Her lips skim to my ear. “I like you, Caiden,” she whispers, and her saying my name with that hot breath, that wet mouth, is nearly enough to break my resolve. “I like you a lot.”
I take her by the shoulders and gently peel her away, my heart hammering out African drumbeats against my ribcage. “You’re so damn incredible, but I can’t do this. It’s totally against university rules. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not my professor,” she says, her expression wounded. “If we like each other, I don’t see why it should matter.”
“I’m Dr. Duncan’s graduate assistant. My boss is your professor. It’s a conflict of interest, since I do most of his grading.”
“So you are conflicted.” It’s clear from the predatory shift her expression takes that she hears that I’m trying to convince myself as much as her.
I drop my head against the headrest. “I am.”
She leans closer again, her breast pressing against my arm through the thin cotton of her top. “I’ll never say anything. No one needs to know,” she whispers, her breath feathering over my neck and stiffening my cock.
My breaths are shallow pants, and I force my lungs to expand with my next inhalation. If I stay in this car with her, so close, I’m going to give in.
“Tonight was really amazing, but I need to get home,” I say, cranking the ignition and gluing my palm to the stick shift.
There’s a long minute that she doesn’t move. Finally, she leans in and presses a kiss to my cheek, then opens her door.
I watch her cross to her car, and when she pulls out, I crank a U-turn and head home. Where I jerk off to Arctic Monkeys with the vivid image of getting dirty with Blaire playing on a loop behind my eyelids.
Chapter 3
Blaire
“We finally did it yesterday,” my best friend Zoey tells me when she slips into the passenger seat of the Mini.
Her mom waves from the front door as we pull away from the curb.
“Who did what?” I ask and really try to pay attention to the answer.
I was off in space all weekend, putting the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge. My mind won’t turn off, reliving kissing Caiden, planning all the other things I want to do to him.
Once I realized he’s as nervous about me as I am about him, the nerves melted away and things somehow became easy between us. We’ve got so much in common, from our love of literature, to our taste in music, to how he gets my poetry, to things I can’t even put my finger on, but feel enormous. Things having to do with how his touch makes my very DNA hum, and the way his glance causes poetry to leak from my soul.
But he’s got rules.
Zoey’s gaze blazes exasperation into mine as I turn the corner at the end of her block. I feel it like a deathbeam, breaking through my deflector shields. “We had sex, Blaire! I finally let Kevin fuck me.”
“About damn time. That boy’s had blue balls for months.”
She shoves my shoulder hard, causing me to jerk the steering wheel and veer us across the oncoming lane, which is thankfully empty, sideswiping the trashcans on the opposite curb. “You are such a bitch!”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I say, righting the ship.
She shoves her short yellow bob behind her ear and glares out the windshield. “You’re supposed to be all, like, ‘Oh my God, Zoey! Give me all the deets!’”
“Oh my God, Zoey! Give me all the deets!” I cut her a glare as I take the right out to the main road. “You spend way the hell too much time on social media. You know I’d never actually say ‘deets,’ right? That’s not even a word.”
“You should at least have a Snapchat,” she grumbles.
“Why? So I can be brainwashed along with the rest of you?”
I boycotted social media in junior high when I discovered it was just hive mentality—a crash course in unoriginal thinking.
She rolls her eyes and drops back into her seat. “Whatever. Just forget it. I’ll tell Jessica when we get to school.”
“It’s not like you cashed in your V-card or anything, Zoe,” I say, starting to feel a little guilty. This is what friends are supposed to do, right? Tell each other this shit? “Sorry. I just don’t get what the big deal is.”
She throws a hand at me. “Your mystery boy must have fucked you wrong, because otherwise you’d know what the big deal is.”
And…there goes any guilt I might have been feeling. “Bitch.”
Zoey’s pretty much the only friend I have outside Marcus and Nate, though she’s cultivated a wider circle than me. I honestly have never related well to people my age. I can’t do the standard fashion critiquing and boy watching that goes on in lunch circles and end up drifting into my own mind, so the rest of Zoey’s friends think I’m socially stunted.