Addicted to You

by Colina Brennan

  Once they passed the second block, he pulled her up to a bar with the front door propped open. Inside, the smoky air stung her eyes, and the dim lighting didn’t help much either. She recognized Finn immediately with his dirty blond hair sticking up at all angles. He was an attractive guy. Downright hot, in fact. And he seemed decent, despite his questionable hijacking of Will’s email, so she couldn’t work out what Kat had against him, other than the fact he’d taken the lead role away from an actual drama student. Leah supposed that would piss her off too, but despite the supposed enmity, it had been immediately obvious to her that Kat was attracted to him. She’d been hiding it beneath hostility, but the girl had undoubtedly wanted to tear Finn’s clothes off (Finn probably mistook it for Kat wanting to tear his head off). Leah knew sexual attraction when she saw it.

  Finn spotted them and lifted a hand to get Will’s attention. Then his eyes—and his smile—grew wide when he saw Leah.

  “Did you two love birds kiss and make up?” he asked, throwing his arms around the both of them.

  Will pushed him off and said, “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “Hey, Scotty, introduce us!” One of Will’s other friends shoved forward to thrust his hand out at Leah.

  She gave his proffered hand and his liquor-tainted breath a flat look. Then, declining to touch him, she looked at Will and asked, “Scotty?”

  “You know, because I’m Scottish. Sorry, forgive him. He’s an idiot. What was I thinking wanting you to meet my friends?” Will said, laughing.

  “I’m Andy,” Will’s friend said, still smiling. His glazed look meant he was well on his way to getting drunk despite that it was a Monday night. He slapped a hand on Will’s shoulder. “We haven’t seen this guy in weeks, and now I know why. He’s been holding out on us.” A couple guys behind him shouted something unintelligible that made Will laugh.

  “Just so you know,” Finn said, “if you’ve got any questions about him, I’m your guy. Did you know he keeps the stuffed hippo he had as a kid in the back of his closet?”

  While Andy and the other guys roared with laughter, Will gave a low chuckle and said, “How do you even know that?”

  “I’m observant,” Finn said. “Plus, I was snooping.” He looked at Leah and added, “I don’t normally do that. He’s just special.”

  Leah smiled. This whole ‘meeting his friends’ thing was kind of fun. She’d never cared to know much about the guys she slept with. In fact, the less she knew the better (except in the case of her burglar). Guys in her past had only mentioned introducing her to friends or family members a few times—those were usually the guys who didn’t realize they were having a one night stand and wanted to get her number in the morning. She always cleared things up for them pretty quickly.

  But everything was different and new with Will, and she knew that, eventually, she would learn to stop being afraid of that.

  And hey, she was actually in a bar, voluntarily socializing (sort of) with strangers for no other reason than to hang out. She couldn’t wait to tell Helena later. Helena would flip. Neither of them were big on barhopping. Helena had shared the party scene with Leah their freshman year. Unlike Leah, however, Helena had kept her priorities straight. Seeing how deep Leah was getting into the party lifestyle, she had taken Leah aside and slapped the sense back into her. Now, they preferred to have their alcohol while comfortably situated in their living room. Less mess and much more convenient for passing out.

  “Come on,” Will said with a low laugh. “Let’s get out of here before Finn starts telling you what color my pants are.”

  “They’re dark gray,” Finn said, and then snickered when Will shoved him.

  Leah glanced down at his jeans. They were dark blue, not gray. She was missing something here.

  “He means his underwear,” Andy said loudly. Some nearby college students looked over at them, expressions curious. One of them even scoped out the boys’ waists to look for peeking underwear. “Took me a while to figure that one out too.”

  The corner of Leah’s mouth quirked into a crooked smile. Maybe she and Finn would have a talk one of these days.

  “Is your underwear a common topic?” she asked Will. This didn’t bother her in the least.

  “I wish it weren’t.”

