Page 37 of Lovefool

Great. I’m arguing with myself. I’ve officially lost my mind.

You know I’m right. You’re scared of having someone you could lose. If you take this step with Lake, she becomes that much more permanent in your life. Right now, she’s a fantasy that you’ve convinced yourself you can’t have. But you both know this…“friendship”…won’t last forever. At some point, it’s easier to give in.

My hands find her waist, and thankfully, it’s enough to stop her in her tracks. “Lake…”

Fuck, she smells incredible. I want to rub my face in her neck, inhale the essence of her, brand it to my skin so everybody knows that I’m hers.

“Trouble. You called me Trouble,” she purrs, drifting her hands down to mine, smoothing her soft fingers over the callouses on my knuckles. “Say my name.”

Unheeding the little voice in my head, I close the distance between us, needing her more than my next breath of air. She’s been taking a chisel to my composure and slowly chipping it away without me noticing. I forget that I’m half-naked, or that she has a front row seat to my lapse in judgment.

She drags her nails up my V-line, then my sides, unaware of the blood that’s currently rushing for the cock she’s centimeters away from brushing. When her fingers catch on the hem of my shirt, she helps me out of it without any resistance, pulling it over my disheveled mop of hair and leaving me fully nude in the middle of the living room.

“Trouble,” I whisper weakly—more of a warning than an indulgence of her request, every tendon in my upper body straining against the give of temptation.

Rising to her tiptoes, Lake takes two fingers and pushes my jaw to the side so she has full access to my neck, where she licks a titillating stripe up my carotid. My legs practically buckle then and there. I cling to her waist like a god kneeling at her altar, begging for mercy, begging for a truce that will never come. This six-foot-five mountain who’s been personally uprooted by the five-foot-seven deity with an affinity for bending the laws of nature.

I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to do this anymore.

Lake lifts my chin up, forcing me to look her in the eyes. “Does it feel good? To resist this?”

My cock is already hardening at the sound of her voice. Raspy in all the right ways, caressing me with a sickly sweet tone that no person in their right mind could ignore. We’ve already established that I’m a masochist. I just never knew it was this bad.

“No. Fuck no,” I confess, a muscle in my jaw shaking. “It feels like my entire body is on fire, and you’re the only person who can extinguish it. Everything hurts when I’m not around you—when I can’t touch you.”

“Then why deprive yourself? You always have permission to touch me.”

You don’t understand. I’m scared of ruining things between us. Sometimes physical intimacy is more terrifying than emotional intimacy.

“Because once I indulge in what I want, I can’t control myself,” I admit quietly.

The air around us has finally gone cold, and despite the tight rod of pleasure running through me, my sensibility is no longer lost to the roiling waves of a tempestuous ocean.

Trouble is a fitting nickname for Lake, because what she says next negates all my efforts to uphold the invisible delineation between us.

“Who says you need to control yourself?”

15

RINKSIDE REPARATIONS

SUTTON

Not even hockey can neutralize the whisper of regret chasing after my skates.

Icy casualties swirl in the air with every glissade across the rink, and I’m figuratively standing on the edge of a bad memory, the cardboard box of every Lake-related fantasy in my mind branded with a DO NOT OPEN label after that failure of a night. I wish I could ease the cardboard flaps open and dig around like a rabid animal, pilfering something—anything—that distracts me from my internal tug-of-war.

I knew in my heart that I couldn’t act on my impulses. Lake may not have been as wasted as I thought, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if she regretted kissing me. Hell, she might not even remember what transpired at two a.m. in my living room.

I haven’t spoken to her at all today. I practically sprinted away from my problems and filled the black hole of loneliness in my chest with algebraic formulas that won’t mean anything in the long run. Whoever thought an eight-a.m. math class would be regularly attended by drained college students was truly delusional.

Apparitions of my teammates’ silhouettes linger long after they whiz across the ice, and my vision is washed in an achromatic palette, starting with the pewter walls and extending to the halogen lights that emit little to no heat in this arctic tundra. My breath shreds the silence; Lake is stuck between my incisors like a piece of gristle that won’t budge.

Luckily, I’ve managed to get my shit together enough to ace Coach’s drills. Unluckily, my friends have taken it upon themselves to tease me about what Lake and I got up to after the party, and my frustrations have been slow-cooking since their interrogations began. The more I deny, the more I spur them on.

Every time I think I’m getting somewhere with her, something happens to set us three steps back. I’ve never been a particularly impatient person until now. I don’t want to come off uninterested, because that’s a grave underestimation, but I don’t want to come off like some horny teenager who only thinks about sex either. There is no perfect balance. And Lake—she deserves perfection.

Anticipation fizzing in my stomach, I get a second wind while I’m barreling toward the goal with the puck in my possession, and I jerk my arm back at just the right angle—with just the right amount of willpower—to hurl the disc into the lower left corner of the net.