed our tube out of the way as was protocol, I expected her to attack. A snowball in the face, maybe. At least a good tongue-lashing, even though she’d obviously had a good time and had most likely felt the evidence of my good time as I’d grown thick and hard beneath her.
Instead, when she’d caught her breath, her eyes were still gleaming and her smile still pasted to her face. My hands were still around her, too. Or around her again, and the way she kept looking at my lips, I wondered if maybe she was thinking about kissing me.
That might have been a real punishment.
Just thinking about it stole my own smile from my face. She sombered when I did, and then it felt even more likely that we might kiss.
I didn’t think I could survive that.
It had been one thing to have her mouth wrapped around my cock. Her lips on mine was a whole other level of connection. One that would surely kill me.
And despite the danger, I couldn’t fucking step away. “See?” I said, desperate for something safe to fill the silence. “Not so scary when it’s both of us together.”
She grew even more serious. “I forgot that. That I’m stronger with you.”
“I didn’t.” Fuck. This wasn’t safe at all.
“No, you always knew. I wish I’d thought that would have been enough.”
Her regrets meant nothing.
Maybe that wasn’t true. “I’ve been mad at you for a really long time because you didn’t believe in us, Jol.”
“And now?” It was a whisper, as though the question might break something if voiced too loudly. “Are you still mad?”
Fuck, yes, I was mad. Mad was all I ever was. It had been the only emotion I’d truly known for so long now that I didn’t remember what it felt like not to be mad.
Except, all of a sudden, that wasn’t true either. “I want to be,” I said, and I was bare and naked now before her.
“But you’re not?”
Everything about her was hopeful. Her expression, the way she held her body, the soft lilt in her voice. It was the perfect chance to say something hurtful to her, to get back for how hurt she’d once made me when I’d been full of hope and looking at her with the same trusting eyes.
Revenge had been a nice fantasy over the years. I’d conjured up many scenarios where I’d given paybacks. Both to her father and her. The times I’d dreamed about destroying her had been the most satisfying.
Right now, I couldn’t imagine why I’d ever want to hurt her. Hurting her only meant hurting me, and hadn’t I been hurt enough?
So where did that leave me emotionally? “I don’t think I’m ready for what I feel.”
She nodded. “I don’t think I’m ready either.”
Then, because she’d said she wasn’t ready—because caring for her and protecting her was what I always did, what I’d always done—I stepped away, without kissing her, without even a last lingering glance at her mouth.
But if she thought I’d stepped away because I was protecting myself? Well. I kind of hoped that’s exactly what she thought.
Twenty-One
Past
* * *
I flattened myself against the roof and bent over the overhang, checking to make sure the window was slightly open before I knocked. That was our code—if the window was shut, it was a bad time. That way I didn’t pop up when her father might see me. We’d become masters at secrecy. It was funny what skills necessity could instill.
Almost as soon as I rapped, as though she’d been waiting for me, her curtains parted, and Jolie lifted her window all the way. Carefully, I turned around and lowered my foot to the open ledge, then worked my way through the opening onto her bed, where she immediately threw her arms around me.
“I swear I can’t breathe every time you do that.”
I knew she was looking behind me, at the drop from the second floor to the ground. The height was even worse here than around the front of the house because the basement opened up to garden level on this side. No sane person would attempt to get to Jolie this way, which was probably why Headmaster Stark had put her in this room.
Headmaster Stark hadn’t been counting on me.
“I could climb it in my sleep,” I insisted. But I tore myself away from her and shut the windowpane because keeping it open felt like tempting fate.
I started to pull her back to my arms when she reminded me. “The dresser.”
Stark was the kind of guy who locked his daughter in her room at night. Literally. The threat of her having no way out in a fire was apparently less frightening than the threat of her sneaking
out. The high window took care of one possible route of escape—or so he thought. A lock on the outside of her door took care of the other route.
If he wanted to walk into her room, the only warning we’d get would be the click of the lock turning, and while both of us agreed it was highly unlikely he’d come to check on her in the middle of the night, Jolie insisted on taking precautions all the same.
