By Referral Only

by Lyla Payne

  “I kind of want to go tumble you in the back of the car, instead.”

  “What kind of big brother are you?” Trying to sound indignant while my body burned at the suggestion proved difficult.

  Music began, some kind of swing tune, and we both reluctantly turned to stare at the stage. The Kappas—mostly freshman, all gorgeous—and the Alpha Chi pledges went through the motions of a swing dance, which actually looked pretty fun, then presented their Hero—a man who had graduated from Whitman in the twenties and went on to found one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country.

  “He’s a hero?” I whispered to Cole.

  He shrugged. “Before he died he gave away almost his entire fortune to cancer research—his wife died of breast cancer.”

  The number ended and the crowd started to move. Cole and I almost made it to the back door when we ran into Audra, who I still had no desire to see after the scene at the house. Her sharp emerald gaze sank to my hand, clasped inside her brothers, and sparkled when it rose to his face.

  “What did you think, bro?”

  “Oh, rousing. I even stayed awake.”

  “I’m sure you’re tired.” She rearranged her face into a serious expression, then glanced at me. “Hey, Ruby. Nice to see you.”

  “Hi,” I managed, making a valiant attempt not to die of embarrassment.

  “Let him get a little more sleep, okay? Big meet this weekend.”

  She ran off, leaving my cheeks as hot as the rest of me.

  “I have a feeling I probably deserved that, after all of the times I embarrassed her in high school.” Cole’s tone was wry, but he searched my face with a concerned expression.

  “I’m fine. I was bound to run into one of your siblings eventually, since you populate half the university.”

  “I’ve actually decided you must actually know voodoo, since you’ve magically managed to avoid both Law and Nox for the past week.”

  We exited the theatre and decided to walk over to the football stadium. If we got into the backseat of that Town Car, we wouldn’t be getting out any time soon, and his driver had already been within hearing distance for way too much hanky panky.

  Students and alumni filled the stadium parking lot with a sea of black, green, and white. Tents popped up to protect fans from the November sunshine, so everyone could get drunk and play silly games in peace. The smell of smoked meat filled the air and joined chatter and laughter, the distant sound of the marching band gearing up, and the occasional shouted announcement from the televisions that the guys had rigged up for the day.

  We wound around to the west side of the stadium, where the SEA tailgate raged at full strength. Cole had agreed to come with me to this one since I wasn’t ready to face his brothers yet, and he and Quinn were good enough friends that none of the SEAs would act stupid about it.

  Pretty much everyone in the Greek system had a love/hate relationship with it—the divisions were arbitrary and stupid—but there were still boundaries many were hesitant to cross. Girls had an easier time forming and maintaining friendships outside their house than guys did.

  Quinn handed us both whiskey and 7Up, even though Cole and I shared an affinity for rum, but booze was booze. He and Emilie stood outside the tent next to us. The autumn sunshine hit my head and warmed me down to my toes. The thought flitted through my mind that Liam would never have come here or been willing to spend time with Quinn and Emilie, and for all of my fears about where things might end with Cole, it was nice to have this moment.

  “Earth to Ruby. Come in.” Quinn raised an eyebrow at me and then threw back the rest of his drink.

  “What?”

  “I asked why the play was delayed.”

  “Oh. Our director had a family emergency and she’s not going to be back until after Thanksgiving. We haven’t even held auditions yet.”

  Emilie rolled her eyes. “Like you’re not going to get the lead.”

  “There are a couple really talented sophomores.”

  Cole snaked a warm arm around my back and tugged me close. “You are amazing and talented and whatever part you want, you’ll get. Plus, you’re going to look super sexy prancing around with a gun and boots.”

  He leaned down and kissed me; it started out chaste but lasted a little longer than we meant it to, like our lips refused to take orders from our brains.

  “Are we this disgusting?” Quinn’s dry question snapped me out of Cole-land.

  He had asked Emilie, but I answered. “Yes. Hell, yes. Worse.”

