Wanna Bet?: An Interracial Romance

by Talia Hibbert

  “Don’t bullshit me.” Jasmine twisted her ankle so that she could see the side where she’d cut herself, bending slightly to look. “Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck—”

  “Stop it. Close your eyes. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “Piss off!” She snapped, her voice cracking slightly.

  “Close your fucking eyes,” he barked.

  And, miracle of miracles, she did.

  Her face had paled slightly, brown skin turning ashen, and her lips were pressed tight together. Her fingers were twisted in the fabric of her skirt. At least he knew she wouldn’t faint. She’d rather die than faint.

  Rahul turned his attention back to the ankle. It was… unpleasant. She’d managed to shave off a four-inch-long strip of skin. Blood flooded the pink wound. A lot of blood. In fact, it was dripping down her foot like something out of a horror film.

  But, he reminded himself, the cut was shallow, and the blood thin. Capillary damage. It was a shaving nick with an unusually large surface area, and at least it wasn’t wide as well as long. There was no reason for his heart to pound like she’d been attacked by a fucking bear.

  It pounded anyway.

  Rahul undid the first button on his pyjama top before yanking it over his head. Wrapped the fabric around her ankle as many times as it would go. Then he crouched beside her, slid an arm under her knees and said, “Ready?”

  “What?”

  “We’re moving.” He picked her up.

  She gave an odd little gasp, more a sharp exhalation really, and then her arm snaked around his neck. He could smell whatever it was she put in her hair—something light and summery—and the soft, clean scent of her skin.

  She’d opened her eyes. Her tongue slid out to wet her lips, and he tried not to remember how it had wet his lips. “You can tell me,” she said solemnly. “Am I going to die?”

  “Stop being dramatic.”

  “I’m being dramatic? You’ve taken off your bloody shirt!”

  “For practical purposes. I needed something to stem the bleeding.” He shouldered open his bedroom door.

  “Because I am going to die.”

  “Because I don’t need your blood all over the hardwood.”

  She huffed as he set her down on his bed, the side he hadn’t slept on. It was mostly undisturbed. He probably should’ve taken her somewhere else, like her room or the sofa, but he wasn’t thinking.

  “What a charmer you are,” she muttered, settling against the cushions. “Your concern warms my heart.”

  “I bet. Don’t move.”

  “Thank God you said that,” she called as he went in search of the first aid kit. “I was going to get up and dance the cancan.”

  He found the green and white box in the kitchen and hurried back. “Wow. High-level comedy in here. I am in awe.”

  She was staring across the room, towards the window and away from him. Obviously trying to hide her alarm. Rahul came to stand beside her. Before he could think better of it, he reached down and cupped her face, his hand nudging her jaw, forcing her to look at him. Panicked eyes met his.

  She dragged in a breath. “I don’t—I don’t like bleeding. I mean, it stresses me out. To see so much.”

  “It’s bleeding a lot,” he said, “because razors are sharp. I promise you, it’s nothing.”

  “I know,” she said, in a voice that was a little too light and unconcerned.

  “Good.” He released her and focused his attention on her ankle. Quickly, he found alcohol and gauze, and got to work. But he didn’t miss the way she rubbed the scar on her forearm.

  “Since when are you Mr. First Aid, anyway?” She asked, her tone accusatory. As if he’d been hiding first aid skills from her with nefarious intent.

  “Took a course at sixth form. Put it on my CV to take up space. So every place I worked at decided to make me the first aider, and they sent me on even more courses.” He shrugged. “The amount of time and money that’s been spent on my first aid skills, I should be a nurse by now.”

  Jasmine snorted. “I think there’s a bit more to nursing than plasters and anti-bacterial wipes, poppet.”

  There was his girl. He flashed her a grin. “But I’d look so good in the outfit.”

  “You’re a pain in the arse,” she said. “I’m going to be late for work. This is entirely your fault.” Her voice barely hitched as he applied the alcohol.

