I don’t want to wait any longer for her to wake up. Even though we’ve been up until the early hours of the morning and it is still only eight o'clock, I want her again.
Pulling her closer, I grind my dick against her bare stomach and light up her neck with warm, wet open-mouthed kisses.
“Ugh,” she groans.
“Good morning, beautiful.” I smile into her neck.
“Go back to bed. You’re a sex fiend …” She sighs, not doing a thing to move away from my ministrations.
I’ve been meaning to ask her about an idea I’ve had. I know it will help clean up my mistake at Grover. Minka loves to pretend she’s a hard, ball-busting woman, but I know better. She’s a romantic at heart. This could clear my name.
“So, I’ve been thinking …” I get down to her eye level. “I want to take you to the fair next week.”
Her closed eyes fly open suddenly, warmth and admiration flowing out of them. “You want to … take me … to the Freeboro Fair?”
“Yes.” I smile, knowing this would be her reaction.
The Freeboro Fair is the end of summer festival held by the county. Growing up, it was the place to take your girlfriend or boyfriend, to show off your relationship. I knew it was probably a corny date idea, but it was romantic if nothing else.
“So, you’ll be my date? To the fair?” She tries to clarify.
“No, I’m going to be your fair slave, you can drag me around on a leash …” I break off when she flicks my abs.
“Yes, I want to take you, Minka Braxton, my gorgeous girlfriend, to the fair.”
“Okay,” she breathes, smiling shyly and blushing. It’s getting me harder.
“Good. Now let’s talk about the date I want to have right now.” I flip her over, slithering down her body while we smile at each other.
25
Minka
Owen runs around to my side of the truck, exaggerating as he opens my door and sweeps his hand out to the side like one of the girls on the Price Is Right. I roll my eyes but take his outstretched hand, all the while little butterflies exploding into the side of my stomach lining.
“Your wish is my command, my queen.” He bows before taking my hand, lacing his fingers through mine.
“This won’t be half as much fun if you’re embarrassing me. You’re supposed to be my fair slave for the night.” I pout and swat at him, but can’t help the huge grin blooming across my face.
“Baby, I’ll be your slave any night of the week.” He winks good-naturedly, but I can see the obvious heat in his eyes. “Although, being a carnie might be weirdly kinky …”
“I’m going to vomit.” From behind us, I hear Farris grumbling.
I’d suggested a double date of sorts and asked Chloe to come. She hasn’t been able to break through Miles’ newly tough exterior yet, and Owen seems genuinely worried about his friend.
Miles has been in a major slump since the breakup and it seems that slump is going to continue. The back seat was completely silent almost the entire ride over and it wasn’t for Chloe’s lack of trying. Miles wouldn’t even look at her, much less indulge her in any kind of conversation. I feel kind of bad for strapping Chloe with the grump all night, especially since I know how she feels about him.
But I’ve sacrificed much more for her in the past. Plus, this was my night to live out the original high school fantasy. Owen Axel, my boyfriend, is taking me to the Freeboro Fair.
Freeboro County houses Mitchum and four other towns, and every year in late August they get together to throw a big carnival smack dab in the middle of the town lines. The fair has gotten more popular in our minds as we’ve grown up; starting in middle school, if you had a boyfriend, you’d come to the fair together to show off, ride the Ferris wheel and generally just be “in love.”
I know it’s a dumb tradition, but I’ve never had someone take me to the fair. Much less someone I love. Although I haven’t told Owen I love him yet. Even though I’ve come so far from where I had been at the beginning of the summer, really where I had been for the past two years, I couldn’t take that last leap.
Saying I love him scares the crap of out me. What if he doesn’t say it back?
Sure, my head is getting away from me. Amped up, clichéd expectations about my first boyfriend-girlfriend experience at the fair are making me turn into Chloe, my hopeless romantic best friend.
“Okay, so what should we do first?” Chloe’s trying even harder than usual to be peppy and I’m cringing inside at how awful this night is probably going to be for her.
