Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 91299 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91299 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
I raise my gaze, and she’s staring at me. I guess she has been this whole time.
“And look at you now. Do they have any clue what an incredible person you are?” she says softly. I like that she didn’t berate or criticize them. I do care for them. I just don’t think my level of commitment to them was ever returned.
“You think I’m incredible? In what way?”
She gets this wistful expression on her face. “You’re hilarious, for one.” She chews on her lip. “I see underneath that too. You’re a layered person, much more than people see.”
“Like an onion? But with fresh breath?” I laugh, then get distracted thinking about her note. I can’t stop my next words. “I have some Big Red in my backpack if you want a piece.”
Her lashes flutter. “Probably shouldn’t. It is the library and there are rules.”
“Yeah, rules,” I murmur. “Not a fan.”
She looks as if she might say something, but she doesn’t.
I take in that erratic pulse at her throat again.
Everyone fades away as we just…stare.
I glance at her lips. God, that mouth. I want…
Her eyes flicker with something I think is desire, and I inhale sharply as memories surface, of us, of her showing up at my dorm room for our third and final hookup, although I didn’t know that then.
Head high, she’d waltzed into my bedroom like she owned the damn world and kicked the door shut with a red heel. “You want this? Come and get it,” she said, throwing off her black coat and twirling around. Fucking goddess. She was completely naked, her tits big and perfect, her pussy already wet. I know because she told me in delicious detail about driving in her car to get to my dorm, how she couldn’t get me out of her head, how she’d masturbated all week to mental images of me. She had a dirty, dirty mouth, and everything inside me wanted her words, needed them. I stared at her while she stood there and played back the previous time she was in my dorm room when we had sex on the floor with me behind her, a redo of the library, neither of us even able to make it to the bed.
“Afraid, football player?” she asked after I stood there too long, probably with my mouth open. She was the sexiest fucking thing I’d ever seen, all curves and big eyes. She gave me a little smile, brushed a finger over her piercing—and I was gone. I ripped my clothes off, barely got a condom on before I picked her up and pushed her against the wall. I slid inside her all the way to the hilt, shuddering. I recall how her heels dug into my back, the feel of her ass in my hands, that whimpering noise she made when I pulled her hair to the side and bit her neck like an animal then kissed it like a lover.
I fucked her until I couldn’t breathe and my legs shook.
I fucked her until she called my name like a prayer.
I fucked her until she was all I could see.
Until she was all I wanted.
Until I thought I might scream from just the need to make her mine.
Afterward, she picked up her coat, slid it back on, and told me she had to go study. I sat stunned on my bed, spent and shaking, watching her, my heart a sledgehammer as I grappled with the realization that I didn’t want her to go. She ran from the library the first time, and she ran the second time, but this time—this time she hesitated at my door, lingering and looking back at me, as if waiting for me to ask her to stay. With vulnerable eyes, she chewed hard on her lush lips, a questioning look on her face as we stared long and hard at each other, our eyes having a conversation neither of us wanted to put out there. She wanted to stay. She wanted me to ask her to stay and see where it went.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
My heart belonged only to me. It had to.
Everyone leaves me. They always do.
And football is first. It has to be. It’s all I’ve had that felt right.
Someone in the library coughs, and I start, scrubbing my face and shoving those memories out of my head.
I jerk to stand. “I need to go.”
She frowns. “Now?”
“Yes. Early class tomorrow.” My words are gruff.
She reads my face, and I imagine what she sees. I’m shutting her out.
I…I can’t be near her anymore. Studying together? What the fuck was I thinking?
We’re over, I repeat in my head for the hundredth time since getting back to Magnolia.
I walk back to my chair, get my things, and put them back in my backpack. We don’t speak as we start back down the stairs. Our hands brush against each other, and I stuff mine deep in my pocket.