by Mara Jacobs
He dipped his head slightly, even though I was shaking my head at him. Shaking that I didn’t want him to. But I couldn’t get the word “no” out. He nodded at me, and the corner of his mouth turned up into a grin just as I closed my eyes and he kissed me.
It wasn’t a sweet, tentative kiss of two people just dating. It wasn’t even the fun, exuberant kiss that he’d planted on me on the dance floor at Betsy’s wedding.
It was mean. It was angry.
And it was something I completely understood and responded to.
His mouth demanded from mine, and I pushed back, opening my lips under his, letting his tongue in, tangling, twisting with mine.
He tasted like peppermint, and with the cold air swirling around us, it all felt like a winter wonderland.
But he was not the guy who should be making me think of lame phrases like “winter wonderland” while he kissed the bejeezus out of me.
And that thought should have made me pull away. Instead, I broke my hands free from his and wrapped them in the soft cotton of his hoodie, chest level, and yanked him even closer to me, needing to feel his body against mine.
His hands did the same, grabbing the lapels of my peacoat. He couldn’t pull me closer—that was physically impossible—but he ground himself into me. My legs instinctively opened, giving him room.
“Christ, Jane,” he whispered as we came up for air, “I don’t even like you.” He was kissing my jaw, which was about the only thing exposed given the high collar of the coat.
I barked out something between a laugh and a sob, hoping it sounded like a laugh. “And I think you’re a complete asshole.”
He pulled back, gazing at me with a look in his eyes that I couldn’t read, but made me uncomfortable. I moved my mouth back to his, resuming the kiss, wanting to block out his face. Block out his knowing look. Block out the thoughts and emotions swirling around in my nearly frozen brain.
And just feel the heat.
Our hands were touching again, backed up against the other’s, each of us clutching clothes and trying to get closer.
His hips moved against mine, slow, easy. Nothing like the furiousness in our kissing.
It was like a challenge, combat almost—who could taste the other more, who could fit their lips the mostly perfectly against the other’s. Who could make those delicious moans come forth.
I opened my eyes and saw our breath from our joined mouths float off in little clouds due to the cold. And I looked up and saw Stick staring into my eyes as he hungrily feasted on my mouth.
It was too close. And, delicious as the heat rushing through my body felt, it was all wrong.
I loosened my grip on his hoodie, turned my hands and pushed him away. It wasn’t a gentle “no, honey, that’s far enough” push. It was a “get the hell off me” push, and Stick stepped back, though still held my coat.
“Not gonna happen,” I said in a calm, low voice that masked the yearning and heat I felt inside. I met his eyes and made my face turn to stone. It was a look I’d perfected over the years. A look that said I would absolutely not change my mind.
He let go of my coat and took another step back. His hoodie was low enough that it hid the bulge I’d just felt pushing against me. He ran a hand through that mop of hair of his while never taking his eyes from mine. I didn’t break eye contact either.
Both of us were breathing heavily, and the little puffs of breath carried between us, almost like thought bubbles in the comics.
He didn’t even look when his friend pulled up right behind him in Stick’s car and got out of the driver’s seat. Stick had probably heard the car approaching (like a mother knows her baby’s cry), but I hadn’t.
Not saying a word to either of us, the friend moved around the car and got in the passenger seat.
Stick’s breathing seemed to return to normal, while my chest (damn it!) was still heaving.
Without looking behind him, he took a step back and placed his hand on the opened door with complete accuracy.
Okay, the guy truly pissed me off, and kind of scared me a little, but that was a very cool move.
“I can give you another lesson on Thursday. Same time. Yes or no.”
No. No, no, no, my self-preservation voice screamed inside my head.
“Yes,” I said.
No look of triumph, no parting smile. Just a small nod, and he got in his car and drove off.
Well, I had to give Stick one thing—asshole or not, the guy could make an exit.
Chapter Thirteen
It was a rare night that all three of us were in our dorm room together. We studied for a while. Syd came over and plopped on Lily’s bed while Lily studied at her desk.
After a while, we all took off our earbuds and started talking.
You would think that three people who lived together wouldn’t need to “catch up,” but we did.
They’d both gotten to the room late. It was the afternoon Lily gave swimming lessons, and Syd was at one of her jobs.
Maybe I should get a job. I was handling school okay, didn’t need a ton of time for studying. With Lily and Syd so busy, I had extra time on my hands.
But then I thought about my upcoming second driving lesson. And would there be a third? And even if there wasn’t, I’d have more freedom having a car on campus. I could drive into Baltimore, or down to DC. Not that I would, most likely, but I could.
I hadn’t planned on telling my roomies about the car just yet. It still seemed kind of unreal, but then I realized it had been kissing Stick and standing in front of Caro Stratton’s house that had been the most unreal parts of the afternoon. Those two items I’d definitely keep to myself.
“So, my dad bought me a car. I got it today,” I said after a lull in the conversation.
Lily rolled toward me in her desk chair. “No way. That’s awesome. What kind?”
“A Corvette,” I answered, almost sheepishly.
The look that crossed Lily’s face was priceless. Like she was confused as to why I’d get that car, and yet didn’t want to say anything in case I was a Corvette junkie or something.
