by Rachel Shane
A warm breeze hit my bare back as Trevor worked to unleash my bra. I pulled the shirt off his arms, and cursed when I discovered another shirt, a plain white undershirt, blocking me from running my tongue over his rock hard abs. I groaned loudly, and he laughed. “I’m impatient,” I said in defense, pushing his jeans and boxers down to his knees instead.
He stepped out of them, his eyes growing with intent. “So am I. But sometimes going slow makes it worth the wait.”
“Disagree,” I mumbled, my eyes fluttering shut as his tongue swept across my cleavage. My nipples hardened in anticipation of his mouth reaching them, and the space between my thighs throbbed with eagerness. “Go fast, please.”
He chuckled against my skin, taking his damn sweet time to swirl his tongue around the hard nub. I let out a gasp at the amazing sensation as he kissed in a line between my breasts while I trailed my fingertips down his back, earning a shiver.
God, he was driving me insane as his tongue took a long laborious path downward. Goosebumps trailed in the wake of his mouth, and I loved the way he took extra care to make sure he tasted every single inch of my skin. My own hands roamed over his tattoos, tracing every delicate line with my fingernails. A desperate aching pulsed between my thighs, a need only he could fill.
Trevor kissed my thighs, then my knees, then my calves, all the way to my feet, pulling off my remaining clothes as he went. I squirmed against the tree, barely unable to wait anymore for him. I tugged him back to my mouth by the hair, knotting my fingers in his long blond locks, and kissed him with no abandon.
He ripped his mouth away, panting, and slid his fingers out of me. “Hold on,” he reassured me. “I’ve got something.” Trevor bent down to retrieve a condom from his discarded jeans. Once it was on, we didn’t waste any time. He lifted me up, cupping my ass, and my legs followed suit, wrapping around his back. He pushed inside me as he pressed me against the tree, bracing his hands between me and the bark to prevent scraping.
The electric sensation of him pushing deep within me, scraping against the exact right spot, made me scream. The pressure felt so amazing, as did being so utterly close to him, wrapped tightly in his arms. He surged inside him, using deep, slow thrusts that rocketed the sensation building at my core. I matched his movements, swiveling my hips to deepen the connection. Both of us moaned at the sheer force of it. Our lips slipped against each other, kissing between ravaged heavy breaths. The lightning shooting through my torso increased with each thrust of his him. “Holy shit,” I breathed before I lost all ability to speak. I could only moan, each one growing louder and fiercer to way the pleasure built inside me to a crescendo.
He grunted in response, a low guttural sound that was pure man. And it was that sound that sent me over the edge, that I could do this to him. This guy who I once had a trivial crush on until I got to know him and the crush turned into more. Much more. He wasn’t just a hot celebrity I ogled on TV. He was someone who helped me, and I rescued him in return.
With the next push of his hips, rivulets of convulsions exploded through me. My body contracted against his again and again until his screams matched my own.
He stopped thrusting, pressing his forehead against mine, both of us sweaty. And I knew I’d made the right choice.
He wore a ridiculous grin on his face as he pulled out and grabbed his boxers. I wobbled on shaky legs for a moment, still coming down from the cloud. I didn’t want to get dressed. All I wanted to do was that again and again and again, but he had to get back to Cliff, give him an answer, and start our future together.
“Erin, I’m just…” He sighed, shoving his eyes shut, like the words were difficult to get out. “Thank you,” he finally said. “For turning me back into the person I should have been all along. I lost my way there when I became Clever Trevor but—”
I pressed my fingers to his lips, shushing him. “But you did it all on your own. I didn’t do anything.”
“You stood by me, that’s something. All my other fans abandoned me but you never treated me like a pariah. You were the only one who still embraced me and gave me the space to change.”
I blushed. Because he’d helped me too, to know what I really wanted.
