Page 39 of Little Do You Know

I grab my shirt from where it lies on the ground next to the desk before pulling it over my head. Sebastian sits up in the bed just as my phone starts to ring. It’s just Blake, telling me that she and Owen are done with looking at her potential internship.

“They’ll be back soon.” I can’t look at him.

“Thalia.”

I push a smile on my face. “Sebastian.” It’s a good thing Blake and Owen are coming back. It makes keeping the promise of this as one time a whole lot easier. It’s too tempting to stay.

“Lia, you don’t have to go yet.”

“This was fun; thank you for agreeing to the one time. Consider a ceasefire in place.” I leave before Sebastian says something else that could change my mind.

I go immediately to the bathroom and turn the shower on so I can rid the smell of sex and Sebastian from my body. It would be so much easier to consider this a system reset if he hadn’t made such an impression. I’m pretty sure I have imprints from his hands and kisses. I should have just left it alone.

If I hadn’t messed everything up a year and a half ago, who knows where we’d be right now?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Thalia

“SO, HOW WAS it?” Penelope asks immediately after answering my call, and I switch to French as I walk to my next class. It’s been a few days, and I don’t know how to be around him. The sex was just sex. I must keep reminding myself of that because all I can think about is how Sebastian looked at me before I left his room.

“He’s all yours. You won’t be disappointed.”

“I didn’t think you’d follow through! Tell me everything, and don’t leave a single detail out.”

“Um, well.” I feel my cheeks flush. “It was enough to get him out of my system hopefully. It was fun. I think we both got out of it what we wanted.” I learned I might have a new kink called Sebastian Walker. Definitely didn’t get it out of my system. It was just sex, but sex I want to have again. Damnit.

“Lia, sweetie, you’re not telling me what I want to know! Stop tiptoeing around it.”

I adjust the strap of my backpack that’s being weighed down by my history books. “I’m not tiptoeing around anything. What do you want to hear? There’s nothing soft about him? He bites? Sebastian made me beg for him to fuck me? He has a filthy mouth that is as hot as he is? That he succeeded in giving me an orgasm and that I blew him?”

“And after all that, you’re just done? You’re not going to dip your toe in the water again?” she asks, causing me to hesitate.

I blow a raspberry, fully aware that this is a mess I took from bad to worse by actually following through with it. “Pen, the whole reason we had sex was to get rid of the tension between us—the one time. The second I put on that stupid lingerie you had me buy, I was jumping in feet first. There’s no more dipping my toe in the water.”

I find a bench to sit on because this conversation is far from over. So what if I end up missing class? It’s not as if history is going to be rewritten. The time difference between Penelope and I makes it hard to have actual conversations more than once a week if we’re lucky. I don’t trust myself not to make an ass of myself if I don’t talk the situation out with her.

“But you want to have sex again with him?”

“Of course I do.” I shake my head, my brain unable to keep up with the whiplash. “No. Okay, maybe? I don’t know. I’m glad Owen was on his way back, or I don’t know if I could have left his room. It was that good, Penelope.”

Penelope pauses, probably to think about everything I just threw at her. I don’t know what I’m doing. “Do you think he wanted you to leave?”

I close my eyes, forcing the image of Sebastian’s face out of my head. “Sebastian told me that I didn’t have to go yet. Except I did, or we were going to get caught. I did us both a favor.”

A small part of me has been wondering what if we did get caught? Would that have been such a bad thing?

“Would it be so bad if it weren’t just a one-time thing?” she continues as I look around campus to people-watch.

“Who knows?” I say vaguely, sighing. “We’re not good for each other. We keep hurting each other. It’s a cycle of insanity.”

“I love you, but have you considered that maybe you are good for each other? Easy love is boring, and you are anything but boring. Plus, he’s hot and good at sex. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss him as an option,” Penelope teases, but I don’t laugh. She clears her throat, quickly recovering. “Have you had an honest conversation with him about the argument you guys had before you left?”

I snort and roll my eyes. “I can’t do boring; you’re right about that. We haven’t talked about it, and odds are, we probably never will. Bash can’t take back what he said, and neither can I. You can’t rewrite history.”

“So move past it. You’re making this harder on yourself than it needs to be.”

“I blame you for the mess I’ve gotten myself into. ‘Just climb him like a tree, and everything will be fine!’ Sure.” I reply sarcastically, and Penelope laughs on the other side of the world.

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