Dare You To Keep Me: HawkRidge High II

by Akeroyd, Serena

  I loved them both, but Jessa was my glue. That was the only way I could describe her. It was like I was a house built of brick, but it meant nothing without her because she was my foundation. And in that analogy, Sam was my cement that kept the bricks in place.

  I was nothing without them, nothing at all, and I needed them to know that.

  Pulling away so I could straighten up, I traced my lips over her chest and up to her shoulder, pushing to my feet as I slid up her body, then moved over to her throat where I sucked down for a few seconds. I wanted to leave a mark there too, wanted to hear her bitch about it in the morning as she tried to cover it up with makeup. Hell, I was so excited about that that my cock pulsed in time to her heavy, panting breaths.

  I moved my lips along the curve of her jaw, finally reaching her mouth, and as I pressed mine to hers, I felt Sam behind us. One of his hands came to her waist, while the other came to mine. Everything inside me locked down for a handful of seconds before it surged into being once more.

  I had no idea how this was going to work. No idea how we’d do it, because in truth, I spent a lot of time thinking about it, but visuals were never really my thing. Sam was right, the porn didn’t match what I wanted to do with them. It looked corny and creepy, and in no way fit what I felt for him or her. It got me off physically, but emotionally? It always left me frustrated. What I wanted with them both was an organic kind of love, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

  The feel of him touching me intimately, though, was enough to make my eyes prick with tears. I was grateful for the darkness, grateful that they wouldn’t see me crying over this, and as I thrust my tongue between Jessa’s lips, fucking her mouth as I wanted to fuck her pussy, claiming her and making her my own in this one small way, it was made a thousand times better by the knowledge that both of these creatures who possessed my heart were both standing there, naked and vulnerable in front of me, when I’d never felt more naked or more vulnerable in my life. And I was fully dressed.

  They’d made the first move.

  “I think it’s time you got naked,” Sam whispered, his tone like gravel, so husky and hoarse that it sent shivers down my spine. I knew I wasn’t the only one to feel that, because Jessa shuddered in both our arms. Sam chuckled. “Someone likes the idea of that.”

  Jessa moaned again as I pulled away, and there was hardly any room to move, so I sidestepped and beneath their watchful gaze, threw my clothes to the ground.

  When I was as naked as them, I whispered, “How are we going to do this?”

  “Don’t you know?” Jessa asked, sounding surprised, and dammit, amused.

  Well, I was grateful that she was finding humor in the situation rather than mortification. There was always a bright side, I guessed.

  “Let’s just go with the flow,” Sam insisted, and because that wasn’t exactly helpful, I huffed out a breath.

  When Jessa began to laugh, I grumbled, “God, you’re not going to go hysterical again, are you?”

  She made a snuffling sound that told me she’d clapped a hand to her mouth. “I can’t help it,” she said around a giggle.

  To shut her up, I held her against me again, pressed my mouth to hers, and let us both tumble back to the bed. As much as I wanted Sam to touch me, I wanted Jessa’s touch more, and I took advantage of her being on top of me, knowing that would help Sam as well a little down the line. Just because I didn’t appreciate porn didn’t mean I was totally in the dark, after all.

  “Are you on the pill?” I asked softly.

  “Sam didn’t tell you?”

  Both he and I snorted. “Of course not,” he answered around a huff. “I never talked about stuff like that with him. That would have been a breach of trust.”

  She released a sigh. “Ever the attorney’s son.”

  Because she wasn’t wrong, I chuckled. “Well, that’s true, but be grateful he can keep a secret. It means that everything we do tonight is going to be completely new for me. Are you a squealer? Or are you as quiet as a church mouse, Jessa?” I teased.

  When her hips pressed down against me, I wasn’t sure who had won that round when I felt her slickness against my shaft. “I don’t know, Drew. You’ll have to find out, won’t you? Just as I have to find out if you’re noisy or quiet.”

