“I love you, Aud. So much that it consumes me.” All my breath left my body and I leaned down to kiss his upturned lips. He didn’t often say things like that, but when he did, they almost stopped my heart.
He stood and pushed me back until I was sitting on the bed.
“Lie back.” He moved to my feet, removed my boots and my socks before grabbing the bottoms of my jeans and tugging. The problem was that they were skinny jeans and a little tight in the hip area, so all he did was pull me off the bed.
I landed on top of him on the floor.
“Shit!” I said and he also cursed. I scrambled to get off him, hoping I hadn’t injured him in any way.
“Are you okay?” I crouched next to him and he squinted at me.
“Yeah, fine. Only my pride has been kicked in the balls. That did not work out how it was supposed to. I guess I need more practice undressing girls. Why are your pants so tight?”
I started laughing at the look on his face.
“Because I had this delusion that I was a smaller size than I actually am.” I stood up and gave him my hand, but he just used it to pull me back down on the floor with him.
“Hey!”
“Did you swear when you fell on me?” he asked.
“I might have.”
“I like hearing you curse. I mean, you never do, so it’s kind of awesome when you do.”
He lay on his side with me. The floor wasn’t the most comfortable place, but at least I had a rug on this particular spot.
“Do you want to give the pants a shot again?” I asked as he stroked my hair away from my face.
“Yeah, but how about this time we go from the top?” He got up and this time he picked me straight up off the floor. Those athletic muscles came in handy.
He set me down on the bed and scooted down until he was level with the top of my jeans.
“Wait a second. Why do you still have your clothes on?” I’d been so busy anticipating where his mouth was going to go next that I’d completely forgotten that he still had his shirt and pants on.
His answer was to sit up and pull his shirt over his head.
“Better?” I wanted to take it off, but it didn’t really matter, now that it was off. I ran my hands up and down his skin. He was still a little tan from the summer and being outside.
“Much better.” He grinned at me and then went back to work on my pants.
My phone chose that moment to ring. The shrill sound cut through the sweet moment with Will.
We both glanced toward my purse where my phone was screaming. I thought about ignoring it, but the person might leave a voicemail, and then it would beep and I couldn’t deal with that.
“I’m sorry. I’ll just shut it off.”
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
I picked up my phone to check and see who was calling.
Maria.
Like it had with Will, all the oxygen left my body, but this time, it was for a different reason.
“Aud?” The phone kept going off and I just kept staring at it as Will kept saying my name.
My hand twitched and the phone fell from my hand and I watched as it fell to the floor and shattered.
I just kept saying her name, but she was far, far away. I couldn’t reach her. Not even when she dropped her phone and it crashed on the floor and broke. I was always telling her that she needed to upgrade to a better model, or get a case for it or something. Well, now she could. But the phone wasn’t the most important issue right now.
“Aud!” I yelled her name and she finally blinked at me.
“What?” Her voice was robotic, as if she was in some sort of trance.
“Your phone. It rang, you dropped it and then it broke?” I pointed to the remnants of said phone on the floor.
“Oh,” she said, bending down.
“Be careful.” I took her by the shoulders and forced her to go back to the bed. I also found her shirt and handed it to her. This seemed like the kind of moment when she’d want to be clothed.
I picked up the parts of the broken phone and put them in a paper bag I found in her closet before I crouched down in front of her, making her look at me.
“Audrey. You need to tell me what’s going on. You’re scaring me and I want to help you.”
She blinked a few times and took a shaky breath.
“It’s nothing. I just . . . I wasn’t expecting a call and I freaked out a little. That’s all.”
I shook my head.
“That’s not the way you react when you get an unexpected phone call. Someone called you that you don’t want to talk to, and I don’t know why. I just know that you’re not okay right now.”
This time she shook her head.
“Please, Will. I don’t want to talk about it.” And then she crushed her lips over mine, stopping my response. Her hands tore at my hair, at the zipper on my jeans. I wanted to push her away, to tell her to stop, but I didn’t think that was going to work.
For right now, this was what she needed. Maybe later she’d be able to talk. So I let her yank my pants and boxers down, while I undressed her as quickly, reaching for the box of condoms that we’d bought on our way back from Bea’s. I didn’t want to use the ones from the RA again.
Her mouth demanded mine, her body demanded mine. I was all too willing to roll the condom on and thrust hard inside her. She cried out and I worried that I’d hurt her, but she just dug her fingers into my back as she wrapped her legs around me and begged for more. Harder, faster. I did my best to comply with her demands. She’d been almost timid last night when she’d asked if she could be on top, but now she was back to being the commanding goddess, bending me to her will. I’d told her that she consumed me and I wasn’t lying. This girl, the one who was under me and telling me to fuck her harder, owned me. She had the power to obliterate me, like Luke had destroyed the Death Star.
She came hard, probably leaving marks in my back, her voice hoarse in my ear. I was right behind her, panting and exhausted as I arched above her and called out her name.