“Who cares? This is lame, can we go now?” Miles grumbles, kicking dirt around with his shoe. Epic cringe.
“No way, man, we’re escorting these two beautiful ladies around the fair! Now kick your sorry ass into gear and ask your lady if she wants to take a whirl on the Ferris wheel.” Owen massages Miles’ shoulders as if he’s a boxer, getting ready to go into battle. Chloe shoots me a death look.
“That sounds like a great idea!” I burst, way too enthusiastically, trying to cajole all the party members involved. Chloe just rolls her eyes at me, but both she and Miles relent.
As we make our way over to the line at the bottom of the big turning wheel, Owen slings his arms around my shoulders. It’s a move I’ve seen a hundred times from a hundred couples, but I’ve never truly known what it means to be at home in another person’s arms until him.
And the fact that he and I are together, at the Freeboro Fair? My heart is nearly exploding. The past couple of months just don’t feel like my life. I’d lost all confidence in myself sophomore year and Owen has been the one to restore it. He’s shown me the way and also shown me that not everything is as it seems.
While a year and a half ago I would have laughed in your face and told you to fuck off if you told me I’d be dating Owen, I’d completely misjudged him.
We squish into the two-seater, which is not easy when you have a two hundred pound demi-god next to you and belt ourselves in, with Chloe and Miles taking the seat behind us. As the car begins to climb, Owen wraps me in his arms, whispering in my ear.
“You look so beautiful tonight, you know that?” I blush at his unexpected words. Of course, Owen is a charmer, but I think he knows what tonight means to me. Ever since our weekend at Grover, he’s been trying extra hard to bestow all kinds of confidence and compliments on me.
His whole support mission really started when I’d confessed my sophomore year scandal at the beach though. Okay, so I hadn’t explicitly told him about Gregory, but I know he understood. You couldn’t live in this town and not have heard about what had gone down that year.
“I could get used to this slave thing,” I rib him, not wanting to take the compliment.
“Hey, don’t do that,” he says seriously. How he knows me already, what I think, how I feel, I’ll never know. “You are amazing. Don’t shy away from me.” I lean into him and kiss him gently, a wordless thank you. “I am the luckiest guy alive right now. It’s a great night, I’m on top of this rickety piece of shit ride with the most amazing girl on earth and later, I get ice cream.”
I laugh at his assessment of what constitutes lucky; he is seriously a child trapped in a grown man’s body. A seriously fine grown man. But I can’t deny that I feel insanely lucky at this moment too. “And maybe, if you’re even luckier, you’ll have another sweet treat when you take me home.”
I don’t know what has come over me. He makes me crave his touch, his look. Yep, that look, the one he’s pinning me with intensely right now.
Looking over, I can see his wide, mischievous smile under the moonlight. Suddenly, we stop moving, suspended in the air three cars from the top. The car swings lightly, just enough to put me on edge. But my heart pounding in its cage for an entirely different reason puts me on edge even more.
Owen turns to me, puts a hand on my face and looks me in the eyes. He stays like this for a beat and then another. In the distance, I can hear the tinkling music of the carousel. My hands are
sweating in my lap, I’m trying to stay still, capture this moment and burn it onto my brain for eternity. This is it …
And then he angles his head, swoops down and kisses me.
His mouth melds with mine, his tongue dancing past my teeth and tangling in an exotic rhythm with my own.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great kiss. A fantastic kiss. A kiss that melts my heart and makes my ears ring. But it isn’t those three little words. I don’t know why I expected them tonight, we’ve only been seeing each other for a little less than three months.
I guess I thought he could feel the same insane, soul-binding connection I do. That when he looks at me, we have the shared knowledge that we were put on this earth, in this godforsaken southern hellhole, to find each other.
Why am I twisting myself up over this? We have plenty of time to explore our relationship.
Except we don’t. Owen goes back to school in two days. We haven’t discussed the specifics of what will happen between us. I’m panicking. Ever since the party debacle, I need a confirmation, whether it’s those three little words or just a verbal commitment that he’s mine for always, no matter how far apart we are.