“Which is why I want to help you with the podcast battle, to secure your house for your friends. That’s where I’m going to announce the new gig. Cliff’s inviting all these media people and—”
My stomach clenched. Because I’d chosen Trevor. But I hadn’t chosen the podcast. I took a deep breath and met his eyes. Whatever he saw in my face must have scared the shit out of him because suddenly the smile plunged off his face. “I can’t do the podcast anymore.”
He stiffened. “Why not?”
“Because I have to help Unlock instead. I can’t be selfish and choose more house space over helping thousands of prospective college students get the scholarships they need.”
“So you’re choosing Keane then? That jerk?”
“I choose you. But I also choose his charity.”
Trevor ripped up his shirt violently. “I don’t really see a difference.”
And then he stormed away, shrugging on his clothes as he went and leaving me naked and abandoned in the middle of a deserted park.
OVER THE NEXT FEW days, I put all my energy into helping Unlock. I vetted applications. I organized money donations. I helped plan our battle to go against the podcast.
I did not think of Trevor.
Okay, I failed that last part because I thought about Trevor a lot. His hands all over me. The way his forehead crinkled before he came. I also thought about how he walked away from me that day and hadn’t called me since. I had no idea if the hosting offer this summer was off the table and Cliff wasn’t returning any of my calls. My friends hadn’t abandoned me—they understood why I chose Unlock over the podcast even though I told them my connection to Unlock was simply because I wanted to help the organization that saved my brother—but they still planned to keep up the presentation for the battle.
Which meant there were a lot of secret meetings in the basement I wasn’t invited to. And a lot of secret meetings at Key & Lock I also wasn’t invited to—which was strange. Anytime I went over there, Keane was meeting with some other recent college graduate. They’d exchange secret handshakes as the person left, their lips sealed from their discussions.
“Who was that?” I asked Keane as a guy I’d never seen before left the house.
“Just someone who wants in on all the good Unlock has to offer.”
“Is he a prospective student?”
Keane chuckled. “No, he graduated from here three years ago. But that doesn’t mean help is off the table.”
“I’d like to join one of the meetings next—”
He waved his hand dismissively at me. “It’s pure business talk. Don’t worry about it.” His words were clipped and curt, the way they’d been ever since the night after I’d slept with Trevor, when I’d gone to an Unlock meeting and Keane leaned in to kiss me after. His lips had landed just beyond my mouth as I tilted my face away. “Keane, I—I can’t.” Even though Trevor had walked out of my life, I’d already made my choice. Unlock. Trevor. I wouldn’t just pick Keane now that he was second place or my only option.
Keane looked shock, his face falling. “But I thought…” He scrubbed his hands over his cheeks. “It’s Trevor, isn’t it?”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “But I’m not doing the podcast anymore. I’m committing myself to Unlock fully.”
“But not to me.”
My heart cracked in two at the hurt in his voice.
Ever since then we’d been mostly skating around each other like business colleagues instead of would be lovers. Instead of friends. I suspected that was why the scholarship money hadn’t arrived yet. My parents and Robby had both tried to contact Keane to no avail. But I was the one with the connection.
So I took a deep breath and knocked on his bedroom door one day unannounced. His face fell when he spotted me. He wore
a suit, and there were two chairs set up in the room, facing each other, as if he was preparing for more business meetings. “Yes?” His voice was an ice pick stabbed into my gut.
I swallowed hard. “Sorry to bother you.” I straightened, standing my ground. “But the scholarship check hasn’t arrived yet.”
He blinked at me for a second before his lips pursed. “Oh. Yeah. That.” He let out a strained laugh. “It’ll get there. No worries.”
A bitter flavor sat at the back of my tongue. “The tuition down payment is due in a few days.”
Keane shrugged. “This is our first scholarship so things are a little slow to process.”
When I was manning the phones, I got a call from Reagan Caridi, the scholarship winner from Waverly University. She was also missing her check. And so were three others from different universities announced the first night. “It’s so weird,” Reagan said. “My cousin is one of the founders of the Waverly Unlock but she seems to be in the dark about the whereabouts of the money. I thought maybe headquarters would know.”
