“You should go,” she says again.
But then she’s pulling me to her, crushing her lips against mine. For a moment, I’m blinded by a bolt of lust. I kiss her back, breathing hard.
She reaches between my legs. Cups my erection in her hand. She thumbs the tip of my dick through my shorts.
I am so fucking attracted to this girl—I want her so badly—I can’t see straight.
I take her waist in my hands. She moves into me, the muscles in the small of her back tightening as I firm my grip.
Rachel kisses me hard. Messy. It’s desperate, this kiss.
It’s desperate because it’s our last one.
I put everything I can’t say to her in this kiss. The regret. The longing.
The love.
She presses her hips into mine. I grunt.
And then I lift her up, holding her as I take one, two impatient steps across the room. I set her down on the edge of her desk. Pencils and notebooks spill everywhere, falling to the floor with a clatter. The lamp hits the wall.
Rachel doesn’t stop kissing me as I stand between her legs.
I’m going to miss you like crazy, I tell her with my mouth. My lips move to her jaw, her chin, her throat. She pants, reaching inside the waistband of my shorts. Her fingers find my dick. They are warm. Sure.
I bite her, just beneath her ear lobe. She cries out.
My hands fall to the hem of her shirt.
“Yes,” she whispers, holding up her arms. I peel it off her, tossing it aside. She reaches behind her and unhooks her bra. For a second I just stare. Her breasts are perfect, round and full. Her nipples are hardened to dark points, begging to be touched.
I duck my head and take one in my mouth. Her head falls back. Her whole torso falls back.
I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
I unbutton her jeans. Unzip the fly. She lifts her hips, and I tug her jeans and underwear down to her knees. She kicks them off and wraps her legs around me, spreading them a bit. Inviting me in.
I reach down and run two fingers up her slit. It makes me want to cry again, how wet she is. How soft and hot and perfect.
I sink those two fingers inside her tight heat. Her hips surge to meet my fingers. I glide my thumb over her clit. She gasps, the girliest, wildest sound.
I don’t wait. I can’t.
I pull my fingers out of her and I pull down my shorts and I take my dick in my hand and guide it to her entrance.
I bend my head and dig my teeth into her neck. Then I grasp the back of her thighs and yank her onto me, bucking my hips so that I sink to the hilt inside her in one swift, smooth motion.
My eyes snap shut. She feels so sweet around me. Her arms tighten around my neck, pulling me close. I begin to move, deep, gutting strokes that make the desk bang against the wall again and again and again. Everyone in the building will hear us.
I don’t give a fuck.
I’m losing my girl. How could I care about such a thing when I’m losing the only girl I’ve ever loved?
I kiss her mouth. The scent of her perfume has me reeling. I slow my pace. I want to make this last as long as I possibly can. Because when we’re done…
That’s it.
Rachel won’t be mine anymore to taste like this, to touch like this.
She won’t be mine. And that fucking tears my heart out.
I kiss her gently. Deeply. She kisses me back. She’s crying again, her tears falling on both our faces, onto my lips.
Her pussy clenches around me.
“Fred—Fred, I’m coming—” she gasps.
My orgasm is on me then, too. It’s coming, I’m coming, I’m coming apart.
“No,” I grunt. Plead. “Not yet.”
But Rachel comes, her impossibly tight pulses making me come, too. I wrap an arm around her waist and clench her to me, burying my head in her neck as I’m hit by wave after wave of excruciating sensation. The hot seep of cum spreads between our bodies. I’ve made a mess of her desk.
She’s made a mess of me.
Dear God, how am I going to leave her?
We’re left panting and spent. I kiss her, one last, lingering kiss, and then I rest my forehead on hers, closing my eyes. I wrap my palm around the nape of her neck, holding her tightly. Both of us are breathing hard.
Both of us are crying.
“Jesus, you’re good at this,” Rachel says.
“Good at what?”
“Well, you’re good at everything. But right now I’m talking about sex,” she replies. “I don’t know where you learned how—”
“I learned from you.”
Rachel pulls back and looks me in the eye.
“You learned from me? Were the other girls you slept with not…you know, decent in bed?”
Shit, I can’t breathe. I can’t bloody breathe when she’s looking at me like this.
“There were no other girls,” I say. “You were my first. My only.”
***
Rachel
My heart throbs, swells, breaks into a million pieces.
Not only did Fred like me enough to break all his rules. He also gave me this incredible gift—the gift of his trust, his virginity.
And now I’m leaving.
The girl he gave everything to is fucking leaving him.
How tragic is that?
“Fred,” I stammer. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Are you mad?” he asks.
“No!” I say. “No, of course I’m not mad. I mean, your sex life is your business. I just never would’ve guessed…”
He shrugs. “I didn’t want to scare you away. I wanted to enjoy the time we had. I love how much you respect me, I love how you have respect for my rules. But all that went out the window in Salamanca. I wanted to be with you in every way I could. If I told you I was a virgin, I don’t think you would have let things go as far as they did.”
