Bury Me (Willow Heights Prep Academy: The Elite Book 3)

by Selena

  He reaches up and tucks my hair behind my ears. “You know, I kinda wish I’d realized it before Devlin did.” He leans down, his fingers lingering below my ear as his lips skim mine.

  I lay a hand on his chest and push him back. “Preston.”

  He offers no resistance, stepping back from me until my hand falls away from him. He shrugs and says, “I had to do it once, Manhattan. I’ve never kissed a New York girl before.”

  “I thought that was your sex bucket list.”

  “Never kissed a girl I didn’t fuck.”

  “Well, then I guess tonight will be a first,” I say. “I’m all Devlin’s.”

  *

  “I’ve been thinking about this all fucking week,” Devlin murmurs into my sweaty hair as he collapses on top of me an hour later. We skipped the postgame party again—the last one of the season—so we can be together. It’s quiet at Devlin’s, and I can be as loud as he makes me. I hate that he’s missing his party, but it’s the only time we can really be together. This, and science class, which doesn’t include quite the same perks.

  “Me, too,” I admit, cradling his head against my chest and running my fingertips over the tattooed skin of his forearm. “What do these mean?”

  “Different things,” he says, pulling the blankets over us without moving from his position on top of me. “Why, you want me to put your name in ink so everyone knows I’m yours?”

  “No,” I say, laughing. “What if I changed my name or something?”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll make it say Crystal Darling.”

  My heart does a little flip. “Devlin…”

  “Kidding,” he says. “I’ll just have them write Sugar. But we’ll both know what it means.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what they mean, are you?”

  “Some of them mean something,” he says. “Some of them don’t mean anything.” He turns his arm over, letting me see the morning glory vine winding up the back of his arm, blooming on his tricep. “This is my biggest one, and I just got it because a guy from Faulkner High wanted to practice on someone.”

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s brave.”

  “Not really,” he says with a chuckle. “I was drunk off my ass. Good thing he was actually really fucking good. I could have ended up with a cartoon animal.”

  “What about this one?” I ask, rubbing my thumb over the one I saw the first time I met him, when he was standing in the parking lot with his arms crossed, and I could see the ink on the back of his forearm. It’s a Latin phrase written in fancy script.

  “It’s the Swan’s motto.”

  “Oh,” I say, swallowing hard. He never talks about that with me. “They make you tattoo that on yourself?”

  “I like ink,” he says. “It’s addictive.”

  “Hm,” I say. “Maybe I’ll get one.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I pull back and look down at him. “You don’t think I’m brave enough to get a tattoo?”

  Devlin leans up on his elbows, his eyes darkening as he looks down at me. I can feel him hardening inside me again. “I like your virgin skin,” he says. “I want to be the only one to leave marks on you.”

  “Me, too,” I whisper. “I love the marks you leave. They help me know it’s real even though I can’t even talk to you all week. I wait for it all week, every week, Devlin.”

  I know we’re digging our own grave, that there’s no way for this to end except in disaster. Every time we’re together, it’s as precious and bittersweet as if it were the last time. Each time, it could be. We’re both willing to risk it for now, even knowing it can’t end any other way. We’re a toxic, doomed, beautiful disaster waiting to happen. But it will happen. There’s no way around that, no matter how hard we pretend.

  He tightens his arms around me, scooting down and pressing his lips to my hammering heart again. “It kills me that we can’t be together at school.”

  “Me, too.”

  Since the day he refused to fight Royal, the day he stepped in to defend me to my own brother, Royal has barely spoken to me. As far as I can tell, he hasn’t ratted me out to anyone else in the family, but he must know what that meant. At school, my brothers rarely leave my side, escorting me like bodyguards and refusing to let me so much as speak to a Darling. With the way my family talks, I’ve been too afraid to let Devlin even climb through my window. I might make noise, and if they came in and saw him fucking me, they’d shoot him while he was still inside me.

  “You can’t talk your brothers into giving me even one chance?” Devlin asks, pushing himself up on his elbows and leaning down to kiss me. “I can prove to them that I’m going to do right by you. I’ll keep trying until the day I die, Crystal. One day, I’ll show you I’m worthy.”

  “I know you’re worthy,” I say lightly. “But I don’t mind you proving it. Especially with jewelry.”

  Devlin smiles. “You’re one of those girls?”

  “Every girl likes shiny, expensive things.”

  “Noted,” he says, rubbing his nose back and forth against mine. “And you know my family’s cool with you already. It’s just your brothers we have to convince now.”

  “So, you’re the liar in the family,” I say, rolling us onto our sides, my legs still locked around his hips. “I would have thought it was Colt.”

  “What?”

  “Preston said he wasn’t the liar in the family,” I say. “I thought Colt was. But it must be you.”

  “You really have to talk about my cousins while I’m still inside you?” he asks. “I was getting hard again.”

  “You talked about my brothers when we were hooking up.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?” I ask. “Because they’re my family, not yours?”

  “Because they’re not girls who want to fuck me.”

