Page 42 of Unsteady

“This is what you want?” I ask, making sure that this time, she can feel me entirely. Every bit of my body is pressed completely to hers, connecting like a perfect puzzle piece.

She’s so much smaller than me, and with our previous interactions being mostly me on the ground looking up at her like some deity coming to save me, it’s something I only really notice now, me towering over her with my hand broad against her trim waist.

“I just…” she starts, but fades off again. Her pupils are blown and the faux red light somehow only highlights the freckles beneath her eye, the angular shape of her face.

“Tell me,” I nearly beg. Maybe it’s the too-loud music giving me a massive headache, or the red light that makes this almost like a foggy dream, but I can’t make myself shut up. “Because I’ll tell you. I can’t stop thinking about the locker room, and I—”

She shuts me up, slamming her lips onto mine. I’m all too eager to reciprocate, tilting down to wrap my arms around her little waist and lift her closer to me, pressing her back into the panels of the door. Her muscular legs twine around my waist in return, holding herself up with ease while grinding lightly down my stomach, chasing friction like a fix.

Sadie’s like a goddamned drug, the effect just as immediate, my mind relaxing and somethinggoodchasing the dark out of my veins until I feel likeOldRhysagain; even my headache dulls to an ignorable level. I gulp her presence down like air after breaking the surface from drowning. I soak it all up, knowing from my experiences with her before, the switch will flip.

This won’t be enough for her, and I understand it. There’s barely enough of me left to make a complete human. Why would I be able to hold her together when she’s becoming the one keeping me intact?

My lips take their time, slowing from her frantic beginning, pressing and sweeping my tongue across her mouth. My teeth lightly graze, pulling her plump bottom lip to suck between my own, before releasing and heading south. Two kisses to the corner of her mouth, a drag of my tongue down the underneath of her chin, before I press harder, slowly sucking kisses into the skin of her neck.

The moan she releases is soft and light, so opposite of the intense scratch of her nails on my arms and back of my neck beneath the light shag of my slightly-too-long hair.

My stomach is swirling, nausea from the headache I anticipated coming into the blaring house party stirring with intense lust, and my anxiety at doing this here, with her, in this damn bathroom.

I pull away to tell her that, to ask her to follow me home, totalkto me; but she latches herself onto my neck, sucking and licking against the skin so fast my vision blurs and I stumble into the wall, hands gliding underneath her dress to grip her upper thighs to maintain some kind of hold on her.

She’s so strong, I feel like I could let go entirely and she’d hold tight, keeping herself up easily.

There’s a knock at the door, to which Sadie quickly offers, “Fuck off!”

I smile into her neck, feeling almost high off her.

But the person on the other side is insistent, shouting through the crack in a high melodic voice. “Sadie Brown! You can get off on Sean later.”

A wave of frustration rolls through me, as if I have some automatic claim on her, like a fucking third grader.I licked her so she’s mine.

“What do you want, Victoria?”

“Aurora is jumping off the high dive like a psycho!”

That makes her pause, dropping from my arms entirely, pulling her dress down just as a flash of black peeks at me. Not giving a second thought to her reddened neck, swollen lips or loosened ponytail, she rips the door wide open and takes off in a near sprint.

I’m frozen for a moment, watching her escape me like she’s on fire. My eyes flicker to the mirror, the light of the room half glowing from the overhead bulbs in the hallway, half red cutting me nearly down the middle. My collar’s looser now, shirt askew, with marks from her mouth across my neck.

I can’t help the warmth that radiates up my spine and turns my cheeks slightly red.

I think I like what the aftermath of Sadie Gray looks like on me.

Victoria stares from the doorway, eyes wide with a pretty smile across her face.

We’ve crossed paths before, both captains of our sports in our junior years, both communications majors with a few classes together. I’ve never slept with her, but she was my type, from before. Perfectly put together, at all times. Intelligent, kind, elegant; blonde.

“Rhys,” she finally manages to speak. “I didn’t know you were here… with Sadie?” She says it like a question, and if it were anyone else, I might refute the claim. But that interaction in the locker room comes to mind too quickly, the hurt defensiveness of Sadie makes me want to protect her—even if I know she wouldn’t let me if she were here.

“Yeah, I’m just here to pick her up.”Literally and figuratively, I guess, since her ass was just in my hands.“I should go see if she needs help.”

Victoria smiles at me, even if her eyes look a little less sparkly, and I edge around her and head downstairs.

* * *

Thankfully, the music is quieter on the large back porch, only two speakers blasting “Wasted” at max volume. I spot Sadie easily, crouched over the lip of the pool on her knees, only two inches between the hem of her dress and her bare ass.

It’s that sliver of pale skin that has me launching down the small set of wooden stairs to stand behind her, blocking her from the small audience forming behind. Only then do I realize that Sadie’s friend Aurora isn’t the only one in the pool; Freddy is right behind her, a few feet away, but close enough to know whatever this situation is, my winger was involved.

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