“It wasn’t my choice,” I said. Lily gave me a knowing, almost sympathetic look, and I felt this twinge of betrayal toward Yvette. Stupid, I know, but I put my chin up and added, “But it grew on me.”
“This just happened today?” Lily asked.
“Yes. When I came home from class.”
“Did you take it for a drive?”
I shrugged, and busied myself with putting my books away so I wouldn’t have to look at her while I answered. I didn’t want to see their reaction, and more importantly, I didn’t want them to read anything into mine.
“Sort of. It’s a stick shift, and I’ve never driven one, so it wasn’t much of a drive. But I got a little better by the time I was done.” Which might have been the exact words I would have used to describe kissing Stick—it got better by the time we were done.
“You don’t know how to drive a stick shift?” Lily asked, a touch of incredulousness in her voice.
“No,” I said, a touch of defensiveness in mine.
“Do you?” Lily asked Syd, now thinking maybe she was the odd one.
“I don’t even know how to drive,” Syd said.
Lily looked at her, then waved her away. “That’s right. You’re from New York. Nobody knows how to drive there.”
Syd opened her mouth to argue, but ended up just shrugging and asking Lily, “You do know how to drive one, obviously?”
Lily nodded. “My dad insisted I learn when I started driving.” She looked away, and I could tell she was embarrassed. She knew neither Syd’s nor my father would be giving their daughters driving lessons. Mine would never take the time, and Syd was cryptic enough about her home life that I assumed her dad wasn’t in the picture. I mean, my dad was in the picture, but there was no way in hell he’d have given me driving lessons.
I could picture Grayson Spaulding, or maybe Lily’s mom, taking her out in the family Lexu
s or something and teaching her how to drive a stick.
But it wouldn’t have felt the same to her. The way it felt to have Stick’s deep voice telling me when to shift, coaxing me into feeling Yvette’s every need. His hand on my thigh, inching its way upward.
His lips crashing down on mine as he yanked my body into his.
I shook my head, as if trying to physically dislodge him from my brain.
Thankfully Syd brought my thoughts out of Yvette’s warm cockpit and the parking lot’s cold air, and back into our room by asking me, “So, like, it was just here when you got back from class? Did your dad bring it to you?”
Syd had seemed fascinated with the whole Joe Stratton thing after Betsy’s wedding, and then my father announcing his candidacy. Then photos would be in People and other mags, and there I’d be, alongside my family, looking like I belonged.
The whole campus had seemed fascinated for about a minute. But Bribury was full of political and celebrity offspring, and it quickly died down, thank God.
“No. He had it dropped off. Somebody…else brought it over.”
Syd nodded, but Lily looked at me strangely. Did she already know about Stick through Lucas somehow? Or had there been something weird in my voice that she picked up on?
I cleared my throat. “Actually, that thug friend of Lucas’s brought it over. We knew he could take cars. Apparently he can deliver them, too.”
“Stick? Stick brought you your car?”
So she hadn’t known. Damn, that meant she’d picked up on something else. God, did I have a Stick tell?
“And what? He just shows up with a car, hands you the keys and runs off? You must have been like…WTF.”
Of the three of us, only Lily would use the letters instead of saying the words, but it made me smile that she did.
“No. He gave me a quick lesson on driving her. Then he left in his car, which a friend had followed him over in.” All true. The definition of “quick lesson” probably wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, and they didn’t need to know that the friend left for quite a while and then came back for Stick. But yeah, no lies or anything.
Lily eyed me suspiciously, but Syd was lying on her back on Lily’s bunk and seemed not to pick up on anything.
Not that there was anything to pick up on.
“Well,” Lily said, “if there’s anyone to teach you how to drive, it would be Stick. That guy knows a lot about cars.”
“One would assume that, given his nickname,” Syd said, as she checked her phone, then laid it on top of her stomach and put her arms behind her head.
Don’t ask, I told myself. Do not ask.
“Yeah, right. Hey, Lily, do you even know that asshole’s real name?”
Yeah, I guess I did have a Stick tell. Lily rolled even closer to my bed, her eyes narrowing. “No, I don’t. But I could find out if you wanted.” She started to reach for her phone.
“No,” I said, maybe a bit too forcefully. “Don’t bother. Who cares, anyway? I just thought Lucas might have called him by his name or something.”
She took her phone from her desk but didn’t do anything with it, just held it out, almost like she was daring me. “No, Lucas has always only called him Stick.”
“I bet he calls him a lot more than just ‘Stick’ since he was arrested. Oh, wait, he probably doesn’t even talk to the guy anymore.”
Lily shook her head, confused. “Why wouldn’t Lucas be talking to Stick? And he is. They’re together all the time, when Lucas isn’t working or…”
“With you,” I said, nodding pointedly to Lily’s bed, where Syd was texting on her phone, seemingly oblivious to Lily and me.
A flush came over Lily’s perfect face. God, she even blushed beautifully.
I wasn’t jealous of Lily’s beauty often. I had come to terms with my looks—offbeat, quirky, but attention-getting—a long time ago. I’d had to own myself early on, or my mother would have created a mini-me, and there was no way I was going to let that happen.
