Riot Rules

by Callie Hart

  She’s already had five shots of various other types of vodka and she’s starting to slur her words. I tried to cut her off before the jalapeño vodka was even an option, but Mara shooed me off, cheering her on.

  I’m two seconds away from grabbing Pres and making a run for the exit when Mercy Jacobi saunters over to the kitchen island, wearing skyscraper heels and a loose black silk shift that barely scrapes the tops of her thighs. Oh. fuck. Definitely no bra, either. Her nipples are very visible through the sheer material of her dress. I have to admit, I’m a little impressed when Fitz’s jaw doesn’t hit the floor.

  He still maintains his cool when she leans forward, giving him a clear view down her dress, and slaps a little baggie full of blue powder down on the marble in front of him. “I suspect Wren was joking, but…y’know. Just in case you need it.” She winks suggestively.

  Fitz stares at the baggie, then picks it up, opens it, and empties the contents into his mouth.

  What the fuck?!

  The English professor winces, scraping his tongue with his teeth.

  “Well? What do you think? You gonna be sporting timber in twenty minutes?” Mercy purrs.

  “Guess I’ll find out.”

  Mercy pouts prettily, her bottom lip sticking out. “For your sake, I hope it was a dud. Everyone knows you fool around with girls at Wolf Hall, but fucking one of us here?” She tuts, running her hand down his arm. “Your career would be over quicker than you can say improper relationships with a student.”

  He carefully takes her hand and places it down on the counter. “You have me confused with someone else. If you’re implying that I’m having any kind of relationship with Mara—”

  “God, no!” Mercy laughs. “No, Mara’s currently my brother’s little side piece, aren’t you, babe?”

  Mara glares at Wren’s sister.

  Presley lets out a startled hiccup.

  The color drains from Fitz’s face. “Wren, huh?” He turns his attention to Mara. “I thought I’d heard something about that.”

  Mara’s cheeks turn splotchy. “What? I never claimed to be exclusive with anyone. No one’s ever claimed to be exclusive with me, either,” she adds. “Until a conversation’s had and the rules are discussed, I can’t be blamed for keeping my options open.”

  Fitz’s moment of surprise is well behind him. He’s doing a great job of acting cool, but his energy’s all off. He can smile and jostle her all he likes, but the man is pissed. I’d go so far as to say that he’s raging. “Of course,” he says. “You’re a young woman. You can sleep with whoever you want. I knew he was sleeping with someone. I suspected it was you. Now the whole thing’s been confirmed. Big deal. Let’s just get on with the evening and have some fun, huh?” Each statement comes out clipped. Too short. Too hard.

  I know for a fact that Mara hasn’t slept with Wren. If she’d even come close to sleeping with him, she would have told me immediately—the girl can’t keep a secret to save her life—so why, then, is she letting Mercy put this seed of ugliness into Fitz’s head? She should be defending herself, not letting him think she’s even remotely interested in Jacobi.

  “I’ve gotta hit the restroom. I’ll be back.” Fitz downs the shot of whiskey he’s been nursing and slams the glass down onto the island. He storms off, shoving his way through the crowd without another word.

  And that’s when I receive the answer to my question.

  Mara grabs my arm and squeals like an excited eight-year-old. “Oh my god. Did you see that? He was so jealous!”

  “What?” Mercy and I say it at the same time.

  “You want him to be jealous?” Mercy adds.

  I can’t believe it, either. Mara’s played some stupid games in the past, but this is just nuts.

  “Try to judge less,” Mara snipes. “What are you doing, spilling that shit in front of Fitz, anyway? You’re trying to cause trouble between us?”

  Uh-oh. The claws are coming out. I do not want to be here for this. “Pres, why don’t we go have a look outside. See what stars are visible tonight?” I do my best to steer her away from this clusterfuck of a conversation in the making, but Mara grabs me and holds on tight.

  “Oh no. No, no, no,” she says. “You guys need to witness this. Mercy Jacobi is about to apologize for being an asshole.”

  “Hah!” Mercy’s eyes glitter like sharpened daggers. “I don’t apologize, Bancroft. Especially when I don’t have anything to apologize for. You told me you wanted to date my brother. He’s been acting super weird lately. I put two and two together and figured out your dumb little secret. Sue me.”

