Dropping In (Snow-Crossed Lovers Book 1)

by Carrie Quest

  I shrug. “Follow the booze.”

  Brody shoots me a look of pure mischief. “Maybe I’ll go find him. Tell him it will look great on the tape he sends his potential sponsors.”

  “No fucking way.” The laughter in Ben’s voice is gone. “That guy is tanked. We are not getting him up on the roof. I’ve spent enough time in hospitals lately.”

  He’s no longer holding his bottle loosely between his knees, his legs cocked open so he can press up against me. Now he’s clenching the bottle so hard I’m afraid he’s going to shatter the glass and he’s moved, ready to jump up and go. I reach out to take the bottle and he looks down at me, his mouth grim, a muscle working in his jaw as he grinds his teeth together.

  “You shouldn’t be up here,” he says. “It isn’t safe.”

  “I’m okay,” I say quietly. I rub my fingers lightly over his knuckles. “I feel safe with you.”

  There isn’t a lot of light up here, but I can see the change perfectly. The laughter and the vulnerability in his eyes vanish in a single blink and he shuts down.

  “I’m the last person you should feel safe with,” he says. Then he ducks back through the window and disappears.

  14

  Ben

  I stop in Tom’s room to grab a few more beers and then shove my way through the crowd of people in the hallway. A few people call out to me or wave, but none of them try to stop me. Not surprising considering I probably look like I’m on my way to fucking kill someone. I’m so tense that I can tell I’m going to be sore tomorrow, which pisses me off even more.

  I used to get sore after a full day of training, now I’m just the shithead who got his best friend hurt, fucked up his own knee in the most idiotic way possible, and moves like a creaky old man in the morning because my muscles ache from holding everything in. From keeping a lid on all of it, because there’s no way I can let it out. That shit’s not pretty.

  Then I’m out the door and kicking the gate open to the tiny backyard. There’s a sign on the gate telling people not to come in, but I know that’s because Tom is fed up with people using it as a toilet during parties. There’s not space back here for anything except a couple beat-up lawn chairs and a grill, but at least there’s nobody in my face. I need quiet.

  I need to think.

  I drop down into one of the chairs and crack open another beer, trying to push Natalie out of my mind. I crossed the line tonight. Hell, I crossed all the lines. I should never have touched her, but the minute I saw her standing next to Eli, I was lost. The way he was leering at her and leaning in, trying to get close, made my heart race because there was no way in hell she was supposed to be with that loser.

  She was supposed to be with me.

  So, I touched her, and it felt so good I couldn’t stop. And then I started bargaining with myself like a goddamned addict. It’s just for the summer. I gave up snowboarding, so I deserve this. It won’t get in the way of helping Adam. I can control it.

  Right.

  But the second she got near me, I lost the ability to think. She smelled so good, and her skin was so soft, and those lips…the way they’d closed around my thumb in the bar…the way her tongue darted out and tasted my skin…the feeling of her lips skimming my face in Tom’s room… Two more seconds of that and I would have locked the door and the window, thrown her on the bed, and stayed buried in her all night. Tom and Brody could’ve slept on the roof.

  Fuck. I have to stop. If Tom doesn’t want people pissing out here, then he certainly wouldn’t be happy about me jacking off in the bushes.

  I take a few deep breaths and another swig of beer. This moment is a crossroads, and I need to think—right now, when she isn’t right in front of me, distracting me with those dark eyes and that wicked grin.

  Low voices float down from the roof and I glance up. Nobody’s visible, but the steep slope where we did our somersaults juts out, a deeper black against the night sky. I’d gone first, and I hadn’t even been scared. Sixteen, fresh out of quitting school and invincible, I’d had so much faith in my body that falling had never even entered my mind.

  It’s when you start thinking about falling that it happens. I learned that early on. If you picture yourself eating shit, your brain focuses on how not to fail instead of how to succeed. The guys who can control their thoughts, keep their attention on what success looks like, those are the guys that win.

