by Hart, Callie
Mr. French won’t just escort us in to see Darhower if we get caught. This kind of public indecency is usually dealt with by law enforcement. I can’t bring myself to really care, though, as Alex dips his fingers inside of me for the first time and I slide down in my chair, my hips angling themselves forward of their own accord, giving Alex more space to move his hand.
I can feel him grinning against my cheek. “Dirty Silver,” he whispers. “You’re staring at that television screen very hard. Are you finding this an educational experience?”
Jesus…fucking…
I grab hold of the edge of my desk, bracing myself and holding myself in place at the same time. With Alex’s black jacket covering everything that he’s doing, no one can see what’s going on beneath the leather, but if I start flailing my legs all over the place then people are going to be able to guess. “You should stop,” I say softly. “If you make me come…”
“Hmm?” His question is a low growl in my ear.
“Someone will notice. They’ll—” I cut myself off, blocking off my throat entirely as Alex angles his fingers upward, stroking them against a spot inside me that makes flashes of color burst in my vision. He isn’t fucking around. It doesn’t matter how hard I protest, or how frantically I tell him he should stop. He means to make me come at the back of this classroom, and nothing I say is going to deter him.
If I really, really want him to stop, I’m going to have to grab his hand and physically drag it out of my pants. I close my hand around his wrist, preparing to do just that, but then I falter. Fuck, it feels…so fucking good. Alex fastens his teeth onto my shoulder, biting down playfully through my t-shirt, nowhere near as hard as I made him bite me in the guest room at home, but the effect that small spike of pain has on me is instant and dizzying. My head rocks back, my mouth falling open.
“God, you’re so fucking beautiful, Argento.” His low, rasping voice is hypnotic. I lose myself altogether as he continues to speak to me, barely loud enough to be heard. “I want my dick inside you so fucking bad right now. Shhh, don’t make a sound. Don’t move. You need this, don’t you? You’re hungry. Don’t worry, I got you. Let me fuck this out of you with my fingers. Let me make you feel good.”
White flares of light chase across my eyes as he pumps his hand quicker between my legs. I’m so wet, I can actually smell myself on him as he moves faster, circling the pad of his thumb over the slick, tight knot of my clit. Combined with his fingers pulsing and surging inside me, it feels as though he’s lit an eternal fire in the very center of my core and it will never fucking go out.
“You’re getting tighter, Argento. Jesus Christ,” Alex murmurs. “Stay with me. Won’t be long now, I promise. I’ve got you. Hold your breath. Hold it. Don’t make a fucking sound. Let it come. Let it come.”
I want to scream. I want to buck against his hand and grind myself into his palm. I can’t, though. I can’t move an inch. If I even allow myself to breathe, I’m going to make some sort of desperate, mindless sound that will let everyone know that I’m teetering on the edge of an orgasm.
“Soak my hand, Dolcezza. Come on. Do it. I want you all over my fingers. Come for me. Come. Come.”
This is an order I cannot disobey. It’s too late. There’s no clawing my way back up this cliff face toward sanity. I’m already stumbling, tripping, tumbling headfirst into nothingness.
‘For millions on Earth, the Christmas Eve television broadcast is the defining moment of Apollo Eight. But for the engineers…and especially the astronauts…there’s a critical maneuver just ahead that overshadows everything else…’
I hear the words blaring out of the television, but it I don’t register a single one of them. I can’t focus on anything but the numbed-out bliss Alex coaxes from me with each pump of his fingers.
“Good girl. Good girl. That’s it. Ride it. Ride it out.”
My fingernails gouging into the wooden desk in front of me, I lock up, trembling, leaning into him as I come. The well of pleasure I descend into feels bottomless, but eventually I reach its end.
I’m too afraid to breathe for a second. I don’t want to gulp at the air like I’m starving, but before long I have no choice. I pull a thin trickle of air in through my nose, my body slowly falling slack against Alex’s chest, and he purrs into my hair like a satisfied cat.
“Damn, Argento. That was the hottest thing I have fucking seen.” He nuzzles into my hair, pressing a kiss against the damp skin of my neck, and I shudder one last time as he slides his fingers out of me. Everyone else in the room is silent, watching the television screen with boredom strewn across their faces. Not me, though. I’m too busy staring at Alessandro Moretti, as he licks my come clean from each one of his glistening fingers.
20
ALEX
“Come on, old man. You’re embarrassing yourself. Harder. Come on, harder!”
Under any other circumstances, I would never dream of speaking to Cam like this, but desperate times call for desperate measures. He wants to be a part of the Jacob Weaving take-down crew, but I know for a fact he hasn’t had to raise a fist to anyone his entire life. That much became painfully clear the first time he swung at the heavy bag hanging in his garage…and he nearly fucking missed.
Silver had three guitar lessons queued up with her regular students after school today, so I grabbed the opportunity with both hands, putting her father through his paces during her absence. And let’s just say, it has not been pretty.
