Undecided

“You’re making everything worse.”

“Guys!” I exclaim. “Let’s focus.” The sooner we find the girl, the sooner we end the hunt. Given the timeline, I’m probably either blank space forty-one or forty-two, which gives me twenty chances to end this search before they start trying to track me down. “What about number eight? Super hot kinkster?”

Crosbie looks intrigued. “Kinkster, huh? How kinky are we talking?”

I forget about wincing and kick him in the shin. He curses and scowls at me, but Kellan doesn’t even notice.

“Very,” he assures us dreamily. “Remember when we went to that club earlier this year on the track team trip?” This is directed at Crosbie.

“The one with the foam or the snakes?”

“The foam.”

“Yep.”

“She was a waitress, and she was wearing this white leather dress—the tiniest thing I’d ever seen, despite her massive—” Kellan breaks off as he remembers I’m sitting three feet away. “Ah, she had a great body. Anyway, we were dancing and the foam was piling up, and she kept grinding back against me, inching up her dress until her whole ass was on display, just split in half with this little red G-string. So I’m like, ‘Your dress is riding up,’ and she’s like, ‘I know,’ and I’m like, ‘Want to go someplace?’ and she’s like, ‘Right here’s good.’ And next thing I know we’re fucking, right there on the dance floor. It was hot.” He rests his chin on his hand. “I miss her.”

I know I’m supposed to be outraged or offended or somehow off-put by this story, but those last three words—I miss her—only make me think of Crosbie. His text. His fingers. His body. And how much I want him. I dart a glance at his face and he’s looking at me, the same thoughts mirrored in his eyes.

Crosbie clears his throat. “Okay,” he says, shifting in his seat. “So you know where she works. You can probably call the club and leave your contact information. Hopefully she calls you back.”

Kellan nods. “Good one. Will do.”

I take a breath. “Number nine? Lin from stairwell at gym? You meet girls in stairwells?” Is there any place he can’t meet women?

“We didn’t exactly ‘meet’ there, if you know what I mean.” Kellan grins thoughtfully. “Or rather, we met there, but for the express purpose of—”

“I think I get it.”

“She’s a volleyball player,” he supplies, though I hadn’t asked. “And we’d been eye fucking for a while, then after one of her matches we bumped into each other and decided to just go for it. She kept the kneepads on, if you know what I mean.”

I rub a hand over my hot face. Be indignant, I tell myself. Be righteous! But all I’m doing is picturing myself on my hands and knees, Crosbie behind me, in front of me, under me, doing so many dirty things.

I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve had sex since that night in the front seat of his car. He picks me up after work regularly and we drive some place to mess around as best we can. Because it’s cold out and I’m not willing to get arrested for public indecency—again—we’ve had to be creative. Hand jobs in the back row of a mostly-empty movie theater, a quickie against the wall in the supply closet at Beans after I let him in the back door, one painful attempt to squeeze into the backseat of his car that left us both with seatbelt-shaped bruises and vows never to try again.

We’d finally gotten so frustrated that I’d pulled up the hood of my jacket and hidden my face as we ran up the stairs to his room at the frat house, so desperate to just have fully-naked, proper sex, that I’d been willing to ignore the consequences. Unfortunately we weren’t the only ones with sex on the brain, and his next-door neighbor and his very vocal partner were doing their best to bring the house down with their sex sounds. When the wall shook so hard it rattled Crosbie’s bed, he’d thrown on jeans and a shirt and stormed out of the room to threaten the guy with castration if he didn’t keep it down. When he got back neither one of us were in the mood.

By the time Kellan’s walked us through the details of his romp with number ten (either Tiffani or Brittani, but it definitely ends in an i), I’m ready to combust. I can barely sit still, my thighs clenching with need, and I’m familiar enough with Crosbie’s flushed cheeks and darkened gaze to know he’s on the same dirty page. The problem is, we have nowhere to go to read this page.

Kellan’s phone rings suddenly, jarring us all out of this strange sexual haze. “It’s Dane,” he whispers, before picking up and saying hello. “Good,” he says. “You?” He nods and listens, nods and listens, then for some reason, gives us a thumbs up. “He’s right here,” he says. “I’ll tell him, absolutely. Cool. See you soon.” He hangs up and gapes at us as though he can’t believe his good luck. “This is perfect!”

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