“Get on the bed with me,” I murmur, but Cal just locks his blue gaze with mine, his face shrouded in the half-dark. His hood is still pushed back, blond hair an ashy gold color in the shadows of the room.
“Not yet.” He kisses his way back up my leg, running his tongue along the length of my thigh as I lean back on my elbows and try to remember to breathe. When I do manage to catch my breath, pulling in a sharp inhale, the sound is loud. “Focus on keeping your breathing slow and controlled for me.”
He pushes my knees apart with gentle fingers tipped in blue nails, putting his mouth up against the front of my panties. Slowly, Cal presses his lips and tongue against my core, teasing my body through the fabric.
My heartrate picks up, and I struggle to swallow a groan of longing. Too slow, too drawn-out. I just want him to tear that slip of silk off, so he can fuck me. But maybe that’s the prize I didn’t win tonight?
My body turns speckled with beads of sweat as Cal holds my trembling legs apart, kissing and sucking at the fabric over the aching heat of my core. The need for him to go further becomes almost unbearable, and I lift my hands to my own breasts, squeezing them through my shirt and bra as I close my eyes.
One of Cal’s palms skims up my belly and under my shirt until it’s resting against my heart.
“Still so jumpy,” he murmurs, pulling his mouth away and then sitting up. He moves his right hand to my waist, matching its position on my other side with his left. I open my eyes to find that he’s still watching me, sliding his hands up and catching the hem of my shirt with his thumbs. Cal lifts it up and over my head, tossing it aside and then pressing his mouth against my lower belly.
He licks his way up, using those careful fingers of his to pull the cups of my bra down, freeing my breasts and the hardened pink points of my nipples to the warm air. It’s cozy inside this house, even if it’s bitingly cold outside. Aaron’s done a good job, making this place feel like home.
My hands dig into Callum’s blond hair as he puts his mouth to one of my nipples, sucking and licking, savoring the taste of me with a low murmur of appreciation.
“This is a good test for me, too,” he breathes, biting down on my right nipple and making me cry out. I curse myself under my breath, but if I listen carefully, I can still hear the girls shrieking and playing on the other side of the wall. Nobody heard me. Not yet anyway. “There’s so much more I could be doing to you right now.”
I shiver as his hands drift along my ribs to my upper back, unhooking my bra and letting it fall to my lap.
“Get on the bed,” he tells me, his voice dark and low, his own hands shaking as he stands up, wincing slightly with the movement and then rubbing at one of his knees. That’s the most damaged part of him, the most scarred. I can only imagine the constant pain he must live with.
I nestle into the pillows, hoping he’ll get naked before he joins me. Instead, he stays fully clothed, boots and all, as he climbs onto the bed. Starting at my left foot, he kisses his way back up and over the mound of pale hair between my thighs, getting just close enough to my clit to make me squirm without actually taking away any of that desperate aching.
His right hand covers my bare breast, kneading the soft round weight with his fingers as he licks around the nipple on the opposite side. His tongue is hot and slick, but he keeps it just far enough away from the pink point that it feels like I’m going crazy.
“Breathe,” he repeats, placing a palm flat on my chest as he lifts his mouth to mine, kissing me with slow, languid movements that promise we have all the time in the world. In reality, we’re both functioning on borrowed time. With all the shit we have going on, we know that forever cannot and will not be promised by anyone or anything.
Callum bites my lower lip hard, stopping just short of making me bleed, pressing down on my chest with his hand to keep me calm. It’s a struggle, especially as he kisses along the edge of my jaw to my ear, and bites that, too. I’m writhing now, but at least I’m still breathing, and very quietly, too. That, and I’m not making a single other sound, not even when he begins to suck on my neck, tasting my thrumming pulse with his tongue.
My legs spread wide, wrapping around him, wanting more and finding myself denied. He won’t grind against me, won’t touch me between the thighs. At least, he doesn’t for a good fifteen minutes. Maybe more. Maybe a half an hour.