I look at him. “But you wanted them to go that far.”
“Yes,” he says. “I still do.”
I look away. Hang my head. Start crying all over again, harder this time. My heart feels like a balloon inside my chest, squeezing all my other organs, making it difficult to breathe. I’ve never felt pain like this. Real, raw pain that has me clawing at Fred’s chest.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For giving it to me. For trusting me like you did.”
He kisses me on the top of my forehead.
“Thank you,” he says. “For everything.”
***
Fred
The intensity of my desire to stay here with Rachel terrifies me. What the hell am I going to do with myself for the rest of the afternoon? The rest of the week?
The rest of my life?
“Fred.” Rachel puts her palms on my chest. My heart is hammering. “You should go.”
I meet her eyes. It must be too much for her, the eye contact, because she closes hers. Tears leak out of them anyway.
I kiss each eyelid, smoothing back the tears. “All right,” I say.
I clutch her to me one last time.
And then I let her go.
Chapter 20
Rachel
Thursday
My carry-on slung over my shoulder, I look up at the aisle numbers as I make my way toward the back of the plane. It’s gigantic, the kind of plane with about ten seats in each of its fifty rows. Maybe that’s why this feels like a death march.
It won’t freaking end.
My eyes start to burn and the numbers blur.
Oh, no, not again. I cried all day yesterday, packing up my shit. I cried all the way to the airport this morning. My eyes are practically open wounds, they’re so sore and swollen from crying.
But I still managed to make it. I’m here, I’m getting on this plane, and I’m going home to pursue my sports medicine dreams. I have an exciting future to look forward to. This summer is going to be awesome.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
Yeah, it hurts to leave Fred
behind. It hurts more than I thought it would. I keep waiting to snap out of it. I’m making the right choice. The smart choice. I should be feeling good about that.
A part of me is. But then a large part of me really, really isn’t. I mean, I took the guy’s virginity. He gave it to me, freely, even though he’s been saving it for someone—something—special for years now. How am I supposed to process that? How is that supposed to make me feel?
I find my seat—praise Jesus, I somehow managed to snag a window seat when I checked in yesterday online—and plop down. I dig my phone out of my bag and shoot Mom a text. Boarded. See you on the ground.
See you soon, she texts back. Have a safe flight. Lots to talk about when you land.
I let my head fall back into the headrest with a thump. I’m dreading that conversation. I have to stay strong and stick to my guns, but it’s not going to be easy.
I called the Meryton Athletic Director this morning and officially accepted the internship. There’s no going back now, not if I don’t want to be blackballed by the athletic department for life.
Still. Fred’s right. Mom is a bully. I totally expect her to put the full court press on me when I get home to pick surgery over sports medicine. I just hope I’m strong enough on my own to make it through the holidays without breaking. I have two and a half weeks until classes start again at Meryton. I can make it two and a half weeks.
At least I hope I can.
While I wait for the boarding process to wrap up—on a plane this big it takes a while—I pull up my texts with Fred. I promised myself I wouldn’t, because it’s torture reading them, seeing how head over heels we were for each other. But I take a sick satisfaction in pretending I’m back in the thick of the excitement and the anticipation of being Fred’s girlfriend, the two of us texting sweet nothings throughout the day just because we could.
I love closing my eyes and pretending today will go exactly how the past three Thursdays have gone: I’m at Fred’s apartment. We just woke up. We’re about to have sex for the eighth time in as many hours. When we’re done, we’ll make French toast. Then I’ll go to class, and he’ll go to training, and when he’s done he’ll send me a shameless selfie of himself without a shirt on in. He’ll invite me out that night for beers at our favorite bar. I’ll spend the afternoon shopping for a smexy dress to wear—something I’ll have to go commando for. I’ve never been fingered in public before, but there’s a first time for everything…
I swallow the lump in my throat. It’s agony, remembering how wonderful our time together was.
But we are not meant to be.
With a sigh, I put my phone away and grab the book I just bought at kiosk by the airport food court. I tried to pick the driest, least romantic thing possible—Don Quixote in the original medieval Spanish—but two minutes in, and my eyes are already blurring with tears again.
I wish it’d stop hurting—the knowledge that I won’t ever see Fred again. Well, except on TV. Which is horrible, because every time I’ll see him, I know I’ll wonder if he ever thinks of me. If he misses me.
And then there’s the fact that there won’t be any more Nutella French toast. No more Harry Potter musings. No more beers over a homemade dinner. No more naked mornings, no more happy, squinty green eyes.
It’s the little things that get me the most. Like the way he drove—one enormous hand on the steering wheel, his grip confident—and how lit up he’d get when we talked football stats.
I miss how good he looked naked. I miss how good he looked in sweats on the sofa, the two of us curled up in front of a new episode of Tournament of Kings.
