by Piper Lennox
Good goddamn luck: Durham anger is legendary and unstoppable. I always prided myself on better temper control than my cousins. I shouldn’t have.
“Ow, fuck, dude,” Max coughs. “Let me go!”
I stare at him a second...and then I do, by effectively punching him out of my own grip.
When he’s down, I tackle him.
25
An unholy racket ensues. Under the sound of my fists hitting Max’s jaw, I hear glasses rattling, a plate or two hitting the floor, girls screaming, and Wes barking at me to get outside.
Everything blurs. Suddenly, I’m standing in ankle-deep snow, swigging from a whiskey bottle.
“Oh, my God,” Wes laughs. “That was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Little Theo finally snapped.”
He flicks the bottle when I stop drinking, to encourage me to down more. I shake my head and shove it back to him, feeling my heartbeat hammer through my skull.
I spit into the snow. A spray of pink lands at my feet. Blood. What the fuck?
“Did he hit me?” I ask, still so keyed-up, I don’t even feel faint at the sight of it.
“Once or twice.” Wes doesn’t seem shocked at my rage blackout. I’m sure he’s had more than a few, himself. “You definitely won, though.”
Gingerly, I touch my lip and wince. It’s swollen. The back of my mouth tastes coppery; I feel wounds in my cheek, left by my own teeth. Probably from when I dove on top of him.
“I don’t know what happened to me, man,” I pant. “It’s been years since I hit someone.”
“And long fucking overdue,” he crows. Of course he’s loving this. He and Van have maintained for years that my lack of social energy comes from bottling up my issues with people.
They may be right, but I don’t see the point of hair-trigger anger, either. It’s how theirs used to be, and nothing good ever came of it.
“Where’s Ruby?” I turn and squint at the house through the darkness, but Wes spins me back. Smart. Just looking at the building, knowing Max is still inside, pisses me off again.
“She’s fine, dude, relax. Clara and Georgia took her upstairs. Someone spilled some wine, it got on her clothes...it’s not a big deal.” When I curse and start to the porch again, he grips my shirt to anchor me in place. “Seriously, she’s cool. She wasn’t upset or anything.”
I wish I believed this. Here I got pissed at Max for causing drama and ruining my trip with Ruby, and yet I took that bullshit to a whole new level, turning into some brute-force asshole right before her eyes. I don’t want her thinking I’m really like this.
Problem is: I am.
“I shouldn’t have let him get to me.” I take the bottle from Wes, settle my nerves with one last drink, and pass it back as we head to the porch. We don’t go inside yet. He sits on the railing, while I brush snow off an Adirondack chair.
“Yes. You should have.” He places his back against a column and cracks his spine with a yawn. “He’s a waste of fucking space. And Georgia’s right: Brooke can do better. It was good for her to see Max get his ass kicked. And it was damn good for me to see.” He laughs again, muttering that he’s got to text Van about it immediately.
While the liquor works its magic, I steady my breathing. Through the window, I see Brooke pressing an ice pack to Max’s face. Something tells me neither of them has learned anything tonight.
“Come on.” Wes pockets his phone as he hops down. “Let’s get you cleaned up, Rocky.”
Well. Better nickname than Porn Star.
“How are you feeling?”
Ruby appears in the bathroom doorway as soon as Wes finishes wiping the blood off my hands. Without my rage blindness, it’s getting to me again, so I’ve been keeping my eyes firmly on the ceiling.
“Better.” I thank Wes before he leaves. Ruby gives him an awkward, tight-lipped smile as he passes, then joins me in the small space.
“That,” she says, inhaling deeply, “was...something.”
“Look, I don’t want you thinking I’m some prick who flies off the handle at every—”
“I don’t think that.” She picks up the ice pack Georgia brought me earlier and presses it to my aching temple. I’m not sure if it’s the ice that helps most, or having her here. “I think you had every right to beat that guy up. What a douche.”
I laugh, quieting fast when her free hand touches my jaw. Carefully, she runs her thumb over the swollen section of my lip.
“Does it hurt?” she whispers.
As numb with lust as I just was with rage, I shake my head.
“Good,” she says, and kisses me until every last sliver of anger is gone.
Theo and I head to our room hours before anyone else.
“They’re still talking about it,” I tell him, when I come back from my eavesdropping mission at the top of the stairs. Instead of social media, the group is now raving over Theo’s well-deserved eruption and Max’s early departure. Much to everyone’s disappointment, Brooke went with him.
“If it makes you feel better, nobody blames you. I don’t think a single person wanted him here besides his girlfriend. And even that’s questionable.”
“It doesn’t make me feel better. I should have controlled myself.” Theo undresses with a slight stumble; whether that’s the whiskey on his breath or the aftermath of what few punches Max got in, I’m not sure.
I steady him by wrapping my arms tightly around his waist. In my hold, he relaxes.
“Ask me,” he sighs, after a moment of me just holding him, breathing in his scent. “I know you want to.”
“I don’t.”
“Liar,” he laughs quietly.
I press my face into his sternum and feel his heartbeat in my sinuses. “Don’t call me a liar,” I whisper.