  “Hey, I’m late too. You should be honoured. If you were anyone else I’d have let you bleed all over the bathroom just so I could be on time.”

  “Sadly,” she deadpanned, “I believe you.”

  “You know, you still haven’t explained why you were shaving your legs fully-clothed.”

  She huffed out a breath. “I forgot to do it in the shower.”

  “Ah.” He secured the gauze around her ankle, then wrapped a shit ton of surgical tape around it for good measure. The added pressure would help. “I don’t know how you feel about this suggestion, but I’d like it if you didn’t go to work today.”

  She looked at him as if he’d suggested playing football with a hedgehog. “You want me to stay off work for a… a scratch?!”

  “Oh, now it’s a scratch?” He tried, and failed, to hold back a laugh. “Five minutes ago you thought it was fatal.”

  “Don’t be pedantic. I can’t just call in!”

  “Sure you can,” he said calmly. “Tell them your evil roommate sabotaged you and now you’re gravely injured.”

  She gave him a narrow look. “I’m not taking the day off. I might take the morning off.”

  “That works too.”

  “If you do the same.”

  Rahul raised his brows. “I beg your pardon?”

  She gave him a smug little smile and settled back against the pillows, clearly making herself comfortable. “If I need time off work, surely I also need supervision?”

  He blinked. That didn’t sound completely illogical, but it was coming from Jasmine’s mouth, so it was almost certainly some sort of trap. Then again, he was worried about her. She looked a little too grey and clammy for his liking.

  Still…“I can’t just take a day off,” he said, the words automatic.

  “A morning,” she corrected. “And if I can, you can. Unless you’re suggesting that your job is more important than mine.”

  “No. No. I just…” The thought of breaking from his professional routine made him feel more than a little adrift.

  But then he looked at Jasmine, and the feeling faded.

  “Okay,” he said. Then, again, his voice a little more firm: “Yes. I suppose you’re right.”

  She gave him a superior sort of look. “I usually am.”

  Jasmine didn’t think she’d ever had so lovely a morning. Excluding the part where she sliced a decent chunk of her own skin off.

  Ick. The thought still made her shudder.

  But that minor horror was almost completely eclipsed by the near-perfection that had followed.

  Rahul lay beside her on his bed, actually relaxing for once. He was so close she could feel the warmth radiating from his body. The sheets smelled like him. She hadn’t realised until—well, until last night actually, when she’d woken up with her face on his chest—that he had a very specific smell, and that it made her feel both comfortingly safe and mildly aroused all at once. But it did. Cloves and fresh paper and ink and tea. She’d been working hard, in the back of her mind, to identify every part of the scent, and she thought that was rather accurate.

  He’d propped her leg up on a pile of pillows, and then he’d brought more pillows from her room to make sure there were enough behind her back. He’d brought her toast even though she’d already had some—not that she was complaining—and then, when she’d asked very nicely, he’d stopped clucking around like a mother hen and taken five fucking minutes to chill.

  That had been hours ago. Somehow sitting beside her had turned into lying beside her, and talking about Lara Croft, and then The Good Place, which he’d s
omehow only just discovered, the poor sod. It was all quite adorably mundane. And she was unbelievably glad that she’d convinced him to actually take time off work. Now he knew that the sky wouldn’t fall if he took a break every so often.

  It should be easy, in the midst of all this happiness, to forget that he’d rejected her last night.

  Which is for the best. You can’t have everything you want.

  She knew that. But all she wanted was him, so suddenly and so fucking badly. She had this idea that if Rahul would just touch her like he had last night, everything in her world would hit that elusive, perfect balance she’d spent her whole life falling just short of.

  Except it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t it wouldn’t it wouldn’t—because he was too good for her to use and discard, and she’d been over this a thousand times, and what the fuck was she on right now? Crack?!

  “Hey,” he said. “You’ve gone quiet.”

  She turned her head to smile at him. “Thinking. Even I do it sometimes.”

