Page 16 of On The Edge
“I’ll drink to that,” Adam announces as he picks up a shot and cheers Markus, both of them knocking the shots back. Markus bends down, pulls the lime from my lips with his teeth before sucking on it. I’m mesmerized as I watch him in the flickering light, squeezing the lime into his tempting lips with his fingers. He sets it down on the bar top before looking back to me with a heated stare, keeping my gaze before bending down and kissing me roughly.
Fuck me—he can kiss.Wow.
His tongue slips along my lips, lapping up any lime juice left behind. He breaks the kiss before I’m ready and my lips chase his.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs, seemingly unaffected by how he just rocked my world.
Adam bites a lime, drinking the bitter liquid before setting the rind down on the bar, sighing. “I bet it was so much betterfrom your lips.” Adam’s eyes zero in on my lips. His blue eyes are so dark from want, they look midnight-blue in the low light. My lips are probably red and puffy from the ferocity of Markus' kiss, but I bite down softly on my bottom lip anyway. Feeling brave, I take the last shot and throw it back, then take a new lime from the plate, wiping it all along my lips slowly, keeping eye contact so he knows what I want.
Because if this is some fever dream… I’m not wasting it.
It’s up to him now.
Adam wastes no time. He curls his body around mine, twisting my head so his lips can reach mine from behind. Sliding his hand up the front of me slowly,so fucking sensuallyit makes my nipples pebble, it makes a home around my neck.
I didn’t know choking was a turn-on for me. But it most certainly is. Or maybe… maybe it’s just an Adam thing. He’s holding me so dominantly, so possessively, that I canfeelour need. His tattooed hand rests protectively along the column of my pale throat and it makes my knees weak.
Adam pulls back when I start remembering that I need air to live, and I immediately miss him.
“Delicious,” he whispers in my ear.
Markus picks up my other drink, handing it to me, then hands another that he must’ve ordered to Adam before taking the last one for himself.
“Let’s dance, Songbird.” He takes my hand and drags me onto the dance floor.
I used to love dancing with the guys. We’d drive out to an empty field and turn the headlights on Adam’s truck and they’d take turns swing-dancing with me in the beams of light while the darkness surrounded everywhere else. I remember laughing so hard, feeling so loved and cared for, that my heart clenches at the memory. When Markus pulls me onto the dance floor here, I’m struck with just how much has actually changed.
There are so many people surrounding us, I’m a little worried we’ll get separated. Maybe that’s what they wanted. To tease me, to pretend they care and then leave me behind.Again.
You arenotgoing to let them have any more of your tears, Melody. If they leave, they leave and youwillsurvive it,I think, clenching my jaw to try and protect myself from what I know is possible.
But then they surprise me. Adam puts his hands on my hips, guiding me behind Markus, who has a tight grip on my hand. Once he finds a spot he likes right in the middle of the crowd, he turns around and pulls me tight against his chest. Slotting his thigh between mine, Markus sways us in time with the music. Adam’s hands tighten on my hips as he draws closer behind me, moving with us in a breathtakingly sexy rhythm.
I’m in a rockstar, ex-best-friend, high school crush sandwich and I’m pretty sure I could die a very happy woman now.
Wrapping one arm around Markus' shoulders, I lean back and wrap the other around Adam’s neck so we’re one complete unit. Markus' thigh is rubbing against my pussy in a way that stokes the fire already building in me. My skirt is short, but in order for his thigh to be so close, I have to pull it up more.
One corner of Markus' lips pulls up in a sly, confident smirk. “Can’t choose, can you, Melody?”
I freeze.
Those words…
It’s what everyone used to bully me with in high school. “Just can’t choose, can you, whore?”
The worst was when I was confronted and I had to lie, deflect, throw them off the scent. Each word I said felt wrong coming out of my mouth, but it was better than being pushed into the lockers or covered in juice in the locker room. Everyone in high school thought I was their playmate. Their whore. And what’s worse, I wanted to be. I wanted them all.
That was why when Darcy, this bitch who was obsessed with Kai, cornered me in the band room the day before the guys left me, I tried so hard to get her away from me. I did the only thing my seventeen-year-old brain could think of at that moment to make the hurt stop.
I denied everything, tried to hide my true feelings and shrug it off. I told her they were like my brothers so maybe she’d stop calling me a sex-starved bitch. I told her I didn’t want them, didn’t think they’d be anything, just so the bullies would leave me alone. After I lied, she laughed, pushed me down and spit on me, calling me every insulting name in the book and saying how no one would ever want me; how no one would ever want someone so fucked up.
And it turned out she was right, because they never answered my calls after that and vanished. That only made the bullying a million times worse.
Besides, they wouldn’t have ever been okay with my feelings and I could never have asked them to be. I want to be shared, I always have. More than that, I only want Reis, Adam, Markus and Kai to share me.
Pulling myself from the memory, I rip out of their shared hold and run toward the bathroom.
I can’t be here.