  “It’s not a competition,” he replied as he refilled his drink.

  “Good, because you’d definitely win.”

  The four of us talked for a while, then Emile and I went to the port-a-potty and came back to find a table set up and a group getting ready to play Flip Cup.

  “You playing?” Cole asked, a roguish grin on his face that showed off his dimples.

  My heart pounded and my mouth went dry. It was hard to believe he still had such an effect on me now that we’d been in bed together, but it surprised me to find that I still enjoyed the flirting and the anticipation of what we’d do later almost as much as the actual sex.

  Okay, not almost. But still plenty.

  “Sure.”

  “I want Ruby on my team,” Hunter said too loudly.

  He was a theatre major and a real dick, an opinion I’d held even before he’d basically tried to rape my best friend last year. Quinn had given him an impressive black eye. He’d gotten off easy.

  “I’m not very good,” I shot back, trying to be as polite as possible.

  “Girls like you are always good at drinking games.”

  The remark didn’t rankle. I’d heard similar ones far too many times to still get upset by them, and really it only did me the favor of revealing the super snobs on Whitman’s campus. I hated that Cole heard it, though, because one of these times the reminder would be his wake-up call.

  He stepped to my side and picked up my hand. “If by ‘girls like you’ you mean ‘amazing girls I happen to like very much that you’ll respect’ then that’s fine. If you’re being a snotty wallaper, then we’ll have to discuss it further.”

  Cole and Hunter stared each other down for several seconds. I wanted to tell them both to cut it out, but didn’t want to make a bigger deal out of the nonevent. Eventually, Toby moved to the table and dropped a load of red plastic cups.

  He looked up at me and smiled. I didn’t smile back, even though Emilie had forgiven him for his part in her bad semester. He’d been a shitty friend, whether he’d taken a few punches for it or not.

  “We’ll do girls against guys. Ruby, Emilie, Blair and Kennedy….”

  “Kennedy’s fucking passed out. Already,” a pretty girl wearing Kappa letters said, rolling her dark eyes. She swept the thick chestnut hair over her shoulders. “She’ll be fine, but she’s not playing anything.”

  She introduced herself as Blair, then told Cole that she and Audra were friends, and I tuned out the chatter as Toby arranged the teams and we started to play. I actually did suck at Flip Cup, and we lost easily a bunch of times in a row. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Cole came to my defense, and how he said he liked me very much.

  How long would he like me very much? How long until he got tired of constantly defending me, or his choice to date me to his friends and family?

  A wavering confidence returned by the time we’d finished the game and walked into the stadium. Cole didn’t take his hands off me for more than five minutes at a time, and the four of us got along great. When we climbed into the Town Car to head home, it seemed like the entire day couldn’t have gone better, incident with Hunter aside.

  I needed to relax, before I let my own issues ruin the whole thing.

  Chapter 20

  We’d left as soon as the game finished, and thankfully the twins were still out. I felt grimy and tired after drinking most of the day, and Cole’s eyes were bloodshot, too.

  He sat down on
the edge of the bed and grabbed his laptop. “I need to do a couple of things for Quinn before we crash.”

  “I think I’ll take a quick shower.”

  The shower in the old house had been remodeled and I loved it. The tile was a weave of pretty earth tones and it had a couple of benches, which made shaving way easier than the stalls in the sorority house. Two heads with amazing massage settings and giant glass doors completed the picture, and I’d enjoyed watching Cole through them just this morning.

  I turned the water as hot as I could stand it then stripped and stepped into the steam. The beating water sluiced away the dirt from the day spent carousing outside, and I used some acting tricks in an attempt to visualize my worries washing away, down the drain and into the ground along with soap and water. Cole liked me. He did.

  The bathroom door opened as though on cue, like he’d heard me thinking about him, and then shut behind him. He pulled the sliding door open a couple of inches and let his gaze wander down my slick skin, heating me with desire in the process.

