Page 81 of Change My Mind
“I no longer feel like I’m going to crash and burn,” I said. Which was the truth.
Eli smiled brightly. “Told you it would help.”
It was in that moment, as I looked at a sleep-mussed, pleasure-happy Eli staring at me through half-lidded eyes that shone with pride, that I finally accepted that I was fucked.
I had broken the golden rule.
The only rule I had never broken.
I had never even come close before.
But with this man, I hadn’t even realised I was breaking it until suddenly I knew.
I was in love with him.
And it was awful knowing that he now had the power to break me, and he probably didn’t even know it because he was sticking to the rules just fine.
Knowing that I had broken one rule, I decided breaking another wouldn’t do me any harm.
“You know what else might help keep me distracted?” I asked as I ran my fingers around the head of his cock.
“Enlighten me,” he answered, his head tipping back as I squeezed his length before running my fingers along his waistband. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
“It might be better if I showed you,” I answered, pulling his boxers down. I settled the waistband under his balls and teased the head.
“By all means, go ahead,” Eli half moaned as I moved to straddle his thighs. I took him in my hand and locked eyes with him as I let a dribble of spit land on his head before I started stroking him.
“Ads, can you do me a favour?” I hummed an affirmative as I ran my thumb across his silverware. “Make it rough.”
“My pleasure.”
Fifty
ADDIE
Unsurprisingly, my professional world did not end on my first day.
And nearly a month in, it still had not ended because I was—surprise, surprise—still good at my job.
If anything, I was better than ever. I had a newfound confidence in my teaching. Students were finding my lectures engaging, and there had been some truly wonderful conversations about the work in my tutorials.
I’d spent a lot of the last two years hating my job and feeling like I was fighting to stay above water, but now, I was getting to bask in the feeling of enjoying what I did. There was a reason I chose to teach university students, and this new start was reminding me of that.
Despite that, I felt like everything was going to shit because I was scrambling to fall out of love with my flatmate and grappling with the fact that Eli was following the rules just fine.
He was not in love with me, and he was dating someone.
Steffy.
He hadn’t formally told me he was doing so, but she had become a bigger part of his life over the last few weeks, ever since I saw them together at the end of September. She always seemed to be at the table tucked away by the bar whenever I was at Vivi’s, and he always made an effort to talk to her. To sit at her table whenever he got a free moment. There was always laughter. She often touched him affectionately. Or batted her eyelashes at him when he was talking. She was always playing with her hair. Everything about her oozed flirting, and he lapped it up and looked like he was giving as good as he got.
Every time I saw them, I was struck by how good they looked together. Physically, they fit well. But they worked better emotionally, too. She didn’t used to hate him with the fire of a thousand suns. She wasn’t a constant reminder of who he used to be before he started owning his own life. She wasn’t obnoxiously nosy. She was an all-around nicer person than I could ever hope to be, and Eli deserved nice.
I was already becoming used to the idea of the two of them being together, and the more used to it I became, the easier it would be for me to fall out of love with Eli. Soon, it would be almost like it never happened.
It was by pure coincidence that, since the increased sightings of the two of them together, I also managed to get my thesis to 40,000 words.
I was tweaking a paragraph about the similarities between Hero and Juliet when there was a knock on my door.
