by Selena Scott
“What?” Jean Luc stood up straight off the wall.
“You were right,” Tre growled, pushing at his eyes again. “She’s gonna sleep with him.”
Jack put the pieces together. “She bought condoms at the grocery store?”
“Yeah.” Tre spit out the word like it tasted sour. “And then she was all happy and bubbly on the ride home. Like she couldn’t wait to get home.”
“This is worse than I thought.” Jean Luc dragged a wide palm over his face. “Do you think she has feelings for him?”
“I have no fucking idea.” Tre paced from one side of the room to the other. He’d never felt so trapped in his life. Pursuing Caroline would only lead to her heartbreak. But if he didn’t, she might end up with Arturo. Which was so horrifying it was almost inconceivable.
“I can’t believe she’s gonna sleep with that… that…” Tre couldn’t come up with a word bad enough for the living slime that was Arturo. A mushroom cloud of fear and rage rose up within him. He turned toward the men. “Do condoms even work on demon semen?”
There was a weighted half second of silence before all three men burst out laughing. The rising tension that had been building in the room splatted like a water balloon on a hot sidewalk.
“Wow.” Jack wiped his eyes. “Demon semen. Sounds like the name of a high school punk band.”
“A bad high school punk band,” Tre corrected.
Jean Luc chuckled into his hand. “Really never thought Arturo could make me laugh that hard.”
Tre, buoyed after that laugh, flopped down on the bed beside Jack. “God, I hate that jackass.”
“That makes three of us,” Jean Luc grumbled.
Their chuckles quieted and Jack turned to Tre. “So, you wanna tell us whatever it is that you think is so bad about yourself?”
Tre was silent.
“Because I’m pretty sure we’re gonna be able to tell you it’s complete bullshit and that you shouldn’t worry about it,” Jack finished.
“Yeah.” Tre sighed. “I’m just… I’m built differently than you two are. And Caroline? Man. She deserves, like, a crazy love story, you know? She deserves real love. And romance. Not some fucked-up dude who’s just gonna hit it and quit it.”
Jean Luc’s eyebrows raised. “You’d hit it and quit it with Caroline?”
Tre shrugged. “I hit it and quit it with everyone I sleep with.”
“Huh,” Jack said, narrowing his eyes at his friend. “Huh.”
“What?”
Jack and Jean Luc looked at one another for a second. Jean Luc was the one who dove on the grenade. “Are you, like, not good at sex or something?”
“Jesus Christ.” Tre pressed on his eyeballs under his glasses. “The number of times I’ve had to defend my fucking manhood over the last few days…”
“I think it’s a fair question,” Jack said, poking his tongue into his cheek and trying not to let his inner bastard show through too clearly.
“You two are such assholes. And you’re clearly enjoying this way too much.” Tre ran a hand through his too-long hair. “I’ve never had any complaints. I’m not selfish. I do my best to pay attention in bed. I don’t know. The end. I refuse to give you two pervs any more details on my sex life. My skills aren’t the reason there aren’t repeat performances.”
“Tre,” Jack said slowly. “You’re into Caroline, right? I mean, I know you’re saying that you aren’t gonna get with her. But we’re not all nuts, right? We haven’t been imagining all those googoo eyes, have we?”
Tre was quiet for a while. “Of course I’m into her. What man in his right mind wouldn’t be into her? She’s, like, the perfect woman. Which is why I can’t ruin her. I couldn’t handle being the one who ruins Caroline Clifton.”
“God.” Jean Luc shoved his hands in the pockets of his athletic shorts and pulled himself up to his full height. He towered over the two men lounging on the bed. “I’m gonna say this one more time: Get your motherfucking head out of your motherfucking ass. I’m so fucking sick of people not understanding what they have to offer. Of lowballing themselves. Tre, you aren’t seeing yourself clearly. And that’s fine. If you were the only one this was hurting, then that’s fine. But your dumbass blindness is gonna get Caroline hurt anyways. She bought condoms to fuck Arturo. All because your head is up your ass.”
