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My heart started pounding excitedly, but I was still intimidated by this idea. I had entertained the thought, but given that I didn’t know these guys very well, I didn’t want to start pushing too many buttons.
But he was the boss, wasn’t he? He was telling me to do it.
I started shaking the bottle, feeling the pressure bulge in the plastic. Foam started up near the top cap but settled deceptively while still contained.
“Go on,” he said, as cool as if asking me to recite a passage from a textbook. He tilted his head toward Raven’s bedroom.
I trailed him to the doorway, and stopped short when Axel stopped, nearly bumping into him.
Raven was bent over a gun. He had a radio on nearby playing what I guessed was Russian rock music.
Axel knocked his knuckles against the doorframe.
Raven picked up his head, turned around. He nodded to Axel and then looked at me, spotting the bottle. He put a hand out reaching for it. “Need something?” he asked Axel.
I crossed the room putting the bottle in Raven’s hand, and tried to appear casual about taking a step back from his table, as if to get out of the middle of the conversation that had nothing to do with me.
“Those guns ready to go yet?” Axel asked.
“Two more to go.” Raven squeezed the top of the bottle and twisted the cap. The soda nearly shook in his hands.
A geyser formed and the top popped up into his palm. Cola erupted around his hand and over his clothes, dripping to the floor. Soda splashed against his face.
“Shit, fuck!” Raven grabbed the bottle, jumping up and running to the door. “Out of the way.”
Axel leaned right and left, blocking Raven from leaving his bedroom, as if pretending to get out of his way, but being completely uncoordinated. However, he did it so smoothly and with such precision that you could tell his bumbling was a farce, as if Axel would never be so clumsy.
The result was the spraying fountain of soda got over Axel’s shirt and mine, including the jacket. Axel didn’t flinch. I stepped back against the wall but couldn’t help the grin on my face, though at the same time, felt the desire sweep through me to be as cool and as collected as Axel appeared to be.
“Fuck, Kayli. Look at the mess,” Raven said.
“I expect you to clean it,” Axel said. “She’s not your errand boy.”
“I was just teasing her!” Raven bellowed at him. He squeezed the top back onto the bottle. “Look at my floor. I’m going to need a steam cleaner.”
“It’ll be coming out of your budget. Your Academy training should have taught you better.”
I wanted to ask what the Academy was, but my mind was reeling. I suddenly felt bad about ratting out Raven. It was a pretty big mess. And what a waste of a soda. “Where’s the towels?” I asked, trying to make peace. If we had to work together today, I didn’t want to do it on bad terms. “I’ll go get them.”
“There, Raven,” Axel said. “Girls can be nice if you give them a chance.”
“I know she is,” Raven bellowed at him. “I was just messing with her for hitting me.”
Axel shifted his intense gaze my way. “You hit him?”
I winced. “It was part of the deal.”
Axel smirked. “Good.”
“What?” Raven made a fist and planted it next to his temple. “It’s not okay to tease her but it’s okay for her to beat the shit out of me?”
“She’s a girl. If she manages to ‘beat the shit out’ of you, you’re going soft.”
“Hey,” I said, unsure which one of us that was meant to insult.
Axel turned on me, he opened his mouth and then stopped as his gaze lowered from my face to my shirt. I thought at first he was checking out my boobs, like most guys do when they look down.
Instead I followed his eyes. My shirt was covered in soda. Even my shorts were soaked.
Axel’s mouth dipped in the corner. “Your clothes are ruined.”
“It’s her own damn fault,” Raven said.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. I wiped my hand across the shirt, and then felt guilty as cola dripped to the floor. I eased the jacket off my shoulders.
Axel pinched the edge of the jacket. He passed it to Raven. “Get this cleaned. I’ll get her some new clothes to wear.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I said.
“You won’t walk around in soda-drenched clothes this in this apartment,” Axel said. He made a wide step to get around soda, and snagged my arm. “Come on.”
Corey was sitting at one of the computer desks now. He closed a screen as we walked by, turning to us. “What happened? Do you need a hand?”
“Do your thing, Cor,” Axel said with such an ease and at the same time using that stern tone, as if suggesting that he had full command of the situation and has had it all along. “I’ve got her now.”
I swallowed.
I followed Axel to the other side of the apartment, toward his bedroom. I hesitated a moment, already stressed about this situation and now heading into the inner sanctum of a guy who barely knew me at all. It was a wild thought for me to have in the moment, because I had already followed a group of guys to their apartment without knowing much about any of them. Did I consider him separate from the others? He didn’t seem older than any of us. Slightly over twenty perhaps. Maybe it was because they called him “boss”.
And what was he the boss of, exactly?
Maybe I was intimidated because the first time I ever met him, he was completely naked, and I didn’t really hate him for it. It didn’t feel like at school when boys occasionally flashed their parts, or that he did it with any sort of malice. Rather, it felt like he didn’t care in the moment.
And why did his nonchalant attitude make me feel all weak in the knees?
Axel opened the door to his room, stepping aside. He continued on and I paused, hovering in the doorway. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. Axel being naked the first time I saw him made it hard to figure out who he was. His bedroom, however, was far beyond what I imagined.
There was a single bed, barely bigger than a cot, pushed to the far side of the room. Above it and next to it were rows of shelves filled with journals, notebook and binders chock full of paper. Some pages were folded and stuck back into the binders, sticking out and baring clips and stabled notes. There were piles of textbooks in a tall floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in topics like biology and physics. There was a desk in the middle of the room, with a laptop and a printer, covered with additional notebooks and binders that were open. All of the handwriting appeared the same on all binders and paper with any writing on it, so I had to assume he wrote every bit of it.
A low dresser and several tables around the room held a collection of glass aquariums. As Axel went for his closet, I moved closer to the dresser, examining the contents. A couple were fish tanks with small fish swimming together. Two aquariums held frogs, one a scorpion and the othe
r I couldn’t see anything inside, but was filled with water and a layer of algae covered rock at the bottom like the fish tanks.
“You’ve got to step up to Raven,” Axel said as he poked around in his closet. “If you let him walk over you once, he’ll do it forever. It’s that Russian blood. They figure out who the alpha is and try to establish the hierarchy immediately.”
“What’s in this one?” I asked. I pointed to the empty tank. “Is it hiding? Or are you going to put something in it?”
Axel leaned out of his closet and looked at me, his eyebrows going up for a moment as if he wasn’t sure what I meant. His eyes followed my pointing finger to the tank. “They’re there,” he said.
“They?” I asked.
He walked back out, having removed his shirt, revealing his very fit, tan body. There was a little bit of hair around the crest of his chest. Probably missed seeing it the first time because he was naked and my eyes had been drawn elsewhere. It disappeared and then there was the firm formation of his upper abs. My eyes followed it to the tiny trail of coarse hair that led down toward his pants.
He wasn’t as tall as the twins, but it was the way he carried himself that made him seem more powerful. Like his voice, every inch of Axel was unyielding and exuded a precise calm without having to say a word out loud.
He flicked off the light from the closet and crossed the room. He pointed to the empty fish tank and reached for the bedroom light switch. “Stand there. Don’t move,” he said.
Oh god. I realized a little too late he was going to turn off the light. The bedroom door was closed. My heart started to thunder and my body tensed, ready to throw punches if this was a trick to try to hurt or rape me. I didn’t get that vibe from him, but I didn’t want to not be prepared in case I was wrong.
He flicked off the light. The room went dark and it was the first time I realized the window that was near the bed must have been covered over underneath the blinds. It took me a moment to readjust my sight, making out just the thin sliver of light coming from around the bedroom door.