  “Whatever you are without having to control your responses, you can be as quiet or as loud as you want tonight, Jessa, can’t you?” Sam replied, pressing a hand to her shoulder before letting his fingers trace upward to cup the back of her neck, then drop down so he could grab her hair, bunching it in his fist. As he pulled her head back, I was surprised by his roughness, but kind of turned on too. Especially when she bit her lip, obviously enjoying his dominance over her. “It’s the first time we’ve ever been able to be as loud as we want, isn’t it? Even when we’ve made out in the car, we’ve kept things quiet, haven’t we, babe?”

  She whimpered, “Y-Yes.” The breathy admission had my heart pumping like crazy, and I couldn’t stop myself from rocking my hips up so my dick brushed her slick heat again.

  “Pill?” I prompted, that one word ragged as hell.

  “She’s protected,” Sam assured me, his eyes never leaving Jessa’s. The sight of that intensity nearly had me crumbling. I loved it when Sam was like this. When he took charge, dominated a situation. I wasn’t a submissive guy, was a leader in my own right, but I’d always appreciated it when Sam had turned on his ‘captain of the football team’ mode. It was always a particularly delicious sight.

  The second I knew she was protected, though, I reached between us and began rubbing her clit again. Feeling how wet she was, how excited, only doubled my own pleasure. I knew she’d been a virgin, that was pretty much all Sam had told me, and that was because he’d been terrified of hurting her before they’d actually done the deed.

  He’d asked me if I’d ever slept with a virgin, had asked me for hints and tips so he could make her first time good, but I’d never been with one and hadn’t been much help.

  It added to my pleasure, knowing that tonight, all she’d feel was pleasure. When she began to writhe against me, her tits swaying as she moved, I couldn’t stand it much longer.

  Her wetness had coated my cock, I could feel her juices dripping around my shaft. The liquid heat burned me from the inside out, and I grabbed hold of my dick, sliding it through her folds once more before notching it at her gate. A surprised, “Oh!” escaped her, and as I gently thrust inside her, she pressed a hand to my chest to prop herself upright, pulling out of Sam’s hold so she could stare down at me. With her hair, all those curls and waves now bobbing around her face, I felt as well as realized that this was the first day of the rest of my life.

  If I could spend every night like this, buried deep inside her, watching Sam bury himself deep inside her after, I knew life couldn’t get much better.

  Was I surprised when she began to ride me? Yes, but I was delighted too. When she began to buck her hips, taking her own pleasure, using me to get off, I knew I’d never seen anything so gorgeous in my life. Everything I’d done, every stupid lay I’d had, had been leading me toward this point.

  And the cherry on the cake?

  When Sam, still looming over us, did as he’d done a few seconds ago, grabbed her hair, and tilted her head to the side, and with his hand around his cock, used it to press it to her mouth.

  I hadn’t expected to go from zero to hero. And I wasn’t just talking about what happened today. I meant with sex. I thought we’d have to gentle her into this, walk her down the path from normal stuff into things that probably did belong in a porn movie. An epic one at that. But she was into this. I saw it, felt it. She burned with passion, throbbed with arousal and need.

  There was no force here. No coercion. She was with us one hundred percent. And Christ, I was almost envious of the way she was sucking him. If I hadn’t been buried inside her, I totally would have been. But even though her attention was split, it didn’t stop her from riding me, from touching me,
her hands on my chest, burning as she rubbed the muscles there, almost like she was soothing me while arousing herself with the connection.

  A few moments later, Sam exploded in her mouth, his gasping breaths were quickly followed by the clamping down of her muscles around me. It was impossible to hold back, to refrain from blowing my load inside her, not when she was doing a Mexican wave around my cock. That we came within seconds of each other just made this even more magical. Yes, fucking magical.

  Once again, I was reminded that tonight was our first night. We had a lifetime ahead of us, one I fully intended on enjoying to the max.

  It was stupid, but the thought made me pause.

  Max.

  Why did I feel guilty when this was the best night of my life?

