Crowne Rules

by Reiss, CD

  It was a much cruder way of saying exactly what Ella had said to me back in LA, but I hadn’t reacted to her like this. What kind of needs could Dante see in me? Was he looking at my pink cheeks? My nipples, which didn’t have the cold as an excuse anymore? Could he tell by the way I shifted from foot to foot that I was trying to stand comfortably with a swollen clit?

  No. He wasn’t superhuman. He was just another presumptuous man I was handing my power to.

  “Such. Pretty. Words,” I sneered, walking toward him. “I can’t wait to get out of here tomorrow morning.”

  I brushed by him to get out of the kitchen, forgetting I was supposed to rinse my cup until I was in the master bedroom. If he wanted chores done so badly, he could rinse the cup himself. I grabbed my stuff out of the master, threw it in my suitcase, slapped it closed, and went into the smaller bedroom, slamming the door behind me.

  But there was a path between us. A joining point.

  He’d be on the other side of the bathroom, like the connected closet where I’d first tasted him.

  Chapter 6

  MANDY

  Aileen’s house in West Adams was an old Craftsman with Victorian touches and a floor plan that defied logic. The adults were downstairs, drinking wine to celebrate the end of the school year, and their children, ranging in age from seven to seventeen, were upstairs in self-selecting groups, playing video games, who-can-scream-loudest, and for those of us in the older crowd… hoodat.

  Hoodat was where the crazy layout of the house made things interesting. Aileen’s closet and her brother Connor’s were connected by a sliding door. The girls stayed in Aileen’s room and the boys in Connor’s. We used a random-number-generating app to choose who went into the closet for seven minutes with a boy from the other side. Highest prime number in the group was Dat.

  “Five percent chance Mandy ends up with Caleb,” Millie said. She held up her phone. Twelve. “Six point six now.”

  “Eight,” Ella said.

  “Ten percent,” Millie calculated.

  “Thirteen.” Aileen held up her phone with a look of conspiratorial satisfaction. She was the only prime so far, increasing the odds she’d end up in the closet with Caleb, who I’d given my virginity to and who I was supposed to end up in the closet with.

  A knock came from inside the closet. The boys had chosen.

  “Go, Mandy.” Millie nudged me. “Still at ten.”

  “If I get Logan, I’m out,” I said, hitting GENERATE. “We’re friends, and that’s it.”

  But if I got Caleb, I’d be alone with him long enough to ask him why, or make out with him in the dark, or tell him how much he’d hurt me until he said he was sorry and begged for me back. At least I’d know what I’d done wrong, how I’d come up short. There was no talking in the closet—we were supposed to identify the other by feel—but I was going to break the rules to get answers.

  “And if you get Caleb?” Aileen teased as my app flipped numbers around for the sake of suspense.

  Winning meant you got to either go on a date with the person you guessed or make them go on a date with someone else—usually your friend who liked them—who had to act put upon. The rules were intellectually simple and socially complex.

  The numbers on the screen stopped, landing on seventeen.

  “Oh,” I whispered, suddenly faced with the prospect of being with Caleb in the closet.

  “Twenty percent!” Millie clapped.

  “If it’s Caleb, you should bite him,” Ella said after knocking on the closet door to tell the boys we were ready. “Then send him out to me, and I’ll bite him.”

  I’d gone nonverbal. Did I really want to know what I’d done wrong? What if he said it was because I had sex with him and I was lousy at it?

  But what if it was me? Like, really me?

  “Odds are it’s not him,” I said, surrendering my phone with the timer set for seven minutes. “There’s math on that, right?”

  “Try to have fun,” Ella said with a wink as she opened the door.

  Aileen shut off the bedroom light.

  Once I was inside the cedar-lined closet, the door closed behind me. My heart seized. Fabric brushed against my shoulder, and I jumped. My eyes darted, looking for purchase on a stitch of light, but hadn’t adjusted yet.

  My throat was clogged with hardening concrete, and my lungs shrank to the size of kidney beans. Panic seized me, running my thoughts like a sportscar with broken brakes.

