by Cassie James
There’s frenzy in my movements as I drag a condom out of my pocket to toss her way before I start tugging at my own clothes with hurried clumsiness. Piper stoops to pick the condom up, and the sight of her taking it between her teeth so her hands are free to push her jeans and panties over her hips and down her legs turns my brain straight to goddamned mush. “Clock’s ticking, Jude,” she taunts once she pulls the packet from her mouth to start opening it, and I lose all conscious control.
My clothes land in a haphazard trail through her room as I stalk in her direction. Her eyes are liquid with lust when I stop in front of her, naked and panting at the thought of fucking the lingering sadness out of her eyes. She reaches toward my dick, but I grab her wrist and shake my head no. I’m not a one orgasm and done kind of guy, typically, but we just don’t have enough time for her to play around, not when I need to feel her clenching around me, head falling back as she comes undone from the way I’m making her feel.
Piper groans and holds the condom up with a quirked eyebrow. I smirk at her and jut my hips toward her, letting my dick brush against her hipbone as she squirms in front of me. I tease her for a few seconds before pulling back enough to let her slip the condom on me with expert hands. She strokes me once before I jerk her hand away and latch my hands around her hips. I bury her shriek in my mouth as I hoist her up, leading her to wrap her legs around my waist as I carry her across the room. She moans as her back connects with the glass of her ocean-front window.
I reach between our bodies to swipe my fingers across her flesh experimentally, and she rolls her hips against my fingers when they brush over her clit. I groan at the feeling of her slick heat, knowing that she’s gotten completely wet for me in next to no time is a heady feeling, and something I might tease her about any other day. Today, there’s just no time for teasing of any kind. I pull my lips away from hers as I reach for my dick, lining myself up against her entrance as she gasps and moans.
“You better be quiet, Piper. Wouldn’t want Stan to hear you getting thoroughly fucked on your first day here, would you?” I can feel her legs trembling as I start to push into her with each of my dark, teasing words. She nods earnestly, and I smirk at her before slamming the rest of the way into her with one swift moment. A sharp gasp falls from her lips as I pull back before slamming into her again.
Her fingers dig into my shoulders with a tight grip as I pound my body against hers. With each of my frenzied thrusts, my gut twists a little tighter and her shoulders bump against the heavy glass of the window. Her hands loosen from around my shoulders, and she’s bracing herself against the window with her shoulders as I continue to slam into her relentlessly. One of her hands comes up to press against the window over her shoulder, contorting her arm in a way that definitely can’t be comfortable, but she moans, the sound soft and breathy, and I reach up to cover her mouth with my hand.
I rock my hips into her even faster, surging against her as we both seek release from the frenzied motions. But then her free hand is trailing over her neck and tits, splaying over her stomach for a short moment before finding its way between our bodies. My eyes follow the motion, and I jolt at the sight of her fingers circling her clit the same way I had.
My fingers dig into her thighs as she bucks against me, legs trembling as she falls apart around me. I press her against the window until her arms come around my neck, and she’s panting against my lips when I lean in to kiss her as I finish pumping into her a few more times. I jerk against her hips as I come, relishing in the way she quakes in my arms with the aftershocks of her pleasure as I’m hit with my own.
I give us one long moment to pant in one another’s arms before I pull out of her and lower her to the floor on shaking legs. She stumbles unsteadily, and I chuckle as I reach out to help her stand. She passes a half-hearted glare in my direction, and I wink at her as I step away from her, yanking off the condom and tying it off before meandering toward the open door of what looks to be an ensuite bathroom. I toss the condom in the trash, pausing to throw some cold water over my face before pushing my way back into the room.
I can’t help but laugh at the way she’s struggling back into her clothes, but she’s smiling in a sated sort of way, and contentment settles in my gut as I dress quickly, too. I’m tying my shoes when she stops in front of me, fingers twisting just in my line of sight as I stoop. When I glance up, she grabs my shirt collar and drags me up until she can press her lips against mine. It’s quite the fucking awkward position, and my body aches a little from all the strange contortions, but I let her kiss me until it’s out of her system.
She steps back, her eyes impossibly wide as I stand the rest of the way and smile down at her. “Thank you,” she whispers reverently, and I don’t have it in me to be the smartass she’s used to. Instead I step toward her, wrapping my arms around her and dragging her closer to me until her head’s nestled against my chest and my nose is buried in her hair. “I love you,” she says quietly, and I smile into the crown of her head.
“I love you, too, Piper,” I whisper back, trying and failing to ignore the way everything just sort of feels right with her wrapped in my arms.
We’re all sitting in a circle in the middle of her floor a couple hours later, digging through the boxes she’d made us help carry up from Stan’s car after he surprised us with a hastily arranged dinner. My fingers dip into the box and pull out yet another pair of lacy panties, and I quirk an eyebrow at her as she dives around the circle to jerk this particular box away from me. It’s not my fault her panties have me thinking all about how I could add to my collection since I’m still in possession of her prom panties.
“You’re obscene,” Piper says as she shoves the box behind her, with the other couple of boxes of clothes we’d been through so far. “All I want is my bracelet—do you have to be such an asshole about it?” she chides, and Brennan and Tyler laugh when I shrug at her.
