“We can do plenty. This is the part where we get a ton of quotes down so we can jam them into our presentations and essays to make us look super smart.”
“You do that? You, Juliet Judith Carmichael, take shortcuts to look super smart?”
She wanted to hate him for the raised eyebrow, and for using her full name.
But she couldn’t. The most she could manage was suppressing the laugh.
“I’m going to act like you didn’t say that dreaded thing and just skip straight to the question.”
“You really hate it that much, because I th—”
“I said, I’m skipping to the question.”
“Okay, cool, cool. What was the question again?”
“Do I take shortcuts to make me look smart? And the answer is yes. Yes I absolutely do all the time. I did it in school, I do it now, I will do it forever.”
“But you are super smart. Why do you need to pretend?”
“Everybody pretends, Tate. Even actually clever people.”
“You’re shitting me. Are you…are you shitting me?”
“No. Who really wants to read the whole of…” She searched for and held up the book she was most dreading. “Theoretical Dynamics in Cinematic Interpretation?”
It didn’t calm him down, however. If anything, it made him more animated.
And animated Tate was a ridiculously funny and marvelous sight to behold. He waved his arms. He somehow made a shrug seem sarcastic. He feigned sadness and outrage in the most delightful of ways, with every inch of his eyebrows and the most beautiful downturned mouth—and all while he said things that were more than enough on their own.
“You mean to tell me I just sat here and read about the alien in Aliens representing my anus for nothing? I can never now undo that mental image, Letty. You have forever tainted a major part of Jim Cameron’s filmography for me. All I wanted to do was have fun watching movies when I took this elective, and instead I now know way too much about buttholes and how obsessed every director seemingly is with them,” he said, and now she couldn’t suppress the laugh if she tried. It wriggled out the second he stopped speaking, and it shot right through the middle of her next words.
“Hey, I didn’t order you to read an essay called ‘James Cameron’s Butthole’!”
“I know, I get that, but I thought it would impress you. I’m trying to pull my weight here only to discover that you don’t give a hot fuck about any of this stuff at all. This whole time we could have been baking on the couch in front of Dirty Dancing, goddamn it.”
Now it was her turn to be animated.
She practically fist pumped. Her grin was unstoppable.
“I knew you liked Dirty Dancing. I fucking knew.”
“Hell yeah I like Dirty Dancing—because it’s the best fucking movie there ever was! Now are we going to get the fuck out of here and watch it or what?”
“Okay, maybe we could do that.”
“That doesn’t seem enthusiastic enough—lemme hear that enthusiasm.”
“Fuck yeah, we can totally fucking do that.”
“Now give me a high five,” he said, so het up she couldn’t resist.
But man oh man, did she live to regret it.
Chapter 10
She first knew she had made a major miscalculation when they got to his place. Images of cool lofts and fraternity houses danced through her mind, until they got to the building at the tail end of campus and she realized. He was living in a dorm. Tate Sullivan, king of cool, was in a tiny one-person dorm room like hers—in fact, his dorm room was smaller. He had to turn sideways to get between the desk and his bed, and said bed barely looked big enough for his enormous body. She was willing to bet every dollar she had that his feet hung over the end when he lay down. When he sat his knees touched the leg of his desk.
It was ridiculous.
But also wholly terrifying. Somehow she was supposed to sit in this tiny room with him, and not on the couch he had mentioned. He had lied about that, or else thought his bed counted—which she supposed in most ways it did. It was couch shaped and people could easily sit side by side on it. What was the big deal?
She didn’t know.
She only knew that she was fidgeting, and not really listening to anything he was saying.
“Okay, so all I got is my laptop, but it’s super big so it should be fine to watch. Do you think? I mean I guess we could see if the AV department has, like, a TV we could borrow or—”
He stopped short of finishing his sentence the second he saw her.
She couldn’t blame him, however. She knew she looked…off.
“Letty? You still with me?”
“Oh. Yeah. The laptop. Cool.”
“You seem weird.”
“Don’t I always?”
She let out a little laugh, but knew how it sounded. She read it from his uncertain, baffled expression, as clearly as if he had told her what he thought.
It was as hollow and desolate as a haunted auditorium.
“No. No not really. That was just something I said in high school because some asshole had briefly taken over my body. Remember? You have to remember. I said it like twenty minutes ago.”
“I remember. But really there’s nothing wrong. I’m fine.”
“Okay. Great. So you’re gonna sit down now.”
“Sure I am. Any second. Definitely about to happen.”
“Oh definitely. Yeah, I can see that you sitting next to me poses no problems for you at all,” he said, in a way that should have seemed nasty. Only it didn’t, and he made sure it stayed that way. “Or you know I could just take my desk chair and move it into the bathroom doorway, so we can both see my laptop without ever making you look as horrified as you do now.”
“I look horrified?”
“To put it mildly.”