“It’s not that simple,” Tre snapped, his frustration rising again. Why couldn’t they just trust him that he knew what was best in this situation? Why did everyone need every single sordid detail? If they knew what kind of house he’d grown up in, if they’d seen the way his dad was after his mother died, then neither of them would be pressuring him about shit. But they didn’t know and they didn’t trust him enough to just trust him that this was actually the best plan. Not fucking Caroline was noble thing here. But they were making it seem like he was taking the coward’s way out.
“Yeah,” Jean Luc spit back. “It really fucking is.”
He turned on his heel and left the room. Jack sat up slowly, put his elbows on his knees and turned to look at Tre. “If you really are into her, then it’s simple. No one said it’s easy. But it sure is simple.”
Then he was gone, too, and Tre was left alone in the darkening room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
If dinner had been a little quiet and strained, Caroline barely noticed. She was too busy attempting to calm down the colony of hummingbirds that had apparently taken up shop in her gut.
They usually all spent time together as a group after dinner, Arturo excluded, of course, but tonight Caroline excused herself back to her room. She took a long, hot shower to calm herself down and rubbed lotion onto every inch of herself. Instead of her normal pajamas she grabbed the silk pajama bottom and cami set that she’d brought on a whim. She sat in the desk chair and looked out the window, brushing and brushing her damp hair until it shone.
She was going to sleep with Arturo tonight.
Oh boy.
Caroline had only slept with two other people in her life. One of them had been her high school boyfriend. He’d been sweet as pie and cute to boot. They’d split up when he’d gotten accepted to UCLA and she’d stayed on the east coast. It hadn’t been long before she’d met Peter. He’d waited until they were married before taking her to bed and at the time it had seemed as if that were an indicator of how serious he was about her.
These days, though, she’d begun to wonder if it was indicative of something else altogether. She wondered if they’d ever really been on the same page as one another. Sex was important to Caroline. She’d always been a sexual creature, despite her low number of partners. And Peter was, too. He was the one who’d demanded their relationship become an open marriage a few years ago. He obviously needed sex just as much as Caroline did. He just didn’t need it with her. And maybe he’d never been attracted to her.
Why, then, would he have married her? Her hand tightened on the handle of the brush. Because of her family’s money? Her father’s law connections? Her mother’s standing in the world of the east coast American royalty?
Who even knew?
All she knew was that she wasn’t looking for anything but passion. And tonight she was going to get it. The hairs on her arm raised as she thought for a moment about touching Arturo. It was a simple fantasy, really. She imagined lacing fingers with him. A strange electricity zipped over her skin and she shivered, in not an altogether good way. She felt nervous and jittery.
She wanted this, she reminded herself. This was what she wanted. She wanted a man who wanted her. And Arturo definitely wanted her. She could feel his eyes follow her around the room, he hung on her every word, watched her mouth when she spoke.
She pressed a hand to her belly, feeling a little sick.
A knock at the door had her straightening up. A light little tap tap that usually meant Celia was ducking her head in to say goodnight.
“C’min!” Caroline called over her shoulder.
The door opened.
&nb
sp; “Smells like a cookie in here.”
She turned and saw Tre standing in the doorway of her room, one hand on the doorknob. His brow was furrowed. Just like he had for days, he looked vaguely annoyed.
“Must be my lotion,” she told him.
He cleared his throat. “Is that what always smells like vanilla?”
She nodded and kept brushing her hair.
His eyes narrowed. “Those are… fancy pajamas.”
“Fancy?” she looked down at herself. They were royal blue silk with a little bit of lace on the hemlines. She’d hoped they were sexy. Fancy sounded less promising. Another wave of nervous anticipation rolled over her.
“Yeah.” Tre fixed his face by the time she looked back up at him. He knew it wasn’t going to work to glower at her like any of this was her fault. He was well aware that Caroline was simply living her life and going after what she wanted. He had to respect her for that. Yeah. As far as Tre was concerned, this was firmly Arturo’s fault. “Look, I wanted to, ah, tell you something.”
