“Shit. Sorry.”
What is wrong with me tonight? Where’s my game? I’m making a fool of myself, and the clock hasn’t even hit eleven yet. I can’t fucking think straight when Staten is around—I especially can’t when she’s wearing black like the color was made for her.
“It’s okay, I—” She cuts herself off, allowing her epiphany to steep before her expression transfigures into giddy amusement. “Wait a second, are you nervous?”
Hands of fire band around my throat, pruning all the saliva in my mouth and shrinking the opening of my airflow to a needle’s point. Dizzying hypoxia is quick to strike me, and despite having a dictionary of words at my disposal, I can’t decide on a single one that would absolve me.
“Me? Nervous? Pish, what? Why—why would I be nervous? That’s ridiculous. I just…zoned out a bit. Yeah, that’s it. I don’tgetnervous, Ace. I’m perfectly fine, thank you very much,” I prattle, handing off her comically full, semi-tacky cup.
She accepts it with raised eyebrows, and I can feel her gaze boring a hole through my goddamn skull while I pour myself my own drink, more than ready to down the entire thing.
Staten takes a dainty sip from the rim. “I didn’t realize thattheKnox Mulligan got performance anxiety.”
I—the walking hot mess that I am—down at least two-thirds of my beer, doing my best to ignore the way my belly lurches in protest. When I come up for air, I wipe the back of my mouth with my forearm. “I don’t. Never have.”
“Wait, that’s right. You clearly didn’t have any qualms during our last tutoring session.”
I prickle. She’s talking about my dick. Shecan’tbe talking about my dick when she looks like that right now.
“That was just a normal bodily response.”
“Oh, really?”
“Haven’t you ever taken a biology class before?”
“If you’re so adamant, maybe we should test that hypothesis.”
Not only do I reek of lies, but my body is starting to respond to every subtle lick of her lips, the way her cleavage heaves slightly when she breathes, the murky well water in her eyes that urges me to sink into manganese sediment andstay.
“What do you?—”
We weren’t standing far apart before, but now Staten slinks closer to me, marching her fingers up the length of my bicep. A dogfight of innocence and lust taunts me to bite like the glowing lure of an anglerfish in the bathypelagic zone.
“I mean, if I touched you there again, would you swear not to feel anything?”
I think I’m being punished. It was mortifying enough to get a hard-on in front of Staten, but to try and hide one in front of an entire party? My junk would make headlines before dawn broke.
Fuck, she smells so good right now…but I want her to smell likemine. A marriage of citrus and lavender, scratching an itch in my olfactory senses that I didn’t know I had. A scent so inebriating that people stop us just to get a trace.
There’s pressure ballooning in my groin—a precursor to the breakneck desire that’s about to take me for a tailspin—and I have to resort to biting my tongue in case any embarrassing whimpers slip out.
I’m expecting her fingers to fall lower—to get back at me for all the times I’ve made her life a living hell—but her posture locks up as if she’s caught in the line of a hunter’s bow. She’s looking at something over my shoulder, and I can’t reallyexplain it, but the green-eyed monster inside of me stirs with a growl. I don’t need to turn around to know who has stolen her attention.
“Leif is here,” she whispers, panic underscoring her tone. “He’s looking right at us.”
Of course. Stupid Leif. I’d attach his foreskin to a goddamn Prius and hit the gas if it wasn’t illegal.
Surprisingly, hesitation makes itself scarce, and the confidence that I pride myself on kindles like the rebirth of a flame in a hearth that hasn’t been tended to in years.
“Then let’s give him a show,” I mutter beneath my breath.
I spin Staten around so her back is facing Leif and her front is close to mine, my fingers gripping her sides in a harsh flare of territorialism. “Nuzzle your nose into my neck.”
“What?”
“Just do it. Really get up in there. Act like you’re all over me.”
Her nose is already centimeters away from the target zone, and I can feel her breath caress the delicate stretch of my throat. I know this is all some poorly constructed ploy to make Leif jealous, but I ache for her touch more than I thought was humanly possible. Then again, what I feel for Staten is anythingbuthuman. We’re like the sun and moon dancing around each other, never destined to fully collide.
