Page 29 of Set Me On Fire

Revenge apparently didn’t taste so sweet.

I’d thought about this moment way too often, even imagining some crazy scenario like Annie had described where I looked freaking amazing and Noah realised just how big a mistake he’d made rejecting me, so why didn’t this feel like victory? His eyes were hollow holes in his head, staring like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and that made my heart hurt.

Why, though?

It had been ten years. We lived in the same city. If he still felt a thing for me, he could’ve found me without too much effort. Noah didn’t talk to me for the rest of high school, for the rest of our life, until he just happened to come to my rescue, and that meant I owed him nothing. I settled back down on Knox’s lap, and that’s when I felt just how into this the big man was.

Both Sally and I had shared a whole ‘OMG girl, did you see the size of that thing?’ look when Knox dropped trou. Like what in the Girthmaster was that? Not massively long, but thickness wise, the beer cans were looking pretty damn slender. I just knew it’d hurt so damn good when it went in. An experimental wiggle had his grip on me tightening, so I settled right where I needed him, that solid length pressing up through my thin pants and against my bare heat.

“So whose turn is it?” Noah snapped that out, his voice ringing with challenge. “Whose turn?”

“Charlie’s,” Knox replied, and damn, I could feel that rumbly voice.

It wasn’t actually his turn. I’d landed on ‘kiss someone next to you,’ but apparently we weren’t playing by the rules anymore. Charlie picked the coin up and placed it on his name, sucking in a breath before he turned to the rest of us.

“Only a few players left. How’re we gonna do this?”

But we all knew. The rules were simple, we each flipped a coin and did what the dare told us to do or piked out and faced relentless teasing from everyone else, but that’s not what Noah did. He placed the coin on one of the few blank spaces and then wrote something curious.

‘Ring the last person you called.’

“Why the hell—?” I started to say.

“Just flip the coin, Amelia,” Noah said. People only called me my government name when they were pissed with me, so my eyes narrowed. “Unless you’re done playing.”

Being the younger sister to three brothers had me doing stupid shit sometimes. The boys manipulated me by playing on my desperate desire to be one of them, so maybe it was that reckless urge that rose in me now.

Or maybe it was the wine.

I didn’t look at the board, place it where I wanted to, instead flipping the coin and letting fate take the wheel.

Apparently Lady Luck was a dirty ho.

My coin landed between ‘hot seat’ and ‘kiss the person next to you’.

“So which is it going to be, Millie?”

Charlie was taking everything in like it was some kind of fascinating reality TV show or something. His lips twisted into a smile as he watched me watch him.

“Well, I’m already in the hot seat.” I shifted a little, just in time to feel Knox hold me tighter. “So shoot. What do you guys want to know?”

Charlie went to reply, but Noah cut across him.

“When you saw Dave write down that dare, you have to have considered you might land on it.” He glanced down at the paper. “He made sure to write it right next to you, making it hard for you to miss. Who did you hope you’d end up kissing, Millie?”

You,I thought, the reply almost instantaneous, but by their reaction, I’d said it out loud. Knox went to let me go, but my hands covered his.

“You, because there was a time in my life when I couldn’t want anything more.” I sat tall, staring down at Noah. “I thought you were going to be my first. In my mind, you’d be nice, gentle, respectful, not like some of the other dicks at school. They no sooner kissed a girl than they were running back to their mates and telling them all about it.”

My hand went to my mouth, my lips feeling soft and swollen, as if we already had.Not him, my drunken brain informed me,Knox.

“Part of me feels incomplete that we didn’t.” It was all coming out, the shit I barely talked about, and it hurt when it did. “Like a sentence without punctuation, or when a show ends on a cliffhanger, but isn’t renewed. I...” My throat closed up, but I shook my head, determined to forge on. “I thought you liked me.”

“I did.” Fuck, I didn’t realise I needed to hear that, not until I did, Noah’s voice a perfect pitch of raspy need. “I do, so much?—”

“But you didn’t. You didn’t break up with me, because we weren’t even together.” He flinched at that. “You didn’t even want to talk to me. It was just one minute we were like this and then we weren’t and I had no idea why.”

“Millie—” he started to say.

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