She turned completely and set the brush down. He could hear the sound of her damp, heavy hair falling over her shoulder. For some reason, her room was a little cooler than the rest of the house and it made him want to huddle closer to her. Instead, he just closed the door behind him and leaned his back against it.
“What’s up?” she asked, rising from the chair and going to sit cross-legged on the bed.
“You asked me a question in the van, on the way to the grocery store. You wanted to know if I ever ignored reality because I was stuck and there was no reason to acknowledge something terrible.”
Her eyes widened with sweet surprise when she realized that he was actually opening up to her about something instead of slyly redirecting the conversation the way he always did.
“Go ahead.”
“Well.” He stepped forward, thought about sitting in the chair she’d just vacated, but detoured to her bed instead. He sat cross-legged as well, a good three feet of space between them. “Yeah. The simple answer is that yes, I have a ton of experience with that.”
She leaned forward to press her warm fingers against the back of his hand for just a second and Tre got the deep, warmed scent of her drying hair. It was almost debilitating. Her room was cold but she was this little bundle of heat. Soft and sweet and smelling all mouthwatering. He cleared his throat, determined to stay on track. He came here to give her something he’d been depriving her of. He came here to give her a piece of himself in hopes that it would keep her from going to Arturo. He figured that was an appropriate trade. He’d open up to her, just enough to appease her, and she wouldn’t run to Arturo for intimacy.
“My mom died when I was a kid.”
“Oh, Tre.” Her voice was a hushed whisper, true pain in her tone.
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. And honestly, I’ve healed from that wound. It’s what happened after that left more of a mark.”
He frowned at himself. He hadn’t planned on saying that part. He’d figured he could give her some vague mentions of his childhood. But suddenly words were kind of tumbling out of his mouth.
“My dad kind of… lost himself after she died. He barely kept himself alive. Actually, I was the one who kept him alive. Made him eat. Made him shower. I did everything for myself, too. Food. School. The whole nine.”
A small little noise blew out of her. A sound of sympathy, so different than the sound of pity he’d spent half a lifetime dreading. She swiveled around so that they were sitting next to each other, knee to knee. She threw both arms around his shoulders and buried her cheek on his bicep, treating him to a surprisingly tight squeeze.
“So. Yeah. I think I spent a decade pretending that my life wasn’t my life. Telling myself that it wasn’t that bad. And then when I finally got out from under it, out of the house, on my own, I was able to look back and see how lonely my childhood had been. And tired. I spent so much of my childhood so tired. Busy. Holding the weight of the household on my back. No time to even mourn my mom. If I wasn’t at school or making dinner or cleaning the house, I was on my computer, in a different world entirely. I found myself online. I made myself. Built myself from scratch. No one knew I was this skinny little redheaded twerp from Queens with no mom and a deadbeat dad. No one even knew I was a kid. By the time I was fifteen I was already getting paid to hack foreign accounts. My life was this fantasy world. But meanwhile, my real life, the one I tried to ignore, was so dumb. And sad. And lonely.”
He couldn’t believe these words were coming out of him. He’d barely even put these thoughts together before, connected these dots. And here he was spitting them out all over Caroline. This was not why he’d come to her room. He’d seen her float away after dinner and just wanted to check on her. He’d figured he’d share a little bit about his past, cultivate a little bit of the connection she’d been seeking, and then leave, no one worse for the wear. But then he’d gone and laid his bacon on the griddle. Like, there ya go.
“Oh, Tre,” she whispered again. “I know all about lonely.”
She pulled back from him and it was as if her honey eyes were lit from within. They glittered with glossy, unshed tears.
“Isn’t it crazy,” she asked. “To be right next to somebody and still feel lonely? Isn’t that just the worst kind of lonely there is?”
Later, he’d rationalize it as survival. When you’ve been dragged to the bottom by the current and you finally break the surface, you breathe. When the world burns around you, you stop, drop and roll. When there’s a knife in your gut, you yank it free. And when Caroline Clifton blinks up at you with tears in her golden eyes, her hair everywhere and her weight balanced against your shoulder, you kiss her. It was just a matter of choosing to live or choosing to die. Tre chose to live.
