There was no point in denying that he liked her. More than that, he wanted to take her on a date. If sex was the issue, then they simply wouldn’t have sex.
Of course, one thing continued to bother him.
The object of his attraction didn’t know that he had come to the meetings as a fraud and that he had been taking note of everything. The only reason she opened up to him was because she believed him to be one of them. The longer he lied to her, the worse it would be when she discovered the truth. He had no doubt she would be furious. She seemed angry a lot of the time already.
Not to mention it was selfish wanting a girl who had problems with self-control and sex. Maybe she was really trying to get better, and it would be best if he didn’t go back to the meeting on Thursday.
But he knew that wasn’t even an option. He had to go back, and his job with James had nothing to do with it.
The kiss, his revolving thoughts, the guilt—it all wound round and round his head like the snake-patterned path that wended through campus and into the surrounding woods. An endless coil where you didn’t really know where you were going but couldn’t stop if you wanted to find your destination.
It took a few seconds of silence before he realized the sound of a pencil on sketch paper had stopped. He turned his head from where he was reclined on Finn’s sagging sofa to find the guy in question watching him from his scarred dinner table with one raised eyebrow.
“What?” Will asked, feeling self-conscious. Had his face given away his thoughts?
Finn shook his head and returned to drawing in his enormous sketchbook. Nearby, an easel featuring a half-finished oil painting stood on paint-spattered cloth to protect the floor. The painting sort of looked like a fish. A robotic fish. If you squinted and turned your head to the side. Will concluded it was abstract.
“You’re thinking about something really hard,” Finn said, sounding amused. “Nice change of pace, I bet.”
“Your quips have improved,” Will said, rubbing his forehead. He stacked his hands behind his head and returned to staring up at the speckled ceiling of Finn’s apartment. To keep Finn from further speculating on what he was thinking about, he said, “So tell me about this new role.”
“I’m playing the male lead,” Finn said.
Will could hear the smile in his voice, but there was something else there as well. He turned again to look at his friend. Finn was now staring intently down at his sketch. “All right? And?”
Finn wasn’t a drama major and, to the department head’s eternal frustration, Finn had no desire to be one. But he was such an expressive and talented actor that whenever the University put on a play, depending on the casting director, a part was always saved for Finn just in case. This time, apparently it was the lead. The actual drama majors probably weren’t happy about that.
“And it’s taking up a lot of time. So I’ve been staying up late to get my real work done.”
Will sat up and pushed off the sofa. “What are you drawing?”
Leaning back, Finn held up his sketchbook so Will could see. The girl on the page was skillfully rendered. The strands of her hair, the light reflecting in her eyes, the beauty mark on her jaw—the details jumped off the page. She was beautiful.
She also took up the vast majority of the other pages in Finn’s sketchbook.
“Her again,” Will said, leaning forward to get a closer look at Finn’s drawing. “Wow. That’s really good.”
“Thanks.” He sighed and dropped his sketchbook on the tabletop. Will gave him a sympathetic slap on the shoulder.
The girl’s name was Kat, and she was a drama major. He suspected the only reason Finn was so obliging of the drama professor was because it put him in close company with Kat, a gifted actress who often took leading roles in the University productions. Unfortunately, from what he’d heard, Kat was about as pleasant as chewing rusted nails. He was pretty sure she had no idea Finn existed except in a peripheral way.
With Finn landing the lead role in this play, though, he had probably succeeded in getting her attention, although likely not in a positive way.
“Is she in the play too?” Will asked.
Finn nodded. “Female lead.”
“That’s great! Why are you shaking your head?”
“Because!” Finn shoved away his sketchbook and tossed his pencil on top of it. “She hates me. She doesn’t respect me because I’m not serious about acting and I’m taking the role from someone who’s actually passionate about it. And, I mean, she’s totally right.”
“Are you going to give it up?”
Finn shrugged. “I don’t know. I get to see her every other day now.” He dropped his head back and made a sound like a dying donkey. “And she already has a boyfriend. God, I’m pathetic.”
“A bit.”
His head snapped back up, his eyes narrowed. “You’re one to talk. You like someone at your sex therapy job, and you’re only there to spy on them.”
Squashing the immediate urge to defend himself, Will returned to his spot on the sofa.
“Technically, it’s research.” Which he supposed was a more acceptable, but no less culpable, excuse for spying. “And I never said I liked anyone.”
“You’re transparent. Who is she? Is she older?”
Will sighed. Maybe talking about it would help exorcise the thoughts from his mind. “No,” he said. “She’s a student. She probably goes to REU actually, but I’ve never seen her on campus.”
“Hot?”
“Scorching,” he admitted.
“No wonder she’s a sex addict.”
He winced. “She sort of kissed me.”
Finn picked up the pencil he’d tossed down a moment ago and twirled it between his fingers. He gave a small laugh. “What do you mean ‘sort of’? How does a girl ‘sort of’ kiss you? Did she purse her lips at you?”
Will gave him a flat look, which only made Finn laugh again.
“Okay, smartass. She kissed me.”
“You’re getting way to comfortable with American swearing. So then what’d you do?”