  Instead of laughing, he smiled gently back. “You do it a lot.” He’d taken off his glasses. His face was a hand’s width from hers, and she could see flecks of honey-gold in the warm brown of his eyes.

  “Not as much as I should,” she murmured.

  “Maybe you don’t need to think as much as everyone else,” he said. “You know, because of your mighty IQ score.”

  “I don’t believe in IQ scores.”

  “Only people with high IQ scores say that.” His voice had become a laughing whisper. She watched a network of fine lines form around his eyes, watched smile lines bracket his mouth. What a fucking mouth. When his smile faded, she realised he’d caught her.

  Jasmine met his eyes, not with embarrassment, but with a sense of inevitability.

  “What is it?” He asked, his voice low.

  She wasn’t good at denying truths. She wished he hadn’t asked. “It’s you.”

  The words hovered between them like cigarette smoke and secrets between the lips of teenagers. Like promises you break, and never forget, and always regret. Like the capsule eternity of that pin-prick moment before a first kiss.

  She barely remembered her first kiss. She remembered their first kiss, though, better than she’d like. In fact, she had a disturbing feeling that, unlike all her other firsts, it was one she wouldn’t forget.

  “Jas,” he whispered. “I’m sorry about—”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry about last night.” She made herself smile. “That’s usually my line.”

  He laughed. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

  Oh, yes you do. “Look; I should apologise. You didn’t want to, and I hope I didn’t… make things awkward.”

  His expression flickered. “What? No. It’s not like that. I mean, it’s not that I don’t…” He trailed off, pressed his lips together. A familiar little furrow appeared between his brows. She could kiss that furrow. She could kiss his ferocious frown.

  Weird.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s all. You don’t owe me an explanation. Saying no is enough.”

  He nodded. “Well, I—I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

  She swallowed and tried not to wince. “I get it,” she said, hoping her voice sounded casual. “You don’t want to complicate things.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t want to complicate things. And I don’t want to lose your friendship.”

  That… was an interesting way of phrasing it. A way that made her palms itch, made her skin hot and prickly with possibility. But she was probably reading too much into things. And, she reminded herself, he’d been right to refuse her. She’d been talking nonsense last night, rubbish about friends with benefits as if that could ever work. Jasmine avoided complications for a reason.

  “You’re such a nice boy,” she said lightly, searching for a way to change the subject. “No wonder your mother is so proud.”

  He snorted. “I don’t know about that. If she is, she tells everyone but me.” He said the words with fond amusement, rather than any kind of resentment. It was an old joke. The look on his face was soft and… secure. It was the look of someone who was loved.

  She attempted a smile in return and tried not to sound painfully jealous. “Whatever. She brags about you all the time.”

  “Maybe.”

  He hadn’t shaved yet. The permanent shadow on his jaw was darker than she’d ever seen it. Jasmine stared at the stubble, remembered the harsh rasp of it against her skin, and the softness of his lips soothing the burn. She wanted both. Again.

  She wondered, if she called someone else and tried to feel what she’d felt last night, would it work? Usually, she’d try. Just to see.

  But she felt so sure that it wouldn’t.

  “Can I ask you something?” He murmured.

  She blinked, dragged her attention back to reality—the reality where he’d said no. “Maybe. Ask and we’ll see.”

  He gave her a half-smile. His hand found her arm, traced over her scar the way it always did. “You never told me how you got this.”

  She stiffened instinctively, then forced herself to relax. “The usual way.”

  “Hm.” His hand kept stroking. “You don’t have any other keloids.”

  She didn’t like thinking about it. She also didn’t like coming off all eternally tortured and damaged when she was actually completely fucking fine, so she said, “I had an accident when I was a kid. Cut myself.”

  “Badly?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “How?”

  She gave him a sideways look. “With a knife, genius.”

  “I mean, if you were a kid—”

  “I wanted a sandwich. My mother wasn’t going to make me a sandwich. I thought I could cut cheese on my own.” God, she didn’t want to talk about this. It was exhaustingly pointless.

