by Elle Kennedy
“Stop.” Taylor pulls her mouth from mine and I freeze. Shit. Was I being too rough? It’s been a while since I screwed around with a virgin.
“Am I hurting you?” I ask immediately.
“No, it feels amazing.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I just… I think I want to go down on you.”
“You think?” I clamp my teeth down on my lip to stop a laugh. That’s not usually how these conversations start. I mean, honestly, it usually isn’t much of a conversation at all.
She nods, appearing to grow more confident as the idea tumbles around her mind. She licks her lips, and my cock damn near tunnels through my jeans. “Yeah. I want to.”
“You don’t have to, you know.” I lift an eyebrow. “I don’t believe in transactional sex.”
“No, I know.” Taylor smiles at me, and there’s a conspiratorial glint in her eye. A girl about to set out on an adventure. It’s sort of cute, in a weird way. My babe’s first dick.
“All right, then.” I roll over onto my back and fold my arms behind my bed. “Make a man outta me, Taylor Marsh.”
Laughing softly, she crawls down my body and unbuttons my jeans, tugs them down with my boxers. I’ve been hard since she walked into my bedroom an hour ago, and my cock springs up to say hello.
Taylor bites her bottom lip as she takes me in her hand and carefully strokes my shaft. She says something, but I’m not listening because all my concentration is dedicated to not blowing my load. I’ve yanked it to this moment so many times since we met—getting her mouth on my cock, her Caribbean-blue eyes staring up at me while she sucks me off.
“Am I hurting you?” she mimics, giving me another gentle stroke. Teasing me. “Because you look like you’re in pain.”
“I’m in agony,” I mumble. “Don’t think I can survive this.”
“Good. Just don’t come in my hair,” she orders, and my answering laughter dies in my throat when she licks up the length of my dick.
I’m done for when she takes the head fully in between her pouty lips, her tongue working me over. I thread my fingers into her hair, encouraging her to go slower. She complies, the hot suction of her lips swallowing me up one millimeter at a time. By the time I’m buried nearly to the back of her throat, I’m sweating.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I use my free hand to swipe at the beads of sweat dotting my forehead. My breathing becomes labored when Taylor utilizes the same torturous pace to drag her mouth off my cock. Her tongue sweeps over the tip in a slow, seductive swirl, and I almost lose control right then and there.
Why did I think slow would be a better idea? Slow, fast, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to last either way. I don’t know where she picked this up, but Taylor’s giving me the best head I’ve ever gotten.
“Fuck, babe, I’m close,” I grind through my teeth.
Lips glistening with moisture, Taylor releases me with a wet noise and sits up, still stroking my cock. Groaning, I grab the T-shirt hanging off my headboard and take my dick from her just as my entire body tightens and shudders. I come into the shirt, while Taylor sweetly kisses my chest, my neck, until I strain for her lips. Our tongues meet, and I kiss her hungrily as the aftershocks of release tremble through my body.
“Was that okay?” She breaks the kiss, smiling shyly. How this girl turns on a dime spins my head. From innocent virgin to dick whisperer and back again.
I let out a happy sigh. “Better than okay.” Then it dawns on me. “But I didn’t get you off. I can still—”
“I’m good.” Taylor snuggles up beside me, resting her head on my chest. Her fingers lazily travel across my stomach. “That was fun.”
“I’ll get you twice next time,” I say, and kiss her forehead while I toss the shirt into my hamper across the room.
Hooking up with Taylor has made foreplay fun again. Before this, either a chick was so anxious to get on my dick I’d barely get her name, or I was so amped to get her naked we wouldn’t even kiss. With Taylor, I don’t want to miss anything. I want to learn every inch of her body, give her every experience. I’m her first, and I want to make damn sure I do it right.
My phone vibrates on the nightstand beside Taylor. “Mind grabbing that?” I ask.
She hands it to me. An unknown number lights up onscreen, triggering a frown.
