by Angel Lawson
She pushes back down, taking me all the way in.
It’s that determination that’s always drawn me to her, and I know better than to fight her. Not that I want to, because the coil in my balls unwinds and rushes through me like a tidal wave. I gasp and let it go, hitching out a strained, “Ahhh,” as I pulse hard and hot between her slick lips. My hand grips a tight fistful of her sweater, twisting it up. “Jesus, V.”
When our eyes meet again, hers are satisfied. Mine are probably crossed.
My knees feel like jelly and there’s this deep buzzing sensation happening in the pit of my stomach that is the very opposite of unpleasant. There’s a reason I didn’t want to do this in a rush. The urge to touch her is overwhelming, but instead I’m tucking myself back into my pants, eyes tracking the way her chest rises and falls, nearly as rapid as mine. I pull her off the bed and tell her, “You didn’t have to do that.”
She shrugs and straightens her sweater, but I can see how flushed she is, the way her eyes keep dragging down my body. “I told you, I wanted to.”
There’s no such thing as an appropriate thank you in a situation like this. I mean, there totally fucking is, but there just isn’t time. I do the only thing I can; I kiss her on the mouth, slow and gentle, tasting myself.
“Now that we’ve confirmed you’re a thrill junkie,” I say, which elicits a smug grin, I fumble in my pocket for the stamp. “Let’s find this fucking thing and jet.”
She quickly agrees, eyes scanning the room for the portrait. “I think this may be our girl,” she says, nodding to a framed portrait that looks similar to one we passed in the hall. It’s quick work to take it down, flip it over, and add our two stamps to the back. After that, I grab her hand and lead her hastily out of the room.
It never even occurs to me to look back at the crystal devil.
25
Vandy
Reyn puts the Jeep into park and cuts the ignition. The parking lot is dark and deserted, nothing but the tall rise of buzzing sodium lights scattered here and there. Fleeing the Alumni house was easy. We hadn’t made a sound. But inside, I was a tangled mess of want, praying that Reyn wasn’t just going to drive me home.
I can’t believe that twenty minutes ago, I had Reynolds McAllister’s dick in my mouth.
I guess I always expected that giving a guy a blowjob would be tiresome and unpleasant. The reality was much different, though. Reyn pulsing hard between my lips, the way his hips kept hitching forward, like he couldn’t help it. The way his hand felt on the back of my neck, not pressing or insistent, but just there to make contact. The sounds he made—God—like something was torturing him. I did that. I made his knees tremble. I’m the reason his face collapsed into that agonized expression of ecstasy. I’m the one who tasted his release, the one he kissed so sweetly afterward with that wrung-out look on his face.
All of it coalesced like a lightning bolt striking right between my legs, and now I’m squirming, my core still throbbing in distressed wait.
Fortunately, he’d pulled the car into here.
Now we’re sitting in the dark, a sea of cracked concrete spread out all around us. He’d pulled his hood up to leave Preston House and it’s still like that, shielding his expression from me. I have no idea how to ask for what I want, because I can’t totally parse it myself. I just know if he doesn’t touch me soon, I might die.
I look over at him, but he’s already unbuckling his seatbelt and turning to me, pushing a sucking kiss to my mouth. I meet him in the middle, fingers tangling in his sweater, holding him close.
“Christ, you’re so fucking—” He sighs, hand coming down to cup me, right between my legs. He never finishes and I need to know what he was about to say, but the world seems to narrow down to the heel of his palm, rubbing rough and insistent against me. “Want me to…?” He trails off, fingering the button of my jeans.
My breath escapes in a loud gust. “Yes.”
He makes short work of it, pulling down my zipper and then stuffing his hand inside. I raise my hips into it, the feel of his fingers sliding through all my messy wetness. I take in his breath as our kiss stalls.
His eyes fall closed on a jaw-clenched groan. “Fuck, I love how wet you get.”
