Riot (Page 75)

“I love you,” I say between thrusts. There was a time when the words made her stiffen, made her pull away from me. Now, she turns into putty in my hands. “I fucking love you,” I say again, and she melts against my skin.

She’s moaning, her ankles crossed tight behind my legs when someone jiggles the doorknob.

Her eyes get wide, and I stop moving for only a second. “Just a minute.”

“This is my fucking office!” the person outside yells.

I move Dee to another wall and go back to fucking the hell out of her. “Be. Right. Out!”

I can see the anxiety and desire warring in her eyes, but when I kiss her, the battle is easily won.

The person outside doesn’t stop jiggling or knocking, and I thrust into Dee until her moans in my ear are all I hear. When I finish giving her all I’ve got, my forehead resting heavily on her shoulder, she taps her fingers against my hands and I lower her feet back to the ground. She cleans up with some tissues from the desk, tosses them in a wastebasket, and takes my hand. I give the owner of Mayhem an exhausted, apologetic smile as we leave his office, and he mutters something about me being an asshole as we pass.

“You’re going to get in trouble one of these days,” Dee warns.

“Worth it,” I counter, and her giggle makes it that much more true.

On the bus, she and Peach talk about Dee starting fashion school next week, and even though Dee just blushes and tells me to shut up, I make sure to tell everyone how proud I am of her. She applied, she got in, and I know she’s going to be amazing. The shirts are great, but her designs are what she’s passionate about, and if she can learn to see in herself what everyone else sees in her, there will be nothing to hold her back.

At home, I give her a much more satisfying version of what happened in the office, and afterward, she lies snuggled against my side with her purple fingernail tracing invisible patterns on my chest. I watch her, breathing slow so I don’t bring her back from wherever she is. She’s so damn gorgeous, especially in moments when she’s lost in thought and showing me she loves me without even realizing that’s what she’s doing.

Her almond eyes slowly lift to catch mine staring, and I kiss the top of her head. She lets out a contented sigh and snuggles closer against me. “Why do you love me?”

With her silky brown hair spilling through my fingers, I tease, “That’d be like me asking why you love ice cream.”

“Because it tastes good,” she argues, and I contain a chuckle.

“You taste good.”

“Oh, you’re such a—”

I cut her off by digging my fingers into her sides, and she laughs hysterically while wiggling out of my reach. When she stops laughing and shoots a glare at me, I plant a surprise kiss on her lips and wrap her back up in my arms. She growls but lets me do it, and I smile because I can’t help it.

“I love you because I can’t not love you,” I say, and her fingers curl around my ribs to hug me close.

The night I almost killed Cody was the night I realized just how much she meant to me—more than any girl ever has or ever will. I don’t think I loved her yet, not like I do now, but it was the start of something, and I couldn’t have stopped it even if I tried. I spent the next few weeks falling—fast and hard, just like she and I do everything. I fell at the festival, at my birthday, during quiet nights at her apartment. I fell every time she smiled at me, every time she let me hold her.

“Do you think we’ll last?” she asks, her words a quiet whisper floating across my chest.

I keep her close, not answering because I don’t know. Loving Dee is like loving fire. The night I first told her I loved her, when she told me to go home, it broke my heart in a way that it had never been broken before. I ended up drinking myself sick with my mom, toasting the girl who burned me and hating everyone who wasn’t as miserable as I was. Then Dee showed up, giving me hope and taking it away again, and I drove back to town that day vowing to forget her.

“Do you?” I counter. I don’t know if we’ll last—I only know that I hope so. The more time passed after what happened between us in the roped-off bathroom at Mayhem, the more girls I used to try to forget her face, but every night, I found myself drawing her with the pencils she gave me for my birthday. There was no forgetting her, and it took her chucking a poster tube at my head and screaming that she loved me at the top of her lungs to make me realize I’d never want to. Things between us will probably never be easy, but the best things never are. What matters is that every day, I promise to love her forever, and every day, she promises it back.

“I hope so,” she says, and I smile when she echoes my thoughts.

Brushing her silky hair through my fingers, I say, “Me too.”

We lie like that until there’s nothing between us but her heartbeat and my heartbeat and a future we both want—until I quietly say, “I wished for this.” When Dee lifts her gaze to mine, I explain, “On my birthday. When you had me blow out the candles, this is what I wished for.”

“You wished for me?” she asks, and I give her a smile.

That night, with her face illuminated behind soft flames, I wished for the only thing I’d ever really wanted. I wished to be happy.

“Yeah,” I say, lifting her fingers to my lips and planting a soft kiss against her palm. “I wished for you.”

The End