Page 27 of Power Play

“I know what literature means.”

Aura’s smile returns. “Then tomorrow should be easy.”

I look toward the back table again.

Ryan is listening to Cade, but his attention shifts to me as though he felt my eyes touch him. He raises his beer once more, confident I’ll appear tomorrow because he understands something I’ve spent years refusing to admit.

I never walk away from anything that might make me better, even when my need to be better has already begun destroying me.

2

Ryan

I spent most of the drive to the Book Nook telling my dick to behave.

It wasn’t a conversation I expected to be having with myself before noon, especially over a woman I’d known for almost four years, but apparently friendship stopped being useful protection once the friend in question started flirting back.

The light ahead turned red, and I eased the truck to a stop before dragging one hand over my jaw. My phone sat facedown in the cupholder with Charm’s message from twenty minutes ago still waiting beneath the screen.

Charm: I’ll be there at noon. Please tell me you aren’t bringing enough books to publicly humiliate me.

I’d answered with a picture of the box currently riding in my passenger seat.

She’d sent back a middle finger.

That was part of the fucking problem.

Charm used to blush if I looked at her too long. Freshman-year Charm could barely hold eye contact with me without finding something extremely important to do with her purse, her hair, or whatever happened to be sitting in front of her. I’d known she had a crush. Everybody had known. Bliss once told me Charm dropped an entire stack of pencils because I asked whether the chair beside her was empty, and I’d spent the next month asking her about available seating just to watch her get pissed.

It had been cute then.

Now she flipped me off through text and looked directly at me when she made an innuendo.

My dick preferred the upgrade.

“Behave,” I muttered as the light changed.

A car behind me honked almost immediately, and I lifted my middle finger toward the rearview mirror before accelerating through the intersection.

Charm had always been beautiful. Every guy with working eyes who attended KFU during the last four years knew that. Strawberry-blonde hair, pale skin that flushed easily, legs that looked dangerous beneath the skirts she wore, and a face soft enough that people assumed everything about her would be.

I’d learned quickly that assumption was bullshit.

The first time I really noticed her body had been at a lake party the summer before last. She walked down from Bliss’s family cabin wearing a white bikini and sunglasses, carrying two towels beneath one arm while arguing with Aura about sunscreen. I’d been halfway through a beer and nearly swallowed the fucking bottle cap.

Cade caught me looking and laughed. I told him to fuck off and spent the rest of the afternoon deliberately facing the water.

Charm had been immediately untouchable anyway, and her father had nothing to do with that.

I barely knew Lance beyond what I’d picked up from the girls and the few times I’d been around him. I knew he had enough money to make people straighten their backs when he entered a room. I knew Charm’s entire posture changed when his name appeared on her phone. I knew Bliss joked about him checking Charm’s GPA more often than most people checked their bank accounts, and Aura had once described the Harlen house as a luxury prison with catered appetizers.

Whatever Lance thought of me had never mattered.

The people attached to Charm did.

Bliss and Aura had been part of our circle long enough that the lines between friends and family disappeared years ago. Charm came with them. She was at hockey games, bonfires, birthdays, holidays, parties, hangovers, breakups, and every other piece of life that turned a bunch of unrelated people into something harder to walk away from.

You didn’t risk that because somebody looked good in a bikini.