“Callum, I can’t take it,” I admit as he nuzzles into that hollow space between my neck and shoulder, biting me there, too. I’m soaked in sweat now, absolutely drenched. God knows how long we’ve been in here.
On the positive side, Kali’s ghost seems to have disappeared again. That’s a good sign, right?
Without warning, Cal sneaks his hand between my thighs and slides two fingers into the molten heat of my core before I can even register that he’s taken my words seriously. His thumb slicks my own juices up and over my clit, massaging that as he fucks me with his hand, just as slow and easy as he kissed me.
My fingers curl together behind his neck as he stares down at me, so much less vulnerable since he’s clothed and I’m not. I decide to go for it and reach my right hand between us, searching for his cock.
It’s thick and hot under my palm, even with his jean shorts between us.
“Sometimes you have to wait,” Cal tells me, taking my wrist in his hand pushing it into the bed above my head. “Even if the waiting’s longer than you’d like. Then, when it’s time, you strike. That’s how I move the way I do. I wait, I watch, and I never try to take something before it’s time. You, for example. Bernie, I waited a long, long time to take you.”
He drives a third finger into me, and my hips buck up off the bed, body pulsing around his hand. I’m thrusting against him, digging my nails into the shoulders of his hoodie and wishing I could tear it right off.
He doesn’t change his pace, moving his fingers in and out until he’s able to add a fourth. His lips tease the hollow of my throat, and then he bites down hard, slamming his hand into me over and over and over until I’m coming so hard that I see stars, that I groan so loud I bet every nosy ass neighbor on that street can hear me.
And then I collapse, boneless and shaking, into the sheets.
Cal sits up and then wipes his hand on his hoodie with a small, secretive smile playing on his fairy-tale lips.
“I have to wash this tonight anyway,” he explains, leaning down one final time to press a kiss to my lower belly. “You did well, Bernadette.”
I say nothing as Callum stands up and leaves the room. By the time I get dressed again and head out into the living room, he’s already gone back to his grandmother’s place.
Unlike Oscar, however, I know that Cal isn’t running away. Instead, he’s trying to teach me something.
Good things come to those who wait.
I’m determined to graduate. I don’t want gang leader’s girlfriend to be my only lifetime accomplishment. Besides, I’d be the first woman on my mother’s side to actually finish high school and get her diploma. That, and there’s always the chance that something will happen, that we won’t get the money. It seems too good to be true, and when something seems that way, it usually is.
When I tell this to Vic, he looks at me like I’m nuts.
“First off, I do want you to graduate, so don’t take this the wrong way.” He steps up close to me, smelling too good to be real. Too male to be sane. “Gang leader’s wife, first off.” I roll my eyes, but Victor’s smirking at me because he knows he’s got me. “And this will work out. Just trust me.”
“Trust you when you ask about an annulment like it could be a good thing?”
He stares back at me as I sit on the edge of the bed in panties and a bra. I haven’t gotten dressed for school yet. To be honest, I’m dreading it. First thing I thought when I opened my eyes today was why the fuck do I have to go back there, to Prescott motherfucking High?
But goddamn it, I’m going to finish high school if it kills me.
The thing is,
it just might …
“What do you make of James Barrasso being at that club?” I ask, and I can see the muscles in Vic’s back tighten. He turns around, a pair of jeans slung over his arm. He hasn’t gotten dressed either; I can see his dick. I intend to keep this view for as long as is feasibly possible.
“Trouble,” he tells me which isn’t really an answer at all.
We ride his bike together to the school, park at the curb, climb out like everything is normal. There are extra cops here, sure, but that’s nothing new. It’s not Sara Young’s presence, or Detective Constantine’s that makes everything feel so surreal, like one of those awful paintings at the art gallery, some cubist nightmare come to life.
It’s the fact that Kali isn’t here.
Mitch isn’t here.
Logan isn’t here.
None of the Ensbrook brothers are here.
I sit down in Mr. Darkwood’s class first thing, black-painted fingernails tapping out the rhythm to MISSIO’s song “Twisted”. The Charter Crew is absent, but so are a lot of kids. This is fucking Prescott High for fuck’s sake. People go missing or run away or quit all the time.