  I shouldn’t have agreed to play this game, but I wanted to talk to Caleb and I also didn’t think I’d get picked, but now I was in a dark closet, and what no one knew was that I was deeply terrified of the dark. Palms sweating, I knocked on the sliding door with two sets of three raps, hard enough to signal the kids in the bedrooms to start the timers.

  My eyes adjusted the closet into splotches of gray. Clothes. Boxes. Feeling forward, I touched the door between the two closets just as my silent partner slid it open.

  It wasn’t Logan. I knew that right away from his smell. Logan had an anise scent. My hoodat was richer and earthier. That was good and bad—good because I didn’t want to be stuck in a closet with Logan for seven minutes while everyone wondered if we were making out, but bad because I couldn’t just tell my partner it was me… Mandy, and we could both win.

  Also, I wasn’t sure if it was Caleb, which should have alerted me to the fact that he and I had never clicked. If we had, I’d have felt him there and known.

  But I didn’t.

  “Caleb?” I whispered so low it was barely a breath, trying to cheat the system.

  He put two fingers on my lips, letting me know he was playing by the rules and expected me to do the same. His commanding manner could have frightened me, but it didn’t. The lump dissolved, and my breath entered lungs large enough to sustain me.

  I hoped my hoodat was Caleb at the exact same time I knew it wasn’t.

  His fingers still on my lips, I laid my hands on what I thought was his chest but found solid upper abs covered in a button-front shirt. Tall. Could have been Caleb. Like any young person who hadn’t been shattered a few dozen times, I was open to pleasant surprise.

  His fingers slid between my lips. Reflexively, I opened my mouth to ask him, “What the…?” and he slid his index and middle fingers between my teeth and over my tongue. He tasted like the rosemary olive bread in the basket downstairs.

  Who’d taken that one? Which of the five or so boys?

  I sucked off the taste, looking in the general direction of his eyes as he pulled out so slowly I could feel each knuckle bumping against my lips as if it was between my legs.

  This was not Caleb.

  I let my hands drift down the sides of his body, over his hips. Jeans. Belt. Who was wearing a belt tonight? I couldn’t visualize anyone, couldn’t imagine a boy who could put his other hand under my jaw, gripping my throat just tightly enough to hold me still and send a shot of electricity down my spine the way this boy did. Which one would lean so close into me I could feel him put his slick fingers in his own mouth, sucking my spit off with the rosemary bread?

  His breath hot on my cheek, his body drawing me into him, he wiped his wet fingertip along my lower lip, and I opened for him.

  It was so natural to say for him to myself that I thought nothing of it until later. Like everything else about the encounter—the way his hand pressed against my throat, the way I opened my lips for him without being asked, the way our flavors mixed when his fingers reentered my mouth, or the way I closed up to suck on them—I dismissed it as a fluke.

  I didn’t realize I was gripping his shirt until his fingers slid all the way out and he pulled them away, turning me until my back was to his front and my wrists were pinned behind me.

  This was more intense than I’d signed on for. We were supposed to be two teenagers fumbling and giggling while trying not to talk. This wasn’t a boy trying to cop a feel while trying to figure out who I was. This was a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it, an
d it had taken him two minutes to render me powerless and so turned on I couldn’t do the one thing that would send all our friends into the closet.

  I couldn’t scream or say, “Stop,” because I didn’t want him to. Even when he loosened his grip to a more or less symbolic hold or ran his hand between my breasts, not touching the nipples that had furled tight for him as he made his way to my waistband and to my belt buckle.

  He slid to the end of the belt, handling the metal end, and letting it drop.

  “Yes,” I whispered without thinking. My ache had grown past the size of my jeans, pressing against the seams, stimulating me with even the slightest move.

  “Amanda,” he said in my ear.

  I didn’t recognize the voice, but we were both talking in breaths.

  “Who are you?”

  Gently, he lifted my hands and put them on the sliding doorjamb. “I don’t have to tell.”

  He was right. He could win, and I could lose.