“Yeah?” I answer, continuing to run my hand through the length of Taylor’s hair.
“’Sup, brother.”
Every muscle in my body tenses up. Kai. That motherfucker. “How’d you get this number?” I ask coldly.
Taylor looks up at me with questioning eyes.
“Don’t be mad, bro. I talked it out of one of your boys at the club in Buffalo.” Bucky, I bet. That kid would give up his bank PIN if you asked nicely. “Bunch of fucking lightweights, those jocks.”
“Well, lose it. I told you before—”
“Easy, brother. I come in peace. Listen, I’m gonna be in Boston this weekend. Let’s meet up, talk it out. It’d be good for both of us.”
Yeah, right. With Kai, there’s only ever what’s good for him.
“Not interested.” I end the call and toss my phone to the floor. Damn it.
“Was it that guy again?” Looking concerned, Taylor unwraps herself from my side and sits up, adjusting her shirt and zipping up her jeans. “Kai?”
“It’s fine. Forget about it.” I say the words to her, but I’m really talking to myself. Ever since Kai reappeared that night after the tournament, I haven’t been able to shake the sense of dread knotting in my stomach.
“Conor. I know you’re holding something back.” When Taylor turns her gaze on me—sincere, vulnerable—I feel like such an asshole. “And if you’re not ready to tell me, or you don’t trust me with the information, that’s fine. But don’t act like it isn’t there.”
Fuck me.
“I’m sorry.” I lick my suddenly dry lips. If Taylor’s going to finally realize she’s too good for my dumb ass, it might as well be sooner rather than later. “I didn’t want to say anything because I like the person you think I am.”
A groove digs into her forehead. “What does that mean?”
It means that if Taylor knew what was good for her, she’d block my number.
“It means if you’d known me back then, you’d have been smart to run the other way.”
“I doubt that’s true,” she says, and it absolutely guts me. This girl has so much misplaced faith in me. “Just tell me. I’m sure it’s worse in my head.”
Fuck it.
“I’ve spent the last couple years trying to get away from Kai because I used to be him,” I admit. “I was in it up to my neck with him since we were kids. Letting him talk me into dumb shit, breaking into abandoned buildings, tagging, some shoplifting.” Fighting, smashing out car windows. “By high school Kai started getting into dealing. Just pot, mostly. It’s what people did, you know? Like, it didn’t feel wrong at the time. Sometime during sophomore year of high school, though, his older brother got locked up for chopping cars, and after Tommy went away, it seemed like Kai started speeding down the same path. Hanging out with some of his brother’s friends, missing weeks of school.”
I can’t read Taylor’s expression as I tell her all of this. And I’m still unable to bring myself to admit the worst of it, because I’m ashamed, embarrassed of what I was. Knowing it’s all still in me, under the surface. The stain that’s soaked through the carpet.
“Then my mom married Max and we moved out of the neighborhood. They sent me to a private school.” I shrug. “That got me away from Kai, for the most part. If it weren’t for that, I probably would’ve been locked up by now. Gotten into the same shit Kai started in on.”
Taylor stares at me for a long time. Silent, pensive. I don’t know I’m holding my breath until she releases hers.
“That’s it?”
No.
“Yes,” I say out loud. “I mean, yeah, basically.”
/>
Christ, I’m an asshole. A coward.
“Everyone comes from somewhere, Conor. We’ve all screwed up, made mistakes.” Her tone is soft, but ringing with conviction. “I don’t care who you were before. Only who you choose to be now.”
I chuckle darkly. “That’s easy for you to say, though. You’re from Cambridge.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You can’t understand what it’s like to be dirt poor one day and dropped off at a private school in loafers and a tie the next. I hated all those pretentious fucks driving goddamn Beamers and carrying Louis Vuitton backpacks. Every day I’d get dirty looks, hassled in the halls, and I’d be thinking to myself, man, it’d be so easy to jack their car and go joyriding, or loot all their rich kid toys they just left sitting in their gym lockers. It’s why I went to a state college in California, because I was tired of not belonging.” I shake my head wryly. “Then I end up here with all these East Coast old money types, and it’s the same shit. They smell poverty every time I walk into a room.”