Our ride comes to an end shortly after and we fulfill all the other cliché things on the “teenagers go to the fair” list.
Chloe wanted to do bumper cars, which was actually one of the only things Miles seemed to take pleasure in. I think it was because he got to ram into people at high speeds.
Owen insisted on showing off his “mad basketball skills” for us and ended up winning me a little stuffed bear. Before I could drag everyone over to the cotton candy booth, Farris disappeared to God knew where. Poor Chloe.
“It’s a fair ritual and I will not leave here before my stomach is filled with pink sparkly fluff,” I whine as Owen protests my choice of dessert.
“Cotton candy is literally pretty air. There is no substance. Wouldn’t you rather have something good, like funnel cake?” He puts his best puppy dog face on, but I’m not budging.
“Yo! Axel, what’s good, man?”
That voice.
I turn, knowing that when I do, the world will bottom out.
Keep it together, it can’t be him. You can’t remember his voice.
But then I see Owen hug him. Gregory. Right here, embracing my boyfriend in front of me.
It feels like I am simultaneously being punched in the stomach and stabbed in the heart. My fingers stop working. My senses go haywire, my vocal cords all but freeze up.
They’re standing two feet in front of me, chumming it up like old buddies.
“… want to introduce you to my girlfriend. Hey, babe … come here, I want you to meet someone.” He motions to me, waving with a giant grin on his face.
Chloe stands there, a somber, fearful expression on her face, waiting for my cue. Were we bolting? Playing it cool? Can she do anything?
Only a time machine to take me away from this moment.
Gregory turns his head toward me, away from the conversation he’s having with Owen. The moment his eyes lock onto mine, he stares in disbelief for just a moment. Then, the jerk has the nerve to look over my head, as if Owen isn’t talking about me.
I can’t move. Chloe is looking at me, Owen is holding out his hand and all I can do is stare into the venomous eyes of the boy who had shattered my world three years ago.
When Gregory finally realizes I must be the girlfriend Owen is referring to, he leers at me. Gregory openly assesses my body, his beady little eyes roaming over my curves. I involuntarily cringe at the memory of his hands on me and a cold sweat begins to trickle between my breasts and down my neck. I thought I might bend over and spill the contents of my stomach into over the dirt.
“Babe?” Owen’s voice breaks me out of my terror coma.
“I want to go home,” I declare, standing stoically in my place, not having moved any closer toward their conversation.
“What? Come meet my friend Greg.” He looks at me, confusion and annoyance marring his aqua eyes.
He’s annoyed with me? I told him my deepest, darkest, most personal secret. I shared my shame with him and he stood there, bro-pounding the asshole who stole my virginity? Taken it from me under false pretenses only to throw it back in my face.
“I want to go home.” My brain isn’t working fast enough. It’s the only coherent thought I can voice.
“Minka, what? Come here and then I’ll take you home.” He moves closer to where I am rooted into the ground. “You’re being kind of rude, this isn’t like you,” he whispers for only my ears.
His words feel like a slap, so much that I flinch backward. Owen catches my arm, pulling me back to him before I have the chance to trip over myself and land in the mud. He looks at me like I’ve come down with the plague. “What is wrong, babe?”
He really isn’t comprehending why my senses are shutting down? Why I can’t stand to breathe the same air as this creep. Unable to bear the sight of what is transpiring any more, I turn on my heel and begin to walk off, not stopping when I hear Owen start to call my name.
I feel an arm snake around my waist and lean in as I feel Chloe start to support my weight while we increase our pace. She knows, without me even needing to say it, that I need to be as far away from him as possible.
“Just breathe, I’m getting you out of here,” Chloe instructs, punching the keypad on her phone.
It feels like every breath I take in is searing my lungs, flaying me open from the inside out. I’m shaking so violently that I almost can’t walk.
Finally, we hit the parking lot with Owen hot on our heels.