“I’m sorry. My face disobeys me all the time. I tell it to look like an ordinary freshman about to watch a movie with wrestling champ Tate Sullivan, and all it can manage is what feels like anxious frowning.”
“It looks a lot like anxious frowning, too. But we can easily make that go away.”
He stood, and lifted his desk chair like it was made of paper.
“See I can just move this to here.”
“Stop. Tate, stop a second,” she said.
But he didn’t.
He just kept on rearranging furniture.
“And then if I just angle the screen…”
“Tate, no, no. Stop I said.”
“It’s really not a problem.”
“I know. But I’m just being ridiculous. I don’t need you to sit in the bathroom, okay? I can sit on the bed with you and everything will just be normal and fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded after the word, yet still he hesitated. More than that, in fact. His eyes roamed over every item in his room, as though looking for an alternative solution.
And he found one.
A really stupid one.
“I tell you what, then—how about we put something between us?”
“You want to put something between us. Like in medieval times.”
“Exactly, yes. That way, my leg will never touch your leg and my butt will never nudge your butt.”
“I wasn’t concerned about our legs touching. Or our butts nudging. Can butts even nudge?”
“My butt is a world-class nudging champion. But see, now you don’t have to worry about that,” he said, and he was completely right about that. She didn’t.
She had to worry about everything else.
When she sat down his scent assaulted her from all directions, too sweet and clean for her to fully accept it. He was supposed to smell like feet and farts and locker rooms, and instead everything was as fresh as a walk in the wintry air. His pillows could have been laundered that day. His comforter felt smooth and crisp beneath her fingers, and left the scent of meadows between them.
And then there was his body, his clothe
s, his hair.
That tart cologne she remembered so well from high school was gone, replaced by something that seemed incredibly familiar. It had a hint of almonds, warm and honeyed and so good she knew she should know it. It even reminded her of nice things, like sitting in the window seat of her bedroom with a book or driving to the movie theater for the first time with her friend Becky Rivero.
But it took her until twenty minutes in to dredge up the memory. Twenty minutes of puzzling and trying not to too obviously sniff him, before realization washed over her in a great facepalm-inducing wave.
It was her own perfume. The one she had worn in high school.
Or at the very least it was damned close. It was perhaps a touch more masculine, and that slightly musky man smell lurked beneath it. Yet once she figured it out, she couldn’t deny the fact. No matter how weird and inexplicable it was, Tate Sullivan had her favorite scent somewhere on him. Like a loaded gun, just waiting to go off and blow out most of her brains.
She already felt unable to think.
Logical reasons for this completely eluded her.
Questions she thought of asking were, at best, embarrassing.
In the end she just had to carry on watching the movie—but doing so hardly helped. Dirty Dancing was at least 30 percent sexier than she remembered it being. Within the first half hour, people were gyrating all over each other. Swayze had his shirt off before the second act, and everyone seemed to be sweating constantly. It made her sweat, just watching them.
Or was it just the temperature of the room? It seemed to have risen at least ten degrees since she’d gotten here—quite possibly because of Tate. It was like sitting next to an enormous engine. Heat rolled off him in waves, thick and stultifying. She could almost feel it through the pillow, burning and burning until she could barely take it anymore. She came close several times to telling him to stop being so hot, and only resisted by patiently explaining to herself how stupid that was.
He would think she meant the other hot.
Even though she didn’t. She totally didn’t.
She hardly knew what she meant.
She only knew that he made her heart bolt its bone cage when he suddenly leaned across the pillow to whisper something. That her mouth went dry and all the hairs on her arms stood up and the heat…
The heat seemed to treble. Quadruple. Millionable.
“Do you think people were that sexually liberated in 1963?”
“I have no clue. We should probably write that question down,” she said.
Of course she knew why she did it—because it gave her an out. She could lean down to get her pad and scribble, instead of enduring more of that scent and the heat.
“Yeah, maybe write it down. And while you’re there write down that she initiates.”
“She initiates what?”
“The sex.”
“They have sex in this?”
She glanced up at the screen, sure that he was wrong.
But no, her top was coming off. There was a visible bra.
Followed by lots of sticky-looking kissing.
“Of course they do. I wouldn’t have suggested we watch it otherwise. I mean, how are we supposed to talk about sex in cinema if we just look at movies that have no sex in them? What are we supposed to say? Their hand holding was particularly fascinating? The scene where you almost see a butt really meant something?”
“That…yeah, okay, you make a good point.”
“Though to be honest, this barely qualifies.”
“You don’t think this is a good sex scene?”
“He kisses her collarbone and then they look at each other while in bed. They could be searching each other’s faces for signs of rigor mortis. Both of them are barely moving.”
“They’re moving a tiny bit. His shoulder just jerked.”
“Oh man, that sounds hot. Shoulder jerking.”
“It looked kind of hot to me.”
“It looked like she was panicking.”
