Playing Games: A College Bully Romance

by Candace Wondrak

  “If you’re so over her, why don’t you pick a new one?” he said, pointing to the group of girls immediately to my left. “The blonde has been staring at you all night.”

  All night, as if the party had started hours ago. It hadn’t. The truth of the matter was it had only just begun.

  I turned my head, spotting the blonde in question. She was talking to her friends, pretending as if she hadn’t heard Dean’s blatant observation. Her cheeks were flushed, and she ran a hand through her long hair, trying to fluff it up.

  She was pretty, but she wasn’t Kelsey.

  “Come on, Levi, prove me wrong,” Dean said.

  He clearly didn’t think I would, so I turned off whatever emotions I could before getting up and going to her. Her friends quieted when I came near, and the blonde sent me a flirty smile. I asked if she wanted to sit with me, and she did.

  I found out her name was Kiera. A pretty enough name for a pretty enough girl.

  As the minutes ticked by, she inched closer to me on the couch. I sure as hell didn’t do the inching, because I didn’t want her. The girl I wanted was the one girl I’d never have again, because of the asshole across from me. No matter what I did, I’d always be the bad guy. Me playing into Dean’s hand right now? That was me being bad.

  Some guys liked being bad. Some guys it came to naturally. Me? Most of the time I didn’t care, but here and now…I cared. I cared too much. I cared so much I wanted to be the good guy, which I wasn’t. That had to say something about me, about this fucked-up situation.

  Kiera’s blonde hair was tousled over her shoulder, its lengths long and wavy. The perfect hair to run your fingers through, it was true. If I closed my eyes and tried harder, I could imagine that hair was Kelsey’s kinky brown mess.

  “Come on, dude,” Dean suddenly spoke over the music, causing both me and Kiera to stare at him. The girl hanging on his side had curled against his chest. “Why don’t you just be a man and kiss her?”

  Kiera’s cheeks turned red, and her eyes widened as she glanced to me. Maybe she’d had a bit to drink, or maybe she just found me attractive. Either way, she whispered, “I’d be okay with that. I mean, just a kiss, right?”

  I didn’t know whether that was her way of hinting at more or not. I didn’t read people well enough, I guess.

  As my hand brushed the side of her cheek, feeling her warm, flushed skin under mine, I couldn’t stop my mind from thinking: this is wrong. I don’t want to kiss her. There’s only one set of lips I want, but I fucked it all up. I’d never get the one I wanted.

  Her lips were puckered by the time they met mine, and it just didn’t feel right. Me and Kiera—didn’t even sound right in my head. It felt like all those times I kissed Mel; it felt like a lie. And if it felt like a lie, it probably looked like a lie, too.

  No, I needed Dean to believe this, to believe me. I needed him to think that Kelsey meant nothing to me, or else he might still go after her.

  So I kissed Kiera harder. Moved a hand to her neck and held her close. Pushed my tongue into her mouth and gave it my all.

  It was then I heard Dean start to laugh, and I slowly pulled myself away from Kiera when he said, “What the hell? This is perfect. Too fucking perfect.” To the girl leaning on him, he whispered, “You really just can’t make this shit up.”

  An angry girl stood near the couch, her full lips puckered into a familiar frown. Kelsey. I immediately wanted to get up, to take my arm off Kiera’s shoulders, but I stopped myself. If I jumped at her right now, if I tried to tell her this wasn’t what it looked like, it’d only prove Dean right.

  “Looking for a new dick to suck?” Dean asked Kelsey, causing the girl beside him to roll her eyes. Still, she didn’t distance herself from him. Dean had her wrapped around his finger.

  Kelsey didn’t bat an eyelash at his blunt question. “Actually, I am,” she said, and a knot formed in my stomach. A knot that made me want to get up and pull her from the room. “Know any takers?”

  Dean chuckled, but I could tell by the chuckle’s curtness that he hadn’t expected her to say that. I glared at her, trying to tell her to leave, to convince her that this was not a good idea. I didn’t think of myself a jealous guy, but hearing the mere mention of another guy’s dick made my teeth grind.