I know he was kidding. And, even if he weren’t...that’s what I am. But I still can’t stand to hear it. It hurts more than him calling me honest.
“It’s not how it sounds,” he says, after a beat. “I didn’t ‘do porn.’ There just...used to be some videos of me out there. Let’s leave it at that.” He holds me at arm’s length and stares into my eyes. “They’re gone now. They’ve been gone.”
Yeah, I think bitterly, I know. I fought nonstop to take them down.
He’s wrong, though. Somewhere out there, a copy or two still exists. It always will. And, if nothing else, it’ll live in my head forever.
“Really. It’s okay.” I give him a smile I don’t mean, but that I know he’ll fall for. He always does. “If you say it’s not what it sounds like, then...I believe you.”
Theo stares at me another moment, then takes my face in his hands and kisses me. “You,” he declares against my mouth, “are amazing.”
Liar, I think, then hate myself all over again for making him one.
We change into sweatpants and T-shirts, climb into bed, and watch movies on the tablet he props up between us.
In the middle of a fight scene, I pause it and turn to face him. “I do have one question.”
“I knew it.” Theo flops into the pillows. “Okay, go. Let’s get it over with.”
“Not about the videos,” I correct, although I wish I could spill every question I’ve got about those, too. The biggest one is simply...why. And I know I can’t ask that.
“It’s about Max. You said you guys used to be friends. What happened?”
Theo wets his lips, thinking, then flinches at the pain; the lower corner is turning purple. Lightly, I touch it with my cold fingertips until he settles.
“He was one of the kids I overheard talking shit about me back in the day, that’s all. Most of them were just my Hamptons friends, people I only saw in the summertime. But Max…we went through school together. Our dads worked together. Anything one of us did, the other did too. Soccer, peewee football, sleepovers, detentions—you name it. Outside of my cousins, he was the closest I had to a best friend.”
“And you heard him joining in with everyone?”
“Leading it, actually.”
That sting in my heart comes back. At least the people talking bad about me in high school were enemies.
He props his head in his hand, elbow drilling into the pillows. “Realizing some of those kids just liked my money, the parties…it hurt, but it wasn’t the worst of it.”
I stretch my arm out underneath my head and push my fingers into his hair. “What was?”
“Finding out most of my friends, including Max, didn’t like me anymore because I was changing.”
It hits me milliseconds before I can ask. All our previous conversations collect in my head, forming the answer.
“You stopped being a bully,” I say softly.
He nods. “Started defending kids against my friends, too, calling them out on their shit, distancing myself when they stepped out of line.... But pulling a one-eighty like that didn’t sit well with my old crowd.” He messes with the strings of my sweatpants under the blanket while he talks, keeping his face and tone casual, but I know better.
I know better, because I’ve been there: having to play things cool. Ice fucking cold. Because the only thing that feels more pathetic than being the butt of someone’s jokes and fake friendships, is showing that they actually got to you.
“I’m glad you pulled a one-eighty.”
Weakly, he smiles. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Because I like who you are now way better.” I cover his hand with mine on my abdomen. “Plus...I was one of those kids.”
Again, he nods. “I remember you telling me that, on our first date. You called yourself ‘socially unaware.’ And weird. Trying too hard.”
He slides close to me, our hands trapped between our stomachs, body heat multiplying.
“That’s exactly the kind of people my friends and I used to make miserable. And that’s why I stopped.” With his other hand, he pushes my hair from my face. “Why punish the people who try the hardest?”
My heartbeat fills my ears again. The truth, all of it, bobs in my throat, until I decide to set a tiny piece free. I hope it’ll be enough.
“Someone like you broke my heart once.”
“Like me?” he asks. “Or who I used to be?”
The caress of his fingertips, featherlight across my temple, my cheekbone, gives me the same hazy rush as his hand tracing constellations across my navel.
“The person you used to be.”
The rest coats my mouth like the poison it is. The destruction he brought. The heartache.
The quiet, consuming rage I’ve lived with ever since that summer, and the revenge plan that was dead on arrival the moment he kissed me in front of the Falls.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
I shut my eyes as he draws me in the rest of the way, fitting us together completely. I tell him thank you.
I tell myself that this apology, somehow, has to be enough too.
And when he kisses me, promising that who he is now would never break my heart like that, I believe him.
26
Theo moves the tablet to the nightstand and shuts it off, then clicks off the lamp. The darkness is profound and suffocating, until he tugs the shade on the window above the headboard. Moonlight floods the room, brighter than usual as it bounces off the snow.
While he works on setting the mood, my hands focus on him.
“Ruby, baby, slow down,” he laughs, after I’ve managed to get him hard as stone through his sweats. One spot is damp with pre-cum.
I can’t stop touching it. I can’t stop obsessing over what I do to him, the thrill of both partners wanting each other so completely.
As soon as he lies back down, I climb overtop him and grab his waistband.
“You’re sure?” he asks, when he feels my breath wash over his erection.
I look up. The moonlight tumbles across his hair and shoulders in beads of silver. From here, it looks like frost: clean and impeccable and impossible to resist ruining, once you’ve admired it long enough.