I wanted to collapse, but I turned and fell on the bed beside her. She was silent, staring at the ceiling. I needed to go clean up, but I didn’t want to leave her yet.
“I’m not going to talk about it,” she said to my unanswered question. Her chest heaved with exertion, and she licked her lips.
“You can’t blame me for being freaked out. You scare the shit out of me sometimes.” I’d never told her that.
“I scare you?”
“Yeah. All the time.” She finally turned toward me.
“You scare me. How you feel about me scares me. You becoming a huge part of my life scares me. There are things . . . ”
“That I don’t know,” I finished for her. “I know. I’ve known since I met you that there was something you were keeping close to the vest. I figured it would just take you some time to open up.”
“I’m so, so sorry, Will. I thought I could keep you at arm’s length, but then I fell in love with you.” A tear drifted down her cheek and I wiped it away with my thumb.
“I didn’t mean to fall in love with you,” she said. “I tried not to.”
“I’m sorry.”
She actually laughed, but it was brief.
“You don’t have to be sorry. You were just being your irresistible self. I’m powerless against your charms.” Now I was laughing.
“If anyone’s powerless, it’s me, Aud. You have all the power.” Her expression shifted and the laughter was gone.
“It doesn’t feel that way. I feel like I’m spinning out of control.”
I rubbed my hand up and down on her shoulder.
“Is there a way you can talk to me about it without really talking to me about it?” I desperately wanted to ask her what could be so bad that she couldn’t tell me, but I was so wary of scaring her off.
“No. If there was, I would have done that already. You know I want to tell you, right?” She held the side of my face and the pain was obv
ious in her eyes. Whatever her secret, I could see it was breaking her.
“I know, Aud, I know. But can I tell you something?” She nodded.
“Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Nothing would change how I felt about you. Nothing. Not now, not ever. Okay?”
She nodded again, as if she couldn’t form words.
We lay for a while, and she moved closer to me. I put my arms around her and she closed her eyes. Soon her deep breathing signaled that she’d fallen asleep. My arm had as well, but I didn’t dare move it. I didn’t want to wake her.
The one good thing about my phone being demolished was that now I couldn’t call Maria back. I had her number saved into my contacts and didn’t know it off the top of my head. Of course, I could call my mom and ask her, but I would rather cut off my own arm, fry it up and eat it for breakfast.
And then there was Will. The boy I was disastrously in love with. He was being so kind and so sweet and I didn’t deserve him.
This day was supposed to be the start of our new relationship. A beginning. Instead, my past had come to find us, like I always knew it would.
For now, though, I was going to try to just be with Will. And ignore my broken phone and the calls from my aunt.
“I’m starving,” Will said later that afternoon. We were still in bed, but I had Will’s shirt on and he wore his boxers.
“Well, I might have some cookies or something.” I got up and searched the top shelf of my closet, but I must have imagined the cookies.
“Darn. False alarm on the cookies. Um,” I said, searching around the room as Will watched me. “I don’t think I have anything, other than the pie. This could be a problem.” I turned around and found him checking out my backside.
“Just to make sure, you should probably look again,” he said, with mock-seriousness.
I put my hands on my hips and glared down at him.
“You just want me to walk around the room and possibly bend over, don’t you?”
He gasped.
“I would never.” I couldn’t help the giggle that fell from my lips. I shouldn’t be giggling. The bag containing my shattered phone had been kicked under the bed, but there were still a few plastic bits stuck in the rug.
Maria had promised me that she wouldn’t contact me. That was the deal. So what could make her break that? I didn’t want to know.
“Well, we could order takeout. I have a few menus here somewhere.” I kept a folder in my desk for emergency takeout when I pulled all-nighters in my room.
“Chinese, pizza, pizza, pizza or pizza?” I fanned the menus out in my hand and held them up in front of him.
“A hard decision, that is.” He pointed to one of the pizza menus. I sat back down on the bed while we decided what we were going to get. Will wouldn’t stop touching me and I didn’t want him to. I loved feeling his fingers on my shoulder, or in my hair, or his chest resting against my back, or his chin on my shoulder.
“You’re going to have to order, since I don’t have a phone.” My voice choked on the word “phone”. Will kissed my shoulder and went to his backpack to get his and call for a large pepperoni with green peppers.
“You know, one of us is actually going to have to get dressed to go down and pick it up,” I said when he hung up.
“I’ll take one for the team,” he said, grabbing his pants. I tore them away from him.
“It’s not going to be here for another half hour. There’s a lot we can do in half-an-hour.”
He grinned at me and dove back onto the bed.
The day faded into night and as the light faded, so did my ability to just focus on Will and block out the things I didn’t want to think about.
“Hey, beautiful. Why so serious?” He touched my forehead, which I’d probably been wrinkling with worry.
“I’m sorry. I can’t stop thinking.”
“About your thing?”
“My thing?”
“Your secret.”
“Yeah. My secret.” My big, bad, awful secret. He said that it wouldn’t change his view of me, but it would. I knew it would.