  Even as she settled down on top of me, still panting and skin slick, even as we fell onto the mattress and stayed where we lay, cramped and squished on the too-small bed, my mind was adrift for a few moments as I pondered Max and where he belonged in our unit...

  Then, the need for sleep hit me, and I didn’t think of anything else.

  Good or bad. Didn’t even feel the bed jostle when Jessa got up and headed to the bathroom, nor did I see my screen flare brightly, intruding upon the darkness.

  I felt, heard, and saw nothing for the next eight hours as I enjoyed—did I but realize it—the best night’s sleep I’d had in years.

  4

  Max

  When I made it home, my father hadn’t been there. It had been my stepmother, Carrie, who’d texted me, asking me if I remembered the curfew my dad had set when I’d gone to live with him.

  How the fuck could I forget the damn thing? It cramped my style something fierce, especially when I was used to being able to do whatever the fuck I wanted, whenever the fuck I wanted.

  If he’d set the limits because he cared, I wouldn’t have minded. But he didn’t. He was just a control freak who wanted to keep an eye on me, make sure I wasn’t a deviant or like my mother—a drug addict.

  The thought made me want to scoff as I pulled up outside the house in Jessa’s car. Carrie was standing there at the front door, waiting on me like I was a soldier just coming home after a long ass deployment. She was even wringing her damn hands.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if my father was beating her. She was scared of her own damn shadow, for Christ’s sake.

  “Whose car is that?” she asked the second I climbed out, my sneaker-covered feet crunching against the gravel.

  When I heard a, “Is everything okay, ma’am?” I wanted to roll my eyes. The private security guards at the gate all had a crush on her. Hell, even the soldiers who accompanied my dad on occasion couldn’t keep their eyes off her. They all drooled over the general’s wife, but she currently looked too terrified to even notice.

  She gulped. “I’m fine, Timothy. Thank you for asking.”

  I cut Timothy a look, well aware my father wouldn’t appreciate her knowing the guard’s name. Still, it was on him if every other male in the vicinity appreciated his wife when he didn’t. It was also on him that he was never around, had a main residence on the post where he worked, and felt the need for additional security here because of it.

  I didn’t blame the guard for being ‘enamored’ with Carrie. She was beautiful and there was a delicacy about her that would appeal to anyone with even the most basic instinct to protect and defend. She looked like a beautiful lost cause in need of saving, and that was evidently a challenge for the security men who guarded the house.

  Heading over to the front door, I frowned at her when she cupped her elbows like she was cold—when it was over seventy degrees right now. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I had a call from the principal today, Max. To be honest, I expected you home sooner than this to discuss what happened today.”

  I snorted. “What’s to discuss? I didn’t do anything.” It was probably odd that I sounded strident now when earlier I’d been terrified. Hell, terrified was an understatement. I’d been petrified. So fucking certain that I’d end the day in jail, and all because Derick fucking Petersen had a hard-on for Jessa and was trying to stir shit.

  But now, after what had happened with Drew, and the way Jessa had come to me, wanting to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid?

  I knew I wasn’t alone.

  Even if I didn’t have the backing of anyone in this house, I had Jessa, Sam, and Drew. Their dynamic was proving to be odder than anticipated, but I wasn’t going to be perturbed by that. I devoured the old romantics for a reason, and they’d lived odder lives than most.

  Byron and his sister had been lovers, for God’s sake. A ménage à trois wasn’t exactly going to reinvent the wheel, was it?

  “There was a mention of drugs,” Carrie rasped, as she stepped inside the foyer and waited on me before closing the door behind us both. She pressed her spine to it as she stared at me, waiting on an answer.

  “It had nothing to do with me,” I repeated.

  “The principal...”

  “Fuck what the principal says, Carrie,” I growled, irritated with myself when she jerked in surprise at my sharp tone and the cursing. Sucking in a deep breath, I murmured, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get angry, but it’s been a long, weird day.” I reached up and scraped my hand over my head. “Look, I found one of the other kids at school messing around with Jessa’s locker. I stopped him, texted her to come and see if anything was missing from her things, and when she opened it up, there were some drugs on top of her stuff.” I shrugged. “That’s it.”