He leaned forward and swallowed her gasp of surprise even before his lips made contact with hers. And then his hand was tangled in the warm damp of her hair, and his other hand steadied himself against the bed as he leaned into her. Damn near leaned her all the way back.
For her part, she seemed to have gone into some sort of rictus. Her body was fully taut, her hands tangled in his shirt, her legs still criss-cross-apple-sauced. When it became clear that this wasn’t a fleeting kiss, her body jolted. She was all tangled up in herself and she wanted to be tangled up in him.
She fought one of her legs free and tossed it over his lap. His hand wrenched free from her hair and clasped her ankle. Back to her hair. Back to her ankle. When his tongue swept across her bottom lip, Caroline had already hoisted herself forward, pressing half her weight over his lap. They were listing in a half-tangled tilt of lean and weight and it wasn’t a surprise when they tumbled to one side.
Tre didn’t care. It freed up both of his hands. As far as he was concerned, this wasn’t even a kiss. This was beyond the realm of lips on lips. Kissing Caroline was like dipping a foot into a bathtub only to realize it was filled with hot lava. Her lips were soft heat, parted and working. She was the most active kisser he’d ever had the pleasure of sparring with. Her lips moved almost twice as fast as his, dragging him away down the rapids. When their tongues touched, Tre groaned, sharp and fast, like he was in pain.
And it kind of was pain. The good kind. The muscle-cracking ache of the first stretch of the day. He felt strangely like she was lifting off a layer of bone he hadn’t been aware he’d been wearing on the outside of his body.
There was nothing sharp in their kiss. It was just firm and warm and soft and warm and melting, melting, melting.
Tre was most of the way on top of her, her hair spreading everywhere and that vanilla scent filling every molecule of air between them.
Her flavor was invading him. Shoving aside anything that had previously had the audacity to think it belonged inside him. It was only Caroline. Only Caroline belonged inside him.
Caroline’s sails were fully filled with wind. She was skimming over the top of the white water, barely skipping as she skidded over the waves. T
his was a different speed, a different temperature, a different sport than she’d ever played before. This kiss was a free fall on the back of a peregrine falcon.
Caroline clung to Tre like letting go meant blackholing. Her fingers ached where they gripped his shirt, somehow her legs had clamped around his waist and his shirt had inched up. She felt the heat of his stomach against the V of her legs and she couldn’t help but gasp her approval into the air. She tossed her head back for a second only to have Tre grip her firmly by the chin and drag her mouth back to his.
He attempted, for a moment, to get her to slow the kiss down, but he found himself once again swept away in the storm of her. She devoured him like birthday cake and Tre just went ahead and let it happen. Their tongues slipped and pressed and searched for more. They found that more in the most private parts of one another’s mouths. Their teeth clacked as one of his hands slicked under her camisole and drew a steady line up the silk of her spine.
She wanted so badly to touch his skin as well, but her fingers wouldn’t unclasp from his T-shirt. Instead, she just lifted her arms and started to yank his shirt right off. He lifted his arms and slid away from her, and was back, a half second later, shirtless and panting. Caroline found she didn’t want to cast his shirt away. It was so soft and so warm and so Tre. She gripped it tight in one hand and let her other hand hit him, palm up on the coppery fleece of his chest hair.
Chest hair was new for her. Her high school boyfriend hadn’t had any and Peter had shaved his. The rasp of it over her hand was surprising and sexy and it jolted her.
It hit her then that this was Tre over top of her, pressing her into the bed, sucking her tongue into his mouth. Tre. This was his chest hair in between her fingers. Those were his glasses jamming into the bridge of her nose. That was his breath in her chest. His flavor lighting her up. It was Tre’s stomach she was pressing her womanhood against. It was TRE that she was about three seconds away from dry humping.
Caroline tore her mouth away from his and took a gasping, clarifying breath.