Piper’s eyes narrow as she jerks the last unopened box toward her. I tried to tell her well over a goddamn hour ago that we could easily just go get her another bracelet, and she’d thrown a fucking book at my face. No, it had to be that bracelet because it was the one she’d gotten on her first day out with Macie. I bit my tongue to keep from spitting that Macie would probably fucking take her back to wherever they got it for another, or that I’d gladly go buy her a goddamn store of them, to keep from taking another book to the face. I can’t have her damaging the money maker only a couple weeks before my next shoot starts.
She rifles around through the box, digging out her laptop and tossing it onto the bed next to her, groaning as she apparently reaches the bottom of the box. My heart sputters for a stupid goddamn minute, and I shake my head hard at myself. I’m Jude fucking Alton, and I need to start acting like it, not like the soft, fluffy son of a bitch Piper likes to try to make me out to be. I’m on the verge of telling her to just buck up, that I’ll drive her over to the jewelry shop on the way home from school tomorrow, when she squeals and pulls her hand out of the box, a glint of gold flashing between her fingers.
I try not to over-analyze the way my heart pounds in my chest at the way she smiles at us then. “Thank fuck, I thought you were going to start crying any minute now.” Piper shoots me the middle finger.
“Dude!” Brennan says through his laughter as Piper mock glares at me again.
But she’s laughing soon, too, and out of no where, she’s launching herself at both of us, her arms wrapping around our necks and squeezing us close. She lets go as quickly as she grabbed ahold of us and crosses over to Tyler, snuggling into his lap and pulling him close, too. She’s quiet at first, but she eventually sighs and says, “Guys, I can’t… I don’t—I just…”
“Words, Piper.”
She glares at me again, but it melts away quickly into a smile. Piper nuzzles her head against Tyler’s chest as she takes a moment to gather her thoughts. “I feel like I owe you guys the world. You saved me. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”
But as she sits there, wrapped in Tyler’s arms rolling her eyes at me, I can’t help but think that maybe she has it backwards. Just because we didn’t want her when she first showed up in August doesn’t mean we didn’t need her. As much as I hate to admit it, the bigger truth here is that we all saved each other.
30
Piper
Figuring out the semantics of my new life away from the Hawthornes takes a few days to really nail down, but when I finally figure it out, all bets are off. Stan’s relatively easy to live with—he stays out of my way, I stay out of his, and he only pesters me a few times a day with questions about my experiences as he jots my answers down in a small pocket-sized notebook he’s taken to carrying around with him. There’s no looking over my shoulder or worrying about saying or doing the wrong thing—Stan revels in each of my new experiences, respecting the boundaries I set when I tell him something’s off-limits. He seems more amazed at my capability to fully embrace my life than he is disturbed by the fact that I always seem to have my mouth on a different boy’s whenever he walks up on us. The hardest part of my day, it seems, is the hour-long ride to and from school with Jude, and there’s nothing hard about that at all.
It’s blissful and confusing, and I spend my evenings back and forth between Stan’s house and the Altons’ beach house. I’ve spent more time in the ocean in the past week and a half than I have the entire rest of the time I’ve existed. Occasionally Tyler and Brennan ride back out to Malibu with us, sharing dinners that Stan never seems to grow tired of having catered in before we all lounge somewhere around the massive house. Even though gossip typically spreads through West Ex and Rosewood Academy like wildfire, I never hear a fucking whisper about what happened between me and the Hawthornes. I’m not sure if people really don’t know or if no one actually cares. But at the end of the day, all I really care to focus on is the fact that this, this is what living is supposed to feel like.
It’s bittersweet then, when two weeks after moving into Stan’s house, I’m standing in front of the mirror in my bathroom, fixing my hair in the mirror as Macie sits on the edge of the tub chattering away about everything and nothing all at once. None of the guys had been able to talk their parents out of letting them out of family obligations this morning, but Macie was quick to inform her parents that she was coming to Malibu to get ready for graduation with me whether they liked it or not. We make eye contact in the mirror as I pin my hair behind my ear and then tuck a few bobby pins in the pocket of my dress in case I need them to keep my cap in place, and appreciation and affection warms me all over again.
It’s been less than a year since we’ve been friends, but I don’t think I’ll ever quite shake the girl that was ballsy enough to pull me out of the jeering crowd on my first day of school and sit across the table from me and introduce herself like it didn’t matter that I was the ghost of a dead girl she hadn’t actually liked when she was alive. The memory plays over again in my mind as I give myself one final spritz of hairspray.
“Macie Wharton,” she introduces herself as she holds a hand out.
I shake it delicately, part of me afraid that she’ll run off once she feels my skin under hers. “Piper Hawthorne.” Her smile crooks a little higher on one side than the other as she studies me even closer than before.
“But you’re not really are you?”
I spin around to face her, propping my hip against the sink and crossing my arms over my chest all in one quick motion. Her chatter stops immediately when I quirk an eyebrow in her direction, and her head cocks to the side slightly. “Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, practicing your speech or something right now?”