“Ah, so now you’re an expert on women’s facial expressions.”
“You don’t have to be to know she got nothing out of that. I bet he was one and done.”
“What the hell does one and done mean?”
“One thrust and done.”
“You can’t say that about Swayze.”
“I can and will and have.”
“But his hips though. His hip action.”
“All the hip action in the world can’t help you when you think collarbone kissing and some grinding is going to get her motor revving.”
“So what would get her motor revving?”
“Eating pussy would probably be a good start.”
She had been looking at him up until that point. But as soon as she heard the word pussy, she had to glance away. It rang out like an alarm in the tiny room: turn back turn back turn back before it’s too late. The only problem was: she didn’t know how to turn back.
Or know why she wanted to.
“Okay. Okay but you just said yourself that this is a pretty tame movie. I mean it’s not like they can just show him…doing that to her.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why can’t they have him going down on her? They show guys getting blow jobs in PG-13 movies all the time. Hell, they do it in pretty family friendly comedies.”
“They do not. Name one movie where that happens.”
“Police Academy. Ghostbusters. Ace Ventura.”
She went to protest again, then stopped.
Mostly because her brain was already supplying the scenes he was talking about.
“Oh my god. Oh my god, you’re right.”
“I am as amazed as you are.”
“Are you writing this down?”
“Hell yeah I will, now that you think I have a point. What should I put, like—more women need to get head in movies? Better class it up, huh.” He took out his own notebook and started carefully noting down the idea, reading it aloud as he did. “There…is…a sexual double standard.”
“Sexual double standard sounds pretty good.”
“We should totally count how many women get something onscreen that could possibly lead to them actually having a good time. Or at least, a time that could conceivably make them come.”
“And how are we going to judge something like that?”
“What do you mean by judge?”
“Well, we have to establish a criterion for a good time,” she said, then immediately regretted it.
He was going to say something like pussy again. Something that made her sweat even harder.
And she was right to worry, too.
“Jumping aboard and pumping for thirty seconds, nope.”
“Yeah, but in most films you’re supposed to see that as a kind of condensing.”
“Are you? Or do the dudes making it just want you to think that’s normal? Like if you’re not coming out your ears by thrust four there’s something wrong with you?”
She could feel him staring at her. How could she not? His eyes were practically burning holes in the sides of her face. Her only hope was that her face had seemed flushed before—because of the heat in the room or the sexiness of the film or just anything, anything but the truth.
“Oh my god. You do actually think that.”
Shit fuck shit fuck balls bastard.
“No, not exactly. No. Not at all in fact.”
“You totally think you should be coming by thrust four.”
“Well it wasn’t thrust four.”
“Holy shit, Letty, come on. Where is your head, girl?”
“I don’t know. I just blew a hole in it with my imaginary gun. My brains are all over your comforter right now. Can we please just not talk about this?”
“Yeah. Yeah of course we can,” he said, as casual as anything.
He was lying, however.
She could see the urge to ask shivering underneath the surface of his face.
It was in his tense jaw,
and his suddenly tight lips.
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“Just be quiet and let me try really hard not to.”
“Goddamn it, Tate. You know you’re the last person I want to talk about my sex life with. Like, I get that yours is really amazing and adventurous, but I’d rather not have my face rubbed in that right now.”
“What makes you think my sex life is amazing and adventurous?”
“Well, you sure make it sound that way.”
“Because I know what it takes to make a girl come? Honey, your bar is super low on the amazing-sex front. Like, you should be coming as the bare fucking minimum. That’s rock-bottom standard—getting the person you’re with off. Otherwise what’s the fucking point in doing it?”
“Maybe people just enjoy being close.”
“Did you?”
She didn’t answer.
She couldn’t.
And that was enough to tell him all he needed to know.
“Yeah, you didn’t even get that out of it, did you.”
“I really don’t want to talk about this.”
“So let’s talk about me instead. You want to know about my amazing sex life? Last girl I hooked up with escaped out the bathroom window while I was waiting naked in bed.”
“What? Bullshit. Bull. Shit. Why would anyone do that to you?” she gasped, only realizing at the last possible second what she’d just implied.
“Well, I’m flattered, Letty.”
“Hang on, I didn’t—”
“No really, it’s cool you think I’m worth sticking around for.”
“I don’t think you’re worth sticking around for. I misspoke.”
“Are you sure? Because that bullshit sounded pretty insistent.”
“I meant that no one would do that to anybody. Not specifically you.”
“Okay, whatever you say.”
“It’s a weird thing to do, all right?”
“Especially to me. Handsome and wonderful Tate Sullivan.”
She wasn’t sure what was worse: his singsong tone or the gestures that accompanied it.
He actually ran his fingers through his hair—then licked his hand and ran it down over his body.
He was a perfect nightmare of unbelievable awesomeness.
“You can’t have been that handsome and wonderful if she ran out on you.”
Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1) Page 7