Fuck, don’t answer that.
Her palm enclosed itself around my wrist, and I looked down, wishing I could see her take charge. She began moving my hand faster, and I leaned in, talking over her mouth. “Tell me, did you think of me at all while you were gone?”
“No.” Her hips curved up with the answer that I knew was a lie.
“Don’t lie to me.” My hand went around her neck, and her pulse was a rampage against my palm.
“Why would I think of someone who left me out to die?” Her teeth sunk into my bottom lip so hard that I tasted the rich, metallic sensation against my tongue. I growled, keeping the truth on lockdown. If she was already fearful over what happened, what the fuck would she think if I told her the truth? That I’d been getting threats months before she was attacked? I don’t deserve her.
“I thought of you every fucking day,” I admitted, letting my confession pour out of my chest even though I knew it wouldn’t take away my guilt or the betrayal that she felt. “Every time I turned a corner, every time I saw a fair-skinned girl walk past, every time I touched myself. You. Journey. I thought of you every fucking time, even if it hurt.”
Her head turned, and she heaved out a sigh that was more seductive than anything. I added another finger, feeling myself grow harder than I’d ever been in my life. I so badly wanted to flip her around, pin her hands on the pipe above her head, and fuck her so hard she forgot about what I’d done to her. But I didn’t, because this wasn’t about me. It was about her. Her walls were beginning to tighten around my fingers as I unbuttoned her school blouse, taking my free hand and dipping inside her shirt to feel for that pebbled nipple that I knew would be there. “Do you like knowing I thought of you when I beat myself off?” My nose skimmed the sensitive part behind her ear as she tried to suppress a moan. Her hips were moving, and my fingers were pushing in and out of her so slowly even I was beginning to feel the pull. “I thought of your perfect little pussy and how it always responded to my touch.”
“Cade.” Journey was fighting the dirty talk that I knew she loved so much. My sweet little Journey, who was timid and soft, turned into a minx when it was just her and I. Even when I had taken her for the first time, deflowering the perfect little thing that she was, she latched onto the dirty things I’d whispered in her ear. Journey was a girl after her own rebellion. She was a flower with thorns that no one had ever dared touch. Except me.
“You do, don’t you? You like knowing I thought of your perfect ass when I gripped myself in the shower. You like knowing that I pretended I was fucking your sweet little, eager mouth, huh?”
“Stop it,” she rushed out, tightening around my finger like a boa constrictor.
“How can I stop when I know how much you like it?”
Just then, Journey’s entire body seized, and she sucked my fingers so hard I had to bite down on my own lip from sinking my teeth into her perfect skin. She is mine. I’ll never stop wanting her.
“Ride it out, baby,” I said, pushing the back of her head toward mine and closing my mouth over hers. She kissed me fiercely, and even if the kiss only lasted a few seconds, I knew the past had vanished momentarily. Journey kissed me like before. With every bit of passion she had to offer. She gave me everything, and I fucking let it go.
Once she pulled away and let go of my wrist, I pulled my finger out slowly, unable to focus on anything other than the way my dick was straining against my pants and begging for her touch. I hated myself for trying to fuck away her memory with the other girls at this school. Loathed myself. I loathed myself even more afterward, when I realized that the entire time I was fucking some blonde, I pictured her.
“I’ve been fucked up since that night,” I said, standing there with my hands down by my side, feeling a gust of warm air as she bent down and pulled her skirt back up her shaking legs.
Her gulp was loud, and I knew the moment was lost in the steam that surrounded us.
“You think you’ve been fucked up?” The icy tone was back, and it cooled my hot blood almost instantly. I stepped away and clenched my fists, hardly able to even focus on the way her sweet wetness coated my finger. I wanted to lick it, but it didn’t seem very appropriate at the given time. Things had suddenly shifted, and we were back to our little game of hate and love. “I was stood up by the one person I trusted, assaulted, taken away from the only place I’d ever known happiness, and thrown into a psych ward.” Journey stepped forward, and I could finally see her face as one of the tiny red lights to the right clicked to green and stayed. The gloss of her eyes sucked me in, and I was drowning. Fully fucking drowning. “And don’t even get me started on what I had to do in that place to find a way out.”
She shoulder-checked me on the way past. I turned around to follow after her, having absolutely no idea what I could say to fix what was shattered between us. “Journ–”
She whipped around with the door half cracked, lighting up the small room that we just completely lost all direction in. The broken and tired girl that stood in front of me was a knife to my chest. Her cheeks were flushed from the orgasm I’d given her, but her eyes were dull and full of sadness and maybe a little fear. Journey was lost and confused, and I was half to blame.
“Journey? Where are you?” Journey quickly spun away from me, and I barely caught the door in my hand before it slammed as she rushed out. I traveled down the hall and stopped around the corner when I saw her standing with Gemma.
“I have no idea what happened. I’ve never done that before.”
“You had a panic attack,” Gemma said, rubbing her hands down Journey’s arms. Her blouse was still unbuttoned, and Brantley caught my eye as he stood behind the girls and Isaiah. His eyebrows raised before rolling his eyes, knowing what Journey and I were doing for the last ten minutes.
Brantley didn’t believe in love, and I wasn’t sure he ever would, and I envied him for that. If you didn’t find love, you could avoid that true, earth-shattering pain when you lost it, and that was exactly what I felt looking at the broken girl in front of me who used to radiate nothing but smiles when we were alone in our own little world.
My arms crossed over my chest as Tobias appeared from the stairway that led to the dorms, stalking past his sister, grabbing onto Journey’s arms, and looking over her body like she had been hurt.
“What happened? Gemma texted me and said you flipped out. Was it that Aubrey girl?”
Tobias was still looking over her body as my teeth gritted together like sandpaper. Aubrey? Well, she was done for.
“I don’t know. Someone pulled my sleeve, and it shot me back to when Barry used to come up behind me and try to catch me.”
Our group was silent as we stood in between the stairway and the hall that led to our classes. I saw the narrow hall beginning to fill with students from the dining hall who were pretending not to stare but were fully invested in what the fuck was going on with the group of Rebels. The attention was evasive and annoying, and in the beginning, when our elite group started, we ate it up like a pack of wild animals, but now that we had real and dangerous shit going on, it wasn’t as appealing.
“Jesus,” Tobias muttered, still looking Journey over to assess for damage.
A lingering being stood at the end of the hall as everyone began disappearing into their classrooms, meaning we would need to go, too, which did nothing but irritate me because that meant Journey would be leaving with Tobias, and I wouldn’t see her for the rest of the day. I found it uncoincidental that we had zero classes together, but that wasn’t why my blood pressure was currently rising. The person at the end of the hall had my muscles tensing. I kept my eyes on him and waited until he shifted his attention from Journey and Tobias, then over to me.