“I kissed her back,” he said. That should have been fairly obvious. “What else was I supposed to do?”
“She’s a sex addict. You’re not. You didn’t think maybe you shouldn’t have—”
“I know,” Will said, slumping back into the sunken sofa cushions and rubbing a hand through his hair. “I shouldn’t have.” He popped his head back up to give his friend a curious lift of his brow. “I can’t believe you’re actually yelling at me for kissing a girl.”
“Getting kissed by a girl,” Finn corrected.
“Semantics. And anyway, I wouldn’t have done anything else.” Possibly a lie. “The counselor walked in on us and sent us home separately. I felt like I was getting caught by my dad or something.”
Finn had flipped his sketchbook open again and was paging through it. “You like her?”
That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? He decided to be honest.
“Aye,” he mumbled, more to hear his own admission than for Finn’s benefit. He covered his face and groaned. “Aye, I do. Something about her just gets under my skin.” She was complicated and irreverent and beyond gorgeous. He wanted to know her. To peel back her many guarded layers and really know her. He slid his hand down his face to scratch at his jaw. He sounded like a lovestruck teenager. “Promise to murder me in my sleep after this, would you?”
“That bad, huh?”
Unfortunately, yes, and he hadn’t realized it until this moment.
“You should come out with me this weekend,” Finn said. “Maybe I can find a pretty guy for you.”
Will laughed. “I don’t think we have the same taste.”
“You’re just thinking about it wrong. See, from my angle, I’ve got a much larger dating pool to pick from than you do.”
On account of Finn being bisexual, Will supposed this was true. During their freshman year, he had returned to their shared dorm to find Finn
in bed making out with his then-boyfriend. It had been a shocking way to discover his roommate’s sexuality, and he had freaked out a bit. But only in the sense that it had surprised him.
“And yet you pick the one girl who hates you,” Will said with a pointed look at Finn’s sketchbook.
Finn groaned. He closed his sketchbook, abandoning it completely as he pushed to his feet. “Want a beer?” he asked.
“Hell, yes.”
Chapter Ten
“And since then, I’ve had a new appreciation for tinfoil.”
Old Lady stopped talking, and a stunned silence fell. Leah’s teeth clacked painfully as she snapped her jaw shut. Her mind filled with disturbing images of tinfoil and a turkey baster.
The counselor had asked everyone to recount their most degrading sexual experience, presumably in an attempt to remind them why they attended the meetings and to perhaps motivate them toward recovery. She was pretty sure it was because of what he had witnessed between her and Blue Eyes last week.
At least that must have been the theory. In practice, all it meant was that she was receiving an education in deviance that surpassed even her own experience.
How would the counselor have felt having planned today’s session only to find one of the people who’d inspired it hadn’t returned? Well, she would never know because here she was.
And she still couldn’t believe herself. For months, she had been counting down the weeks until she would be free of these pointless meetings, and yet, after fulfilling her promise to Helena, here she was again. By choice.
When she left the apartment earlier, she’d had every intention of going to the library to catch up on her poetry assignments. Instead, she had somehow found her way back to this stuffy room, unable to resist the compulsive desire to see him again.
“W-why don’t you go next,” the flustered counselor said to Packers Cap.
Packers Cap rubbed his hands together gleefully. The counselor gave him a weary look, but gestured for him to begin anyway.
“So I was at this football game, right? And there’s this woman sitting right in front of me, body completely painted green with a gold string bikini and a wedge of cheese on her head that said, ‘Eat me.’” His smile transformed into a leer.
What had Leah been thinking coming back here?
She tuned him out. She would need a shower after this. As for herself, she had no idea which memory she would dig up from the recesses of her brain. Compared to these people, her sex life had been tame.
However, she was looking forward to hearing Blue Eyes’ story.
Packers Cap finally finished with something about a hot dog, a football, and a multipurpose foam cheesehead. The counselor looked ill. Stilettos was snickering. Old Lady had probably fallen asleep the moment her turn had finished, and Blue Eyes—
—was looking at her. Seeing him reminded her perfectly of why she’d come back here. A lump formed in her throat, and she looked down.
God, was she actually being coy?
She scowled into her lap.
That was better.
As a second stunned silence lingered in the room, she resisted the urge to say, ‘Hey, you know you’re sick when you shock the other sick people.’
The counselor shook his head sadly at Packers Cap. “That must have been terrible,” he said in a voice that dripped thoughtless compassion.
“Yeah,” Packers Cap said with a dirty smile. “Terrible.”
“Now,” the counselor said, eyes still glazed but focusing on the guy who had recently taken over Leah’s entire brain without a shot being fired. “How about you?”
His body language was relaxed, but his blue eyes showed a different story. They looked a bit uncertain, which Leah hoped was in reaction to the stories being told and not because he couldn’t decide which of his torrid affairs to reveal to the group.
“Can you come back to me?” he asked.
The counselor gave him a kind smile and nodded. “Of course.” He fixed his eyes on Leah next, and she mentally groaned. “When did you realize that your sexual behavior was unhealthy?”
She crossed her arms and glared so fiercely that the counselor actually looked a bit taken aback.
