Page 22 of Level Up

I looked at the bartender, trying to ignore the ache between my legs. “What do you recommend?” I asked.

The bartender, a taller guy with brown hair and a charming smile, leaned forward. “I’ve been known for my Screaming Orgasms, although I do usually reserve them for my boyfriend.” He flashed a cheeky smile and looked over to a quieter guy sitting next to me. He dropped his head, his cheeks blushing red. But there was a smile there. “I’m Perry, by the way. Have I seen you before?”

“I’m pretty new on campus,” I said. “And I think I’ll take a Screaming Orgasm.” I tried to ignore the dull ache between my legs.

“One Screaming O coming right up,” Perry said, grabbing a bottle and twirling it in his hands with impressive ease.

Ryan leaned into me. “If that’s what you wanted, then we should have stayed in the bathroom stall a little longer.”

My cheeks burned. The ache grew stronger. I trained my gaze on the shelves of expensive liquor that was mostly untouched, everyone usually going for the cheaper options. A breeze carried in from the nearby ocean made Ryan’s cologne waft in my direction, giving my knees another reason to buckle.

“What does Maddy want?” Ryan asked as he started ordering another drink after Perry brought me mine.

“I think she’s sticking to the beer tonight.”

He ordered drinks, grabbing a Leg Spreader for his friend Colton and a vodka pineapple for himself. We also grabbed another pitcher of beer. They’d gone up in price to thirty whole pennies.

We went back to our group. It was only Colton and Maddy left at the table, the other guys having dispersed into the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. Damn, there was a ton of people here. I considered grabbing Maddy and getting lost in the crowd. It would avoid any potential issues that could come up from me hanging out so closely with a Redpine.

Then again… fuck that. I was drunk, horny, and kinda intrigued by the sporty gamer with silly Dad jokes that made me genuinely laugh.

Besides, with pitchers of beer being worth about a quarter, I figured no one else in this bar would remember tonight anyway.

We were safe.

I sat on a stool next to Ryan, setting the drinks down on the circular high-top table, already sticky with beer.

“You two were gone for a while,” Maddy said, wiggling a recently plucked brow. If she didn’t enjoy being a doctor, she could definitely become a detective with how suspicious she constantly was.

“Had to make a pit stop at the bathroom.” Ryan was nonchalant about it, sucking down a big gulp of his drink through the two tiny pink straws.

It flashed me right back to having those same sexy lips around my thick pink straw.

Annnnd I was hard again. Fuck.

Colton didn’t seem as suspicious of us. He was a cool guy. I liked him. He had a bearish kind of vibe to him. Dark hair, scruffy beard, bushy brows. He had a little bit of a belly and some dark chest hair peeking out from the collar of his dark blue T-shirt. He swirled his Leg Spreader and said, “Maddy and I were talking about how that one Freshman FUker went viral for doing that funny dance during orientation.”

“Ah, shit, yeah, I saw that,” Ryan said. He started to move his hands and hips in a terrible impersonation of the viral dance.

“Bless you and your lack of rhythm,” I said with a sad hand to my chest.

“I’ve got plenty of rhythm when it counts,” Ryan said.

I narrowed my eyes and turned away from him. “It went more like this.”

I did a perfect imitation of the dance, swirling my hands like I was casting some kind of spell, moving my hips in the same way. My feet moved as if I were dancing salsa. All in all, the dance looked like a weird and messy mix of a hundred different kinds of dances, and that was probably why it took off.

Plus, the guy was cute, and the video was reshared by a ton of different celebrities, so that all helped.

“Yeah, Jay’s right,” Colton said, looking impressed. “You’ve seriously got no rhythm, Ryan. You looked like one of those blow-up things they put outside of car dealerships.” He lifted his arms and waggled them in the air, all of us laughing.

“You do that pretty well,” Maddy said. I noticed she leaned a little closer to Colton than she had when we’d first gotten here.

“My uncle owned a Ford dealership,” Colton confessed. “I spent way too many afternoons dancing with that thing.”

More laughter. The Screaming Orgasm Ry had gotten me was making my head feel all light and my hands feel kind of numb and my balls feel really full. Damn it. What kind of spell did Ryan cast on me? Because that really had to be the only explanation as to why I was ready to throw away all of my carefully curated morals so I could hop on his lap.

Well, that and the copious amounts of alcohol I’ve consumed.

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