Stuck With The Four Hotties

We sit there for a while in silence, and I just enjoy the feel of him behind me. When I wiggle on his lap a bit, he goes completely still, one arm banding around my waist.

“Don’t test me, Charity,” he whispers against my ear. “I’m not a very nice man.”

“Maybe I’d like to personally test you and see if that’s true?” I whisper back, shifting again. Tristan stands up suddenly, sending the chair scraping back, and then shoves his plate onto the floor. I’m pushed over the table with his hips aligned behind me, his hardness teasing my core.

“Like this?” he asks, and I feel this ache inside of me that says yes, exaFtly like that. But then Tristan’s pulling away with a growl and raking his fingers through his dark hair. “You’re too good for me, Charity. You should run while you still can.”

“Stop that,” I murmur, pushing up into a standing position and turning to face him. “You’ve come a long way in the past year.”

“I’m a poison, Marnye. I kill everything I touch.” He lifts his fingers and stares at his hand for a moment before glancing over at me. “Pick someone else, anyone else. They’re all better choices than I am.”

“I don’t know that that’s true,” I say, panting, feeling this desperate need to take Tristan into my arms and comfort him. When the hell did that happen?! He was always the worst bully of them all, the most closed-off, and now … I love this vulnerability. I’m craving it.

“It’s true. Stay the fuck away from me, and save yourself the heartache.”This text is property of Nô/velD/rama.Org.

Tristan storms off, and the house is so big and convoluted that even with the map, I don’t find him the rest of the day.

Four days into my stay-and one night visit from Zack-I find an old game room with boardgames like Connect-Four, Scrabble, Monopoly, Clue, and so

on. There must be hundreds of them. I select Twister from the shelves and head upstairs to see if I can find Tristan. He’s been elusive and weird, and I’ve caught him three times hanging out with just Lizzie.

This time, when I step into his room, he’s alone.

He looks up at me, and his face is twisted into an expression of sheer frustration.

“There’s an Infinity Club meeting being held here,” he says, and I pause, setting the game of Twister on a side table. “In three days.”

I move over and sit on the bed next to Tristan, our legs so close that I can feel his body heat through the black fabric of his pajama pants. They’re all that he’s wearing. Otherwise, he’s shirtless and beautiful, a modern day Adonis begging for my touch.

Ahh, Marnye, stop! But I can’t help it. I want to put my hands on, so … I do. Pulling up every ounce of courage I have inside of me, I stand up, face Tristan, and then straddle him so that my knees are on the bed on either side of his body.

“What does that mean, exactly?” I ask as I take his face in my hands and he closes his beautiful gray eyes.

“It means you and Miranda have to leave. It means my father’s coming home. It means …” He stops talking and just rests his forehead against mine. After a moment, he lifts his thumb to my lips, and I take it into my mouth, sucking lightly.

Tristan’s breath hitches, and he drops his hand, curling his arms around my waist instead and rolling us over so that he’s on top. We start to kiss, and I find that he’s every bit as calculating and cruel in his ministrations as he is in his day to day to life.

We’ve kissed many times before, but not like this, alone in a quiet bedroom in a house with no academy faculty, no parents. It’s uninhibited, and deliciously wrong.

Tristan pins my arms above my head and kisses his way down my face toward my breasts, putting the hot heat of his mouth above the thin, silken fabric of my shirt. He licks the fabric, slow and languorous, like he has all the time in the world, and then, when I’m about to buck him off and beg him to stop teasing, he takes my left nipple into his mouth and sucks on it.

It’s like there’s a string connected from my nipple to my core, pulling and tugging, begging for more.

Tristan ends up with his mouth crashing into mine, hands frenzied as he tears at my clothes, ripping my shirt in his haste to feel a bare breast cupped in his palm. I’m groaning and thrashing beneath him, my arms still pinned, want still coursing through me.

What are you doing, Marnye? I ask myself, but I don’t really know. I’m not sure.

Tristan’s hips grind against me, the hard, hot length of him teasing me through my shorts. His breathing picks up pace, and then he’s using his left hand to push his pants down. He shoves my shorts aside, and in an instant, I can feel the tip of him pressing against me.

He looks down at with a blade gray gaze, his right hand still holding my wrists pinned above my head. My bare breasts rise and fall with each breath, but I don’t say a thing. I can’t. I’m tongue-tied.

“I want you so bad, Marnye,” he says, and I groan, rubbing against him. He closes his eyes like he’s in pain. One hard thrust of his hips, and we’d be joined together. Instead, he opens his eyes and just looks at me again. “I want to fuck you until you can’t remember you’re dating anyone else, take you so completely that you become mine.”

“But?” I whisper, and Tristan curses, pulling away from me and yanking his pants into place as I sit up. “Tristan, wait.”

“I can’t do this. I can’t fucking do this, Marnye.” He heads into the bathroom, slams the door, and then turns on the shower. I only stay so long as it takes me to fix my clothes.

On the day of the Infinity Club meeting, everyone’s in a nervous titter. I know we all have to leave by two at the latest, but before I go, before I head off into the sunset to spend an entire summer away from Tristan Vanderbilt, I have to see him again.

He’s in his room yet again, sitting on his bed in a black t-shirt and jeans, staring at his phone. He scowls at me when I walk in.

“Stop that,” I say, but he turns away, and rakes his fingers through his hair.

“Believe me: you don’t want to be here when William arrives. He punches his own son. Imagine all the things he might do to a charity case from the wrong side of the tracks.”

“You can’t push me away,” I tell him, grabbing the game of Twister and moving over to the large empty space of floor on the right side of his bed. “No matter what you do, it won’t work. I’ve seen the real you, and that’s not something that can be undone.”

“You don’t like me. You can’t possibly,” he scoffs, sounding a lot like Creed did the first night we …

“Why? Because you’re fiercely loyal, sharp as a tack, and the only person I know who can keep up with me on an academic level? Or maybe it’s because you have hair like a raven’s feathers, eyes the color of the moon on a cold night, or abs so hard they could probably crack nuts?”

“Crack nuts?” he echoes, and I grin as I lay out the plastic sheet with all the colored circles on it.

“Yeah, like, stick a walnut between your abs, flex, and voila. Nutcracker abs.” Tristan exhales, like maybe he’s just too stressed to laugh. No problem. I am, too. All I can think about is him on top of me, the tip of him pressed into my core, and the amount of self-control that must have taken him to pull away.

“What the hell is this you’re putting on my floor,” he asks as I hand him in the spinner and kick off my shoes. I’m wearing a cream-colored satin dress that Miranda insisted I try on, so not ideal for the game, but man, Trist

an Vanderbilt needs to loosen up a little.