“Sorry, I’m in the same boat with my own brother. As soon as I find out, I promise to give you a call. Word on the street is things are just slow because the donations are still processing.”
“Oh,” Reagan said. “That makes sense.”
Still, another day passed. Then another. Robby was in danger of losing his spot without a down payment. Cold panic sluiced through me, and I marched right back over to Keane’s, my hands curled into fists. I didn’t bother knocking, just twisted the knob to his room. He and the other guy he was with both jerked upright, their mouths zipping shut.
“The scholarship students are calling. None of them have received the money yet.” There was a hard set of my chin.
The guy Keane was meeting with squinted in confusion and Keane sighed, placing two fingers at the bridge of his nose. “Okay, here’s the truth,” he said.
Apprehension knotted at the base of my throat.
“We asked most of the benefactors to withhold their contributions until the battle. They’ll place them there officially in order to count toward the contest. I promise, we’ll issue checks the next day.”
I let out a breath. Now that made sense. Each dollar raised during the battle would count as one point. Whichever organization had the most points at the end would win the house. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
His voice deepened to sternness. “Because it’s unethical. And I didn’t want word to get out.”
I drew my thumb and forefinger over my lips. They were sealed. Unlock needed to win the battle, and receiving millions of dollars’ worth of donations would be unmatchable. I called Reagan and Robby and they explained the situation to their schools, buying them an extra few days to provide the down payment.
Whenever I wasn’t helping out Unlock plan their big presentation for the battle, I threw myself into sorting the rush bids with the girls in my house. Our organizational skills paid off and the form yielded over seven hundred submissions. For a college of only eleven thousand undergrads, that was a huge percentage.
“We fucking rock,” Bianca said, squinting at her laptop.
And my heart swelled, because we did. We were doing this fair and square. Using Excel algorithms and pivot tables to help generate matches between members and houses. It became more complicated when some houses only wanted one gender but those of opposite genders submitted requests to join. And I groaned and had to force myself not to accidentally hit delete whenever I came across a perfect one to one match between a girl and Layla’s Rho Sigma.
We planned to dole out bid envelopes during the battle, requiring a dollar donation in order to receive the bid in an effort to edge the podcast out over the other competitors. I was now rooting for Unlock but I still had to follow through and help with recruitment. And there was no way the podcast could beat Unlock’s donations anyway.
I didn’t let the others know about Unlock’s trick up their sleeves though. I kept my promise of secrecy to Keane, just like I’d been doing for years as a member of Key & Lock.
But this time it made me feel like I was hiding something.
The day of the battle, a knot welled in my stomach I couldn’t shake. Maybe it was my inevitable betrayal of my friends. Or maybe it was the fact that the podcast felt incomplete without Trevor and me at the helm. He’d left ship to prepare for his new job at Music Nation, doing a press tour to amp up excitement, but it should have been us sitting there on stage for the live podcast. Instead it would be Holly.
Her sex questions podcast was the second highest downloaded after mine, and it was starting to get a cult following. She planned to do a live version, asking for volunteers from the audience to hop on stage and reveal all.
Warm weather and pale blue skies promised a good turnout for the battle. When I headed to the quad, there were already hundreds of students milling about, eager for the festivities to start. Even the Dean stood proud on the steps of the Student Union, looking out at all the students who wanted a say in what organization would join the ranks of the campus. Or more accurately, they wanted something else. To know what house they would be in. To see the celebrities Unlock had advertised would be in attendance. To hear the last Clever Cast podcast that wouldn’t even be airing like we’d originally promised.
Each organization would have a half hour to give a presentation showcasing why their organization should be the one to receive the vacant house. The organizations were doing wildly different things. Ours had the podcast. Unlock planned to pimp out celebrities telethon-style, each showing off a unique piece of their talent: An original song. A monologue from their most famous movie. A reading of a passage from an unpublished sequel to a bestselling novel. And who knows what Layla had planned.