“You should be mad at me for not telling you,” I said.
“I’m not. Do you want me to be mad?”
“I don’t want you to be anything other than you.”
“Well that’s good to know.” He kissed me and then swiped the last piece of now-cold pizza. “I don’t know how to be anyone else. But if you wanted me to be Han Solo, I could probably swing that. For you.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a wizard with glasses and a scar on his forehead.”
Will rolled his eyes.
“I don’t know if I can learn all that pseudo Latin. But I think I’d be good at using a wand.” He waggled his eyebrows and I knew he wasn’t talking about the same kind of wand they used at Hogwarts. Not that they didn’t probably do that, too. I’d always wondered about what they got up to in the Room of Requirement. Seeing as how it could be anything you needed at the time. I was sure more than a few students had needed a private place for a tryst.
“Are you thinking about Harry Potter? You always get this sort of expression on your face when you’re thinking about it. Happy. I can’t wait to see your face when we go this summer.” Oh God, I’d completely forgotten about that. Well, now we could actually go.
The thought of standing in front of the Hogwarts castle and taking a picture with Will sounded like absolute heaven.
“I might have been thinking about Harry Potter. And you might be thinking about Star Wars right now. You’ve got that goofy smile on your face.” He totally did.
“We’re nerds. But shhh, that’s just between us,” he said.
“It’ll be our secret.”
“Right. Ours.”
At least I could share one secret with him.
Our day of bliss might have been a little messed up by the phone call, but the next day we had to deal with telling our friends. Aud and I talked about it and decided doing it at dinner was the best idea, but they had other plans.
“They’re all here,” Aud said, looking through her peephole on Saturday morning after someone had knocked. I’d thought I’d covered with Simon, saying I was crashing at a friend’s place to give him some privacy with Brady.
“All of them?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“All of them,” she confirmed, smiling grimly. We were both in various states of undress, having barely left her bed, except to order food and wash her sheets. My dick had gotten a serious workout and was now in hiding.
“Hold up, lemme put a shirt on,” I said, getting up. Audrey also threw a robe on and quickly made the bed as so many fists pounded on the door, it rattled on its hinges and I was afraid Aud was going to have to pay to replace it.
“Why can’t they mind their own business?” I said.
“Because they care, William. Because they care.”
Audrey opened the door, and they all piled in. I didn’t think the tiny room could hold so many people, but the gang was all here, and they had a range of looks on their faces. Lottie was smug, because she already knew, Simon had an accusatory glare in his eyes and the rest ranged from not surprised, to amused, to Trish. No one seemed shocked or pissed, so that was good.
“Yes. We’re together. Not that it is any of your business. Not one of you,” I said, pointing an accusatory finger at every person in the room.
“Of course it’s our business, sweet brother,” Lottie said, sitting down next to me and punching my shoulder. “You seemed to think it was your business what I was doing with Zan and now I’m just repaying the favor. Because you deserve it.” Her fingers pinched my shoulder.
“I, for one, was not surprised,” Trish said in a bored voice.
“Well, none of us are,” Simon said, rolling his eyes. Brady was looking at us like we were an adorable pair of bunnies and he just wanted to squeeze us both.
“Is this really necessary?” I said, but everyone ignored me. Aud took my hand and grinned at me t
hough, so I knew she’d heard me.
“Yes, we’re together and we’re going to see how this goes. I don’t want to think about possible scenarios, because it’s pointless to try and plan that kind of thing out. You never really know what’s going to happen in relationships.” She looked down as she said the last part and her voice lowered.
Her tone always changed when she talked about something that was close to her secret. I paid attention to everything she said, but sometimes I got a little distracted by staring into her eyes.
Okay, okay, maybe down her top. Sometimes at her ass. But really, it’s not my fault. I can’t help it.
Still, distractions aside, I was starting to put a few things together. Aud might have said that she wanted to tell me and couldn’t, but maybe I could figure it out for her and save her the trauma. It would work out perfectly. Then I could prove to her that I didn’t care about whatever it was, because I’d already known about it.
I silently congratulated myself on my brilliant plan as the rest of the group talked about Aud and me as if we weren’t there.
Our friends were weird.
“You have a secret pie place and you didn’t tell me?” Lottie screamed as we all sat down to a very late brunch at the Union. Several people around us stared at her, but she didn’t notice or care.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything,” Aud said, as if I’d be mad at her for such a thing.
“It’s okay. It’s not a big deal. I can share.” Not when it came to her, but everything else, sure. Lottie usually just took things without asking anyway. I was used to it.
“I could go for pie,” Stryker said.
“Same. I could always make a few. We could have third Thanksgiving,” Katie said, and giggled as Stryker whispered something in her ear. I would call them out on their disgusting behavior, but I really couldn’t because now I’d be a filthy hypocrite.
Everyone had been bitten by the love bug and it wasn’t even spring. I blamed it on the Maine winters. There wasn’t a whole lot to do, so staying inside and keeping each other warm was the only option.