I am sure. The memories that stopped me before—cameras and bodies swarming me, that house in the Hamptons feeling more and more like a tomb the longer I was there—go flat now, like photographs in someone else’s history. Not mine.
Not ours.
Who we were then doesn’t matter. And who I am now wants Theo Durham, exactly as he’s laid before me in this moment. Split lips and dented pride in moonlight, and social skills he can’t quite fix, and a temper that proves he’s more like me than I thought.
As soon as I tease my lips over the head of his cock, he moans my name and drops to his elbows. When I take him into my throat, he drops back completely and shuts his eyes.
Through the hair falling over my face, I watch his hands. One stretches behind himself and grips the headboard. The other slides to his stomach and rests there.
I grab it and put it on the back of my head. My fingers press down into his until he takes over, setting the rhythm he needs.
He warns me in a stammer. “If you keep going—”
I don’t stop. I know what will happen if I keep going.
Theo will spill his release down my throat, not my face.
The door will stay locked.
This moment, this intimacy I was cheated out of so long ago by a different boy than the one in front of me now, will finally happen how it was supposed to.
Theo comes hard, breath hissing in his chest as his abdominals tense. I put my hand on them. I love the feeling of his muscles slowly unwinding as he finishes.
In the panting silence, I swallow and lift my head.
He pulls one arm over his eyes and smiles, breathing hard through his mouth. “God, baby.”
Baby. It certainly feels more right than Aria, and miles above Callum’s “babe.” Even more right than simply “Ruby.”
“Up here,” he orders with a smirk, jerking his head towards the window.
Straddling him, I move up his body, stopping at his hips. “Here?”
“Way closer.” His hands grab my hips roughly and guide me, so that I’m almost on top of his face. “Lean on the headboard.”
I drape my arms over the top of the ornate wood and feel him shift underneath me. His tongue teases in and out of me until my thighs shake.
“Sit.” He grabs my ass in both hands. “Relax.”
Slowly, I lower myself over his face completely, groaning in pleasure when his tongue fills me.
The glass of the window hovers an inch from my face. I feel its cold aura and adore the contrast—chilled air and a frozen postcard view before me; unbearable heat and filth underneath.
When he decides to lavish attention on my clit, I lose it.
My forehead drops to the top of the headboard; I whisper down to him that I’m coming. “Fuck, Theo, I’m coming so hard....”
One of his hands grips the back of my thigh and lifts me, just a little. Just enough for his other hand to position itself somewhere else.
The second my orgasm begins, I feel an earth-shattering fullness.
Theo pushes three fingers into me and moves them wildly. My orgasm, powerful but compact before, absolutely explodes.
I whimper his name and grip the headboard until my palms ache, the tendons in my wrists ready to snap. I wish we were alone in these mountains so I could scream into the darkness and frost how good this feels. How I never want it to end.
When it eventually does, Theo slides out from underneath me and kisses the inside of my quaking thighs, then the backs, all the way up my spine. His hands cover mine on the headboard, arms surrounding me.
“I just had the craziest thought,” he says.
“Don’t say it.” I know what he thought. I know exactly what he’s feeling.
Because, God help me, a piece of me is feeling it too.
“I won’t.” He watches me watching the snow, counting the branches where it shakes loose in the wind. “Just promise me something.”
I lean my head back against his shoulder and nod.
“One of these days, when I do say it—don’t say it back
because you feel like you have to. Not if you don’t really feel it. Just promise you’ll tell me the second you know for sure.”
I smile. “Do I have to be sure?”
He lifts my hands off the headboard and draws me against him, lowering us from the window. I sink to the mattress with another brushstroke of kisses, all the way down my front this time.
“Not completely,” he says.
When he gets to my inner thigh, he sinks his teeth in. It draws an aftershock from my body. I feel him smile.
“Just sure enough to know you’ll never want to take it back.”
His mouth lands on mine again. Our tastes melt together.
I fall asleep in his arms. It’s not until I wake, somewhere just after dawn, that I realize I never actually made the promise.
“‘Not official,’ my ass.”
I cut my eyes to Clara when she joins me by the Keurig. “Good morning to you, too.”
She smiles and elbows me out of her way while she digs through the bowl of coffee pods. “You two are definitely a couple. I don’t care what you call it.”
I shake my head at her…though I’m secretly inclined to agree, after last night.
“We haven’t actually called each other ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ yet,” I point out instead, more to remind myself than her. That thought I had last night sounds all the crazier in broad daylight.
Not that it’s any less true, but still.
“There’s a sunroom at the back of the house,” Clara says suddenly, all high-pitched and singsong like she’s letting some secret slip she wasn’t supposed to.
Hint taken. I take mine and Ruby’s mugs through the living room, nodding at her on the sofa as I pass so she’ll follow.
The sunroom is more what I’d call a greenhouse: the steel-framed structure is covered in glass, including the ceiling. Sheets of ice glitter in the early sun. It’s got an even better view of the mountain than in the living room.
Guess I owe Clara my thanks. This is a pretty romantic spot to make things official.
“It’s perfect out here,” Ruby sighs happily. She joins me in a freestanding hammock in the corner. It faces out, so all we can see is blinding white. The faint blue of the sky washes out entirely, it’s so bright.