And so her dresser was pushed in front of the door. It wasn’t heavy enough to keep anyone out for long, but it could buy me time to go back through the window.
“One day, he’s going to come up here because he hears us sliding the dresser against the door.” I tugged it into place all the same while she pushed with her shoulder on the other side.
“It makes me feel better.” It was what she always said, and I understood that too, but it was the same reason that made her feel better that made me hate the safeguard—I was the one who was protected. Not her.
But that was the price of her love. She looked out for me, and when it came to avoiding the wrath of her father, she was the expert. And as I moved with her back to the bed, I promised myself, as I always did, that one day I would be the one who did all the protecting.
Back in her arms, my lips found hers, teasing them open with soft kisses before claiming her with my tongue. I was at turns aggressive and gentle, a technique I’d only recently realized drove her wild—the chase, the retreat, the chase again. That was exactly how Jolie wanted to be pursued. She wanted to be wanted but couldn’t handle being wanted all at the same time, and the push/pull seemed to allow her space to process both feelings separately.
Driving her wild, though, meant I’d just set the agenda for our tryst. I’d wanted to talk to her first. Truth was, I missed her. We’d been avoiding each other publicly the past couple of weeks, sure her father was onto us, a fear that could very well have been imagined. Regardless, we’d been playing it safe, and while I loved the physical with her—love wasn’t even the right term; I craved it, needed it, depended on it for my survival—our connection went beyond that. I yearned to know every part of her, to be the keeper of her every secret, both the important ones and the trivial. My heart beat more steadily in her presence. Keeping my distance had been agony, and I wanted to catch up. There was the thing I wanted to ask her too, the pipe cleaner from my mother’s craft kit burning like a hot coal in my pocket.
But I also wanted this—her panting and eager, her mouth everywhere, her hands tugging at my sweatshirt.
I broke away long enough to get the thing over my head. By the time I’d tossed it to the ground, she was already climbing onto me, straddling my lap, grinding her hips against the aching rod in my jeans.
With a grunt of satisfaction, I unthinkingly leaned back and jerked at the unexpected surge of pain as my body met the decorative framework around the window.
Jolie, of course, noticed. “Is it still really bad? Does it need more ointment? I’m pretty sure I could get an antibiotic if I faked a sore throat.”
“Carla had something from her last toothache that she never finished. I stole those.” Carefully, I repositioned myself so I was leaning against the flat of the wall instead of the uneven molding. “It’s healing pretty well, I think.”
It had been worse this time than usual. He’d brought out a cane instead of his skinny-tailed whip, and the single stripe he’d left had torn open and bled. It had been more than a week since I’d slept on my back, and only the last few days that I’d been able to go long stretches without thinking about it at all.
I downplayed the pain for her, though. Partly because it had been her father who’d made it, and I didn’t want her to feel any guilt about that.
But also because I was ashamed of it. Ashamed that I’d been stupid enough to get myself in trouble. Ashamed of what had happened in that room after the cane had broken my skin.
I still hadn’t told her all of it. She carried enough on her own. I didn’t need her to feel this pain with me too.
“Turn around. Let me see it.”
I shook my head and tried to pull her back toward me. The heat of the moment was ruined now, but if I let her examine me, she’d turn into my nurse, and I didn’t need that kind of attention right now.
She resisted for a moment, then sighed and stretched out, her legs tangling with mine, her head resting on my chest. “How long do we have to hold on?”
“It’s only two months. Less, actually. Seven weeks.” I pressed my lips against her forehead and stroked her hair. “We just have to get through seven weeks, and then we’re gone.”
“Tell me again how we’re going to do it.”
This was becoming as routine as the window being left open and the dresser pulled in front of the door, me reciting how we’d eventually get away like it was her favorite bedtime story. “We’ll walk the stage. We’ll get our diplomas. Then after the ceremony, we’ll leave. We won’t even go to the after party. We’ll just be gone.”
“And we won’t take his car.”
“No. We won’t take my mother’s either.”
