Page 140 of Arctic Titans of Northwood U: Volume 3

“I’m just saying, it’s an imbalance that’s unfair.”

“Just wait until you see how many layers I’m hiding under the hoodie,” he teased, but I knew there were none. I’d already seen his abs.

“I’m calling that bluff,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he said, shuffling the cards. “But there is no imbalance in how many pieces each of us was wearing at the start.”

I frowned and drank my wine. “How so?”

“You’ll find out if you play the next three games well,” he said.

I counted it. Socks, hoodie, pants. The thought of it made my heart race a little faster. He wasn’t wearing any underwear. He was right here, on my bed, without any underwear.

Why that was the hottest thing ever, I had no idea, but the room just got unbearably hot.

“Are you getting hard, Kane?” he asked, his gaze dropping down to my crotch as I slouched a little deeper.

“Just deal the cards,” I said.

He did, giving me a full hand of terribly mismatched cards. The simplicity of it, the innocence, made the night so much more bearable. For all my cocky attitude at the frat den, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was improvising, trying to match his freak, and hoping things wouldn’t go terribly wrong.

It was one thing to fool around a bit when neither one expected anything. But tonight was brimming with expectations. For all our flings in the past and secret kisses and sneaking around, we had never gotten to this.

There was something slightly disconcerting about knowing you would sleep with someone you’d known your whole life. These things simply didn’t happen. You didn’t just jump into bed with someone that familiar.

Yet here we were.

“Go fish,” he said, and I had forgotten which card I had even asked about. I fished, but they were all mismatched again.

One after another, Damon paired them up, tossed them on his growing pile, and dusted his hands off once we ran out of new cards.

His eyes were dark, pupils shot wide like he’d treated them with nightshade, and his chest was rising and falling slowly in controlled breaths.

I peeled off my sweatpants and remained in nothing but a pair of navy blue briefs. I returned to the bed and yanked the pillow from behind me, tucking it into my lap and shooting Damon a murderous look.

“Don’t be shy,” he said. “I like you when you’re hard.”

“You don’t like me,” I said. “We tolerate each other.”

“Exactly. I tolerate you when you’re hard,” he said.

We laughed a little, each enjoying it in our own special way. We played another round that had him finally stripping off his socks. I needed to win two more consecutive games, or I would be sitting here naked, suffering his insufferable teasing.

I drank my wine and promptly lost the next game.

Damon swept the cards off the bed and stuffed them into the box, tossing it onto the desk and leaning in. “Take them off, Kane. Rules are rules.”

I looked at his lips, the way they shone under the light of my reading lamp, red and wet and so impossibly soft. “Make me.”

“You wouldn’t break the rules,” he said in disbelief.

“What if I would?”

“I…I’d have to enforce them,” he said.

“Do it.” I lifted my chin in defiance.

He looked at me, wide-eyed, fully in character. “You wouldn’t dare.”