I’m too slack-mouthed and breathless to answer back, but when my eyes drop to his hand, I gasp a sharp, “Reyn.” His wrist is trapped beneath my panties, hand disappearing inside, and I can see the way he’s moving it beneath the denim, these tight little circles over my clit. The sight of it makes my brow screw up in pleasure.
“Don’t,” he says when my chest hitches with a bitten-off sound. “Let me hear you, baby.”
It’s easy to forget that we can be loud here, that no one is around to catch us. I brace my hand on the fogged-up window, leaving a smudged print, and finally moan the way I want to. It’s shrill and frantic, laced with an embarrassing amount of urgency.
“Yeah,” he breathes. “You like that? Does it feel good?”
Reyn, I’ve found, is a talker. It drives me crazy, the way his smooth, deep voice sounds in my ear when we’re doing stuff like this. It drives me crazier that I’m never coherent enough to meet it.
I nod dumbly, tongue wetting my lips. “Y-yes.”
I know he doesn’t have much space to work with here, and I briefly consider lifting my hips and pushing my pants away. But with a jerk of his hand, a slow slide, he somehow manages to sink one of his fingers into me, knuckle deep.
That already has me barreling toward the edge, legs trembling when I buck into it, moving my hips with his rhythm, chasing the sensation.
And then his lips come up to my ear, voice gruff. “Is it my turn to give you head now?”
I clamp my hand hard around his wrist when I come, pressing it close as I grind up against it, crying out. Just the thought of his face buried between my legs, those green eyes burning up at me, has me falling. ‘Earth-shattering’ is such a cliché, but that’s exactly how it feels, like the ground is quaking beneath me as I fall over the edge, thighs clenching. It’s almost better than the last time he did this, and that’s…
That’s saying a lot.
Reyn buries a warm chuckle into my throat. “Maybe next time.”
It takes me a ridiculously long time to shudder through the aftershocks, lungs sucking in these frenetic little gasps. I can’t seem to let his wrist go. “Oh my god, you’re so good at that.” I’m not sure where Reyn got the nuclear launch codes to my vagina, but here we are.
“Yeah?” he asks, his palm giving me another one of those crazy-making grinds.
I whimper in response, over-sensitive, but somehow unwilling to let him go. “So good,” I emphasize.
It’s difficult to let his hand slide out of my pants, but the way he licks soft and slow into my mouth soothes the loss.
He sighs when he pulls away, resting his forehead on mine. “I was trying really hard not to be that guy.”
I frown. “What guy?”
“The guy who fingers you in the Kmart parking lot.”
I reach up to touch his jaw, fingers rasping on the day-old stubble there. “Better than Martha Langford’s bedroom.” We share a quiet laugh, and I feel boneless and fizzy by the time he pulls away.
“What can I say?” He turns the keys in the ignition, fixing me with a deadpan smile. “I’m a romantic.”
“You look like hell.”
“Thanks,” I grouch, resting my face on the art table. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
As I say it, there’s part of me that wants Sydney to ask why, to question why I didn’t get any sleep, to declare I look different, more mature, less…virginal. And then I can tell her that I got fingerbanged. Twice. By easily the hottest, most off-limits guy in school. And then I can finally tell someone about this thing that keeps growing in my chest, every time I see him. It’s heavy and hungry, but it’s also full of excitement and delight. I think I know the name for it, even if I’m too cowardly to say so.
But she doesn
’t ask.
In fact, what I notice the most about Sydney these days is that she never asks me about myself, at all. She never wonders what I’m doing or what’s going on in my life. I realize now that she never did. It took me having something to tell to really recognize that our friendship has always been about her social life—the gossip that swirls around her, the boys that like her, or wish she would like them back.
My relationship with Sydney is completely one-sided, and now that I have more going on in my life—real stuff, with an actual, albeit secret, boyfriend—the reality of it sinks heavily in the pit of my stomach.
Sometimes I wonder if she even really likes me, or if this has always been about the spectacle of it all, nothing more.
“I texted you at midnight,” she says, suddenly, pulling out her sketch pad. We start each day with a pen and ink sketch of an object on the front table. Today it’s a stuffed owl. “If you were awake, why didn’t you answer?”
