Page 48 of Breathe Like Hell

And sometimes I forget what a fucking hypocrite you are.

After a minute, I managed to pick up my phone and see what the message was.

Mason : My bed still smells like you. Don’t sleep with him tonight. Let me pick you up

I gripped the device tightly, squeezing the sides with my fingers. It wasn’t worth me replying now, because I’d say something bitchy to piss him off, then go crawling right back to him tomorrow.

This pattern with me and Mason was so familiar it made me feel nauseous. I was deep in his ocean, being repetitively tossed between waves.

Seasick.

━━━━━

My third and final lab of the semester was fast-approaching. I’d already done all my portions of the pre-lab work and had printed out the experiment procedure so it was ready for me to bring to the lab. Now, all I had to do was prepare to survive those strange few hours where I was physically close to Micah but had to pretend like he was nothing more than my professor. Lecture was easy—I sat in the back. And when it was just us in his own lab, I didn’t have to pretend anything.

But in these long lab periods with my group and a TA around, it was different.

By some stroke of luck, I’d not actually seen Nick again since seeing him in Micah’s office while my jeans were pulled down around my thighs. He obviously didn’t know what’d happened because Micah had made me invisible at the time, but I couldn’t even fathom how I was supposed to act normally around him now.

I’d only vaguely known about Micah being capable of making things invisible before that moment, and we’d never talked much about it. I’d had no clue it was going to come with a full-body sensation of cold needles—or that it only worked if he was touching me.

Sometimes I wondered what it would feel like to be able to do all the shit he could do.

Insane, probably.

Micah’s words about how he wished he could be my professor for longer had etched themselves on the inside of my skull. I thought about them often, using the memory as a source of comfort, like tracing my fingers over engraved words on worn stone.

The only issue was I had to ignore the beginning and end of the full memory. I had to pretend the parts of our conversation that were characterized by bitterness and disconnect didn’t exist. I had to cut and paste pieces of that night into a happier imitation of the real thing, a scrapbook page of nice words without the bad ones.

I wished I could say all of the bad came from Micah, but that was so far from true it was ridiculous to even think. Yeah, I’d pissed him off and now he was being cruel to me, but underneath that, I’d hurt him, even if he’d never admit it.

That was a much more difficult pill to swallow.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DAKOTA

“Put your swimsuit on,” Mason said as he walked back into his bedroom. I shook my head, sliding further under his comforter. He’d basically kidnapped me after my last class of the day, and I’d been held hostage at his apartment ever since. Micah was irritated I didn’t show up to work in his lab when I was supposed to, but it wasn’t really my fault.

“No.”

“Yes.” He crossed the room in a few long steps, then snatched the corner of the comforter and ripped it off me, grabbing my ankles and yanking me down the bed. I gasped, hands grabbing pointlessly at the sheets. “You’ve gotta stop defying everything I say, baby.”

“Well, you never explained why I needed a swimsuit in the first place,” I argued as I pushed up to sitting on the edge of the mattress, brushing my hair out of my face. Mason stood at the end of the bed, towering over me, his face shadowed in the low light.

“There’s a pool here, and I want to swim with you.”

“It’s also cold outside,” I pointed out, but excitement was quickening my pulse, a low throb beginning between my thighs. The combination of Mason and water was so fucking dangerous, but so fucking addicting. It’d been too long.

“The pool is heated all year.”

“You just want to swim?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice rougher as he threaded his fingers through my hair, holding the back of my head. “I won’t push you under.”

Liar.

I’d told myself I would never put myself back in this position again. I’d promised myself.