Page 17 of Star-Crossed
Then she could breathe again, alone at last in the solitude of her room.
Cy leaned back and studied her with those steady, dark eyes. “So, Lyra McKendrick. Now seems like a good time to clear the air about why you hate me.”
Stopping just short of a spit take, Lyra struggled to swallow her beer and suppress an impressive burp. Grabbing her composure with two desperate hands, she said, “Don’t feel special. I pretty much hate everyone.”
That lifted one corner of his full mouth, but the smile never touched his eyes.
“You know what I’m talking about,” he pressed, tightening his fingers around the beer bottle as if the reminder of the past kicked up just as much tension for him as it did for her. “You and me…in the back of that bus…”
The tension had stretched far enough for Lyra to snap, and her porcupine quills emerged on a snide sneer.
“Oh, you mean the night you turned me into a late-nineties movie cliché by giving me my first orgasm on afucking darefrom your football buddies?”
FOUR
Brash Wood
TYPE OF REACTION WOOD WHICH IS WEAKER THAN NORMAL DUE TO THIN CELL WALLS AND DECREASED FIBER CONTENT; PRESENCE INCREASES THE LIKELIHOOD OF FAILURE.
So,Cywasthe asshole, it turned out.
Nursing a lukewarm beer, he sat at the extreme opposite end of the couch from Lyra, whose hands remained primly folded in her lap as she refused to meet his gaze.
He had known she was mad, but he’d assumed it was “girl mad,” as his sister Kiki called it. The kind of mad that specifically related to a breach in the unspoken rules of romantic engagement. Like not calling. Or your ex-boyfriend failing to continue to pine for you for the rest of his natural life before dying miserable after having settled for a woman who was obviously your inferior.
Butthis.
By giving me my first orgasm on a fucking dare.
He no longer regretted bailing his online D&D game smack in the middle of a battle with an aboleth to come haul Larry’s idiotic ass out of the tree. Not even walking away fresh off rolling a natural twenty on a critical hit was enough to dampen his spirits.
And yet he still felt like a total shit.
That, for the last seven years, Lyra assumed that he’d been so cold and calculating. That the whole thing had been to collect on a bet.
The very thought made him want to crawl between the couch cushions.
“It wasn’t my football buddies.”
Lyra glanced over at him, her face still a guarded mask. “Excuse me?”
“No one on the football team dared me to do anything,” Cy explained. “It was my sister, Kiki. She dared me to ask you out.”
Her pretty mouth twisted into a shrewd grimace. She wasn’t buying it.
Additional information would be required.
“So, we had this thing where we’d try to outdo each other with ridiculous dares.”
Cy’s mind flashed back to some of the more outrageous challenges Kiki had proposed, like scaling the water tower or eating an entire ghost pepper without flinching. And then there was the dare that changed everything: asking Lyra McKendrick out on a date.
“Why the hell would she do that?”
“Because she was tired of the kind of girls I was bringing home.” His oldest sister by six years, Kikisoblu Nootka Rose Forrester had become a secondary mother to Cy after cancer stole their own. The only Forrester child named for a person—Chief Seattle’s daughter—instead of a tree, she’d often lorded the fact over her siblings. Juniper and Hazel, nine months apart and four years older than Cy, had been long gone by the time he hit high school. And so were not around to give him shit about his two main romantic criteria.
That, coincidentally, both fit in a bra.
Lyra’s dark brows shot up as she nodded. “Yeah, well, I can’t say I disagree with her.”