  I snort and roll away from him, sitting up to arrange his blankets over my legs while Devlin disposes of the condom in the trashcan beside his bed. “Preston does not want to fuck me,” I say. “He hates me. He wants to hurt me, so yeah, he’d probably rape me because he knows how badly that fucks a person up, but he doesn’t actually want to fuck me.”

  “He hates you because he can’t have you,” Devlin says, pulling me back down beside him. “Because you’re the only girl who doesn’t cream her jeans when he starts talking shit. Because you never bowed down to him. It kills him that you weren’t interested.”

  “In a guy who basically sexually harassed me from the second I walked into this school? Gee, that’s a real shocker. How could I resist that?”

  Devlin smiles a little. “I’m glad you resisted,” he says, tucking an arm around me and pulling me back to him. “I want to be the only man you can’t resist.”

  “You are,” I say, leaning in to kiss him. “But don’t tell me your family loves me. Your dad got arrested because of me.”

  “Not because of you,” Devlin says, folding his arm under his head and staring at me with those intense blue eyes. “I promise he’ll love you if you’ll give him a chance.”

  “You hid me from your mom,” I remind him.

  “That was before this,” he says, squeezing my hip. “That was when it was goodbye.”

  “So… What? You want to introduce me as your girlfriend now?”

  “Mom loves us,” he says. “She might be upset about your family getting us arrested, but she’ll come around. And my dad doesn’t hate you. The guy helped named you, Crystal. You should get to know him.”

  “Okay, I gotta hear this,” I say. “I know you think your family is omnipotent in this town, but my parents didn’t even live here when they had me.”

  “That was the idea for the first candy,” Devlin says. “The one my dad came up with.”

  I lean up on my elbow. “That’s not true. My dad named the first candy after me.”

  Devlin holds up both hands. “Okay. Not trying to argue.”

  “I mean, the first one that was his,” I say. “
Obviously, he got the store from my grandpa, so the first ones were his recipes, and then Dolce Drops put him on the radar, but Dolce Crystals came out the year I was born…”

  Devlin doesn’t answer.

  I flop back on the bed and pull a pillow over my face. “Which means he probably named them a long time ago,” I groan. “He’d been working on that recipe for years. Oh my god. He didn’t name his signature candy after me. I’m named after a stupid hard candy.”

  “Hey,” Devlin says, pulling me close again and pressing his nose against my neck. “It’s not so bad. If that’s the worst you can say about your dad, that’s nothing.”

  “You know that’s not the worst I can say about him,” I say, uncovering my face. “And what would you know? From what I hear, your dad’s a regular saint.”

  Devlin arranges the pillows to lie on his back, an arm under his head. “He really is,” he says, sounding pretty damn smug.

  “But he cheated on your mom,” I say, laying a hand on his chest. I remember what Dolly said, and suddenly I’m glad she wouldn’t tell me. I want him to tell me this, to tell me everything. Talking to him is as addictive as touching him.

  Devlin’s face tenses, and his muscles tighten under my fingers. “Who told you that?” he asks, his voice edged with the coldness I remember too well.

  “Your mom did,” I remind him. “At that party where you led me around on a leash. Remember?”

  He swallows, the muscle in his jaw standing out with tension. He plucks my hand from his chest and pushes it away. “Why do you want to know about my family?” he asks.

  “Because I want to know everything about you,” I say, trying to hide the hurt from my voice. “And I want you to be the one who tells me. Don’t shut me out, Devlin.”

  He clenches his jaw, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “How am I supposed to believe you love me, Crystal?” he asks, his voice low and edged with bitterness.

  “You?” I ask, drawing back. “How am I supposed to believe it, after everything you did?”

  “Exactly,” he says, sitting up and staring down at me. “After everything I did to you, how can you love me? If you just need me to fuck you like I did in the car that day, I can understand that. I can make you cum, screaming my name, every Friday night. But let’s stop pretending this is more than that to you.”

  “Devlin.” I sit up and wrap my arms around him, even though he’s still tense, his muscles straining with anger under my touch. He turns his face away, but I know this boy now. I can see the pain under that anger.

  “Look at me,” I whisper. I take his chin and turn his face to me, like he’s done so many times to me. “I don’t know where you got the idea that I just want you for sex. As much as I love your penis, it’s not why I’m with you.”

  My attempt at a joke falls flat. Devlin pulls my arms off him and turns away, sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me and his head in his hands. He’s so fucking beautiful, a god of a man, with every inch of his glorious body on display, all those muscles in all the right places. I do know where he got that idea. Because he looks how he does, and he has money, and a name, and every girl in this town wants him. Probably a hundred different girls are all over him at every party, thinking that’s what he wants. And now he thinks it’s what all girls want from him. He said as much on the lawn one night, that he couldn’t give me money, and if I didn’t want sex, he had nothing else to offer me. But he’s wrong.

  “Devlin,” I say, crawling over and wrapping my arms around him. “You have everything I could ever want. Just let me have it. I want to know you, inside and out. But I can’t do that if you won’t talk to me.”

  “Telling you about my fucked up family is somehow going to make you love me?”

  “I already love you,” I say, stroking his smooth, bronzed skin. “Please talk to me.”

  He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah,” he says. “My dad cheated on my mom. There. Are you happy?”