“I haven’t and it isn’t,” she said.
Stilettos snorted. “Then why are you here?”
Because she had poor judgment. Out loud, she said, “Bad luck. I slept with someone who robbed my apartment, and then got blackmailed into coming here by my roommate. She’s the one who thinks I have a problem. She’s wrong.”
Blue Eyes was giving her a look that she couldn’t figure out beyond the fluff that filled her head every time she looked at him. His expression might have been almost like … hope? Weird.
The counselor, on the other hand, gave a disapproving cluck of his tongue but didn’t press her further.
Leah settled back into her chair and listened vaguely to Stilettos recount her leopard print and steel-toed booted voyages into the world of genital friction. But it was Blue Eyes who maintained Leah’s attention. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Just a perfectly ordinary pair of jeans and a totally standard black T-shirt. But the way he wore them, the way they molded to his muscles in just the right places, neither too tight nor too loose, made Leah’s knee caps melt. Under those clothes was surely the most beautiful body. Anything else would be false marketing.
But she also wanted the chance to talk to him again. For the first time that she could remember, she was looking forward to learning more about a guy.
Usually, faces and conversations were pretty irrelevant to her. It was bodies that mattered, anonymous bodies that let you share quick and mutual pleasure and didn’t ask anything else of you. At least that was how it had worked in Leah’s world since discovering sex and the ability to be close to someone without sacrificing herself in the process.
Blue Eyes was different. After her talk with Helena, Leah had wondered if she was falling for him. However, after thinking about it all week, she had decided she was wrong. She had no time for such neediness, such hearts and flowers crap. But she couldn’t deny the warmth in her stomach when she looked at him. Part of it was lust. The rest of it was something else, something born from that first meeting and that first tense exchange between them.
And now the object of Leah’s mood swings and helpless staring was talking and nervously lacing and unlacing his fingers as he did so. The vulnerability of it made her ache.
“Well,” Blue Eyes began, glancing at her and then away again. “I suppose that my most unhealthy sexual experience was …” He looked around the circle of addicts, hesitation in his bright eyes, and then his gaze settled on Leah.
He watched her for long seconds, long enough for the counselor to tilt his head and look uncomfortable. Long enough for the warmth in her stomach to ignite into a low flame that spread through her skin.
“There was this girl,” Blue Eyes said at last, his voice quiet enough that Leah had to lean forward a little to catch each lilting word. “I never knew her name. As soon as I saw her, I knew we would be together. Sex, I mean. It was inevitable. Eventually, I got her alone and before I knew it, we were kissing. She began undoing my pants and sinking to her knees, but I stopped her. I wanted to do it for her instead.” His gaze on Leah was so intent, so heated, she wondered how she didn’t combust. “I slid my hands over her hips, her thighs. Pushed her dress up. I got onto my knees in the dirt and...” His gaze faltered, and he looked down. His lips quirked into a small, enigmatic smile. “Well, I’m sure you can imagine what happened.”
It wasn’t until he stopped talking that Leah realized she was clinging to her chair so tightly the skin over the back of her knuckles felt like it might split open. She released the breath she’d been holding slowly, shakily. Blue Eyes had told that story to her and only her. There had been no one else in the room. Their eyes had locked, and she had almost felt his hands, seen him kneeling there, felt his breath hot against her skin.
Mouth dry, heart
pounding, clothes too warm—all the familiar sensations of arousal, of anticipation, the kind of human interaction that she was used to, the kind that she secretly felt was all she had a right to. And yet, somehow, there was also the inexplicably powerful, and completely unreasonable, feeling of jealousy that any other girl had ever touched Blue Eyes.
The mental alarms going off in her head shocked her into clarity. She needed to either avoid Blue Eyes or just sleep with him before her feelings got any more complicated or contradictory. Before she went completely crazy. And then she needed to stop coming to these meetings and never see him again.
Chapter Eleven
Will stopped typing and grimaced at his notes. They were pathetic. More like meeting minutes than anything else. Certainly not up to the standard expected of a psychology major in his junior year. And he still felt a bit uncomfortable after summarizing the stories the other members had told during the meeting. ‘Oral hijinks’ were two words he’d never expected to use together. He didn’t think James needed to know the details, but his boss had insisted Will be thorough and that was the least he could do at the moment.
He gave a frustrated sigh and closed the file. Then he attached it to an email to his boss and reluctantly hit ‘send.’ No doubt once James read his notes, he would punish Will for his pitiable work by sending him off on some cruel and unusual task like posing for the art department’s nude drawing classes.
Will wouldn’t have minded if his grumpy beauty had said she was an art major.
He closed his laptop before gathering up his jacket and shrugging it on. Bonny tangled around his legs, and he reached down to scratch her head.
“Sorry, Bonny. I’ll play with you later.”
She made a sound that was decidedly indignant as he shut the door behind him. Even though he didn’t live far from campus, driving through rush hour meant the short drive took three times as long. Parking around the University was usually terrible, but at least by now, most of the students had cleared out for the evening.
Heat Up the Fall: New Adult Boxed Set (6 Book Bundle) Page 27