“Talk, Helen. I need you to give me your words.”
“Oh, so you do know it’s me? I wasn’t sure if you were fucking me or Abby. Or maybe it didn’t really matter who you fucked, as long as you had a warm hole to dump your rage into.” I slapped his chest with enough force to make him wince. “I don’t need you to be my boyfriend, but my pussy is not a receptacle for your feelings for another woman. You owe me a lot more respect than that. So fuck you. And get the hell out of my way so I can put my underwear on before I catch hepatitis from this counter.”
“Helen—”
“No.” I hopped down, and he allowed me to slide by to grab my clothes. I shoved my legs in my shorts and glared at him. “You told me when we started this you don’t want to be responsible for my emotions—and you hammered that home just now. This is my line in the sand I will not let you cross again. We can be done. We don’t have to have a conversation. I’m out, Theo.”
“Theodore,” he murmured.
“Fuck you, Theo,” I hissed.
I got a step toward the door before Theo was on me, whipping me around to face him.
“I knew it was you,” he shot out. “How can you think I didn’t know exactly who I was with? I’ve never been this way with anyone else. What we have is only ours.”
“I saw you and Abby.”
He nodded. “I know you did, baby. I saw you too.”
“Who are Sarah and Thomas?”
He jerked back, clearly surprised by my question. He answered anyway, and I wished he hadn’t. “They’re the names we thought of for our future kids. In high school, Helen.”
I winced like he’d struck me. “Cute. Very Waspy and perfect. You’re obviously still torn up about your breakup. You’re so devastated and angry at her, you had to wreck my pussy and—”
He came at me, cupping my face with both hands. All the anger and roughness from earlier was gone, replaced with the gentle Theo I knew.
“Did I hurt you, baby?”
“Yeah, you did.”
His eyes flared. His hands went to the top of his head. “I hurt you, Helen? You’re telling me I hurt you?”
I nodded, but my fight had evaporated at his devastation. Because that’s what I was seeing. Theo was beside himself right now, pacing the small bathroom like a feral cat.
“Theo, I didn’t mean it like that. Yeah, you were rougher than you’ve ever been, and I will definitely feel it tomorrow, but that would have been okay if you were with me the whole time.” I pressed my hand to my forehead. “You made me feel used and cheap—and you’ve never made me feel that way before. That’s what hurt—getting that from you.”
He dropped his hands, sweeping me with his gaze. And then he was on me, pulling me in his arms, not to ravage me, but to hold me against him.
“I don’t think that of you. I will never think that of you. Ever, Helen.” His lips touched the top of my head again and again. “I was out of my mind, but there was never a second I didn’t know who I was with. And that was about you and me. Because the whole time she was there, I was thinking about how badly I wanted you in my lap reading Shakespeare with me.”
“You were angry.”
“Yeah, I was. I was angry at her for getting in my face, finding our spot, bringing up shit we’ve settled. I was pissed you had to see it and would think I had invited that to our spot. I shouldn’t have taken you when I was mad, but I need you to believe when I’m inside you, it’s only you and me. I will never bring anyone else between us.”
In my head, Mads was telling me to listen to what he was saying. To feel his arms around me and take it all in. But I didn’t want this, these emotions, this attachment. We agreed from the beginning what we were and what we weren’t, but we hadn’t agreed on this. And I just couldn’t.
I blinked up at him. “This is too much.”
“What?” he breathed.
“This, what’s happening here. We said sex, friendship, but not this. I’m not your girlfriend.”
He studied me with eyes that were duller than they’d ever been. Then he nodded. “You’re right. I’m bad at keeping to my own rules.”
I removed myself from his arms, grinning as I did, even though I didn’t like it.
“Do better, Theodore.” I tapped his chest. “You have it easy with me. Lots of sex, no responsibilities except not being an asshole. Don’t screw it up.”
I shoved every ounce of light I had left into my words to convince us both we weren’t more than just sex.
He cocked his head, studying me some more, now from a distance. Then he grinned, and I knew his smiles enough to recognize it was forced.
“I’ll work on that.” Then he shook his head. “I don’t want to screw up a really good thing.”
“Then don’t.”
Our gazes locked, and the heaviness in them betrayed the lightness of our words. But neither of us were ready nor willing to take on the weight of what could be, that much was obvious.
Maybe one day, though. For Mads and all she’d lost, all she’d never have, I’d keep my one day open.
Chapter Fifteen
Theo
“Still can’t believe you were trying to shut me out.”
Helen scratched the back of my neck and leaned into me. “Lock is smarter than you. Obviously I’m going to pair up with the smartest dude in our class. That’s just good thinking. You can’t blame me for that.”
I took her leg and slung it over mine. “I can, and I absolutely will. You need a partner in class, it’s me. We’ll rub our two dumb brains together and come up with something smart.”
She snorted an adorable laugh, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. “That’s not how it works. And we both know if we were alone, working on this project, we would not be rubbing brains.”
Considering we were in the library and my hand was creeping up her inner thigh, she had a point. A terrible fucking point, but still a point.
It’d been a couple weeks since our post-Abby bathroom encounter. Things were smooth. I wouldn’t say easy, because Helen wasn’t an easy kind of girl. But that was fine. I’d take her difficult any day. And I did. Bent over the side of her bed. In the back of my car. Pinned to her wall. On top of her. Behind her. Every way we could have each other. Except sleeping. The one time I’d wanted to crash at her place, she’d shoved me out the door.
I got it. I’d been tired as hell from fucking the living shit out of her, but I still got it. We functioned within parameters I’d set for us. If Helen was sticking to them, all the better. As long as I got to be inside her, I could deal, because I was well and truly addicted to having her raw and unencumbered. I could deal for now, at least.