  “Are you?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “Now you think my dad’s an asshole, and you probably think that I’ll cheat on you.”

  “So, convince me otherwise,” I say, lifting his arm and pulling it around me. I snuggle into his side, resting my head against his shoulder.

  Devlin pauses. “No,” he says, shaking his head. “If you believe that, then you believe it. If you trust me, then you trust me.”

  “Then why don’t you trust me with your family secrets?”

  “I trust you,” he says, turning and laying me down on the bed. He lies beside me, so we’re facing each other. “And they’re not secrets. The whole town knows. If you really want to know, ask anybody.” He pauses, running the back of his knuckles up my arm, sending chills dancing through me. His gaze is intense and heated as he watches goosebumps rise under his touch.

  “I don’t want to ask anybody,” I whisper. “I want to ask you.”

  “Okay,” he says slowly. “My grandfather arranged my parents’ marriage, and they weren’t happy. If you want to know all the drama, you can ask. But I love that when you look at me, you don’t see the entire fucked up family saga of my name dragging around behind me. That’s not me, Crystal. This is me.”

  I understand his words so much it hurts. With him, I can just be myself, not the Dolce daughter, and I love that. I also love that he feels the same about me. His family history is just that—history. I want his future. I wrap my arms around his neck and press a kiss to his lips. “Okay,” I say. “Don’t tell me, then. It doesn’t matter. What matters is right here.”

  Devlin’s hand falls on my waist, pulling me to him. “Agreed,” he says.

  “Just tell me one thing,” I say, pulling back. “How come you never told me you had a sister?”

  “She’s not my sister.”

  “Your… Stepsister?”

  “And cousin,” he says with a grimace. “It is Arkansas, after all.”

  “You don’t like her,” I say, noticing the change in his tone since we started talking about Mabel.

  “It’s not that,” he says. “She hates all of us. I think the divorce fucked her up more than all of us—or in a different way, anyway.”

  “That bad?” I ask, thinking about the impending situation in my house. Knowing my parents, though, they’ll just run away from it, pretend it doesn’t exist, and stay married forever.

  Devlin shrugs. “A never-ending clusterfuck that took up most of my childhood. Mabel’s got Darling blood, but she doesn’t want to be a Darling. She hates what we do at school. She doesn’t play into any of it. I’d bet money that the day she graduates, she’ll ditch Faulkner and never look back.”

  “I thought she was Grampa Darling’s favorite.”

  Devlin scoffs. “His favorite to manipulate.”

  We’re quiet for a moment, and then I take my shot. I’ve wanted this since the day I walked into Faulkner and saw Dixie on her knees in front of Devlin. I didn’t imagine this was how it would end, but it’s time that it does.

  “I don’t like what you do at school, either,” I say quietly, keeping my gaze steady on his.

  Devlin draws back, a frown pulling together between his brows. “Is someone still messing with you?”

  “No,” I say. “Not since the day you got into it with Royal and defended me in front of the whole school.”

  “Good.” He laces his fingers through mine and kisses the back of my hand.

  I speak before he can change the subject. “Devlin, I want to be with you, but I won’t lie. I hate what you guys do at school. I hate the whole Doll and Dog thing. Why can’t everyone just be who they are? Like we are here.”

  “It’s not that easy,” he says, trying to roll away. I hold tighter, throwing a leg over his hip.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not my decision,” he says.

  “You made me the Dog,” I point out. “And you undid it. I think it’s that easy if you want it to be.”

  He’s quiet for a long moment. “Okay,”
he says at last, nodding. “I’ll make it happen. For you.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t give out those necklaces,” he says. “I gave one to Dolly when we were freshmen. That’s it, Crystal. It’s not my deal. I’ll talk to my cousins, but you’ll probably have to let us each keep one Doll.”

  I swallow hard, trying not to feel the blow of that one word—us. He wants to keep one Darling Doll, too.

  Which is fair, I remind myself. He can’t take Dolly’s necklace. She’s the original Darling Doll, the one the rest are named for. But even knowing he doesn’t love her that way, the fact that he wants to let her wear that label forever still stings.

  “Okay,” I say. “But no more Darling Dog.”

  “That was around before us,” he says. “If we didn’t pick one…”

  “Then the Midnight Swans would,” I fill in.

  He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to. When he avoids my eyes, it’s enough of an answer.

  “I know about your secret society,” I say, squeezing his hand. “I was in that basement. That’s where they meet, right?”

  “I don’t want to lie to you,” he says. “So don’t ask me about it. All I can tell you is that I didn’t know Royal was there, and I had no idea my family had anything to do with it. You found out when I did.”

  “Okay,” I say, nodding. “I believe you.” I run my hand up his, pressing our palms together. Devlin searches my eyes a moment as if he can’t believe I’d let him off that easy. But some things are not my business. I’m not going to force him to tell me what he doesn’t want to tell me. We’re our own people, with our own pasts, and that’s okay. I’d rather leave my shameful past where he never has to see it, and I respect him enough to afford him the same privacy.

  “Crystal…” he says slowly, then clears his throat before continuing. “I’m not telling you what to do, or how your dad should run your family, but maybe your brother needs more help than he’s getting. Like, mental help.”