Series: Like Us Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 241
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
“Really?” I smile, and I’m surprised to feel a swell of joy rather than grief at hearing about this forgotten moment. “That must have been three…”
“Three years ago, yeah. I finished wrapping your tattoo on your forearm. We were in the middle of the bus at this booth-table thing. Oscar was driving, and Farrow had been with us for a second—but he left to go chat with him.” Donnelly taps ash outside the window. “You went to the bathroom to look at the tattoo, but you brought out your toiletry bag. You were digging around for a sec, and I thought you were gonna take out your birth control or something. But you pulled out a baggy of pills.”
Pills?
I’m about to ask what kind, but he’s a good storyteller and I don’t want him to jump around.
He continues, “It’s not like you were showing me. Your back was slightly turned, but I could see. I was cleaning up my tattoo machine, putting away ink, moving around you. And Charlie—he went to use the bathroom around that time, so he must’ve seen you too.”
“But we talked about the pills that same night?”
“Yeah,” he nods, “but you gotta understand, we weren’t friends. I barely knew you at the time. You’d just turned eighteen, and I was twenty-six. I had no business hanging around you before that as anything other than a bodyguard. And I didn’t really wanna be alone with you then. I know what people think I’m willing to do, and it’s just not who I am, you know? Not when you’re that young.”
I nod. “Yeah, I get it. You wanted to give it some time before befriending me, for the freshness of my eighteen to wear off a bit.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not like I was looking to ever befriend you, Luna. I was just kind of…drawn to you.”
I squint in thought. “Like a pheromone?” I imagine Wallflower from New Mutants comics. “Maybe I had the superpower of pheromone control back then. I must have smelled like lust.”
He smiles. “Didn’t get close enough to smell you when you just turned eighteen. So I can’t say.”
“What does just turned twenty-one smell like?”
His gaze inches so slowly down me, I quiver, and he sucks the cigarette with casualness, blows more smoke outside, then says, “Lemme see.” He steps forward, and one of his hands slips against the back of my neck, lifting into my hair. His head dips, and he breathes me in against my sensitive nape, his lips just barely skating across my goose-pimpled skin. I have to hold on to his waist to keep from trembling, pleasure trying to rattle my limbs.
“Your twenty-one,” he whispers, “smells ripe.” He pulls back just to caress my gaze with his. “Like you’re ready to be eaten.”
Please. “Yep. I’m ready,” I rasp. “Eat me out.”
Donnelly isn’t taking the bait that easily tonight. He’s not so ready to harvest me, maybe since we haven’t finished the talk he wanted to have. I want to have it too. It’s just distracting. How much I crave the sensualness and physicality of him.
He releases more ash outside, being careful about the cigarette in my family’s bathroom. “Back to the tour bus?” he asks.
“Uh-huh,” I nod, flush still bathing my face. I feel wet, so I cross my ankles, thighs gluing together.
“You alright?”
I nod a few more times. “How’d you ask her—I mean me”—I’m trying to think of us as one person more and more—“about the pills?”
“You cracked open an energy drink, and we caught eyes when you popped the pill in your mouth. I just asked you what it was. You shrugged and said, ‘Adderall.’”
“Adderall?”
“Yeah. I think I said something like, ‘You have a prescription?’ and you shook your head. You seemed kind of tentative. I think you thought I’d rat you out to security. But I wasn’t judging you for it, and you ended up asking me if I’d taken any before.”
“Have you?”
“Yeah, once or twice at Yale. Hated how I couldn’t sleep. I’d rather just have a nicotine high.”
“Was I just trying to stay up late or something?”
He rubs at his face. “I, uh, dunno what you were trying to do, Luna. ‘Cause most of us on the bus ate edibles that night, including you, so I got concerned seeing you take uppers after downers and washing Adderall down with more caffeine. I shoulda said something to you about it then, but I didn’t. I just asked if I could have a swig of your energy drink. I drank a lot of it. Then over the next year, there were times where we were in group settings, and I’d see you do the same thing. I’d just say things like, ‘That doesn’t mix well.’ You usually listened to me or let me drink whatever you were drinking.”