Page 44 of True Honey
Silas was more than just a man.
I bit down on my lip as a tiny shudder rippled through me and I fought to control my racing heart. Traitorous and loud, it demanded more. I barely noticed Silas slip from between my legs and disappear across the room. He returned wearing a clean pair of boxers and handed me a t-shirt that wasn’t my own. I took it from him with a shaky hand wiggling it over my head and shoulders without much movement.
“Dizzy?” Silas asked, kneeling on the bed beside me. He leaned over and kissed me again, slower that time and it pushed a strange feeling around in my chest as I followed his retreat and took another without asking. “Stay here until you get your legs,” he chuckled.
He got comfy in the bed next to me, his sheets smelling just like him.
“Just until I’m not dizzy,” I said, the whiskey swirling around my thoughts.
His lips found my ear, his scruffy jaw tickling my sensitive skin as I curled against him and tried to come down from my tipsy high. I closed my eyes again, ignoring how good it felt to be held as his hands roamed my back beneath the sheets.
It was only in the silence that the realization dawned on me.
What the hell had we just done?
SHORE
It was rare that the sun woke me up but I had slept through all of my alarms and rolled over in the bed expecting to have contact with Drew but she was gone. I could still smell her on my sheets, feel her on my fingertips, and it was infuriating.
I understood why she slipped away, August couldn’t know and he was too old to hide things from. We had been stupid last night but I couldn’t help myself, she just… she took the time to recognize what I needed and it cracked something inside of my brain.
I was the helper, I didn’t need help.
But she didn’t make it feel like that, she just was there.
I was choosing to blame the whiskey and the pancakes, pushing aside the fact that I couldn’t get the taste of her out of my mouth. And I had brushed my teeth twice that morning.
Fuck me.
I made my way out into the apartment and Drew was leaning over the counter in a pair of jeans that highlighted the perfect curves of her ass. I took a deep breath in, adjusting myself in my pants before clearing my throat and wandering over to the fridge.
Drew looked up from the page she was reading and offered me a small smile. I wanted to kiss the way it softly curved to the left but shook out the feeling and grabbed a protein shake from the back shelf.
“Do you know algebra?” she asked. The question caught me off guard as I approached her. Her gentle scent hit my nose and flashes of the night before blurred across my vision as the smell of orange blossoms engulfed me.
My eyes flickered to a small hickey on her collarbone, barely exposed beneath her sweater. I reached out and pulled the sweater over her chest and she looked down, zipping it up further with a nervous chuckle.
The tingling sensation of seeing it made it hard not to tell her how much I liked it.
I rolled back my shoulders, hiding the immense emotional frustration coursing through my body that she was just pretending like it didn’t happen. We had both felt how real it was. I knew how much she enjoyed it, the sounds of her doing so were burned into my mind.
I sighed, letting the feeling pass.
“A little why?” I said, instead of telling her how I felt. Setting the drink down and angling myself to look at the paper, when I got too close she pushed the paper across to me. It shouldn’t have stung, but it did.
“Auggie is failing it,” she said, “and I don’t know how to help.”
There was a hint of despair in her voice, one I hadn’t heard since the night at the bar. I watched her carefully trying to read her expression past the hardened one she liked to use around me. The guilt flickered in her eyes and I realized then, she was blaming herself for it.
“Algebra is hard. I barely passed it in school and I’m a genius.” I smiled at her, trying to calm her down a little without giving away just how much I had figured out. “Luckily for Auggie you two gained more than one roommate,” I said.
“What exactly does that mean?” Drew asked, her hair falling over her shoulder.
I pulled out my phone and dialed a number, looking over at her as it rang, “Tonight we have some fancy dinner party to attend, if you can swing it…”
“That's the deal isn’t it?” she said, brushing over the fact that somewhere between the question and last night I had forgotten that our domestication wasn’t real.Shit.
“Yeah, I can get Cael to hang out with Auggie, if he’s okay with that?” I asked.