Still … this is different.
I had my hands around Kali’s throat. Aaron shot her. She’s gone and she isn’t coming back.
“Boo,” Cal says at lunch, and I jump. I don’t mean to, and he smiles sadly at me when it happens, but it’s just more proof that something isn’t quite right here.
“I don’t like what’s happening,” I tell the boys in the cafeteria, just waiting for that first summons to the principal’s office. I’m nowhere near untangling myself from Sara Young. I just have to hope I can lead her in the right direction. If not, she might end up in the same position as Kali. “Something doesn’t feel right.”
“Because it’s not,” Oscar agrees, sitting at the table with his iPad. He’s wearing contacts again today. He’s been wearing them quite a lot actually. It took me an entire week to figure out why he wasn’t wearing his glasses as often: his face hurts. Of course, he’d never tell me that himself, but I caught him in the bathroom, sliding his glasses onto his nose and cringing. I pretended that I didn’t catch his flinch. “I don’t like the fact that Barrasso was at the club. And I don’t like Trinity Jade.”
“At least the school is under control,” Aaron says, observing the other students. We’ve been treated like royalty since we arrived on campus this morning. Nobody wants to ask where Mitch or Kyler or Logan are, where Kali is. Because they already know the answer to that.
Don’t mess with Havoc unless you’re willing to pay the price. And since people keep forcing our hands, we’re all growing up much faster than we should be. Our bites are most definitely worse than our barks.
“Not you, though, Bernadette. Because you didn’t kill me. You wouldn’t.” Kali’s ghost sits beside me, a frustrating reminder of my own fragile morality.
I exhale and stretch my knuckles.
“Prescott High is peaceful, but the city’s in a turmoil,” I say, because I can feel it. People are looking at us who never noticed us before. And not the right kind of people either. Our age no longer protects us.
“I’m meeting with my mother today,” Victor announces, pushing his math homework forward. I’ve never noticed before that he’s in calculus. I didn’t think anyone but Oscar was in calculus at Prescott High. It’s not even really a class. The regular math teacher—Miss Addie—just prints out course material from an online college class and uses that for any advanced students. “She wants my answer about the annulment.”
“It’d be safer for Bernadette,” Aaron offers up, drawing Victor’s unnerving focus and attention. For a second there, I’m convinced that Vic is going to start a fight with Aaron, or that Aaron is going to push so hard and so fast that Victor has no choice but to defend his authority.
“It would be. That’s why I’m agreeing to it.”
A shock tears through me, one that makes me feel cold and empty for the briefest of seconds. My hands curl into fists, but I keep the rest of what I’m feeling from showing on my face.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Hael asks as he looks between Callum and Aaron for help. He knows better than to look at Oscar; we both know how likely it is that Vic’s already talked this out with him. I remember Oscar’s words from the other day, too, when he said he never should’ve let Vic marry me.
I half-expect Victor to raise his chin and proclaim that he’d never in a million years, in a trillion sunrises and sunsets, ever consider an annulment. Fuck, I’m his, and he’s mine, and we both know that. The other half of me knows that this is what I should’ve expected the second that offer was made. Vic Channing is nothing if not opportunistic. He knows exactly when and where and how to play his hand.
Shit, look at me. This entire situation, this whole fucking scenario, is just a manifestation of a game he’s been playing by himself since ninth grade. A bet against the universe. He wagered me in it, and then he won me back forever. That’s supposed to be the point, isn’t it? Why I accept all of his bullshit like it’s fate?
But Victor is doing what a smart leader would. He’s playing into a game that has a lot of variables, that can be manipulated and turned into a sure thing for him to win. He stares back at me, tapping his fingertips against the tabletop, waiting for me to say something.
Instead, it’s Hael who gets irrationally upset. Part of me feels it’s because he has abandonment issues, because his father chose dark instincts and murder over his son. But what the shit do I know? I’m just a no-nothing from Prescott High. Wearing that red-and-black gown the other night, sitting in the back of that limo, it was easy to forget. I feel huge on the inside, like a star that’s burning so hot it’s pulling planets into orbit.
