Too soft. Too intimate. I hadn’t yet learned how to cope with kind attention from Drew. Being bent over and fucked like awhore was far easier to deal with. Just bury my face and come like a slutty freight train.
While Jake had always been a safe harbour. Drew skulked like a shark in shallow waters, nipping dangerously at my heels while I clung to Jake.
Submitting to being eaten had changed everything.
But beneath the hot nights and gentle touches, danger still lurked. Drew still held my secret.
The power was still in his hands. One sentence could ruin it all.
Jake trusted him.
I sat caught between delving into that trust and the memory of Drew’s fingers bruising my thighs while he whispered threats in my ear.
Jake added his fingers to Drew’s, both of them running their hands over my skin as I grew languid in the bath.
A moment of pure serenity. The calm after the storm at the match.
Our little trio stayed in that bubble of quiet until the candles burned low. Until wax pooled on Eloise’s perfectly polished cabinets and I shivered as the water cooled.
By the time we pulled on clothes and went downstairs, Jake looked ready for Eloise’s wrath.
I wasn’t.
Her look was razor-sharp as we approached the dining table.
Her pointed fingernails tapped on the tabletop. Mike, Jake’s stepfather, looked pale and tired. He must have been on the yelling end of her ire in our absence.
‘So,’ she began, her voice barely containing her anger. ‘What’s the plan now? Are you just going to linger in the mid-league forever?’
Jake paused, and I squeezed his hand tight.
‘I don’t know,’ he answered.
‘The money I’ve spent?—’
‘Christ, Eloise.’ Drew slammed one hand onto the table, making everyone jump in surprise. ‘Do you even hear yourself? He collapses on the fucking pitch because he’s been breaking himself in two trying to make you proud, and your first thought ismoney?’
She stiffened as Drew continued, his voice rough with years of swallowed rage.
‘You don’t deserve him. You’ve never once looked at Jake and seen the boy who already gave you everything. You only see the next rung. The next trophy. Do you know what that does to someone? Living like nothing they do is ever good enough?’ Drew placed his hands on the table and leaned toward Eloise, her eyes shifting under the harshness of his words. ‘It ruins them.’
Jake flinched, but Drew didn’t stop.
‘You ruinedmewith it. But you don’t get to ruin him. Not this time.’
Eloise sat pale and rigid while Mike looked everywhere but at the people surrounding him. Jake’s hand grew limp in mine. I worried when his breath quickened.
Our little pocket of safety had been ripped open with such ferocity, so quickly, that its vulnerability rocked me.
We’d come together so quickly, and steeped in blackmail and deceit, that I feared we were doomed in the real world. That we only existed when steeped in shadows.
TWENTY-FOUR
DREW
Eloise had avoided us for days.
A blissful time.