Cameron gives me an irritated scowl as he lunges forward, jabbing at the bag like I showed him to. At least he’s connecting properly with the damn thing now. That’s something, I suppose. I doubt a hit from Cameron could put a man down on his ass, though. It’s not as if the guy’s unfit or anything. He’s young, all things considered, and broad-shouldered. There should be nothing stopping him from sending the heavy bag suspended from his garage roof swinging for the rafters, but it isn’t happening. There appears to be a problem, namely the fact that whenever Cameron Parisi pulls back his fist and sends it hurtling forward toward the bag…he doesn’t fucking mean it.
It’s understandable. He hasn’t seen the way Jake looks at Silver. He hasn’t seen the smug, self-satisfied smile on the motherfucker’s face as he traipses through the hallways of Raleigh like he fucking owns the place. If he’d caught one glimpse of Jacob’s eyes crawling over Silver’s skin, the way I’ve caught them crawling, then he wouldn’t be having this problem right now. I nearly gave myself a fucking aneurism pretending that everything was okay at school today. I wanted nothing more than to hunt down that motherfucker and tear him limb from limb, but I didn’t for Silver’s sake. She must have thought I was fucking crazy, skipping into physics like I didn’t have a care in the world. And then making her come under her fucking desk? Yeah, I must have come across like a goddamn psychopath, but it was all I could do to distract myself from the chain of bruises that I knew were worsening under the high neck of her sweater.
“I have an old skiing injury, y’know,” Cam grumbles as he jabs at the bag. “I dislocated my shoulder when Silver was six. It comes out of joint if I’m not careful.”
The garage door’s closed. There are three little element heaters pointed at us from Cam’s barely used workbench, and the space has gotten surprisingly hot. We both shed our shirts about half an hour ago, and I’ve been trying not to stare at Cam’s extraordinarily pale chest ever since. Not one tattoo on the guy. Not a fucking one. Weird.
I brace the heavy bag against my side, rolling my eyes. “D’you know how ultra-privileged and ridiculous that sounds? Oh, no, my old skiing injury. I can’t possibly hit something hard, or all of my money’ll go flying out of my pockets.”
Cameron pauses, straightening up a little, a warning look on his face. Antagonizing him probably isn’t the best way to plant myself firmly into his good graces. He arches his eyebrows at me, and I arch mine back. I am the king of the sardonic eyebrow arch. Cam’s gonna have to practice some more if he wants to compe
te for the title. “What? You want me to apologize? Will that make your old skiing injury hurt less?”
“Jesus Christ, you’re an asshole, you know that?” he mutters darkly. “What Silver sees in you, I have no idea.”
There we go. Salty, salty Cameron. When he hits the heavy bag again, he puts a little effort into it. Enough that I can actually feel the hit through the bag. Not enough to make me stagger back a step, but it’s something.
“If I’m such an asshole, then why are you okay with me dating Silver in the first place?”
Cameron bares his teeth as he throws another punch at the bag. “Silver’s not like most kids her age. She’s smart. She knows what she wants. She’s also stubborn as hell. If I forbid her from dating you, in a year’s time she’d be shacked up with you somewhere fifty miles away with a newborn keeping her up all damn night and I’d probably never see her again.”
I’ll admit, the mental image he paints throws me for a second. “She’d never do that,” I say. “She is too smart for that. We’d never just take off and leave. We’d never wind up with a kid like that, either.”
“Why not?” Cam asks sharply. “You don’t want children with her?”
I choke on a number of different responses to that question. The words are all bunched up at the back of my throat, stumbling into one another. If this is another test, like handing me a beer to see if I’ll drink it in front of him, then I don’t know what kind of warped, fucked up game this guy is playing, but I want out. Nothing I say here will ever be the right answer. “It’s getting real hot in here,” I say through my teeth. “Silver said you used to go to a Mauy Thai gym on the other side of town. Why’d you stop?”
Cameron’s eyes glitter as he drives a right hook toward the middle of the bag. “Shame you were so enthusiastic with all the ink. You could have been a politician later in life, the way you side step questions, Moretti. Quite the talent you’ve got there.”
“What do you want me to say? Yeah, I wanna knock up your daughter and fill an entire house with our kids? I’m seventeen. So’s Silver. Neither of us are thinking about that right now.”
“You’re just thinking about getting your dick touched as often as possible, consequences be damned, right?” I feel his hit this time. I’m pretty sure Cam imagined the bag was my head on that last one. A spike of anger licks up the back of my neck but I ignore it, shrugging it off. I’m used to people saying things to try and kindle my temper. Gary used to do it all the time. During the last few months under Quincy’s roof, I probably would have unleashed on him and gotten in a few good hits if he’d said something like that to me. This time, with Cam, I’m not going to do that. He’s so fucking worried about Silver. I’m betting he doesn’t even know what he’s saying half the time.
“I’m not gonna talk to you about my dick, Mr. Parisi,” I tell him.
“Ahh.” He stands up, straightening out of his fighting stance again, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm. “Back to Mr. Parisi, huh?”
“Until we settle on another topic of conversation that doesn’t make me think you might kill me, I think it’s probably for the best.”
He huffs out a breath of air that I think is supposed to be laughter. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole, too. You must be rubbing off on me, Moretti. Come on. Let’s switch out.”