  “Where’d you two meet anyway?” Andy asked, leaning too close to Leah again and wavering unsteadily. Finn gave him a none-too-gentle shove. It didn’t seem to faze him. “You go to REU?”

  “Save the questions for when you’re sober so I won’t have to tell you everything twice,” Will said with a small laugh. He nudged Andy toward their other friends. “Who’s DD? Make sure you get his keys from him.”

  “You got it, Scotty,” one of them said before Andy muttered something about having to piss. They dragged him off toward the bathroom.

  With a hand at Leah’s elbow and an apologetic look for his friends, Will guided her to an empty stool at the bar.

  “They’re lucky Scotty was awesome,” she said. She shook her head when the bartender asked if she wanted anything. Will ordered soda, which hopefully meant he was no longer nervous.

  “You’ve watched Star Trek?”

  “Just the movies. I’m surprised you’ve watched Star Trek.”

  “Finn is a fan.” Will gave a small shrug and then paused in such a way that Leah knew he was thinking about how to ask something. “When you left my apartment that night, you said you couldn’t believe you had put up with the therapy for me. But you’d been attending the meetings for a long while before I showed up.”

  Leah grimaced. “My roommate made me promise to attend twenty sessions for getting us burglarized.”

  “And that first time you kissed me, you told the counselor you’d been attending for twenty weeks.” A slow smirk twisted his mouth. “You didn’t have to keep coming back, but you did.”

  “Don’t look so satisfied. You said you quit the project, but you kept coming back too.”

  He gave a short laugh, and his smile turned sheepish. “That’s true. But you wouldn’t give me your name so I didn’t know how else to find you.”

  There was a brief silence as both of them awkwardly acknowledged attending therapy and listening to the lurid tales of their fellow members for no other reason than to see each other. What would the counselor think of that?

  Leah was admiring the way the smoky air added a dreamy quality to his blue eyes when a rough hand came down on her shoulder.

  “Hey! Remember me?” a scruffy-looking guy with a goatee asked, leaning in much too close.

  He was kind of cute. And vaguely familiar.

  Shit. Dread spilled into her stomach.

  She pushed his hand off her shoulder and fixed him with a look of cool distaste. She hoped it would make him leave. “Should I?”

  The guy leered. “I could remind you,” he said, before dropping his eyes to her cleavage. Her face grew warm with anger and embarrassment.

  She wasn’t ashamed of her past. She might have used sex as a substitute for a real relationship, but she wasn’t defined by who she slept with. And whatever Helena believed, it wasn’t an addiction. She had screwed up, and she had learned from it. She didn’t care what anyone thought of her anyway.

  But she did care about what Will thought of her.

  Will stood, a dark look tightening the lines of his face at the same time Goatee gave Leah a lewd smile and said, “I heard there’s a nympho on campus. Know who it might be?”

  A hand gripped Goatee’s shoulder and pulled him back. Finn inserted himself neatly between Leah and Goatee, and released a dramatic sigh before she could even think of a response.

  “You’re completely right,” he said, stepping into Goatee’s personal space. “It’s me. Want to join me in the men’s bathroom?”

  Goatee gave Finn a disgusted look before stumbling off in confusion.

  Once he was gone, Finn turned to face them with a triumphant grin. “I owed you one for being a dumbass at the theater.”


  “Thanks,” she said and meant it.

  Will laughed and brushed his fingers over her arm. Warmth tingled through her skin.

  “So,” she said once Finn had wandered back to his corner of the bar, “where are you taking me for our second date?”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Two months later

  Leah had given herself one rule in her relationship with Will. No sex for two months. She maintained she never had a full-blown addiction, and the fact she hadn’t had sex in over six months—not since the burglary—reassured her of this. Even Helena had begun to ask when she would put them both out of their misery and just sleep with him. But Leah wanted to be absolutely, one hundred percent certain that sex wouldn’t play a factor in how she felt for Will.