  It’s all about control, and I’d been the master. What I ate, what I drank, when I fucked, where I rode, making sure my equipment was in perfect shape…I’d controlled all of it. Every aspect of my life. Until Adam’s head hit that pipe and all of a sudden, I no longer controlled anything.

  Since then, I’ve been drifting, and every time I try to stop, to make a plan, I fail. I wasn’t going to keep Thor, but then I did. I was going to spend every waking moment with Adam at the hospital, but instead I’m laughing at weirdos in the dog park and dragging Brody out to follow Natalie to bars. I was going to stop training completely and ride out my knee story, but this morning I dug out my running shoes and hit the trails.

  Most of all, I was going to keep Nat in the friend-of-sister zone, but instead I’m leaving her jokey presents and feeling her up in bars and bedrooms. I’m holding her hand. I’m so hard every time I think of her that my dick is suffering from chronic erection syndrome.

  Basically, my control is shot to hell. The question now is whether I’m going to accept its loss or try to claw it back.

  This is pretty deep shit to be thinking about when I’m alone in the dark, half-buzzed and hiding out like a fucking angry hermit, but it’s been coming to a head for a while and I need to make a decision. Maybe then I’ll be able to sleep without nightmares.

  A laugh drifts down from the roof. Natalie’s laugh. It’s light and warm, and I don’t want to be hearing it from down here. I want it in my ear, preferably when I’m lying on top of her, pressing her into a mattress and kissing my way down her neck.

  Her laugh, her eyes, drinking with my friends without worrying about fucking up a competition, Thor’s goofy gait when he races ahead of me on the trails, the chance to see my sister: I want more of all of them. And it’s scary as hell. I never let myself picture failure when it came to my career, but it’s all too easy now to close my eyes and visualize every single little way I could fail at making a life. Or, worst of all, fail Adam again by letting my own shit get in the way of helping him.

  I look up again, hoping to see Nat, but only the steep line of the roof is visible. That cocky sixteen-year-old would want to kick my ass if he could see me now, alone in the dark and scared shitless to take any kind of risk. He’d be disgusted.

  That thought is enough to get me up. I retrace my steps back to Tom’s room, a little slower this time but still not stopping to talk. There’s only one person I want to talk to, and when I find her climbing in through the window, I hold out my hand.

  “Ready to head home?”

  She nods and takes my hand, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but I’m done hiding.

  When we hit the house, Eli drops his pants, throws his stupid hipster glasses onto the floor and crawls onto the sofa. Then he lets rip a fart so loud it sends Chuckles hissing up the stairs and puts Thor into maximum crazy overdrive. He leaps over the coffee table and tries to bite the blanket—my fucking blanket—that Eli’s burrowing under, but I catch the mutt and boot him out the back door.

  “Are you going to try and sleep in Piper’s room?” Nat’s sitting on the stairs, biting her lip. She tosses Eli a look of disgust. “I’m really sorry he’s kicking you out of your bed. If I’d known what Monique had in mind…” She trails off and shrugs.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. Like it’s her fault the prof basically blackmailed her. Besides, what Monique actually had in mind was Eli burrowing under Natalie’s blankets. Or, worse, burrowing into Natalie. The thought of that happening makes me want to thump the guy in his smug, sleepy face.

  “I could try a
nd sleep in Piper’s room,” she says. “Sometimes Chuckles doesn’t attack me. Much. If he’s in a good mood.”

  We both turn and look to the top of the stairs, where Chuckles crouches, his tail twitching. He’s growling and his eyes glow green in the dim light.

  “I think it’s safe to say he’s not in a good mood tonight,” I say. “I’ll figure something else out.”

  Chuckles hisses at me and flounces into the shadows, straight toward Piper’s queen bed. Little fucker.

  Eli starts snoring like a goddamn chainsaw and Nat stands up.

  “Well,” she says. “It’s late, so, I guess I’ll head up.”

  She looks straight at me, daring me to stop her, maybe, or daring me to follow. She’s waiting on me to make the move, and I don’t blame her, not after I’ve been sending her mixed signals all night, all over her one second, then pushing her away. She’s made it pretty clear where she stands. Now it’s my turn.