“Whatever, it’s bullshit anyway,” she says flippantly as she pushes herself away from the edge of the tub. She stretches her arms over her head and yawns, and I remember that she’d admitted to staying out late with Rhys the night before rather than prepare the speech—insisting at the moment that she would just wing it and hope for the best. She’s goddamn reckless sometimes, and I appreciate that about her more than I probably should. “Who the hell cares about being Valedictorian? It’s a construct that doesn’t actually mean anything in the long run. I already got my acceptance letter to CalTech, it doesn’t actually fucking matter that I give some dumb speech to a group of bored kids that just want to go sleep off their hangovers. I thought about making them give it to Brennan when they wouldn’t let me skip out on the speech, but then I remembered that shithead landed himself an internship at HBI—I can’t let him have it all, right?”
“You’re ridiculous, you know that right?” I ask her as I shake my head at her antics, and she shrugs at me with a smile before moving around me to check her own reflection in the mirror. She’d finished way before me, happy with her minimal makeup and simple hairstyle. “I’m glad you’re my ridiculous best friend, though. I can’t imagine having done this year without you.”
She wraps an arm around my shoulders and squeezes once before stepping away and tugging at the ends of my hair. “Yeah, you’re okay.” Macie laughs as she escapes into my room. I take one last look in the mirror and nod at my reflection in reassurance. This is it—the last hurdle before I face the rest of my life. And even though I don’t really know what exactly that entails right now, I’m happy to get lost in the joy of the day. I smile even as I heave a sigh and turn into my bedroom to follow my erratic best friend. The answers to life’s little questions sure as hell aren’t going to come to me standing in the middle of a fucking bathroom.
I fly through the parking lot behind Macie as she runs toward the doors, pushing past parents and scrambling around stalled groups of people. Our robes are flying behind us, still unzipped in our haste to get to the part of the coliseum we were supposed to report to almost an hour ago. We’re tragically late, and I’m secretly worried we might actually miss our own graduation ceremony.
We have no one to blame but ourselves, too. Stan warned us that Saturday afternoon traffic might be bad when he left the house a full half an hour before us, but we brushed him off in favor of trusting a GPS app that showed no indication of stopped or slowed traffic. The irony that the tech genius was right and the app was wrong wasn’t lost on me.
I’m panting as I slide against the over-waxed floor behind her, nearly wiping out as we round the corner to the massive hall where our peers are already gathered. Heads swivel in our direction as we clatter into the hallway, breathing heavily and looking a fucking mess. We scurry between the two lines of students, apologizing as we go. Tyler reaches out and snags me by the arm before I can accidentally pass him, and I wave at Macie as she continues her way toward the very front of the line.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Tyler asks through clenched teeth. He reaches down to zip my gown as I pin the cap into my hair, and I reward him with a quick kiss as the opening chords to Pomp and Circumstance start playing loudly. I pull back to peek over his shoulder, and I catch sight of Brennan staring at me from his spot further up the line with wide eyes. Jude’s shaking his head at me as he smirks and taps his watch. You’re bad, he mouths at me, and I smirk back in response.
“Traffic,” I manage to mutter when I turn my attention back to the frantic boy in front of me. Tyler runs his hands down the front of my gown, straightening the crumpled material the best he can, and my heart feels so fucking light in the moment. I throw my arms around him and squeeze him tightly before letting him go and running my hands over the front of my gown myself.
“I can’t believe you almost missed your own graduation,” he says with disbelief lacing his tone, and I shrug before shoving him forward to fall in line with the rest of the seniors that have a
lready started the processional ahead of us. I fight the urge to tell him that the ceremony itself isn’t what matters—it’s not like I actually needed high school or really earned my diploma—it’s sharing the day with him, Jude, Brennan, and Macie that’s the important part. I keep the thought to myself, though, smiling at his back as he shakes his head at me.
“When we started this school year, we all had a pretty good idea what to expect: more difficult courses, college essays and applications, one last year to spend with the friends we’ve made over the years, and even the best parties money could pay for—c’mon we’re Rosewood Academy, if there’s one thing we could always do better than any other school, it’s throw a freaking party,” Macie jokes into the microphone, and a wave of nervous laughter ripples through the students. I lean against Tyler’s side and chuckle at her even as the entire administrative team looks like they suddenly wish they’d granted Macie’s wish of not delivering the required Valedictorian’s speech.
“Nothing’s ever that easy, though, is it?” She sobers in a second as her eyes rove over the heads of our peers, searching me out with a grim smile before turning her attention away and continuing to survey the gathered crowd. “We were given an unexpected reminder at the beginning of the year that life isn’t black and white, it’s not even close. There’s more to our existence than grades and parties and being the most popular person in school, we have to want to be more than grinding cogs in the ceaseless machine, and our little shade of gray came with shadows and darkness and shock. It’s that shock, that unexpected element to life, that we need to learn about more than anything else. Because life isn’t ever going to be easy, it’s full of those shadows and gray areas, and it’s up to us to take our lessons in whatever form they come in and actually set out to change ourselves, accepting the things that we don’t understand, and surviving in spite of all that darkness.”
