She’d be hotter with just the jewelry on.
I turned back to Will. “I have plans for her. Don’t worry.”
His eyes lit up. “I love your imagination. Do I get to come?”
I tilted my lips in a smile, not missing his double-meaning. “I have plans for you, too.”
And then I let my eyes fall to the two hickeys on his neck, one of them damn nasty looking. I knew exactly where they had come from, too. The girl who’d dealt them probably had twice as many of her own.
“Some girls need to learn that sucking dick like a vacuum is a skill you don’t waste on a man’s neck,” I told him, flicking water with my fingers as aggravation settled in my gut. “Maybe you should watch while I retrain the one who did that to you.”
“Aw, jealous?” he teased.
But then a look passed between us, and I wasn’t fucking laughing. His cocky smile started to fall, and he straightened up.
Will was my best friend, and what was mine was mine. He knew that.
An awkward silence passed, but then he noticed something behind me and jerked his chin. “Uh-oh.”
I looked over, seeing Arion walking toward us through the water. She’d let down her hair and had her hands tucked behind her back. I had geared up all week to be in the mood for something far different tonight, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay.
But my plans fell apart, I had nothing better to do, and if she wanted to play, maybe I could get my head in gear, after all. She was pretty enough, even though she had a set to her eyes that made her look a little mean and her jaw was more square, making her look too thin and giving her an air of hardness I didn’t like. She wasn’t sweet.
But whatever. I wasn’t the one who would fuck her.
As she reached us, she pulled her fists out from behind her, eyeing us coyly, and opened the left, revealing a turquoise triangular pill and handed it to Will.
X.
“Hell yeah.” He took the pill and washed it down with his beer.
She then looked at me, opened her right hand, but it was empty.
I darted my eyes up to meet hers, but she just smirked and then opened her mouth, revealing my pill already on her tongue.
She rose up, moved in for my lips, but I turned my head away.
“I don’t need help to get crazy,” I told her.
Plus, this wasn’t middle school.
Her eyebrows rose with the challenge, and she took my beer out of my hand and took a drink, swallowing the pill herself.
Licking her lips, she plastered her body to mine, and I let her stay there. For the moment.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered up at me. “I’d like to see your crazy.”
I reached up, holding her chin between my thumb and fingers.
Would you?
It no longer worried me that there were things wrong with me. That over the years I developed different tastes than other people, or that I was harder to please than other men.
The only thing that worried me now was that it was getting harder to please those tastes. It was like I was developing an immunity to kink, and I constantly needed to up the dose.
I stroked her jaw once, trailing the sharp ridge with my finger. “I want you to go into the hedges,” I told her in a low voice. “Over there.”
I gestured to her right with my eyes where there was a hedge line around the property before it gave way to the forest, the cliffs, and the ocean beyond. There wouldn’t be anyone back there.