  She frowned at me. “That isn’t what the principal said.”

  “I don’t care what he said. He’s a liar,” I grumbled. “He wanted to blame it on me because it was easier than blaming it on Derick Petersen. Why not blame the kid who has a record, a record that has nothing to do with him really, that reflects a decision he had no say in making if his mother wasn’t—” I broke off, gulping as the memories of the past hit me.

  Carrie’s eyes softened. “If your mother wasn’t what, Max?”

  I gritted my teeth as I stared at her bare feet. She had nice toes, and her nails were always painted, unlike the ones on her hands. It was easier to focus on her goddamn feet than think about my sordid childhood.

  I didn’t want to share this with Carrie, didn’t want to tell her about my mother, but if it got her on my side, made her realize that I wasn’t a bad kid, that the crime I’d committed had been beyond my control, then I knew I’d have to open up to her.

  “She used to beat me, okay? When I was too little to do anything to stop her.” I blew out a breath. “She barely fed me sometimes, especially when I was younger and wanted me to do stuff for her. I had no choice. Not if I didn’t want to be hurt or starved. If she wanted me to help her dealer, then I had to help her dealer. I was relieved when I got caught. I didn’t want anything to do with the games she played. That wasn’t me. None of that was me. I’ve been working hard ever since to get out of the world she dumped me in, and I won’t let a little shit of a brat at a swanky school drag me down.”

  Though she didn’t reply, the way she was looking at me made me feel like she was scanning me. I felt like I was being X-rayed, for fuck’s sake.

  Then, I remembered she’d been a teacher before she’d married my father, and I figured that made sense. It was the look a teacher gave you when they were trying to decide whether to hand out a detention or not.

  When she murmured, “I believe you, Max,” I swallowed. Hard.

  She probably didn’t know how much that meant to me.

  “You do? About the past or today?”

  Her chin dropped. “Both.” She pursed her lips. “This will be between you and me. I won’t tell your father—”

  Fuck, I hadn’t thought about that. Jesus. Being held accountable for my actions to a parent wasn’t something I was used to and wasn’t something I particularly wanted to adapt into accepting easily, either.

  Rubbing the back of my neck, I murmure
d, “Thanks, Carrie. I appreciate that.” If my father had been made aware of what had gone down today, I knew he would have taken the principal’s side.

  He was that kind of man.

  It was why I had a curfew that was earlier than my half-sister’s. Because I came from trouble, and he expected me to get into even more.

  She nodded. “You’re welcome. Now, you get to bed. It sounds like it’s been a long day. Unless—” She hesitated. “There’s food in the fridge?”

  I knew my eyes lit up. “Thanks.”

  “There’s leftover lasagna.” Her mouth tightened into a taut smile. “I was the only one home to eat it.”

  Guilt set in then.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  She shrugged. “Some work thing. Of course. When isn’t he on post?” she muttered.

  Though I really didn’t want company, would have preferred the silence in solitude, the part of me that Jessa was opening up to the world couldn’t help but ask, “Would you like to sit with me while I eat?” I cleared my throat. “Unless, I mean, you’re doing something already?”

  Her smile was hesitant. “I’d like that.” Without another word, she stormed forward and down the hall.

  The place was set in an old kind of plantation house, but inside, it was very modern. I knew this was from Carrie and not my father, because his office looked like something from the nineties, his house on post—the place where my social worker, Jerry, had dumped me after my mom’s death—was spartan and utilitarian at best, and the rest of this house consisted of clean lines and dark colors.

  The hall, for example, was a deep navy blue with copper accents. It led into a teal green kitchen that had more copper notes in the form of light fixtures and curtains with copper inset into the fabric’s pattern. The cupboards were all shiny, and in the center of the room was an island with copper pans hovering above it. A copper kettle sat on the stove there, more as an ornament than anything else since I’d never seen her use it nor the pans that were on the rack hanging from the ceiling.