  Cole reached out a hand and cupped my breast, letting his thumb tease my nipple in the slippery soap while his eyes darkened and his shorts tightened across the front.

  I moved closer, careful not to jostle the contact I was enjoying immensely, and pulled his mouth to mine. We kissed, my tongue tasting him and my body soaking through the front of his white swimming T-shirt. His hands worked harder, pinching and brushing until I moaned into his mouth, the tingling heat between my legs unbearable.

  “Get in here.”

  I pulled him in without letting him get naked first, unwilling to let his lips leave mine for that long. The feeling of his chest through the wet cotton, pressed against my bare skin, delighted me. We managed to struggle his shirt loose a few minutes later. Shampoo dripped onto my forehead and I stepped back into the water and tipped my head back, anxious to get clean and into bed now.

  Cole’s fingers ran up my neck and into my hair, gently massaging the suds out but coating us both with soap in the process. My fingers found the button on his shorts and pushed them and his underwear out of the way, then wrapped around his hard length. It filled my hand as easily as it filled the rest of me, and I spent a few moments repaying him for the teasing caresses he’d heaped upon me moments ago.

  He groaned, tipping my lips up to his and devouring my mouth, his tongue stroking mine with increased impatience. I redoubled the efforts with my hands, enjoying the feeling of control and my ability to drive him as crazy as he drove me.

  “I want to just bend you over right here,” he growled into my lips.

  If anything about Cole had surprised me, it had been his confidence in bed, at least after that first time. For a guy hesitant to fall between the sheets, once there Cole knew what he wanted, when to take control, and how far to push without making things uncomfortable. The sex was surprisingly uninhibited and animalistic, and neither of us had ended up feeling awkward, even after a couple of particularly wild sessions this past week.

  I loved it. It was everything I’d ever wanted in a relationship, and like Cole had said, we just seemed to have some kind of connection that made often uncomfortable moments into everyday occurrences.

  Until now, we’d used condoms every single time, though there had been one morning where we’d basically woken up having sex and had to stop to get one. I knew we should stop, dry off, and take it into the bedroom, but I didn’t want to.

  I pushed him backward until one of the benches hit his knees and he sat down, then turned my back to him. His hands squeezed my hips, guiding me down on top of him until I sat on his lap, his hardness buried inside me. He ground against me, his lips trailing kisses along my neck.

  “We can get out and get protection.” His voice shook and I felt him shudder under me.

  He didn’t want to move any more than I did—this felt amazing. I turned my head so that we could make eye contact, so he would know how sure I felt of him and us right now. He would never hurt me. If he was worried about my safety, he would stop.

  “I trust you, Cole.”

  Happiness flooded his face and his arms went around my waist. Water poured over us as our bodies slipped together. The tiled floor gave my toes enough traction to move up and down, against his movements, as he thrust into me with building intensity. His hands wandered up and squeezed my breasts gently, and we moved together at a lazy pace until both of us tired of gentle and steady.

  He pushed me to my feet and we traded places, my hands on the bench and him plunging into me from behind, his hands tight on my hips. It amazed me how taken care of I felt in that moment—even getting fucked bent over in a shower, Cole wouldn’t let me fall. I wouldn’t get hurt.

  If only it were as easy to trust him with the idea of the future.

  An orgasm built, starting in my belly and trembling lower. Cole moved one hand between my legs and worked his fingers until my legs shook and buckled, until I came, clenching around him and crying out as those waves I’d come to anticipate pounded me senseless for so long I thought I’d shatter.

  Cole finished with his arms around me, holding our sweating, sopping bodies tight together while he whispered my name into the back of my neck in a way that made me desperate to repeat this moment over and over again to see if it ever lost its power over me.

  The juxtaposition of rawness against tenderness still undid me at times; the idea that sex could be fun and energetic but still include unexpectedly strong feelings knocked me off balance.