  But I’m stuck. Paralyzed at the bottom of the stairs. All of a sudden, I’m hyperaware of all the noises around me: Eli’s grunts and snores, Thor whining at the back door, the shouts of drunk people walking home down our street.

  The thumping of my own heart.

  Adrenaline kicks in, rushing through me the way it does when I’m about to drop into the half-pipe. It’s a familiar cocktail of feelings: fear, excitement, the thrill of testing myself and finding out if I’ve got what it takes.

  I’ve never felt this way with a girl before. If it were anyone but Nat, I’d smile, take her hand, and lead her up the stairs to her bed. I’ve never hesitated like this. Hell, a couple weeks ago I started jerking off in front of her and invited her to fuck me in the shower.

  But it’s different now, because I really like her. I have no idea what to do with that.

  Her eyes wander over my lips, and she sighs then shoots me a sad little smile. “Good night, Ben.”

  She shrugs off my hoody and tosses it down to me. My hand shoots out automatically to catch it, and I fight the urge to bury my face in it and inhale her scent like a creeper. She turns to walk up the stairs, and my eyes head straight for her ass, remembering those little shorts she wore the first time I saw her and the way she wiggled up the dorm stairs.

  And then it hits me. I’ve wanted her since then, and not only because of her ass. Because of the way she laughed with Piper, and the Tolkien books I saw her unpack and stack on her shitty dorm desk. I wanted her, but I was so good at denying myself anything that didn’t have to do with winning that I barely even noticed.

  I’m sure as fuck noticing now, though.

  “Wait.” My voice comes out hoarse, like I’ve forgotten how to speak.

  She stops and looks back.

  “Does your door have a lock?”

  “It’s broken,” she says. “My landlord’s kind of a dick.”

  I laugh, and the adrenaline running through me turns to something else. I feel light, almost giddy, like weight and gravity no longer apply. I’m halfway sure I could float up these stairs if I want to. Put me in the half-pipe and fuck the triple cork, I’d land a sextuple with no effort at all. The feeling’s unfamiliar and it takes my brain a few seconds to catch up.

  It’s joy.

  “Broken, huh? Want me to take a look?”

  She looks at me carefully, studying my face, and she’s so damn pretty that I’m already walking up the stairs before she even answers.

  “Yeah,” she says. “That’d be good.”

  I make a show of inspecting Nat’s lock even though we both know it’s bullshit. The last owner put in a flimsy little slide bolt, but it’s bent to shit and Chuckles could break it open.

  “Your landlord really is a dick,” I say. “He should’ve done this a while ago.” He should’ve done a lot of things.

  Her room’s not huge, most of it’s taken up by a big double bed with a carved wooden headboard. That thing must’ve been a bitch to haul up the stairs. She’s also got a bookcase, which is crammed full and has a flat screen TV balanced precariously on top, and a desk so covered in papers that her laptop has practically disappeared. She’s perched on her desk chair, watching me.

  Part of me (a very specific part) wants to grab her and walk her over to the bed, but that doesn’t seem right. Because again, this is different than it’s been with any other girl. I want more than just her body. I want it all.

  “Is that where you write?”

  She glances back at the mess on the desk and blushes a little. “Sometimes. Mostly I go out to do the actual writing because it’s easy to get distracted here. This is where I do the planning, though.”

  I take a step closer and she busies herself gathering papers, making sure I don’t see anything. She’s still red, and her shoulders are hunched up. Maybe talking about her writing makes her tense, which makes sense. She’s basically putting a huge part of herself onto paper and then inviting the world to take a wander around her brain. It would make anyone feel a little vulnerable.

  Not that Nat’s got anything to worry about. Adam fucking loved her story today. The zombie detective’s been kicked to the curb, and he made me promise to hit Nat up for more before I come see him again.

  She shoves the papers into a folder, refusing to meet my eyes, and I realize (not for the first time) that I’m a total ass.

  “I should’ve told you before,” I say. “Adam loved your story.”

  She looks up, and the relief on her face is so great that I want to give myself another black eye for not saying something as soon as I saw her at the bar.