“Are you okay? What the hell was that, Minka?” He looks bewildered and mad.
After I disclosed everything about my past, after we had sex, I thought he would have understood. I thought he would have known about everything that went down. But apparently, he is more trapped in his popular bubble than I originally thought. He hadn’t been paying any attention to me when we were in school together. How did I ever expected him to understand the gravity of what went down?
Pulling him away from where Chloe could hear us, I know I need to tell him the whole truth. My voice shaking and tears pooling in my eyes, I forge on.
“Remember how I told you about my past when we were at the beach? About the bet and how awful high school has been for me? I told you that it was a certain guy who had led me on and taken my virginity on a bet.” I look down at my fingers, pulling at them to avoid spilling the truth. I don’t want to say his name. The whole thing is just too painful for me to even talk about, let alone remember.
“Yeah, I remember. And I told you I don’t care about any of that. That you’re beautiful and smart and you shouldn’t let what idiotic things other people choose to do or say affect you.”
It’s so easy for him to take that mentality.
“I know that. But … the guy?” I stall, twisting my fingers and biting down so hard on my lip that I think I might draw blood. “It was Gregory.”
Owen looks honestly stunned. Questions fill his eyes and I know he’s thinking it over in his head, rolling the idea around like a marble, trying to place the events I described to him onto his friend.
“No, it couldn’t be. Greg is a great guy.”
My stomach drops to my feet. My throat goes dry and it feels like he’s slapped all the air out of me. He thinks I am lying?
“You don’t believe me?” I can hear the unshed tears clogging my whispered question.
“I just … babe, I’ve known Greg forever. I really think you’re mistaken. He’s an awesome dude, he wouldn’t do something like that. Maybe you didn’t get the entire story …”
My head is spinning and I can’t feel my limbs. I can only tell that I’m crying from the wetness spilling from my cheeks and chin onto my collarbone as I stand there motionless.
And there it is, clear as day. The blatant difference between us. He was in and I was out. He will always put his cherished people, the popular crowd, o
ver me. That’s how this always works. Their word is stronger than mine. There’s no use fighting the inevitable.
“I have to go home.” I glance around, looking for Chloe. I see Kelsey’s green Jeep pull up and I know Chloe called her. I could kiss them for being so great if I didn’t feel like my heart has just been carved out of my chest. I will my numb feet to move toward them and away from Owen.
“Hey, wait a minute! I can take you. Minka, what the fuck?” Owen clutches my arm, looking incredulous as if he hasn’t just ripped my heart from its cavity and stomped on it. It’s hard to even look at him. I wanted to tell him that I loved him. How the hell did I end up here again? I overlooked all the warning signs, the bells and whistles telling me I was walking into a trap. I have to get out of here.
Facing him, I deliver the blow that I know will wreck and preserve me all at once. “Owen, we shouldn’t see each other anymore. Please don’t call me.” I hope he can hear the robotic sentences coming from my mouth. I’m not sure my octave is even reaching a hairbreadth over a whisper. I’m trying so hard to force the syllables past the lump in my throat. Big salty tears leak from my eyes as Chloe grabs my waist, supporting me once again as we walk to the Jeep.
“Minka! What are you doing? Can we talk about this? What the hell is happening?” I see Owen’s pleading eyes boring holes into me as Chloe loads me into the Jeep. He plunges his hands into his hair out of frustration and moves angrily toward me.
Pulling at the now locked door, he shouts at the side of my face through the glass, “Minka! You’re seriously mad about me talking to Greg? You have got to be wrong! Come out here and talk to me, goddammit.” He pulls a few more times at the locked door handle and pounds his fist into the window.
I strain my body and will it to keep facing forward. I can’t look at him or I will dissolve into a puddle of tears. My body feels like it’s being sucked into the earth; my ears are filled with a whooshing sound and my stomach and heart keep doing that dipping thing like I’m on a roller coaster. I’m not shocked to find I might be sick in the back of Kelsey’s Jeep.
Over the Fence Box Set Page 19