  “Here’s the kicker, though,” Kelsey went on. “I’m going to give it to a guy that has someplace we can go. I’m not getting naked in this house again.” That was leveled at me, and Kiera wasn’t quite like the girl near Dean; she slowly got up, leaving me alone on the couch, not wanting to be a part of this.

  The pretty enough girl with the pretty enough name knew when to step aside.

  Grady, a freshman who was so not Kelsey’s type—and by that I meant he wasn’t me—had suddenly appeared near her. His blonde hair was cut short, his green eyes wide as he checked her out. “I have a car,” he offered, “if you’re serious.”

  Kelsey sized him up, blatant in the way she looked him up and down. She must’ve decided he was up to her standards, for she said, “It totally counts, Blue. Let’s go.” She hooked her arm in his, ignoring his my name is Grady statement.

  Blue? She couldn’t call him Blue. She called me Blue. Me. No one else. That nickname was reserved for me. That fucker’s eyes weren’t even blue like mine. The nickname literally made no sense when she called Grady it—but then again, maybe that was the point. Maybe she’d done it simply to rile me up.

  If so, she got her wish. I was sufficiently riled up.

  I got even more riled up when I watched her and Grady leave the house through the front door, leaning forward on the couch as if I was going to follow them. I couldn’t. I couldn’t follow them…but if I didn’t, if I let them go, would she really hook up with him? Would those lips wrap around Grady’s dick? The mere thought sent me tumbling down the rabbit hole of rage I knew I’d never escape from, not when she so easily flaunted her ability to pounce and bound from guy to guy.

  Dean grinned at me. “You want to go after her, don’t you? You’re trying to say you’re done with her, but I can see it in your eyes, Levi. You’re not. You’re a lovesick fool.”

  I said nothing, biting my tongue. Mostly because my mind was elsewhere, on Kelsey, on Grady, on what they’d be doing together once they reached his car in the parking lot. It was a ten-minute walk, but knowing her, with how angry she was, she probably made them walk fast. She was doing this to get back at me for what she thought was my fault, and if I told her that Dean was the man behind it, I knew I’d sound like I was just trying to set aside the blame.

  Would she even believe me at this point? Would she even listen to a single word I said?

  “Lovesick fools are easy to break, you know,” Dean informed me, something I already knew.

  The truth? The truth was the hardest ones to crack were those who had closed themselves off to the world. Until recently, I’d thought that was me, but Kelsey came and showed me that I was wrong.

  She’d broken down the walls I’d put up effortlessly, and I’d be damned if I was going to let her go and fuck Grady. No, that girl belonged to one man on this campus, and that one man was me.

  Chapter Twenty – Kelsey

  Grady was cute enough, I guess. He wasn’t as tall as Levi or as muscular as him, but he’d do the trick. He’d dropped his drink in their front lawn, and after I asked him where his car was, he’d told me in the front of the lot, so that’s where we went.

  “Are we really going to hook up in my car?” Grady asked, obviously confused about this whole thing.

  You know what? I was confused, too. I had no idea why I was hurrying along with Grady. Seeing Levi with that girl, his tongue down her throat…it made me a special type of angry, a certain kind of jealous I just couldn’t put a finger on.

  Which was dumb, I knew, because Levi and I weren’t together. The bastard videotaped us having sex and released it online—there was no coming back from that.

  The whole point of this night was to tell him o
ff, but maybe telling him off and hooking up with someone else would kill two birds with one stone. Get my mind and my body off him. Grady was cute enough.

  Cute enough would have to do for now.

  Grady’s car was a beat-up station wagon two rows in, and he had me pressed against the passenger side door immediately, mostly because I’d thrown my arms around his neck and rammed my back against his car. No alarms went off, thankfully. We weren’t by a light pole, so nothing but cars and darkness surrounded us.