“In fact,” Lily said, “Lucas and Stick seem even tighter after the whole arrest thing.”
“How can that be? Doesn’t Lucas blame that asshole for even being arrested?”
“Maybe that’s his real name…That Asshole. You sure call him that enough,” Syd said, not taking her eyes from her phone. Apparently she was listening.
“Lucas doesn’t blame Stick for what happened,” Lily said.
“Why not? He should.”
She shook her head. “That’s not how he sees it. Lucas totally owns what he did.”
“Well, yeah, he should. But he should still see who put him in the position in the first place.”
Lily shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know all the details of how it went down, but I know Lucas doesn’t hold Stick responsible. At all.”
She seemed so nonchalant about the fact that her boyfriend had a Past. I didn’t want her to read anything into my question, but I had to ask. “How do you deal with the fact that Lucas has…done stuff in his past?”
A pained look crossed her face, which she quickly masked. So, not so nonchalant after all. “I don’t know. It didn’t seem to matter at first because it was all…crazy attraction, and just needing to be near him. I wasn’t thinking long term enough to where his past, his life before me, would come into play.”
She looked away from me, out the window, into the dark night. I noticed Syd’s fingers stilled on her phone, and her head tilted in Lily’s direction, watching.
“But then,” Lily continued, “when I knew it was going to be something more, something…deeper, I had to really think about it. About how I would deal with it, how I would let it affect me.”
“And?” I coaxed when she’d said nothing for a moment, just stared out into the night.
She turned back to face me. “And…I realized that, hokey as it sounds, his past was what made him who he is right now. Am I happy that he had a drug problem? No. Am I proud of the fact that he was involved with Stick’s car theft operation? Absolutely not. Do I believe that both of those things are firmly behind him? Yes.” She took a deep breath, then let it out. “Am I so deeply in love with him that I’m able to let go of his past? Absolutely.”
“But what if you weren’t as certain as you are that he’d put that all behind him? Could you still—”
“Are you saying it isn’t? Do you know something about Lucas? Did Stick say something—”
“No. No. Nothing,” I said quickly, holding up my hand as if to stop Lily’s panicking thoughts. “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant at all. I didn’t mean to imply… That’s not where I was going.”
A look of relief came over her face, and I realized that no matter how much Lily trusted Lucas (and she did), and no matter how true it was that he was done with his past (and I believed it to be absolutely true), there would always be this tiny, minuscule part of her that knew it was there.
And it was so much larger with Stick, who was the freakin’ mastermind of his little car theft ring.
Yeah, the look he’d read on my face today, the look that said I knew he was bad news, the one that had royally pissed him off, was one that would never go away.
Lily had learned to deal with it, to push it way, way to the back of her psyche.
But I knew there was no way that I could.
Chapter Fourteen
“Want a mint?” Stick asked, holding a roll of peppermint Life Savers in front of me.
“Gimme a sec,” I said, needing my hands to steer and shift Yvette down as we took a hill.
He gave a tiny snort of laughter. “Some day you’ll be so good at this that you can hold a cigarette, a beer, unwrap a mint and downshift up a curvy hill, all at the same time.”
“Um…there’s so many things wrong with that sentence I don’t even know where to start.”
Out of the corner of my eye I caught his smile. He unwrapped the roll of mints, took one and held it in front of my mouth. I waited a second for him to make some crude comment ab
out me opening up for him or something, but he just patiently waited. And when I did open my mouth and stick out my tongue, he just placed the mint on it, then took his hand back.
Not resting on my thigh as he had last time, but firmly back in his lap.
Not that I wanted his hand on my thigh. Just being in the small, cocoonlike cockpit with him was jarring enough after that angry kiss we’d left with on Tuesday.
But he hadn’t mentioned the kiss when I’d met him outside my dorm, nor on the walk to Lot H, not even when we’d gotten out of town and he’d pulled over and we’d switched positions and I’d started driving.
In fact, it was like I was totally some driving lesson student and he was acting the professional teacher.
It was good that he’d decided to go this route.
And it drove me mad.
The scent of him—once we’d gotten into Yvette and the seat warmers and heater had been going—wafting through the small car. It was a mixture of laundered cotton, oil and peppermint. And it drove me crazy.
Now, tasting the mint he’d so carefully placed on my tongue, I knew at least where that part of the Eau De Stick had originated.
And I was reminded of the taste of him. The mint brought it all back, and I ground the clutch a little bit. “Sorry, baby,” I whispered to Yvette, getting her back in gear.
Yeah, I needed to get back in gear.
I waited for Stick to make some smartass comment about the clutch, but he kept quiet. He did, however, place his hand on the dashboard, and I swear he petted her a little bit, as if to calm Yvette.
Damn, but I wanted him to pet me, too. Except that I didn’t. Because I knew it wouldn’t—couldn’t—go anywhere. And I could get plenty of casual sex with my Bribury boys—I didn’t need to seek out a townie for it.
Even though I figured Stick might know a thing or two more between the sheets than the rich boys on campus.
“Thanks for the mint,” I finally said, desperate for something to say so I wouldn’t blurt out something stupid like, “It tastes like you do.”