“That’s not true,” she insists with a bit more bite in her voice. “No one who cares about you gives a damn if you grew up rich or not. Anyone who does isn’t your friend anyway, so fuck ’em. You belong here just as much as anybody.”
I wish I could believe that. Maybe for a little while I did believe it. But Kai creeping back into my life has reminded me, whether I like it or not, who I really am.
21
Taylor
Although it’s mid-April already, the weather hasn’t decided which season it wants to be. Leaving class for the day, it still feels like winter; everyone wrapped up in wool coats and gloves, clutching coffee cups and breathing out big plumes of white. But thanks to the clear blue sky and golden sunlight cutting through the bare branches of oak trees to warm the brown patches of grass across the Briar lawns, it’s also starting to feel a bit like spring. Which means there’s only about a month left in the semester.
Until now, that day has felt so far off. But with the Spring Gala coming up, evaluation for my co-op due, and finals to prepare for, the end of the school year is charging at me like a stampede. I suppose it all feels like a lot because the better part of my attention lately has been focused elsewhere. Namely, Conor Edwards.
We still haven’t labeled our relationship in explicit terms. I’m fine with that, though. Great, even. There’s far less pressure to meet expectations, or have them crushed, when things are kept loosely defined.
That said, I am starting to wonder where Conor sees this going. He invited me to California over the summer, but was he serious about that? And did he mean as friends, friends with benefits, or something else? Not that I’d hold it against him if he saw the end of the semester as the conclusion of our exclusive entanglement. I just wish there were a painless, non-awkward way of asking if he expects us to ride out the summer on the status quo.
Then again, I might not want to hear the answer.
On my way to the library, I get a call from my mother. It’s been a while since we spoke, so I’m happy to hear from her. “Hey there,” I answer.
“Hi, honey. Do you have a minute?”
“Yep, just got out of class. What’s up?” I take a seat on one of the wrought-iron benches lining the cobblestone path.
“I’m going to be in town Friday evening. Are you free?”
“For you, of course I am. The Thai place just reopened if—”
“Actually,” she says, and I don’t miss the note of wariness in her voice, “I already have dinner plans. I was hoping you’d join us.”
“Oh?” Mom is being unusually coy about something as benign as dinner, which gets my mind racing. “Define us.”
“I have a date, to be specific.”
“A date. With someone in Hastings?” What happened to being too busy to date?
“I’d like you to meet him.”
Meet him?
Is she serious? Is this serious? My mother’s always been more driven by her career and scientific pursuits than romantic relationships. Men rarely hold her interest long enough to develop an important role in her life.
“How did you meet him?” I demand.
A pause. “You sound upset.”
“I’m confused,” I tell her. “When did you have time to meet someone in Hastings? And why is this the first time I’m hearing of him?” It’s been years since Mom brought anyone around and introduced them to me; she doesn’t bother until she feels the relationship is serious. The last time she visited, she wasn’t seeing anyone—which means this is a very new, very fast development.
“After we met for lunch last month, I stopped in to visit a colleague at Briar and he introduced us.”
“So this guy’s, what, like your boyfriend now?”
She gives an awkward laugh. “Feels like such a juvenile term for someone my age, but yes, I suppose he is.”
Jesus, woman. I take my eyes off her for five minutes and she’s gone and shacked up with some townie. Or worse, a professor. What if he’s one of my professors? Eww. That feels weirdly incestuous.
“What’s his name?”
“Chad.”
I suppose it was ridiculous to expect her to call him Professor Somethingorother. Doctor Whoeverthefuck. But Christ in a basket I never, ever envisioned Iris Marsh knocking boots with a Chad of all people. Somehow, I doubt he stacks up against a woman of my mother’s singular intellect.