Every teenager feels like that, Bernadette, I think to myself as Hael slams his palms on the cafeteria table and leans in to glare at Oscar.
“This is all you, man, I can smell it all over you.”
“How so?” Oscar asks, acting like when I arched my back, stretched my arms above my head, and yawned this morning, that I didn’t press my ass into him and fuck the first man I found. Wasn’t even sure who I was screwing at first, not until he curved long fingers around my throat and drove into me like I was the be-all, end-all of his existence. I never got the chance to ask him how we ended up in bed together in the first place, considering I was sleeping with Vic.
“You talked him into this nonsense,” Hael growls, standing up and shaking his head with a laugh. “Seriously, man. I get we have to play our hand carefully, but this is the coward’s way out of this.”
“You don’t actually think I’m going forward with the plan to give that genteel, little trollop my money?” Vic asks, but his voice is strange, too, a bit hollow. But then he glances back at me, his purple-dark hair slicked back, a single piece loose and falling across his forehead. If someone told me he was a ghost from the fifties, I might believe them. Well, except for the sleeves of tattoos that color his muscles. He looks sure of himself, as always.
“I’m not the one freaking out,” I say, which is totally a Bernie thing to say. My bloodied red hair hangs over my shoulders as I blink, nice and slow, holding Victor’s stare.
I never wanted to be anybody’s wife. I don’t even care about being Vic’s wife. It’s just a piece of a paper. It’s a contract to marital slavery, a pair of shackles sent by the patriarchy to choke and chain me. Yet now that the idea’s been brought up to dissolve it like it was nothing, I feel sick to my stomach.
“So, you go to dinner tonight and tell her yes? Then what?” Aaron asks, but I’m not listening to him. I’m focusing on my breathing like Callum taught me. My eyes slide to Oscar’s. He’s sitting on the tabletop, long legs folded at the knee, wearing a suit and tie and looking like the president of the country instead of a student at a shitty, no-nothing high school.
He knows I’m freaking out, does nothing. I’m not even sure where we’re at in our relationship. He said he�
�d give himself to me, but what does that mean? What do I have to do to crack this nut?
“Just for the record, I don’t like this plan,” Cal offers up, echoing Aaron’s words from the club as he sips a Pepsi and freely smokes a cigarette. The cops in here are not the normal school cops, but they’re here for a reason much more serious than smoking inside. They’re here for murder, for the murderers … for us. “Feels too much like pandering. It’ll mess with Havoc’s reputation.” Callum pauses and then turns his head slowly to look at me, blue eyes like swords, cutting right to my heart. “Besides, don’t you give a shit how you’re making Bernadette feel?”
“I know how Bernadette feels,” Victor says, slow and calm but laced with menace. He’s annoyed with Cal. He should be. Because I feel like Callum understands me in a way none of the other boys ever will. He and I have a connection that I can’t put to words. He just gets me. “Because I feel the same way. But it doesn’t matter. Those same sorts of feelings will get us killed if we let them. We agree to the annulment and move forward from there. Maybe I marry the girl, maybe I don’t. We’ll see.”
He stands up from the table as Aaron frowns and glances over at me, as if to ask if I’m okay. See, that’s what sets him apart from the other boys. He’s thought to ask me, even if it’s just with his eyes. But Cal already knows. Oscar either doesn’t care or cares so much that he has to sit there like a goddamn statue to keep from showing it. Hael is upset for me, and Victor … he’s right. He probably feels exactly like I feel, right down to the whole not going to say a damn thing part.
Shit.
Fuck, shit, motherfucker, shit.
Vic gets up from his spot at the table, taking his tray and dumping his trash on the way out. The fact that he even cares to do that, considering our now complete control of the school, shocks me to my core.
It also makes me get up and go after him.
“And there she goes,” Hael says, but somewhat like he’s relieved.
I push out of the sticker and Sharpie covered doors, letting them swing behind me as I speed-walk to keep up with Victor.
Anarchy at Prescott High Page 21