We both wrapped our hands before we started, so I’m ready to change up with him. Cam skirts around the bag, assuming the position I was just in. I lift my hands to my face, loosely fisted, raising my guard, and Cam laughs. “Oh boy. I can see we’ve got some work to do here, haven’t we? You need a bit of a wider…” he begins to say.
He stops trying to correct my stance with his half-baked Muay Thai knowledge when I unleash my first punch, pivoting at the ankle, knee, then hip, rotating, twisting, drawing power up through the floor, up through my body, and sending it snapping down the length of my arm as it impacts with the bag.
Cam staggers back not one step but two. He nearly crashes into the work bench behind him. “Ufffffuck,” he groans, his surprised exclamation transitioning into a surprised curse word. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Kind of the point, right? Take people by surprise, when it matters.” My loose, almost drunken style of fighting has shocked the hell out of more people than I can count. To this day, I’ve never lost a fight. I don’t intend on losing any in the future, either.
Cam nods, panting a little as he goes back to hold onto the bag. “Point well made,” he says under his breath. He’s not smiling anymore. Not angry either. His emotions seem to have fallen out of him altogether. “You know this might be the end for you guys, don’t you?” he says quietly. “If we do this, she might not forgive you for not listening to her.”
I chew on the inside of my lip for a second, turning that thought over in my head. I’ve already realized this. There’s every chance Silver will never speak to me again once my plans with Cam have come to fruition. “I know it,” I say after a while. “I’ve made my peace with it. I’ll never be okay without her, but she’ll be okay without me. She’s stronger than I am. She’d be okay…and this needs to be done.” I say nothing about Silver’s murmured nightmares. I say nothing of all the other ways Jacob’s assault is still affecting Silver…sexually…even if she won’t admit it. Cameron just nods, as if he’s noticed his own list of changes in his daughter and he doesn’t want to talk about those either.
“What about you?” I ask. “She’s going to hate you too after we’re done.”
Cam just shrugs, jerking his chin toward the heavy bag, indicating for me to hit it again. “I’m different,” he says. “I’m her father. She can hate me all she wants. A daughter’s supposed to hate her father sometimes. Eventually, she’ll forgive me, though. She won’t have a choice. I’m her blood.”
21
SILVER
A ribbon of light spans from one end of Raleigh High Street to the other, small yellow fairy lights twinkling everywhere, wrapped around the trunks of the trees, individually wrapped around their branches. The storefronts have all been decorated, too. The edges of the windows in cafes, restaurants, and the boutique jewelry places alike have been frosted over with fake snow, and paper snowflakes have been taped and strung to the insides of the glass.
I remember making those snowflakes as a child in elementary school, folding the paper into little triangles and carefully using the tips of my scissors to snick out little pieces along the edge, creating a pattern when the paper was unfolded. We’d make hundreds of them at Raleigh Elementary, writing our names carefully in the middle of our snowflakes in looping pencil. One of the teachers would then go around Raleigh and distribute the decorations to the local store owners, and the children of the town would be taken up and down the high street by their parents to peer into all the windows. We’d all squeal, delighted, when we finally found one of our own snowflakes in a window, displayed proudly, our names pressed up against the cold glass.
Thomas Beekman, Aged 7.
Carlie Harrison, Aged 7.
Leoni Ali, Aged 6.
Jason Press, Aged 5 ½.
In the windows at Henry’s, a little girl called Wendy Michaels has been honored six times, her small, delicate little snowflakes arranged in a circle right in the middle of the window.
Alex takes in the winter magic of the high street, the sides of his Stan Smiths caked with the fresh snow that fell earlier this evening, and I find myself staring at him once again. His hands are driven deep into the pockets of his leather jacket. Every time he takes a breath, a billow of fog clouds the air, quickly rising up through the starry trees and disappearing into the night sky. The small bursts of golden light, like little fireflies, reflect in the darkness of his sharp, alert eyes and in the waves of his almost black, swept back hair.
He looks around, studying the scene laid out before him, like he was just kidnapped by aliens and unceremoniously dropped onto the surface of another strange, unfamiliar planet.
His mouth works, lifting up at one side. “I rode through a couple of times on the bike. There was less snow last year. I didn’t stop, though.” Watching the people of our little town wandering up and down the street in front of us, arm-in-arm, bundled up in scarves, hats and gloves, their cheeks reddened by the cold, he looks like he’s trying to understand what’s going on around him but none of it quite makes sense. I suddenly realize what’s going on in his head. He still feels so apart from all of this. He still doesn’t think there’s a corner of Raleigh’s High Street where he might fit in.
I loop my arm through his, leaning my head against his shoulder as we make our way past Hardaker’s Grocery Store and the Dillinger’s Pharmacy, nestling into him snugly, showing him that we’re just like any of the other couples out to look at the lights.
We reach the Regency Theater at six-fifteen, a little early to meet Ben, but Alex didn’t want to risk being late. We sit on the wall out front, taking everything in as we wait for Jackie’s silver SUV to pull up.
“Looks like the inside of a snow globe,” Alex muses.
“You’re so far away from the rest of town over in Salton Ash. This must seem really quaint and weird in comparison to the trailer park.”
