Page 73 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 1

“Well…” I looked around. “I’ll only ever know that in theory.”

He cocked his head to look at me. “Don’t fuck with me. I saw you shirtless. You can do a chin-up.”

“Tsk. I can barely do a pushup.” I shrugged. The mere reminder that he’d seen me in nothing but a towel, which dropped moments later, was enough to heat up my cheeks.

“Bullshit. Try one.” He was dead serious.

And so was I. “No fucking way.”

“Try a chin-up, Noah,” he insisted.

“I’m not making a fool out of myself in public,” I whispered.

“Just in private?” he teased.

I pursed my lips and flattened my eyebrows over my eyes.

He was relentless. His fingers dug into my ribcage, piercing me through my jacket.

I squealed and yelped.

“See? You’ve made a fool out of yourself already. A chin-up won’t kill you.” He was grinning like an ass.

I looked around, embarrassment threatening to set me on fire. Not a single person looked my way. A guy was dozing over two seats on the far end. A woman was reading a book with a shamelessly sexy cover model that made me slow down in my gaze over the train. Nobody cared.

“Chin-up! Chin-up! Chin-up!” Sawyer clapped his hands at each syllable and I stood abruptly to shut him up, if nothing else.

I grabbed the railing along the ceiling and tightly gripped it, mimicking what I’d seen Sawyer do. I crossed my ankles while still standing, then lifted my legs off the floor only to hang like an orangutan. My lanky, long arms couldn’t pull me up if my life depended on it.

Then, what little dignity had been left to me, disappeared. Sawyer placed his hands on the outer sides of my legs, his fingers reaching as far as just below my butt. And if the way he eased me up so effortlessly wasn’t humbling enough, the proximity of Sawyer’s face to my crotch definitely was. Has anyone ever told him not to put his face so near a virgin’s dick and balls? He didn’t know I was a virgin, though. But if he remained so close and caused my body to react the only way it could, he might start to suspect.

I did a hasty chin-up, mostly pushed by Sawyer and his hands sliding higher up my legs, then dropped down and fell across from him, leaning in as my cock stirred and thickened.

My breaths were shallow. “There,” I huffed. “I can’t do a chin-up.”

“What are you talking about? You did a whole damn chin-up just now.” The grin on his face was bordering on evil. I would have called him out on it if he wasn’t so damn adorable.

The rest of the trip was thankfully somber. We filed out of the train and back to the city surface, then Sawyer practically dragged me to jaywalk across the street. The mall was one of the more contemporary ones. There was something oddly elegant about it. It was different from the usual food court, cinema, and arcade malls of my high school days.

We walked in and Sawyer became the alpha dog of our pack to the last atom of his being. He led the way up the escalator and all around, while I was desperately trying to catch up with his determined stride.

And when we walked into the first store he chose, he simply marched on. He moved through the aisles and scanned the clothes before I could let any of it sink in. He was throwing shirts at me without asking me for my preferences. It was oddly liberating.

Aisle by aisle, he piled me up with shirts, sweaters, T-shirts, and pants. “Don’t worry. You’ll buy what you want. But you’ll try on everything.”

And so the longest hour of my life began. Sawyer, who was a hockey player and a wearer of near-exclusively black clothes, fancied himself a fashionista. And, as he gazed between me and the pants section, I wondered what else his talents were.

“We’re good for the first round,” he announced. And here I was, thinking he’d given me enough clothes to try on for the rest of the year.

If there was a way to speed up the process through a quirky, nineties montage and be done with this personal hell of mine, I would have done it in an instant. I wouldn’t even ask what it cost. But I actually had to undress in the changing booth approximately forty-two thousand times.

On his insistence, I tried a pair of faded red pants that tucked my butt tightly in the stretchy denim. And as I was picking a neutral colored T-shirt, to pull over my bare torso, the curtain of my booth flew aside and Sawyer rocked his head. He examined me shamelessly, though he was only interested in the fitting of my pants.

“Do you think you can go a size smaller?” he asked. “I’m dying to see it.”

“I, erm, don’t think…”

“Wait there,” he said and disappeared.