  She hadn’t told him this, of course, but he seemed to understand because any time a kiss got too heavy and she pulled away, he responded only with a small smile and gentle fingers against her cheek. He’d been excruciatingly patient, taking only what she would give while still making her head spin and her heart pound.

  Now, as they stumbled into his bedroom, she was more than ready to resume what she had stopped over two months ago.

  Thirty minutes earlier, she and Will had been leaving the theater where they’d gone to see the final showing of Finn’s play. She had nudged Will’s jaw with her hand while lifting to her toes to whisper in his ear.

  “You once promised to let me feel you inside me, pressing me into the bed.”

  Will had gone perfectly still. And then he’d turned his head and caught her mouth in a kiss so hot that the sun might have burned with envy.

  The drive from campus to his apartment had felt impossibly long, especially with him thwarting her attempts to undo his pants while he drove. Admittedly, that was probably smart of him.

  The moment the apartment door shut behind them, she had wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. Limbs and mouths tangled, they had careened down the hallway into his bedroom and collapsed onto the bed without breaking the kiss.

  She felt too hot in her own skin, as if a fire had been ignited inside her bones, burning everywhere he touched her. Heat crackled between them, making her arch her hips up into Will's and moan at the sweet pressure.

  He pulled her shirt off, eager hands making him clumsy, and he laughed when the shirt caught on her elbow. She freed herself before allowing a laugh to escape as well. They had been looking forward to this for so long that neither could believe it was finally happening.

  He grasped her arm, gently turning it so he could place a light kiss on her elbow where her shirt had left a red imprint in her skin. Smiling, she dragged her fingers through his tousled hair.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind remained the lingering fear that she would lose interest in him after this, but it was hard to imagine that happening.

  With how much time she spent in his apartment, she practically lived here already. And Elijah was quite attached to him as well, which doubled the stakes.

  That's what Leah told herself anyway, as Will trailed a series of hot kisses down her chest to the edge of her lace bra.

  It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she was utterly, crushingly in love with him.

  He unclasped her bra, this time with careful, deft fingers, and she shrugged it off, tossing it aside. With one hand at the small of her back, and the other tracing the bottom swell of her breast, he lowered his head and closed his mouth over her nipple. She gasped, his mouth chasing away her sanity as she fumbled to release the button of his jeans. He drew away, sliding off the mattress to finish undressing, and she shivered at the loss of his heat. Impatient and wanting, she quickly discarded the rest of her clothes as well, kicking off her panties in what was probably an incredibly unsexy move.

  By the smile on his face, her impatience amused him, but she could see the same desperate quality in the way his eyes roved over her. The way he looked at her, as if he couldn’t get enough, as if he didn’t want to miss a single detail, made her feel self-conscious as she hadn’t felt since the first time she’d lost her virginity to a German exchange student. Will made her feel like there had never been anyone else before him.

  He tugged off his shirt until he was left in nothing but dark boxer briefs. She sucked in her bottom lip, basking in the sight of all that smooth, golden skin. Too many times in the last two months, she’d caught him coming out of the shower, damp and gorgeous and begging to have the lingering water droplets licked off his skin. Every time, she had resisted. But not this time.

  She crawled over the mattress until she reached the edge and her fingers found the waist of his boxer briefs. She helped slide them down over lean hips and corded thighs. Once he’d pushed them aside to join the rest of their clothes on the floor, she straightened, kneeling on the very edge of the bed. Her fingers gripped his hips, jerking him forward so that they were pressed skin to skin, her aching breasts against his chest and his hard length pressed tight against her stomach. Her lips skimmed over the curve of his shoulder, the ridge of his collarbone, the muscle in the side of his neck. She bit down gently.

  With a groan, he tipped her face up and kissed her again, his tongue sweeping through her mouth and making her tremble. Unable to wait any longer, she drew back and tugged him with her onto the bed.

  She lay back against the sheets, cool against her flushed skin. Will followed, kneeling over her, his lips never leaving her for more than a breath.