I blink at her. “I uh—well, I had my phone turned off.” I pick out a good pen, averting my eyes. “You know they suggest turning off all screens when you’re having a problem sleeping? The light is bad for you.”
“Mmhmm.” She starts drawing the owl at the beak. Syd isn’t a bad artist—she’s just kind of sloppy and rushed. Much like she is with everything in her life. “That’s weird, though.”
“What’s weird?”
“That your phone was off. Because I was scrolling though the location feature of ChattySnap and your phone was…well, here.”
“Here?” I’m unsure if it’s an accusation or a question or what. Maybe Syd has been paying more attention than I realized.
She turns to look at me. “Yeah, here. And interestingly, it wasn’t the only phone showing up on campus. Emory. Aubrey. Caroline…” She watches me intently. “Even Reyn.”
“That’s, uh, really weird.” Screw ChattySnap and its stupid tracking features! “Because there’s no way I’d be on campus in the middle of the night.”
“That’s what I thought. Especially with Reyn—who, you know, is not allowed to be near you.” This isn’t actually true—not anymore—but I don’t bother to correct her. She adds an eye and some details. “But then I thought about it some more, and you’ve been distant lately. And not in that ‘too much Oxy’ kind of way, either.”
“Shhhhh!” I glare at her before making sure no one overheard. Our table is to the side of the room, but Syd’s voice has a way of carrying. “What the hell, Syd?”
She puts down her pen, turning to me, and through the firmness in her eyes, I can tell there’s also some hurt. “No, Vandy, what the hell is going on with you? You’ve been ditching me at lunch, blowing me off for getting our nails done, and something is obviously up. I’m not stupid. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed your phone isn’t where you say it is.”
I gape at her. “Are you seriously stalking me now?”
“No. I’m trying to figure why my best friend is keeping secrets from me.”
“I’m not.”
She laughs and rolls her eyes, “Yeah, okay. Sure.”
I push past the panic I’m feeling. I need a way out of this. She can’t know about the Devils or Reyn or any of it. “I’m just…having my own life for once. I’m not sitting at home alone and feeling sorry for myself. I’m…” I glance around the room, buying time. “I’m working on something for the newspaper.”
Her eyebrow raises. “Your article?”
“Yeah,” I admit, my pulse thrumming. “I got a lead on something and I’ve been following up on it.”
She leans forward, demeanor shifting from stiff to eager. Syd can’t resist juicy gossip. “What is it? What did you find out?”
I shake my head. “I can’t say. Not yet. No one knows.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I can see the gears turning. Her eyes widen. “Does it have something to do with Reyn? Is he in trouble again? Or your brother? I love Emory, but he’s got a history of not making the best decisions.” She bites her bottom lip, eyes pensive. “You know, I had a feeling something was up. Things have been weird lately. Afton’s more aloof than ever. Suddenly Tyson’s hanging around all those former Devils…”
I freeze, panic blooming even more fiercely. Shit. Sydney is a nosy, selfish bitch, but she’s right. She’s not dumb. “Look, I can’t say, Syd, but hopefully one day I’ll be able to reveal it—the right way—in a big flashy exposé in the school paper.”
“Okay,” she says slowly, looking down at her sketch. “I wasn’t trying to stalk you, I was just...”
I shrug. “No, I get it. You’re used to me sitting at home all the time doing nothing. It’s a change.” She probably doesn’t miss the bitterness in my voice.
She sighs. “It just sucks that you’re never around anymore. I miss you, you know?” The words sound so sincere that, for a moment, I feel guilty. She’s right, we used to be joined at the hip. And it’s not like I don’t think about her, too. Having all of this stuff, these feelings and new experiences bottled up inside me and not being able to tell her is hard. For a moment, I really miss her.
She turns to me, eyes sparking in delight. “I can be your partner in crime. You and me, hitting the streets, digging up the dirt. Come on, it’ll be awesome!”
I shake my head sadly. “This is something I need to do on my own, you know? It’s the only way to prove to Mr. Lee and everyone else that I have it in me.”