“I’m still sensing some hostility,” she says, her tone cautious.
Yeah, I guess I am a little hostile to the idea that my mother’s been making clandestine trips to Hastings and hasn’t once asked to see me or even called to let me know.
A clench of hurt tightens my chest. When did I become second place? For my entire life it’s just been the two of us against the world. Now there’s a Chad.
“Just surprised,” I lie.
“I want you two to get along.” There’s a long pause, in which I hear her disappointment that this conversation isn’t going better.
She wants me to be happy for her, excited about this. She probably thought about this conversation all day, all week, worrying whether this was the right time to bring these two parts of her life together.
Her next words confirm my suspicions. “This means a lot to me, Taylor.”
I gulp down the lump of resentment clogging my throat. “Yeah, dinner sounds great.” It’s what she wants to hear, and I suppose I owe her that much. “As long as I can bring a date.”
22
Conor
So one thing I’m learning about Taylor—she doesn’t take well to sudden change. With this business about her mom’s new boyfriend, a hidden, lurking, full-blown panic type-A personality has reared its hilarious head. She’s rigid and coiled beside me in the passenger seat of my Jeep, her fingernails tapping the armrest. I can sense her mashing her foot down on the imaginary gas pedal in the floorboard.
“We’re not going to be late,” I reassure her as I pull away from the diner on Main Street. We’d stopped at Della’s to pick up a pecan pie for dessert. “Dude lives in Hastings, right?”
Her phone lights up her face and reflects off her window. She’s studying the route on her map. “Yeah, turn left at the lights. We’re heading toward Hampshire Lane, then making a right on—no, I said go left!” she yelps as I drive straight through the intersection.
I glance over. “This’ll save us time.” I happen to know for a fact that the left-turn light in the intersection we just passed lasts about .04 seconds and then you’re waiting like six minutes for it to change again.
“It’s seven-oh-nine,” Taylor growls. “We have to be there at seven-fifteen. And that was our turn!”
“You said Hampshire. I can get us there faster by avoiding the lights and cutting through the residential streets.”
Her dubious expression says she doesn’t believe me. “I’ve lived here longer than you,” she reminds me.
“And you don’t have a car, babe,”
I say, flashing her a grin she would appreciate if she weren’t so wound up. “I know these roads. Coach lives nearby. Hunter and I spent a night driving up and down every one of these streets when Foster wandered off from a team dinner to smoke a joint. He got lost for three hours. Found him in some old lady’s empty above-ground pool.”
“Seven-ten,” she snaps back.
There’s no winning with Taylor. And I don’t really blame her for being a bundle of nerves. I’ve been in her seat.
It was just me and my mom for so long—and then suddenly this Max goofball shows up at the house in khakis and a Brooks Brothers shirt and calling me Sport or some shit, and I about lost my mind. Had to talk Kai out of boosting the rims off Max’s Land Rover, although I’m pretty sure it was him who slashed Max’s tire the first night he stayed over.
“If you decide you don’t like the dude, just give me a signal,” I tell her.
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. I’ll switch out his sugar with salt or something. I could also replace all his beer with piss, but then you’d have to drive us home.”
“Deal. But only if he’s a super douche, like he’s got a portrait of himself hanging up in his dining room.”
“Or endangered animal heads on his wall.”
“Or he doesn’t recycle,” she says, giggling. “Oooh, maybe you can text the guys to show up at the windows wearing Halloween masks.”
“Damn, you’re dark.”
But she’s laughing, and some of the tension finally leaves her body. This dinner is a big deal for her. For her mother and their relationship. I get the sense that Taylor’s dreaded this day for a while—this moment when someone would become the other most important person in her mother’s life, and she’d have to start getting used to the idea that her mom is a person with a whole life that doesn’t include Taylor. Or maybe I’m just projecting.