  “Hey!”

  I look to the right, and Dash is leaning against the curved archway that leads into the living room, holding a tumbler of whiskey in his hands. God, he’s so fucking handsome.

  Mercy and Mara are arguing.

  Pres has found a chair to sit herself down on, and is resting her head on the kitchen island, pillowed by her arm. She looks like she’s two seconds away from falling asleep.

  “Hey, I’m just running to the restroom,” I tell Mara. She doesn’t even acknowledge that I’ve spoken, so I seize my opportunity and I go.

  I feel my pulse all over my body as I walk past Dash. He follows me. I can feel his presence at my back, the way you feel heat rolling off an open flame. The closer he gets, as I push and jostle my way through the crowd dancing in the living room, the warmer my skin becomes. I’m burning up when his hand circles my wrist and he pulls me to the right, guiding me toward a tiny, narrow door, set back in a recessed alcove.

  He doesn’t say anything as we disappear into the shadows. He hands me his drink, then takes a set of keys from his pocket and uses one of them to unlock the door. In the space of ten seconds, I’ve left my friends, charged across the ground floor, been swept through a door and now I’m standing in the dark. It’s amazing how well the door dulls the dum, dum, dum of the music.

  “Give me your hand, Stella,” Dash whispers.

  I do as I’m told. Dash’s grip is warm and reassuring in the dark. He winds his fingers through mine, and my whole body lights up. How can something so small make me feel so good. Being this close to him, alone, his strong arms closing around me, pulling me to him, when all that keeps us from being discovered by our friends is the width of a door.

  “There are stairs,” he whispers. “Just to our right. I’ll go first. You just need to follow. Cool?”

  I’m nodding before he even finishes speaking. “Yes.”

  “Good. But there’s something I have to do first.” His hands cup my face, and his mouth catches me off guard. I’ve been catching glimpses of him all night, desperate to be close to him, wanting him to kiss me so badly, but I’m never prepared for the reality of it. It’s not something you ever get used to. The second his mouth meets mine, my blood becomes liquid fire. His tongue slips past my lips, probing and tasting, hot and sweet, tinged with the burn of the whiskey he was drinking, and I feel myself melting into him. One of his hands moves to rest at the back of my neck, the other sliding down my side until it comes to a stop on my hip. He pulls me to him, so that there’s no space between us at all anymore, and the firm, warm, solidness of his chest against mine makes my head spin.

  And I’d be lying if the pressure of his hard-on, digging into my lower stomach, didn’t have a certain effect on me, too.

  All it takes is one look. One kiss. One touch. The smallest, most meagre piece of Dashiell Lovett’s attention is capable of burning me to a pile of cinder and smoke. I want him. After denying that truth, even to myself, for so long, it feels even more amazing to be able to acknowledge it so readily now.

  His breath turns ragged as his hands begin to roam again. He groans when he slides a hand up over my ribcage and then over my breasts, cupping and squeezing as he goes. A second later, he rips his mouth away from mine, panting, and takes a step back. “Jesus Christ.” He sounds stunned. “What the hell have you done to me? I’m never this…this…” He pauses. Regroups. Then
, he takes hold of my hand and places it over the center of his chest, so I can feel the erratic thrum of his heart. “I am never this.”

  “Sure that’s not the drugs?” I ask quietly, disguising the question behind soft laughter.

  “What? God no. I’m clean. I haven’t taken anything, and I’m not going to. I don’t need that shit anymore. I’ve had a couple of drinks, but that’s it, I swear.”

  Relief sinks into my bones. I haven’t asked him to stop taking drugs. If I ask him to do that, he’ll want to know why it’s such a problem for me, and I can’t tell him what happened back in Grove Hill. It will ruin everything if he finds out what I did to Kevin. He’ll never want to speak to me again. By swearing off drugs of his own volition, he’s made things much easier for me, though.

  His pulse sings to me. It matches my own, too fast, too reckless, and too wild. Everything feels like it’s coming together and falling apart at the same time. Dash’s fingers find my cheek in the dark; he strokes the tips of them along my cheekbone and then along the line of my jaw, sighing softly.