I miss him.
I squeeze my eyes shut. I take some deep breaths, try to focus on the fact that I nabbed my dream internship. I’m going to work in sports medicine! It’s going to be awesome! I stood up to mom and took ownership of my life! Yay!
Too bad I feel not so yay-exclamation-point. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of how far I’ve come this semester and what I’ve accomplished.
But I wish I was on a plane to Germany right now, not Dallas. Fred would be beside me; we’d order beers from the flight attendant, and he’d tell me a story about his mom, or maybe his sister, or maybe even a story about baby Lilli. He’s told me so many stories, I feel like I already know his family.
I would really liked to have met the Ohrs.
Shit, I’m crying again. I dig my sunglasses out of my bag and shove them on my face.
This flight is going to suck.
***
Fred
That Night
I keep my head down as I follow the lads into the locker room. We slaughtered Valencia—it’s our last match of the year before everyone heads home for the holidays—and the mood in the room is jubilant. Lads laugh and holler as they toe off their boots and roll down their socks and unwind the tape from their ankles, their wrists, their fingers.
No one says much to me; I’ve been avoiding human contact more than usual the past couple days. It never used to bother me, the fact that I didn’t have much to do with the lads, and they didn’t have much to do with me. But now, for some reason, it rankles.
It makes me feel lonelier than ever.
I am so bloody lonely since Rachel and I broke up. Lonely and bored and tired. I keep giving myself pep talks, and I spend a good deal of time on the phone with my agent, the two of us gloating over the extravagant numbers the club is throwing out to keep me in Madrid for another five years.
“You’re at the top of your game, Fred,” he’d said. “I’m not bullshitting you when I say I’ve never been this excited about a client. You’re a fucking ten, mate, and you’re only twenty-two! To think you’re just starting your career. You’re going places. Big places.”
A month ago, this conversation would’ve excited me to the point that I couldn’t sleep. And I am excited. My dreams are coming true. Never in a million years did I think I’d get this far, that I’d play this well, that I’d make this much money.
After I hang up, though, the loneliness returns, worse than before. It’s almost like football isn’t enough anymore. It’s not enough to light me up the way it used to.
It’s probably just a phase. I’m going through the worst of it right now, at least according to Sophie. These feelings of rawness and loneliness will pass. They have to. Right?
I mean, Rachel and I made our choice. We chose to chase our dreams. And my dreams are coming true. I’m winning matches. I’m winning at life, as awful and conceited as that sounds.
I just didn’t think this victory would feel so…hollow, I guess.
I shove my dirty shit in my locker and slam the door.
Alexsandr, whose locker is beside mine, looks up from peeling off his shin guards.
“Want to talk about it?” he says.
“No.”
“I’m really sorry about what happened with you and Rachel.”
I glare at him. “And what do you think happened with me and Rachel?”
He has the grace to look a little sheepish. “I heard a rumor or two from Rhys about you guys breaking up…”
“It’s nothing,” I snap, tugging a towel around my waist. “We had our fun. But she had to go home to the states, and I’m staying here…that’s all there is to it.”
“But last time we talked, you told me you were crazy about her—”
“I’m just anxious to get home for the holidays, that’s all,” I say. I don’t want to talk about this. Not now. I’m worried if I do—well.
I won’t be able to control myself.
“Right. Of course.” Alexsandr offers me a tight smile. “But if you do want to talk about it, I’m here, yeah?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I say, and I turn and stalk toward the showers.
Chapter 21
Rachel
Six Months Later—June
Durham, North Carolina
Meryton University
On paper, today should’ve been the best day ever.
In the afternoon, Brendan, one of the best physiologists in the country who also happens to be my mentor (!), takes me to lunch with the athletic director. Our swimming program is in hot water following a scandal (the director laughs, hard, at his own pun), and he asks my opinion on how to bring it back from the brink. My answer must make an impression, because when lunch is over, he shakes my hand and tells me to email him directly for any recommendations I may need for graduate school applications.
“We’re always looking for passionate, smart people like you,” he says. “When you’re ready to look for jobs, be sure to keep us in mind.”
I smile at the compliment. A year ago, an exchange like this would’ve had me doing cartwheels, giddy with excitement. It is a wonderful feeling, knowing I’m appreciated; knowing I’m doing well enough here to merit such praise. I’m making my dreams come true. Everything I ever hoped would happen, career wise, is happening. It’s a major victory.
But at the same time, that victory feels a little hollow. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m lonely. Lost.
It doesn’t change the fact that I still miss Fred like crazy. No amount of success or praise or 16-hour days spent doing what I love most seems to change that. It’s like I’ve gone back to being the boy underneath the stairs after flying so high at Hogwarts. Terrible metaphor, I know. But it’s true. This loneliness—it’s worse now that I’ve experienced the joy of real companionship.
Lessons In Losing It (Study Abroad Book 4) Page 20