  “He did?” Her shoulders relax and she legit beams. That smile could power entire cities. “Really?”

  “Totally,” I say. “And so did I. You better have more for me because if I show up without the next chapter I’m pretty sure he’s going to get out of bed and kick my ass, and there’s no fighting allowed in the hospital.”

  “I’ll print it out for you tomorrow,” she says. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “It’s really good. What first gave you the idea?” I’m not just shooting the shit until she wants to get naked, either. I really want to know how her brain works. How she looks at the world and takes everything in and manages to create an entire alternate universe with the raw material she finds.

  We talk for long enough that I get tired of standing and sit down on the edge of the bed. She tells me more about the characters and the world, and if I didn’t want to kiss her so bad, I’d probably ask her if I could read the next part now. It sounds that cool.

  “What’s the hardest part for you?”

  She answers fast. “Descriptions.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Because they don’t really move the plot along, you know? So, it feels almost like wasting time to write them down, and I’m not really a visual thinker, so it takes forever. Like, I can close my eyes and picture a warrior in a suit of armor, but actually describing it?” She shakes her head. “Two paragraphs can take me an entire day.”

  She snaps her fingers and grabs a pen. “That reminds me. I need to watch Two Towers again, actually. The Helm’s Deep scene. I want to check out the elves’ outfits for inspiration.”

  “We could watch it now.”

  “Now?”

  I shrug. “If you want.” It’s not exactly my first choice when it comes to horizontal activities, but at least it gets us on the bed together. Not like we need a reason, but it doesn’t feel right to grab her and start sucking face. I want to give her more than that. I can wait for the right time, and if it’s not tonight then so be it.

  “Okay,” she says. “I’ll change.”

  “Cool.” I get up. “I’ve got to let Thor in anyway. Put him downstairs.”

  “Doesn’t he like to sleep near you?”

  I swallow. “Yeah, but—”

  “Bring him up here,” she says firmly.

  I grin and nod. “Yes, ma’am.”

  When I get back, she’s tucked under the covers on the side of the bed near th
e wall. Her face is a little flushed and the hair around her temples is damp. She’s wearing a tank top and my heart kicks when I see the smooth skin of her bare shoulders.

  “Come on,” she says, flipping up the edge of the comforter. “Get in.”

  I hit the lights and throw Thor’s pillow down on the floor. He rolls with the new situation like a champ and drops down. It feels a little weird to be doing this with him in the room, but I can’t leave him out in the hallway to be Chuckles bait.

  I drop my jeans, hoping the blue light from the TV isn’t bright enough for her to see the growing bulge in my briefs. Not that she hasn’t seen it before.

  I slide in next to her and lie back against the pillows. The citrus scent of her shampoo lingers on them and I suppress a little groan. I’m going to be hard every time I drink orange juice for years if this keeps up.

  As soon as I settle in, the bedframe lets out an almighty creak and the mattress sinks in enough that we both roll toward the middle. The noise wakes Thor up and he barks, then comes running over to investigate.

  “Sorry,” I say as her face hits my shoulder.

  She laughs, and I feel the warm air of her breath through my shirt.

  “I should’ve warned you,” she says. “It’s an old bed.” She shifts around, wiggling a bit closer to me, and the smooth skin of her legs hits my calves. Fuck. I’m going to have to start reciting X Games medal winners from 1997 in a second or come in my pants.

  Thor loses interest when he sees the bed isn’t going to eat us. He wanders back to his pillow, and I shift onto my side, trying not to crush her, wincing when the frame creaks like a son of a bitch.

  “This isn’t a bed,” I say, staring down at her. “It’s a trap.”

  She smiles, and I reach out to trace the outline of her lips. “I actually didn’t know that would happen,” she says. “I’ve never let anyone else sleep in here with me. You’re the first.”

  I trail my fingers down her neck and over her shoulders, mapping out all the places my tongue is going to be in about ten seconds. She shivers and smiles up at me, her eyes hot and dark. I keep going until I reach her hand, then I grab the remote and drop it gently onto the floor.