  “We should just stay in here forever,” he says. “Fuck those guys. Who needs friends, anyway?”

  “Seriously.”

  His forehead rests against mine, and suddenly I’m filled with the burning need to see his face. I want to see the intensity in his eyes. I want to see what he looks like when he’s sharing a moment like this with me. It feels too important to miss. “Where do the stairs go, Dash?”

  He lets out a long, tense breath. “Third floor,” he says.

  “What’s on the third floor?”

  “My bedroom.”

  I don’t hesitate. “Take me there.”

  The stairs are narrow and very steep. I follow behind him, a fist full of his t-shirt in my hand as he leads me up, up, and up some more. “The house is full of weird little hallways and stairways,” Dash explains. “The guy who owned this place before Wren bought it was a paranoid recluse. He thought the CIA were trying to kill him. He had all of these little escape routes built into the house in case he was ever raided and needed to make a quick escape.”

  He opens the door and helps me through into what I quickly deduce to be a linen cupboard—the smell of laundry detergent lingers in the air. My suspicions are confirmed when a piercing point of light erupts in Dash’s hands. He’s turned the light on his cell phone on, illuminating the stacks and stacks of sheets and towels on the shelves around us. “I locked my door so none of these idiots could fuck on my bed. I’ll go unlock it. Give me ten seconds, then come out. Go along the landing and straight through the first door to your left. Okay?”

  I nod.

  Dash slips stealthily out of the linen closet and disappears, closing the door behind him. I wait in the blackness, counting slowly to ten in my head, and then I follow him out. I haven’t gone two steps before I walk straight into someone’s chest.

  “Well, well. If it isn’t…shit. It’s…you.”

  It’s Wren. It would be, wouldn’t it. He’s standing in the middle of the deserted landing with a bottle of vodka in his hand. His pupils have swallowed his irises. “If you’re looking for…the bathroom…” He appears to lose his train of thought.

  “Are you high?”

  He points a finger at me, squinting. “Maybe. That’d explain the weird pins and needles. And why everything tastes like hairspray. I think…I think…” He frowns, rubbing roughly at his eyes. “I think I took the ketamine. Which means…I’m about to be really fucked up.”

  “You should go find somewhere to lie down then.”

  He looks at me. Blinks. Then hugs me. I’ve never been so scared in all my life. The contact’s brief and brusque, over as quickly as it begins, but I’m shaking like a leaf when he lets me go. He hands me his bottle of vodka. “You’re right. I’m gonna go…lie dowwwnnn.” He weaves along the hallway, bouncing from the banister railing to the wall. I should help him down the stairs. But then again…maybe a minor tumble down one set of stairs might be just the thing that Wren Jacobi needs. You never know. People’s entire personalities have changed after blunt head trauma; he might fall into a coma and wake up nice.

  I make sure he’s gone before I open up the door to Dash’s room, where I find Dash chewing on a thumb nail, anxiously wearing a hole in the rug at the end of a very comfortable looking king bed. The room is massive, though not quite what I was expecting. It’s way longer than it is wide. The interior walls are solid and plastered, but the two exterior walls that form the corner of the building are floor-to-ceiling glass. It’s as if we’re in a glass tank, looking right out into the night forest. I can only imagine what the view looks like during the day: the brilliant green of the trees, and so much of the sky on display as the mountain slopes down, away from the house. You can probably see for miles.

  There’s a piano in the far corner—beautiful, worn and old. The varnish on the wood is cracked and worn away in places, and the upholstered bench in front of it is a little threadbare. It’s much smaller than the grand concert piano in the orchestra room. It’s the kind of piano you learn at when you’re a child, sitting on your grandfather’s knee—the same instrument he learned at when he was a child.

  There are books littered everywhere. A TV mounted on the wall adjacent to the bed, by the door. A pale grey couch pushed up against the glass, a throw haphazardly discarded over the arm and a pile of sheet music next to it, like Dash bundled himself up there recently to scribble something down. On top of a small bookcase in the corner, close to the piano, three vine plants grow like weeds out of their pots, green and vibrant and healthy.