  We weren’t even supposed to be talking, much less giving clues, but I didn’t know any of the guys to be so confident they could slide their hands down the sides of my rib cage without making me uncomfortable or self-conscious. None of them—not even Caleb, whom I’d been so sure about loving—had put me in such a state of utter surrender.

  “Give me a hint.”

  He felt over my ass, and I pushed it out toward him for more.

  “One day,” he said in a voice I kind of thought I recognized for a moment, until he slapped my ass and I gasped. “But not today.”

  The doors to the bedrooms erupted in knocking. The man-boy and I separated. He slid the panel between the closets closed, and I backed away from it like a stunned animal in the dark, tiny lungs gasping around a thick lump in my throat, terrified again of what I couldn’t see.

  Behind me, my friends opened the door, and light flooded in. I squinted as if I’d been spelunking for days.

  “Well?” Aileen demanded. “Who was it?”

  The central question demanded an answer.

  I’d have to face each of those guys at some point, and one of them had soaked my panties not with a kiss or a promise, but sheer, undeniable wordless command. None of the guys we knew were that confident.

  “Not Jonsi,” I said. “Not Logan.”

  “Caleb?” Sally asked.

  If I said no, she’d break down the odds of who it could have been, and I didn’t want her to deduce who it was. I wanted to know, but more than that—I didn’t want my friends to know.

  “Maybe?” I shrugged. “But maybe Sawyer or Connor?”

  “We’re missing one,” Sally asked, counting boys on her fingers. “Jonsi, Logan, Caleb, Sawyer, Connor, Jackson…” She held up the thumb and finger L, wiggling the pointer for the unknown variable.

  “Describe anything about him,” Ella said. “Height? Weight?”

  Like me, Ella was a fashion person but far more technical. She probably could have used the sensory information I had to discern his shirt size.

  I shrugged again. What had happened in that closet was too intimate to talk about, and it was mine alone. It would not be diluted or broken. It would not be dragged into the light by me.

  Aileen rolled her eyes. Millie had already lost interest and started scrolling through her phone. A bunch of kids stormed down the hall like a herd of wild elephants, screaming, “Ice cream, ice cream!”

  The bedroom door opened, and Caleb leaned in.

  “Hey,” he said in a deep, icy voice, making eye contact with me for a split second—long enough to look away quickly because, even after getting down my pants, he just wasn’t interested anymore.

  “What’s up?” Aileen asked, and the distraction gave me a moment to take in details.

  Caleb wore a T-shirt. The guy in the closet wore a button-front. So, not him, though I had to leave room for the possibility that he’d put it on before the game started and took it off after just to trick me.

  You know it’s not him.

  “There’s a Coolhaus truck in the driveway,” Caleb said, glancing at me again as if reconsidering another go, and suddenly I was game for it. “We’re heading down.”

  “Thanks,” I said because I had to let him know I existed.

  He winked at me and left.

  We joined the flow down the stairs. I caught Logan at the first landing.

  “What did your side say?” I asked quietly. “Did you figure out the hoodat?”

  “Nope.”

  The name from his side would never be pried from Logan, so I didn’t even try. “Us either.”

  We passed the adults as they sat at a long table, laughing, drunk on wine and a vodka my father had picked up in Estonia. The fruit and cheese trays were picked over, and the bread basket had a pebble of rosemary kalamata crust left.

  A hand reached in and took it. I followed it to the source.

  Dante Crowne hung on the periphery of the adults, disinterested in what the adolescents were doing, leaning on the sideboard and talking to Caleb’s mother.

  Could it have been Caleb? I scanned for him. Found him high-fiving Jackson Schmidt.

  No.

  As I passed, Dante popped that last crust in his mouth, looking at me with an unsettling maturity.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked when it was just too uncomfortable.

  “Nice belt.” He leaned against the sideboard again.

  “Thanks.”

  The last I saw, Veronica Hawkins was talking to him, and he kissed the bread from the pads of his second and third finger—the two that my hoodat partner had glided along my tongue, leaving a trail of rosemary flavor.

