“I kissed her back,” he said. That should have been fairly obvious. “What else was I supposed to do?”
“She’s a sex addict. You’re not. You didn’t think maybe you shouldn’t have—”
“I know,” Will said, slumping back into the sunken sofa cushions and rubbing a hand through his hair. “I shouldn’t have.” He popped his head back up to give his friend a curious lift of his brow. “I can’t believe you’re actually yelling at me for kissing a girl.”
“Getting kissed by a girl,” Finn corrected.
“Semantics. And anyway, I wouldn’t have done anything else.” Possibly a lie. “The counselor walked in on us and sent us home separately. I felt like I was getting caught by my dad or something.”
Finn had flipped his sketchbook open again and was paging through it. “You like her?”
That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? He decided to be honest.
“Aye,” he mumbled, more to hear his own admission than for Finn’s benefit. He covered his face and groaned. “Aye, I do. Something about her just gets under my skin.” She was complicated and irreverent and beyond gorgeous. He wanted to know her. To peel back her many guarded layers and really know her. He slid his hand down his face to scratch at his jaw. He sounded like a lovestruck teenager. “Promise to murder me in my sleep after this, would you?”
“That bad, huh?”
Unfortunately, yes, and he hadn’t realized it until this moment.
“You should come out with me this weekend,” Finn said. “Maybe I can find a pretty guy for you.”
Will laughed. “I don’t think we have the same taste.”
“You’re just thinking about it wrong. See, from my angle, I’ve got a much larger dating pool to pick from than you do.”
On account of Finn being bisexual, Will supposed this was true. During their freshman year, he had returned to their shared dorm to find Finn in bed making out with his then-boyfriend. It had been a shocking way to discover his roommate’s sexuality, and he had freaked out a bit. But only in the sense that it had surprised him.
“And yet you pick the one girl who hates you,” Will said with a pointed look at Finn’s sketchbook.
Finn groaned. He closed his sketchbook, abandoning it completely as he pushed to his feet. “Want a beer?” he asked.
“Hell, yes.”
Chapter Ten
“And since then, I’ve had a new appreciation for tinfoil.”
Old Lady stopped talking, and a stunned silence fell. Leah’s teeth clacked painfully as she snapped her jaw shut. Her mind filled with disturbing images of tinfoil and a turkey baster.
The counselor had asked everyone to recount their most degrading sexual experience, presumably in an attempt to remind them why they attended the meetings and to perhaps motivate them toward recovery. She was pretty sure it was because of what he had witnessed between her and Blue Eyes last week.
At least that must have been the theory. In practice, all it meant was that she was receiving an education in deviance that surpassed even her own experience.
How would the counselor have felt having planned today’s session only to find one of the people who’d inspired it hadn’t returned? Well, she would never know because here she was.
And she still couldn’t believe herself. For months, she had been counting down the weeks until she would be free of these pointless meetings, and yet, after fulfilling her promise to Helena, here she was again. By choice.
When she left the apartment earlier, she’d had every intention of going to the library to catch up on her poetry assignments. Instead, she had somehow found her way back to this stuffy room, unable to resist the compulsive desire to see him again.
“W-why don’t you go next,” the flustered counselor said to Packers Cap.
Packers Cap rubbed his hands together gleefully. The counselor gave him a weary look, but gestured for him to begin anyway.
“So I was at this football game, right? And there’s this woman sitting right in front of me, body completely painted green with a gold string bikini and a wedge of cheese on her head that said, ‘Eat me.’” His smile transformed into a leer.
What had Leah been thinking coming back here?
She tuned him out. She would need a shower after this. As for herself, she had no idea which memory she would dig up from the recesses of her brain. Compared to these people, her sex life had been tame.
However, she was looking forward to hearing Blue Eyes’ story.
Packers Cap finally finished with something about a hot dog, a football, and a multipurpose foam cheesehead. The counselor looked ill. Stilettos was snickering. Old Lady had probably fallen asleep the moment her turn had finished, and Blue Eyes—
—was looking at her. Seeing him reminded her perfectly of why she’d come back here. A lump formed in her throat, and she looked down.
God, was she actually being coy?
She scowled into her lap.
That was better.
As a second stunned silence lingered in the room, she resisted the urge to say, ‘Hey, you know you’re sick when you shock the other sick people.’
The counselor shook his head sadly at Packers Cap. “That must have been terrible,” he said in a voice that dripped thoughtless compassion.
“Yeah,” Packers Cap said with a dirty smile. “Terrible.”
“Now,” the counselor said, eyes still glazed but focusing on the guy who had recently taken over Leah’s entire brain without a shot being fired. “How about you?”
His body language was relaxed, but his blue eyes showed a different story. They looked a bit uncertain, which Leah hoped was in reaction to the stories being told and not because he couldn’t decide which of his torrid affairs to reveal to the group.
“Can you come back to me?” he asked.
The counselor gave him a kind smile and nodded. “Of course.” He fixed his eyes on Leah next, and she mentally groaned. “When did you realize that your sexual behavior was unhealthy?”
She crossed her arms and glared so fiercely that the counselor actually looked a bit taken aback.