  He took a breath. The sort of breath that meant he was about to be Very Serious. Which wouldn’t do at all.

  So she forced herself to sit up, to check the clock. Then she pinched his cheek and said, “You know, I think we have time for a quickie. If you’ve changed your mind.”

  He rolled his eyes and moved away from her, rising up on his elbows. “Actually,” he said, “I think we’ve gotten carried away.” His deep voice had the sort of implacable tone that might’ve gotten her wet if he wasn’t using it to reject her.

  Or was he?

  He got up off the bed and strode to the window.

  Yeah, he was.

  Oh—but he’d picked up his glasses. And instead of putting them on, he was cleaning them with his shirt a bit too hard.

  Hm. Maybe the situation bore further investigation.

  And maybe she was being ridiculous.

  “You’re right,” Jasmine said. “We should start getting ready to go.”

  Rahul put on his glasses and turned to peer at her with a frown. He looked, in a word, suspicious.

  So she added, “Be a doll and make me some lunch first, would you?”

  He rolled his eyes, all suspicion erased. “If life were a game, pushing your luck would be your special ability.”

  She gave him her sweetest smile. “It would, wouldn’t it? And I bet I’d win.”

  10

  Now

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Jazzy.”

  Jasmine grinned; she couldn’t help it. Then she cleared her throat, wiped the emotion from her face, and cast a suspicious look around the office. Everyone was working, focusing on their own shit—even Asmita, sitting at the next desk over. Still, Jasmine said politely into the phone, “One moment, please,” and locked her monitor. Then she got up and hurried out of the room.

  Once she was a few metres down the hall, she let every inch of her pleasure show. “Dad!”

  “How are you my love?”

  “I’m good!” Except I made out with Rahul three nights ago, no big deal. “How’s the cruise? How’s Mari?

  “Ah, we’re living the life. Every damned day, tha
t woman’s dragged me down to the spa. You’ll not know me. I’ve had my pores cleansed.”

  “That’s great, Dad.” Jasmine leant against the corridor’s cool wall and cradled the phone to her ear, savouring her dad’s familiar, easy happiness. She wished she was like him, but she wasn’t. She just pretended to be.

  She was like her mother.

  “And what’ve you been up to, my little monkey?”

  “Oh, you know…” Don’t tell him. Don’t tell him. Don’t— “I had a bit of a problem with my flat.”

  Sigh. This was why she’d been avoiding his calls. Jasmine was physically incapable of hiding things from her father.

  Most things, anyway.

  “Problem?” She could almost see his frown, his screwed-up face. Outrage, that his daughter should ever face a problem again. “What problem?”

  “Well, there was a flood.” She didn’t go into detail. “The water damage in my room was pretty bad.”

  “I hope you told that tosser Potter-Baird—”

  “Don’t worry, I’m handling it. They called me the other day actually, and said the room should be fixed in a month.”

  “A month?” He bellowed. “And what are you doing in the meantime? Where the hell are you?”

  Well, at least she had an answer he’d like. “That was a while ago, so it’s just a couple of weeks now. And don’t worry, I’m staying at Rahul’s.”

  There was a pause. A rather long one, actually, which she hadn’t expected; Dad wasn’t one for pauses. When he finally spoke, he didn’t sound as brash and uncomplicated as usual. He huffed out an odd sort of sigh and said, “I don’t know why he does it to himself.”

  Jas blinked. For a moment, treacherous thoughts hovered at the edges of her mind. You’re a burden. Even your own father thinks so.

  Then sense kicked in, a bright flame scaring off the shadows. It’s a joke. You’re not a burden. And even if you were, Dad’s the last person on earth who’d see you that way. She made herself laugh and said, “Poor him, right?”

  “Right,” Dad said wryly. She heard humour in his tone, wondered how she’d missed it before. Her pounding heart slowed. “Well, I’m glad you’re somewhere decent,” he said. “I might give Rahul a call. To thank him.”