“So they can’t come after us saying we stole anything.” This was one of the most important details to her, the part she went over and over. She rarely expressed fear where her father was concerned—because she’d learned to keep it buried, I suspected. Her hyperfocus on making sure there was no legal way her father could come after us revealed the terror she usually kept hidden.
“We won’t take anything of theirs,” I promised. “And you’ll be eighteen then. He can’t call you a runaway.” Her birthday was only three days before graduation. I’d already had mine. Both of us would be adults in the eyes of the law.
“And you’re sure Janice won’t press charges about her truck?”
“Yes.” I wasn’t as sure as I pretended I was, but I felt good enough to count on it. Janice was the school’s gardener. These days, she did more delegating than actual work, but she still occupied the cottage attached to the greenhouse on the edge of the school property. The truck we planned to take had belonged to her late husband and had sat unused in her garage since his death the previous year.
I’d heard all about it when I’d been sentenced to weed pulling for one of my punishments. Official punishment, anyway. The one that had been declared to my fellow schoolmates as a warning to not get caught with a joint. My real punishment had been doled out in the privacy of Stark’s office, the door closed, my mouth biting down into my shirt so that I wouldn’t be heard down the hall. Any sound at all would equal double the thrashing, so I tried extra hard to be quiet. I hadn’t learned as well as Jolie had, but I’d learned some.
The greenhouse part of the punishment had ended up being more of a reward. Mostly I moved heavy bags of soil and dug holes, but it was calm and meditative, the hours filled with a gentle rhythm of work as Janice chatted about her husband and her refusal to learn to drive a stick and the truck that still worked but she hadn’t gotten around to selling. More than once she said that I could buy it from her, and when I told her that I didn’t have the money, she’d always say, “We’ll figure something out.” She’d even shown me where the keys were kept.
We could take the truck, I’d decided. We could write a note explaining. She wouldn’t report us. I hoped.
“We’ll send her money when we can,” Jolie said, repeating the promise I’d made in the past.
“We will. We’ll be fine.”
“And where will we go?”
This was where the story changed from telling to telling. Sometimes I’d say we’d go to New York. Other times, Canada. On days when one of us was feeling especially pessimistic, I’d take us farther—to Europe. To Egypt. To Japan.
Truth was, where we went didn’t matter. As long as I was with her.
I tipped her chin up toward mine so I could look her in the eyes when I said it. But then her mouth caught my attention as she swept her tongue over her bottom lip, and the hand she’d been lazily dancing over my abdomen suddenly felt like not enough touch
.
I pressed my mouth to hers, pulling her leg astride me so that my cock could press against the warm spot between her legs. “I need to be inside of you,” I whispered between drugging kisses. “That’s the only place I want to go.”
Sex was Jolie’s love language even more than it was mine, and that was all I had to say before she was stripping off her girly nightie and scrambling out of her cotton panties. I toed off my shoes and stripped off my jeans. Digging for the condom in my pocket before I tossed them aside, my fingers brushed against the pipe cleaner, and I considered briefly if now was the time for my proposal.
But then she was naked, the moonlight streaming through the window like a spotlight on her beauty, and my cock turned so hard that it became the priority. I tore open the wrapper with my teeth, slid on the latex, and pushed her down to the bed.
She spread her legs to make room for me, and I climbed between and hovered over her, my weight balanced on my palm placed on the bed next to her head.
“Are you ready for me?” My free hand was checking even as I asked, slipping between her folds to find her wet and slick. She hadn’t been the first girl I’d ever fucked—I hadn’t been her first either—but she’d been the first girl I’d fucked long enough to actually feel like I knew what I was doing.
I had a pretty good feeling I was the first person who’d made it good for her, and that was worth more than being the only person who’d ever been inside her. I prided myself on making sure I always made it good for her, hoping that would keep me special, and so after finding her wet, I dragged my fingers up to swirl against her swollen bud.
“Are you ready for me?” she teased, her back arching as I hit an especially sensitive spot.
I was always ready for her.
And I never was.
It was a paradox. How those things could exist together and be true was beyond the capability of my teenage mind, but the reality of it sent a shiver of apprehension down my spine even as I rushed to get myself inside of her.
Wild Rebel Page 15