“I haven’t and it isn’t,” she said.
Stilettos snorted. “Then why are you here?”
Because she had poor judgment. Out loud, she said, “Bad luck. I slept with someone who robbed my apartment, and then got blackmailed into coming here by my roommate. She’s the one who thinks I have a problem. She’s wrong.”
Blue Eyes was giving her a look that she couldn’t figure out beyond the fluff that filled her head every time she looked at him. His expression might have been almost like … hope? Weird.
The counselor, on the other hand, gave a disapproving cluck of his tongue but didn’t press her further.
Leah settled back into her chair and listened vaguely to Stilettos recount her leopard print and steel-toed booted voyages into the world of genital friction. But it was Blue Eyes who maintained Leah’s attention. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Just a perfectly ordinary pair of jeans and a totally standard black T-shirt. But the way he wore them, the way they molded to his muscles in just the right places, neither too tight nor too loose, made Leah’s knee caps melt. Under those clothes was surely the most beautiful body. Anything else would be false marketing.
But she also wanted the chance to talk to him again. For the first time that she could remember, she was looking forward to learning more about a guy.
Usually, faces and conversations were pretty irrelevant to her. It was bodies that mattered, anonymous bodies that let you share quick and mutual pleasure and didn’t ask anything else of you. At least that was how it had worked in Leah’s world since discovering sex and the ability to be close to someone without sacrificing herself in the process.
Blue Eyes was different. After her talk with Helena, Leah had wondered if she was falling for him. However, after thinking about it all week, she had decided she was wrong. She had no time for such neediness, such hearts and flowers crap.
But she couldn’t deny the warmth in her stomach when she looked at him. Part of it was lust. The rest of it was something else, something born from that first meeting and that first tense exchange between them.
And now the object of Leah’s mood swings and helpless staring was talking and nervously lacing and unlacing his fingers as he did so. The vulnerability of it made her ache.
“Well,” Blue Eyes began, glancing at her and then away again. “I suppose that my most unhealthy sexual experience was …” He looked around the circle of addicts, hesitation in his bright eyes, and then his gaze settled on Leah.
He watched her for long seconds, long enough for the counselor to tilt his head and look uncomfortable. Long enough for the warmth in her stomach to ignite into a low flame that spread through her skin.
“There was this girl,” Blue Eyes said at last, his voice quiet enough that Leah had to lean forward a little to catch each lilting word. “I never knew her name. As soon as I saw her, I knew we would be together. Sex, I mean. It was inevitable. Eventually, I got her alone and before I knew it, we were kissing. She began undoing my pants and sinking to her knees, but I stopped her. I wanted to do it for her instead.” His gaze on Leah was so intent, so heated, she wondered how she didn’t combust. “I slid my hands over her hips, her thighs. Pushed her dress up. I got onto my knees in the dirt and...” His gaze faltered, and he looked down. His lips quirked into a small, enigmatic smile. “Well, I’m sure you can imagine what happened.”
It wasn’t until he stopped talking that Leah realized she was clinging to her chair so tightly the skin over the back of her knuckles felt like it might split open. She released the breath she’d been holding slowly, shakily. Blue Eyes had told that story to her and only her. There had been no one else in the room. Their eyes had locked, and she had almost felt his hands, seen him kneeling there, felt his breath hot against her skin.
Mouth dry, heart pounding, clothes too warm—all the familiar sensations of arousal, of anticipation, the kind of human interaction that she was used to, the kind that she secretly felt was all she had a right to. And yet, somehow, there was also the inexplicably powerful, and completely unreasonable, feeling of jealousy that any other girl had ever touched Blue Eyes.
The mental alarms going off in her head shocked her into clarity. She needed to either avoid Blue Eyes or just sleep with him before her feelings got any more complicated or contradictory. Before she went completely crazy. And then she needed to stop coming to these meetings and never see him again.
Chapter Eleven
Will stopped typing and grimaced at his notes. They were pathetic. More like meeting minutes than anything else. Certainly not up to the standard expected of a psychology major in his junior year. And he still felt a bit uncomfortable after summarizing the stories the other members had told during the meeting. ‘Oral hijinks’ were two words he’d never expected to use together. He didn’t think James needed to know the details, but his boss had insisted Will be thorough and that was the least he could do at the moment.
He gave a frustrated sigh and closed the file. Then he attached it to an email to his boss and reluctantly hit ‘send.’ No doubt once James read his notes, he would punish Will for his pitiable work by sending him off on some cruel and unusual task like posing for the art department’s nude drawing classes.
Will wouldn’t have minded if his grumpy beauty had said she was an art major.
He closed his laptop before gathering up his jacket and shrugging it on. Bonny tangled around his legs, and he reached down to scratch her head.
“Sorry, Bonny. I’ll play with you later.”
She made a sound that was decidedly indignant as he shut the door behind him. Even though he didn’t live far from campus, driving through rush hour meant the short drive took three times as long. Parking around the University was usually terrible, but at least by now, most of the students had cleared out for the evening.