  Grady kissed me. Or, well, he tried to. When his lips met mine, it was sloppy and smelled of alcohol. I had no idea how much this one had drunk before I’d showed up, but there was no way the party had been going on for that long. Though it was dark out, it was still early in the night, it being a Friday and all.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d be able to get it up. Alcohol tended to mess that shit up—

  Ah, nope. There it is, I told myself when I started to feel a pressing hardness against my hip. We were on much more even ground than I was with Levi, so with the right angle I could grind myself against him and focus on that instead of the awful way he kissed.

  At least, that was the plan, until Grady was ripped off me by a strong hand, his body slammed against the car beside us. Levi stood there, fuming. Grady’s eyes were wide, and even in the darkness, you could tell he was scared. I didn’t blame him, because as I stood there, watching Levi’s fist grab Grady’s collar, I couldn’t help but be a little scared too.

  I’d never seen Levi this angry before.

  No. Maybe scared wasn’t the right word. More like curious, intrigued…maybe even a bit turned on. No one had ever gotten into a fight for me before, no one had ever actually chased after me.

  Levi didn’t even look at me, didn’t grace me with the glower on his face, but I heard the venom in his voice when he told Grady, “If you ever think about touching her again, I’ll rip your dick off and feed it to you.” Spoken with a level tongue, the kind of threat that wasn’t really a threat but a promise.

  “Dude, you can have her,” Grady muttered, practically running away once Levi let go of him.

  I watched, unashamed, as Levi turned to me. He’d kissed that girl, I kissed Grady. I mean, we weren’t together anymore. That’s what people did, right? They moved on.

  It was as our eyes met in the darkness that I started to wonder if I’d ever truly be able to move on. What we had was short, whatever the hell it was, but it was nothing like I’d ever had.

  “You don’t have the right to decide what I do or who I do it with.” I planned on saying more, on saying a hell of a lot more, but Levi whirled on me, pinning me against Grady’s car. My eyes were level with his chest, and I was slow to lift them, meeting his dark blue stare.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” he whispered, never one to mince words or even compliment me.

  “And you were kissing a pretty blonde, in case you forgot, so I think I have every right to be whatever kind of idiot I want, whether it’s a fucking idiot or just a plain idiot,” I told him, reminding him of the fact his tongue had been shoved down someone else’s throat. “You lost whatever right you had to me when you recorded us and put it online.”

  His body felt rock-hard against me, his chest rising and falling with ragged, loud breaths. I felt each exhalation, every single breath he took, and I fought the way my body responded to his: arching against the car, needing to have him pin me harder. The low ache between my legs, the whining of my body, wordlessly asking for his to unite with mine.

  Levi shook his head, his dark brows coming together. “She wasn’t you.”

  “Oh, is that supposed to make me feel better? Grady kissed like a sloppy mop, but you don’t hear me complaining—”

  He didn’t give me a chance to say anything else, mostly because he grabbed my face, tilted my neck, and collided his mouth with mine. Such a sudden, fast meeting of our lips that I could do nothing but blink at first, and then—then I wanted to fight him. Push him off. Yell at him because how dare he?

  I slammed a fist against his chest, and he pulled his lips off mine long enough for me to cry out, “I hate you. I really do. I don’t think I’ve ever hated someone as much as I hate you.” Lies. All lies, because even after what he did, I didn’t hate him. How the hell could I? I’d fallen hard for this man, and now…

  Even after he’d betrayed me, I still wanted him.

  “Then hate me,” Levi whispered, his forehead against mine, his eyes shut. “Hate me, Kelsey. It’ll be easier that way.”

  Easier? None of this was easy. None of this was fucking easy, couldn’t he see that? Didn’t he know that this was literally the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my life? God, I couldn’t imagine dating, not after this. I never wanted to let anyone that close again.

  “You,” I whispered, hating how pained my voice sounded, “you ruined me.” And I didn’t mean because of the video. I didn’t give a shit about whether other people knew I’d had sex, or even watched me do it. What I meant was that Levi had ruined me for relationships, for guys in general. No man would ever compare. Never again.

  It was stupid. It was so fucking stupid, and yet I tugged on his collar and brought his face back down to mine, crashing my lips against his as hard as I possibly could, needing him to know that I wasn’t lying. Levi Harlen had ruined me, and I was a slave to him, as much as I hated it.

