“Take me home.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” His jaw clenches tight, his eyes stormy.
A rush of fear hits me as I feel his cock rapidly hardening against my stomach. My heart rate spikes. “Hawk…” My words come out a panicked whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m not ready for this.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? I know you fucking want it. I’ve heard all about how you are.”
“What?” My face contorts in confusion, and I attempt to look up at him, but he grasps my throat in his big hand, and I can’t move it. I can barely breathe.
With his free hand, he strips me of my underwear. I struggle to free myself from his hold, but he’s too strong and his fingers tighten on my throat. He’s going to bruise me. “Hawk. Please. I’m—” I choke on a strangled sob.
He finally lets go of my throat to grope at my bare breast, pinching at the nipple and making me cry out, all while his other hand dives between my legs. The foreign feeling of someone else’s fingers touching me where no one ever has before makes my chest tighten and my heart hammer. His ragged breath comes out in bursts at the side of my face as he tucks his head next to mine to whisper, “I’m going to fuck this pussy hard, baby girl.”
“N-no!” I thrash against him, terror rising within me.
Chuckling darkly, he shakes his head, but pulls his hand from me, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
It’s short-lived, as he restrains me with his body and unfastens his pants, then shoves them down past his ass. His hard-on pokes me in the hip, and my lungs are suddenly incapable of drawing a breath. Everything is happening so quickly I can hardly think and feel like I’m moving underwater. My reactions are slow and clumsy as I try to hold him off. I know this isn’t how I want my first time to go. In my head, I scream.Nooooooooo!
“No, Hawk,” I manage to rasp. It finally clicks in my head, that he’s going to do this whether I want to or not. The words tear from my throat in my desperation to make him understand, “I haven’t ever— I don’t want—”
He ignores me, his eyes glitter dangerously in the dark—out of lust or something else, I’m unsure.
* * *
“He’sthe one who what, Lux?” Raven stares at me, her eyes wide.
“The night of his senior prom, he tried to rape me.” My cheeks flush from the flood of all those memories from that awful night.
While we were spinning around, stuck together on the Scrambler, Hawk had said I was a slut. And now I remember that he’d said something on prom night about how it was his “turn.”Holy shit.I’d blocked parts of that trauma from my memory. I hadn’t been able to handle it—refused to think about some of the things he’d said.
He’s reappeared, poking at all my scars, reopening old jagged wounds. I’ve kept everything locked away in a mental vault—everything he’d done and said. But now…oh my God.He’s my worst nightmare come back to life. Invading my rational head space and making me feel crazy. Forcing me to remember things that I thought were in the past. Things Ineedto be in the past.
I let out a ragged sigh, eyeing my new friends. “On the ride just now, he flat out accused me of sleeping around back in high school, but I never—” I shake my head. “Hawk was the first guy I did anything with beyond a kiss.” My eyes slam shut. Even then, we hadn’t done much before prom night—we’d fooled around once under the bleachers, but it was all over-the-clothing stuff. The fact that I even have to think about him after all this time, after it’s taken so much for me to mentally deal with all of it, is beyond any coping mechanism I currently have.
“Wait. Wouldn’t he know about… like…” Raven’s pale face immediately turns pink. “God, I’m awful with this stuff. Why would he think—?” She comes to another abrupt halt, her eyes searching mine. I know what she’s asking. She just doesn’t want to vocalize it.
“I think she’s asking why your boyfriend didn’t know that you hadn’t ever had sex with the other guys you’d dated. And I’d also like to know why he thought you were giving it up to half the school.” Star sweeps her hair up into a knot on top of her head.
“That’s the thing. He was my first boyfriend. I’d never doneanythingmore than kissing before him.”
ELEVEN
HAWK
I’ve got a biology lecture at nine o’clock this morning, and Maddox has some accounting bullshit at the same time, so we’re both up and out the door early on day one of the semester. Kellan doesn’t have anything until some art studio class at eleven. He’d laughed when we mentioned we have some early-ish classes today. I guess the art department has somehow managed to not offer their classes at the asscrack of dawn. Maybe they assume the artistic types need their sleep or something.
That’s bullshit. The ones in need of sleep are those of us who have fucking ridiculous things going on in their personal lives. Like me. I couldn’t catch a fucking wink last night after I hopped off that ride with Lux and barreled away from the Royal Revelry festivities. I hadn’t even waited for Kellan and Maddox to catch up with me. I had to get myself out of there before I seriously blew a gasket and did something in public that I could get in real trouble for.
Thinking back to the ride on the Scrambler with Lux, I’ll admit that maybe the entire reason I’d had trouble sleeping last night was that a couple of things had caught me by surprise. First, I hadn’t expected her to feel so good in my arms, and definitely hadn’t known she’d smell so goddamn delicious. Her body is bangin’—the kind every guy dreams of getting his hands on. And the scent of her skin, oh God, it’d made me want to bury my face in her neck and inhale like the fucking psycho she’s turning me into. My jaw stiffens, my teeth grind. Yeah, she’d managed to fuck me up good as she screamed her head off.
The second thing that threw me, though, was the wild, terrified look in her steel-colored eyes. Like she’s really and truly afraid. Hell, maybe she should be. And fuck if that isn’t what I’m going for. All the same, her fear had scraped at something deep inside of me. Made me feel the tiniest bit bad for her.
But then, I remember all the pain and suffering she caused… and I don’t fucking care anymore. Lux had come out of that horrific accident whole. I’d come out of it with a piece of myself missing.
“I know you got no goddamn sleep last night because I heard you watching TV and banging shit around in the kitchen.” Maddox gives me the side-eye as we cross the bridge and head for the side of campus where the lecture halls are located. “Were you practicing what I taught you?”
“Maybe. Don’t want to talk about it.” I really don’t. If I start, my mind will churn over it all day long. I already devoted my sleep to Lux. She doesn’t get to rob me of my daylight hours, too.