Will tugged the collar of his jacket up around his ears—the nights were getting cooler—and made his way across campus toward Wellington Center. The play Finn was starring in was called The Banker, and it was about, you guessed it, a banker in New York during the roaring twenties who got on the wrong side of the mob. Finn and his cast mates were doing a dress rehearsal, and he was supposed to meet Will outside afterward to grab some pizza. Will was early though, because he wanted to catch a bit of their rehearsal. He was curious about this Kat whom Finn was so infatuated with.
He waved to a pair of students he knew from one of his psych classes and headed inside the building. From the front, Wellington Center didn’t look very big, but once inside, it was easy to get lost in all the corridors and wings. There were a dozen conference rooms in varying sizes, a food court, several lecture halls, and the theater, which was used both for plays and educational seminars.
Paintings by students hung along the walls—forest landscapes, portraits of people he didn’t know, bowls of fruit, and abstract shapes. He didn’t quite see the point of looking at random blobs of color just for the aesthetic, but he supposed that was why he wasn’t an art student. That, and the fact that he didn’t possess an ounce of artistic talent.
Taking the stairs down a single flight, he came to a long, narrow lobby. The opposite wall was set at long intervals with pairs of metal doors. He tugged one open and was immediately met by the sound of a girl shouting. She sounded furious. He quickly ducked inside to avoid interrupting the rehearsal.
The shouting was predictably coming from the stage. A backdrop of a cityscape at night draped down over the back of the stage while a handful of people stood around taxi cutouts and other props. The girl in question was wearing a red flapper dress and a wig with a feather headband. She made angry, jerky gestures as she shouted her lines at Finn, who stood opposite her, looking cool and unaffected in a gray suit.
At his entrance, which brought a bright rectangle of light down the dark aisle between seats, Finn’s gaze flicked over. Will waved and took a seat in the back row. He could see very little of the darkened audience, but he could just make out the dark shapes of a few others scattered throughout the stadium-style seating, so Will figured it was okay to watch. Finn acknowledged him with a nod.
The girl in the flapper dress paused and glanced over her shoulder to where Finn was looking. Even though the door had shut and Will sat in the dark, her gaze found him, and she gave him a look that would have buckled concrete. She looked different with the wig, and her features were unfocused from all the way down to the stage, but he concluded she was likely Kat. The adoring look Finn cast at the back of her head was an obvious sign as well.
An old guy Will assumed was the director flailed at them from off stage while yelling about why they’d stopped. Kat’s red lips moved, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. When she fell silent, Finn scowled, tugged down the jacket of his suit and nodded. The director made a broad gesture which Will took to assume was permission to begin, and Kat started shouting her lines again.
He wondered if that was cathartic for her, considering Finn’s claim that she hated him.
The lights had been switched off everywhere except on the stage so after ten minutes of watching them repeatedly rehearse the same scene, Will closed his eyes and allowed himself to doze. To the University’s benefit, these seats were actually really comfortable.
Interminable minutes later, the unusually loud click of a nearby camera phone made him crack his eye open.
At first, he was certain he was dreaming.
Light from the stage lined her silhouette. She stood a bit farther down the aisle, holding up her smart phone as she took another shot of the stage. Her hair, which she always had tied back during therapy sessions, was loose around her shoulders, and her legs were covered in black tights and gray boots beneath a short skirt that fluttered slightly when she shifted for another shot.
He stared at the way the light outlined the bend of her arm, the curve of her cheek, and the long line of her legs. The wa
y it softened all her edges. He couldn’t believe she was here. Hidden as he was in the darkest and farthest row from the stage, he wasn’t surprised that she had yet to notice him. He pushed himself up straight.
On the stage, the actors had changed back into their own clothing and were speaking quietly to the director as the crew cleaned up. Finn looked like he was searching the audience. Since he probably couldn’t see anything without the door to the lobby open, Will waved. Finn must have spotted him because he waved back.
At the gesture, his grumpy beauty gave a curious glance over her shoulder. She squinted a bit to make him out in the dark. He could tell the exact moment she realized who he was because her entire body stiffened, and she looked ready to bolt down the aisle. Will quickly stood.
“Hey.”
She gave the mostly-empty audience a wary look before pushing her hair behind her ear and holding her phone stiffly in front of her like a shield. Suspicious for someone who supposedly didn’t care about what other people thought of her. As he got closer though, he caught the way her eyes gave him a fairly languid once-over before focusing on his face. He smiled.
“What are you doing here?” she hissed before he could ask the same. Even scowling, she was beautiful.
He gestured to the stage. “My friend is in the play.” With a nod at her phone, he asked, “What’s with the pictures? You know someone acting too?”
“No.” She looked down to scroll through the photos she’d just taken. The light from her screen lit the tip of her nose and cheekbones.
“So you just like taking pictures of people rehearsing?”
Her gaze flicked up. “No.”
He offered her another smile, hoping to crack her shell again. The way she’d smiled the other week during the meeting, as though the action had caught her off guard, had made him immediately decide he wanted to see it again. Unfortunately, she hadn’t smiled since. Would it always take forcing her to talk about her childhood to get her to relax her guard? Although, truthfully, neither of them had been forced to share anything, so what did it say about them that they had?
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