  Dash looks bemused. A little awkward, too, maybe. He sits down on the edge of his bed, looking up at me from under raised eyebrows. “Gonna tell me why you’re smiling, then?”

  “Nothing. I just, uh…I didn’t think you’d be a plant guy, y’know.”

  He pulls a face. “Why not? Plants help with creativity. They like music.”

  “I can’t really imagine you…y’know…nurturing anything.”

  “I take very real offence to that,” he says gravely. “I’m great at nurturing. And anyway. They’re Philodendron. Almost impossible to kill.”

  I laugh, taking the room in, noticing, cataloguing, saving every detail to memory. It feels calm in here. Tranquil. Really, it’s simple, and minimalistic, and beautiful. The colors are neutral and masculine—cream and sand, accented with dark greys and black. I see how hard it would have been for him to pick out all of the wild and vibrant colors for my room now, when this is his go-to palette. I’m surprised by how much I love it, given how subdued all of the hues are. It feels like…him.

  Dash watches me intently from the bed as I wander around, inspecting everything. “What were you expecting? Union Jacks and red telephone boxes?” he asks quietly. “Maybe a member of the Queen’s Guard in full military regalia, standing watch by the door?”

  I stifle a laugh. “Are they the ones with the red jackets and the funny hats?”

  “They’re bearskins, Stella. And yes. They’re the ones with the red jackets and the funny hats.” He speaks softly, chidingly, with a familiar affection that makes my heart swell. I love when he speaks to me like this, so completely at ease.

  “Leave my shit alone and come here,” he says.

  I put down the wooden cross puzzle I’ve been spinning around in my hands, still biting back a smile as I cross his room and go to him. I plan on sitting down beside him, but he shakes his head, placing his hands on my hips and turning me so that I’m facing him, so that I’m straddling him on the edge of the bed.

  He’s so much taller than me that even sitting down, with me in his lap, he barely has to angle his head back so he can look at me. He takes my arms and places them on his shoulders, so that my hands are behind his head, and then he slides his hands around my waist, so that they rest on the small of my back, almost on my ass. “Hi,” he says quietly.

  “Hi.”

  He smiles—the most open, genuine smile I’ve ever
witnessed on his face, suspiciously shy—and my heart summersaults. He’s so fucking handsome. Forget his room; the details of him fascinate me. His strong jaw. The tiny little nick on his chin. The slightest kink to his otherwise very straight nose. His beautiful hazel eyes. They look almost green tonight, with a golden, honey-colored burst around his pupil, speckled with three much darker brown spots.

  “Everything to your liking?” he whispers.

  I’ve been staring at him again. He doesn’t seem to mind, though. The faintest hint of a rogue smile dances at the corners of his mouth. “Are you actually basking in my attention, Lord Lovett?”

  “Yes,” he answers. No artifice or arrogance. “It feels good to be seen by you.”

  All of a sudden, I’m the shy one. He’s studying me back, his bright, intelligent eyes moving over my face, and all I can think of are my flaws. My weird freckles. My unruly hair. The little mole on my cheekbone. I try to duck my head, but Dashiell catches hold of my chin, lifting it gently. “If the girls here are foolish enough to call me Sun God, then you are the goddess of the moon. Diana. Selene. Artemis. Luna. My pale and ethereal queen.” He smirks softly, acknowledging my eyeroll but not giving in to it. “Y’know, for centuries, they used to think the moon sent men mad. Like the phases of the moon affected a person’s sanity. Lunatic. That’s where the word came from. I can see how they came to that conclusion, Carrie. You drive me crazy. I need you so fucking bad.”

  Oh my god. He isn’t lying. The need in his voice. The rough edge to his words. The hardness of him, pressing up against me, between my legs. His reaction to me has me answering in kind, my pulse quickening in the hollow of my throat.

  “But what if I don’t want to be the moon? The sun and the moon are always chasing each other across the sky, never able to catch up with one another.” There are many myths and legends about exactly this—the sun and the moon as ill-fated, star-crossed lovers, never able to be together, theirs a tale of tragedy and lost hope. I don’t want to think of my relationship with Dash in those terms.