  He spun me around and slid his arms around my waist, lifting my lips to his and kissing me as though this entire thing was a fragile piece of crystal he wanted to wrap in paper and keep safe. Then he laid his trembling forehead against mine.

  “I am crazy about you.”

  “Because of the shower sex?” I teased, trying to ease away from the serious scrape of his voice.

  “Because of all the sex, and because of your talent and your fire, the way you’re brave even when you don’t think so, but mostly because of the way I felt when you looked into my eyes and said you trust me.” He kissed the tip of my nose.

  His confession flooded me with happiness more sharp-edged than I’d ever felt, but under that, a cold trickle of fear caught my attention. It took until we’d turned off the water, dried off, and slipped naked into bed before I could put my finger on exactly what scared me.

  It sounded almost like he’d been worried about earning my trust, which made sense.

  And it sounded a little bit like he was scared, too. Like maybe he didn’t think he deserved it.

  ***

  An hour later, I’d finished my homework for the week and done the few things with the website that still required my attention. Cole hadn’t mentioned it again but I hadn’t done anything about his poor ratings. Partly because I thought people would know it was me if I did, and partly because I didn’t want any other girl to decide he’d be worth stealing.

  Cole sat in an overstuffed chair in the corner, his bare feet propped on an ottoman and his brow furrowed at whatever he was reading on his laptop. He’d been working on finance homework, and the room had been draped in companionable silence for most of the hour. I’d lost track of time but had managed to catch up on everything that had been slid to the back burner during the length of my ongoing new relationship honeymoon period.

  The desire to ask him again what had changed four years ago, why he’d turned down every girl he’d dated at Whitman, pricked. The longer he kept his secret, the more my curiosity rose, but pushing him had backfired before and the idea of shoving a wedge in between what was working so well made my heart speed up for a different reason.

  I pushed the uncomfortable feeling aside and pulled out my copy of Annie Get Your Gun, which was the next Whitman U play, and thumbed through to pick an audition scene. We needed one to monologue and one to perform with a partner. At least it wouldn’t be Liam. Hopefully not Hunter, either, though it was a distinct possibility. He’d actually be a wonderful Frank
Butler, but kissing him didn’t appeal to me. Maybe I could bite him on Opening Night and watch him try to recover from that in front of a packed house.

  The monologue was easy to pick, and one I loved—the beginning before Annie started to lose herself to show business and fancy dresses. I ran it several times, mouthing the words silently, not wanting to disturb Cole. It was funny; I actually had more in common with the ladies’ man Frank Butler. He hadn’t been looking for a relationship at all when Annie had fallen into his lap, and especially had never thought he’d fall in love with a girl like her.

  I didn’t think I loved Cole, but he’d certainly taken me by surprise. He was everything I hadn’t been looking for, yet, it seemed, everything I wanted.

  The feeling of being watched jerked my gaze up, and I found Cole staring at me with a small smile. When I caught him it stretched wider, his dimples flashing.

  “What are you staring at, perv?”

  “The prettiest girl in the house.”

  “I’m the only girl in the house, since Lily dumped your brother.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “Trying to work out a partnered scene for my audition.”

  “Want some help trying them out?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You want to be my Frank Butler?”

  “And your Tony, and your Romeo and your Fiyero and so on and on.”

  “How many times have you gotten your ass kicked for loving theatre so much?”

  “I can hold my own.”

  I grinned. The fact that Cole adored theatre as much as I did endeared him to me, and the fact that he had a swimmer’s body and the countenance to match meant he didn’t get messed with too often. He might think me a strange contradiction of soft and prickly, but he was a different type of guy, too. Soft and hard. Confident and shy. Blunt but secretive.

  I shook the last one off and nodded. “Sure. I’m thinking the best duet is ‘They Say It’s Wonderful.’ ”

  “I agree. It’s the moment Annie realizes she’s changed, and the moment Frank realizes he loves her even if she never does.” He stood and put the computer in the chair, coming to sit next to me on the bed. “Where do you want to start?”