After the presentations, attendees would be allowed to vote—with their wallets—for the organization they wanted to win. Unlock had even managed to set up a way to accept credit cards thanks to a Square reader. Clever Media Podcast Network aka Ours would only be able to accept actual dollars. And again, Layla would probably dole out blow jobs as currency in exchange for real money. Throckmorton University would receive twenty percent of all donations. The rest went to each organization.
Three newly erected stages lifted on wooden platforms ringed the quad.
“Good luck,” I told the girls, blowing them kisses as they lugged a folding table onto their stage. Fallon draped the chair with the floral cloth she picked out especially for this occasion. Unlock kept their stage simple. Just wood. No frills. Those would come in the form of the performances they hired. When I greeted the Unlock team in the “green room” Keane had set up inside one of the unused classrooms for easy access to the quad, Alexis Rae popped up from the couch and wrapped me in a giant hug.
“That’s so much for thinking of me!” She gave me a deep smile, and then turned it on Gemma, who blushed for a moment before returning cool, calm, and collective as she jutted her chin toward me in what counted as a nod.
They’d be performing a duet, their first ever. And of course Cliff was bumbling around somewhere making sure it would be recorded now that Trevor didn’t need the podcast. And Layla’s stage? It was a mess of props and pink frills with a hand painted back drop as if they were about to put on a high school production of Legally Blond. The girls in her house—who used to be in my house but now never gave me the time of day—were all wearing ridiculous costumes. Cheerleaders. Lawyers. Doctors. One was even dressed as a nun. This had to be good. Or offensive. Take your pick.
I myself wore a sparkly black dress to fulfill my role of Unlock host. I probably lost a potential job at a network when I walked away from Trevor—or rather, when he walked away from me—but I still could impress here. Cliff might still take me on as a client. I just had to prove myself.
As the crowd grew thicker, some hiding booze in thermoses, others clearly already wasted, my nerves amped. I sucked down a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and told myself I’d made the r
ight decision. This was for a good cause.
“Ladies and Gentleman,” Dean Malcolm said, his voice booming through the speakers. The crowd cheered. I rushed out of the green room and onto the quad to get a better view and gasped at the enormity of the crowd, blanketing the entire quad. I even spotted families with young children. “Welcome to today’s festivities. We have three worthy organizations vying for the vacant house on campus.”
A hand tapped me on the shoulder. I spun around, imagining it was someone from Unlock who needed something from me. But it was Trevor. I gasped, covering my hand over my mouth.
He wore a grave expression, his mouth set in a hard line. “We need to talk.”
I jutted my chin toward the Dean, who was explaining the rules. Trevor had ditched me. No call. No email. Just straight up walked out of my life after sleeping with me. I had nothing to say to him. This was the one area I’d chosen wrong. “I’m listening to the Dean.”
“Please.” Urgency darkened his eyes. “It’s important.”
It was the please that got me. Trevor never ever did anything with begging. “Fine, let’s talk.” I crossed my arms, bracing for my heart to get broken all over again.
“Not here.” He spun on his heels and stormed through the crowd. I followed as Dean Malcolm announced Layla’s club would take the stage first, followed by Unlock, then the podcast network. Layla’s array of costumed fools took the stage and posed in frozen acting starting positions.
Trevor and I trekked a few blocks off campus, toward The Daily Snowflake and Key & Lock. The volume of whatever Layla was shrilling steadily decreased. In the middle of the sidewalk, Trevor stopped and spun around to face me. His face was a mask of pain.
“You’re not going to like this, but I’m just going to come out and say it.” He swallowed hard. “Your boy Keane is using you.”
I cringed, jerking backward. That’s what Trevor came all this way to tell me? “He’s not my boy.”
His expression drew tight as a gust of wind seized his hair, ruffling it around his ears. “There are no scholarships. It’s all a front.”