She rolls her eyes. “But like, what if you don’t? You need someone to do the physical stuff, and hey. Cheerleader here. I’m totally agile, like a cat.”
And all my guilt is gone.
Just like that.
“I can handle it,” I respond, smile so tight that my own face feels brittle.
There’s truth to that statement. Truth to all of it, really. And I feel a little better about adding more deceit to the piles I’ve been building lately. Even if I wanted to let Sydney in on this I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, and I don’t. Ironically, the idea of exposing the Devils has started to lose some of its appeal. I’m working on the article less and less, because among all the lies and deceit are a couple hard-earned truths.
One of them is that I’m more interested in being part of the group than taking them down.
With my parents' approval, Reyn is now allowed to sit with us at lunch. For the past few days, I haven’t had to worry about being seen with him. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that it’s harder and harder to pretend everything is normal between us. That we’re just part of the same social circle. That he’s just my brother’s best friend. That we don’t kiss when backs are turned, or steal little grazing glances beneath the lunch table, or as we leave our driveways, or as we pass in the halls.
And it’s getting downright impossible to ignore that I’m falling in love with him.
We sit across from one another in the bunker, along with the other Devils and Playthings. It’s only been a few days since breaking and entering into the Preston House, but Emory holds another card in his hand, the fifth rite.
We’re almost done.
“The next rite is one the Devils managed to maintain through the years, even if it was a little bastardized.” His eyebrows raise. “A test. Seven minutes in Hell—the Stairway to Hell, that is. Like the tattoos, it’s time to get marked. Only this time, by someone in the group.”
“Wait,” Afton says. “I’ve already been marked. Freshman year. Well, and junior year. Does that count?”
Elana nods next to her.
“No dice,” Emory says, shrugging. “You have to be marked by a current member or pledge, but for those of you in a committed relationship, there’s some leeway. The official Devil’s mark is under the ear.” Right, the famous hickey. Many girls have sported them proudly over the years. Last year, Sydney herself had supposedly scored herself one, although I sometimes suspect it wasn’t made by a Devil at all. “Other than that, it’s up to you and your partner how far you, uh, want to take it.”
It’s awkward listening to my brother vaguely talk about blow jobs, especially when he thinks I have no experience with them. I have no doubt Emory and Aubrey have already gone there, if not further. Emory doesn’t take stuff slow. And Campbell? She built her entire reputation around being the blow job queen, just like Hamilton Bates had his little test. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised this is the one rite that managed to stand the passage of time and they managed to work it in the guys’ favor.
Perverts.
“How are partners going to be established?” Caroline asks, eyes darting around the group.
“Playthings choose their Devils.” The fact that his eyes seem to jump over me gives me an uneasy feeling. “You’ll write down the name of the Devil you want to go to the Stairway with, and turn it in. Since there could be overlap, I may have to make some executive decisions.” He smirks at Aubrey.
Slips of paper are passed around, followed by stubby pencils. My heart pounds in my ears and I stare at my hands. You’d think that with the decision in my hands, it would be a no-brainer. Reyn, obviously. But if I write his name down, if I choose him, Emory will know. Everyone will know. Why would I pick the guy who’d done irreparable damage to me as my partner in this? But my brother had tossed us together over and over again, so could he really be surprised?
“Okay, Devils, let’s give the girls a few minutes to make their decisions. You’ll be notified of your meet-up time and partner by our usual methods of communication.”
“Wait, wait. I think I need to campaign a little here,” Sebastian says, a wolfish grin on his lips. “For the record, my favorite song is The Devil Went Down on Georgia.” He gives Georgia a lewd wink.
All eyes shift to Georgia, and I think we’re all expecting her to blush or brush him off. Sebastian flirts with her and Caroline pretty indiscriminately, and it’s obvious that it flusters them—which I suspect is part of the draw. But to everyone’s surprise, Georgia simply smiles back and openly writes “Bass” on her slip. Sebastian is giving her a look full of raised eyebrows when she drops it into the box.