  I was pushed forward, away from Dante, toward the side door where the workers in a white truck gave out prepaid ice cream.

  Nice belt.

  It was Dante Crowne. He’d identified me from the metal tip at the end of my belt.

  Dante didn’t play silly teenage games, but it had been him in the closet. No doubt. And he’d told them he didn’t know who I was when he obviously did.

  Outside, Aileen was waiting. Caleb had his back to me but would find me useful a few days later. Logan and Millie hovered over a phone, days from dating.

  “Hey,” I said as I approached Aileen. “I think I know—”

  I stopped when a feeling of wrongness hit me like a slap in the face. If I shared a moment of what happened in that closet, I wouldn’t be winning a game but betraying a confidence. And even if I never said it, I’d be exposing my arousal, opening the door to a terrifyingly dark room and revealing the red, unblinking eyes of shame.

  “What do you know?” Millie asked, still canoodling with Logan over some app or another.

  Shaking the vision from my head, I shut the door.

  “Vanilla,” I said as if interrupting myself. “I know what flavor I want. Vanilla.”

  * * *

  Maybe because I didn’t know exactly where he was, I was hyper-aware of Dante’s presence in the Cambria house. I wanted to go into the bathroom and brush my teeth, but we were still at opposite ends of the Jack-and-Jill, and I definitely didn’t want to run into him there. I’d had enough of the man for one night.

  It was pretty late when movement caught the corner of my eye. The wall of windows in my room was next to the other bedroom. Both faced onto the side of the house and cast trapezoids of light on the empty concrete patio, framing my shadow in one. Next to it, Dante’s shadow moved about in the next room. It disappeared and reappeared again with a starkly masculine shape that curved in places usually flattened by clothing.

  Was he naked?

  More importantly, was he looking at the shadow the light in my room cast as it stretched next to his?

  The swelling between my legs throbbed in time with my pulse inside a shell of need and skin. I was tired of feeling things I was powerless to act on.

  I was tired of keeping my mouth shut and taking whatever was given to me.

  I wanted to come tonight.

  So, I would.


  “I do what I want,” I muttered to myself. “Look or don’t.”

  Standing at the window, I twisted off my shirt, making a show of tossing it aside. Lowered my shorts and kicked them away. Pulled out the sides of my underpants as I stepped out of them. I held my arms out in a gesture visible in the shadow he probably wasn’t even looking at.

  There, asshole. Like that?

  I thought he’d reject me by snapping the drapes shut, but he didn’t. He pointed his right finger and circled it, rotating at the wrist.

  Get on with it.

  Get on with what? Was I supposed to know? Because I didn’t care. Getting undressed was a fuck you, not a tell me what to do.

  His left elbow jutted from the edge and back in a slow, rhythmic motion while the right said get on with it again.

  He was literally jerking off. A hot thrill went through me at the realization. He could pretend to be indifferent to me all he wanted, but Dante wasn’t immune to me any more than I was to him.

  It was dirty to the point of being almost disgusting. He was jerking off to my shadow, and that held me there more firmly than shackles, pinning me to a raw opening in my desire.

  What should have been revolting became enthralling. The anonymity of it. The impropriety. The sheer filth of it didn’t repel me. It beckoned.

  I spread my arms for him and swung my hips to show my figure. “Beat off to this, Dante.”

  Spreading my feet apart, I leaned forward until my breasts were visible in the shadow, hanging beneath me as I put a hand on the window and another between my legs.

  Jesus. I was as wet as I’d ever been in my life. I ran my fingers along my seam, pivoting until my shadow on the concrete illustrated what I was doing because I needed to control how I turned him on.

  It was all about me now, but it didn’t hurt to know that I was teasing Dante by reminding him of what he couldn’t have. However good his fingers felt to him, my pussy would have been better, and we both knew it.

  His elbow sped up. My hips jerked in response as I watched, defenses gone, imagining he wasn’t behind a wall, but behind me, fucking me like an animal at the speed of his shadow’s hand, while his other shadow hand swung to the side as if he was slapping my ass.