  His hands traced the curve of her waist, frustratingly light, before his fingers trailed down her stomach and lower. She bit her lip and released a quiet moan. Those deft fingers flitted over her and then pressed in. She gasped and spread her legs, drawing up her knees. Her toes curled into the sheets. His mouth lowered to her nipple, pressing a kiss to it before taking it into his mouth. Lifting up onto her elbows, she leaned into him and dragged her teeth down his shoulder.

  She wanted him so badly and she’d been waiting for so long that she didn’t even care for foreplay. She reached down between their bodies and took him in hand, relishing the way his blue eyes darkened with hunger and the way his lashes fluttered shut.

  “I don’t want to wait,” she whispered and hooked one of her legs over his hip. She dug her blunt nails into his chest as he slowly withdrew his fingers.

  She held her breath as he drew away just long enough to slip on a condom. Then he pulled her other leg over his hip as well and positioned himself. When he finally entered her, she whimpered with pleasure and allowed that strange thing that she only felt with this one guy take over.

  Trust.

  Will rested his weight on his elbows as he began to move. Lifting her head, she pressed her face into the crook of his neck as the world spun. Her legs tightened around his waist, needing him deeper, faster, even as she laughed breathlessly at the bliss running up and down her spine. Her hands glided over his shoulder blades, his back, lower until she gripped his ass. His muscles contracted and shifted against her palms as he thrust into her, and she tightened her grip, encouraging him to move harder, closer.

  She had never felt this happy during sex. For the first time, she knew and loved and trusted the guy she was in bed with, and it felt like something Jane Austen might have written about. If she had been prone to writing erotica. (She would bet that would have made a lot of Mr. Darcy fans happy.)

  She held him close as he moved over her, inside her, reveling in the intimacy in a way she never had—never could—before. His fingers dug into her skin as he thrust faster, and she gloried in the delicious dominance of it. She would never admit it to Will, but allowing him full control, at least this time, felt right. Exhilarating even.

  But next time, she got to be on top.

  She cried out as he hit just the right angle. The sound seemed to push him into some wild, uncontrolled place, and he pressed their mouths together, kissing her deeply. His movements became more frenzied as their shallow breaths grew uneven against each other’s lips. The heat gr
ew overwhelming. Her nails slid on skin damp with sweat as her orgasm corkscrewed ever tighter.

  “Will,” she gasped as she came, muscles clenching, shuddering into his embrace.

  “Almost there,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice even now. A moment later, he lowered his head to breathe into her hair, and then the muscles in his back tightened beneath her hands as he thrust deep, once, body trembling. She felt him pulse inside her, and her thoughts unraveled at the knowledge.

  Afterward, as they lay entwined, she stared up at the shadows carved across the ceiling and breathed. It seemed all she was capable of at the moment, the steady inhalation and exhalation of air.

  She found that was perfectly fine with her.

  She didn’t remember much of what happened afterward. She must have fallen asleep because Will woke her up right before dawn for another round, which she happily accepted.

  Another few hours of sleep later, Leah awoke to a warm block of sunlight falling across her face from the window. The space beside her was empty, but she wasn’t worried. She recalled briefly waking when he’d gotten up, along with the feel of his fingers sliding down her cheek and his lips against her temple.

  As she allowed her brain the time to fully wake up, she thought about everything she had to do that day. Bake cookies and watch an episode of their latest anime favorite with Elijah. Tease Helena about her date with Jay. Brave the mall and her first time Christmas shopping for Will, who had refused to pick out a gift for himself. She supposed she’d just have to surprise him then.

  She also had to finish settling Elijah into her apartment. After nearly two months of flimsy protests from her mom, Leah had finally lost her patience and moved Elijah and his things to her place without their parents’ permission. Aside from an angry voicemail demanding Leah call her back, her mom hadn’t done much in retaliation. Leah should have expected as much, but she had still stupidly thought the woman might care about Elijah enough to actually fight to keep him.