  Feeling his lips on mine gave me life. If I could’ve melded against his body, I would have. If I could’ve caved into him and given him everything—everything that I, Kelsey Yates, had to give—I would’ve. But this…this wasn’t our reunion. This was simply the goodbye we never had, the so-long, farewell portion of our relationship. If you could even call what we had a relationship.

  Was it? I didn’t know, and at this point it didn’t much matter. There was nothing left of us, if there ever was an us to begin with. This was the final curtain call on the Levi and Kelsey act, and after that curtain closed, there would never be a follow-up. We would be done, as much as it hurt me to admit.

  The truth? I didn’t want to be done with this one. Ever.

  His lips were immeasurably warm on mine, and I lost myself to that heat, my hands acting greedy, touching him all over, pulling his large frame down to mine, refusing to let go. His muscled body held me against the car, and the moment he pressed his hips against me harder, I felt how much he needed me, too. This wasn’t just a one-sided goodbye. This was a goodbye for the both of us. After this? Cut off completely.

  I’d said it in the beginning, and I’d meant it. This one was not good for me, for my sanity, for my health. A man like Levi would drive you crazy and make you high on the feeling. A man like Levi would make you crave him and never be able to have your fill with any other man again.

  I’d meant it totally and absolutely when I said he ruined me. He did. He ruined me in the worst of ways, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

  His teeth grazed my bottom lip, and as I parted them and allowed his tongue in my mouth, I felt his hands find their way between us, reaching for the button on my pants. I let him do it; I was past the point of stopping this man now.

  Levi pulled his lips off mine the moment his hand slid between us, down along me, his fingers arching against the most intimate part of me. My breathing hitched the very instant he touched me, and I knew, without a doubt, I was practically dripping wet. That’s what Levi did to me. Made me a hormonal, wild teenager who’d never gotten laid before. Made me crave him so desperately I could hardly see or think straight.

  Hell, at this point, thinking straight had long been in the rearview mirror.

  “You feel so good,” Levi murmured against my cheek, his fingers gliding along my wet, pink folds easily, effortlessly. He knew just how to touch me to make me voice my pleasure in sighs, how to make me lose my mind in all that was him.

  I started grinding my hips against his hand, practically mewling in desire. Was I proud of how I was acting with the guy who’d taped us fucki
ng and then spread it around like it meant nothing? Of course not. What sane girl would be? Levi just brought out the insanity in me, the party girl who didn’t care what the consequences were. The consequences could wait until tomorrow; right now it was only me and him. Him and I. Us, together, for one last time.

  Had to make it count.

  Even though his hand cupped my apex so perfectly, even though his fingers knew just how to work me and rub my clit, how to slip inside and finger me like there was no tomorrow, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. I had to have him one last time. One final hurrah, so to speak.

  “Fuck me,” I whispered, my voice nothing but air. So breathy, the wind nearly carried it away. I was going to sleep with that Grady kid in his car, but being fucked against the car by Levi just seemed like such a better option. Call me crazy, call me mad, call me insane, whatever. At this point, I clearly didn’t care what was right and what was wrong, not when it came to Levi and how he made me feel.

  We weren’t smackdab under a lamp pole, so we were in as much of the shadows as we could be. Grady’s car was a few rows deep in the parking lot, so it didn’t sit next to any sidewalks or the road that wrapped around the lot. Someone could theoretically walk by and see us, but I didn’t care. I’d risk it for him.

  Plus, the whole out in the open thing kind of led to more of a taboo feel, and if there was one thing that made me hot and horny, it was that. Something I knew was wrong, something I knew could get us into loads of trouble, but something I was going to do anyway.

  Namely, Levi. Or, rather, he was going to do me.

  Levi didn’t need to be asked twice. The moment I begged him to fuck me, he withdrew his hand from me and worked on his own pants. He didn’t pull them down all the way; just enough to free his dick. Its length was erect and ready for me, and at the sight of it, my body ached in memory. This would be the last time I’d see and feel that dick.