Page 136 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

“D’you want a kiss, tae?” Finlay asks Rory in an almost mocking tone, loud enough for me to hear, as though he knows exactly how it’d make me react, as though he’s aware of the sudden flare of heat that strikes me like a meteor.

Rory doesn’t answer with words, though he swings his intense expression across to me. Neon blue highlights his blondish hair, and it feels abruptly as though I’ve plunged underwater just by observing the challenge in Rory’s gaze.

He places the pill into his mouth, sealing his lips in an instant, and then lowers his mouth to mine.

My eyelids flutter shut as I sink into Rory’s kiss. He captures my body, winding his hands around my back, almost ripping me from the locked embrace between me, Danny and Luke. His mouth feels like fire, like firewater, igniting and soothing in equal measure. It washes over my skin, my heart, my core.

I pass my pill across to him. Rory devours me, leaving nothing except his own pill, which he transfers from his mouth to mine. It should be fiddly, clumsy, but somehow it’s the easiest thing in the world. I moan against him, and even without willing it, without even trying, Rory’s pill slides down the back of my throat, slickened by our saliva.

He pulls away from me, as though to check my reaction. His fingers hold my face, grazing my hair, framing me so that I look at nothing other than himself. With Rory’s gaze fixed on me, I see the slow bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows his pill.

I’m curiously devoid of anxiety. Yes, I’ve just taken a probably illegal drug in a sleazy nightclub but it feels right. Total obliteration of the self. It feels exploratory, experimental, its unknown effects just as much of a tease as the hands securely fastened to my hips, just as much of an unknown as the dark future that lies ahead.

Finlay shoots Luke and Danny a scrutinizing look and then, with caution, removes another pill. Like it’s medicine for myself, I open my mouth without hesitation for him to place it on my tongue. He does so, and I capture his departing fingers between my lips, giving them a soft suckle.

With a groan, Finlay removes them from my mouth. “Fuck’s sake, sassenach,” he yells, the heady music swelling around us. “Keep lookin’ up at me like that when ye’ve got me inside ye, and ye’re gonnae make me fuckin’ combust.”

I don’t disguise the dark pleasure in my smile, because ofcourseI want Finlay to combust.

“Gie it tae Luke,” Finlay instructs, and I do so, turning around in the enclosure Danny and Luke have created for me, so that I can confront the former prince directly.

But Luke shakes his head with a soft, regretful smile. “I need a clear head,” he tells me in a rueful tone, and I realize he hasn’t drunk anything either, not since our first few shots. “But I’ll take the kiss. Gladly.”

I almost have to stand on tiptoes to kiss Luke, and I laugh slightly as I try out exactly that. He presses his mouth to mine, lifting my head to meet him halfway. His soft, full lips are like heaven, his tongue a slow tease around mine. The kiss is a gentle, masterful massage that methodically erases my sharp, elevating heart rate, the spike of chemicals rioting across my brain, slowing everything down including time itself. I relax into Luke’s arms, my heartbeat thudding slow and uniform between my ears, and I’m comforted, cherished, the slide of his tongue against mine a whisper of teasing promises.

When he pulls away from me, I blink, stunned, into the swinging overhead lights. Luke’s face is cast in shadow, but there’s the hint of a grin, something in the crinkle of his dark eyes that suggests pleasure and pride.

The pill rolls around in my mouth again, having had the good grace to stay in the one spot during Luke’s dreamy kiss. I wonder what I’m going to have to do with it, because if Luke’s not going to take it, then there’s no way Danny—

Danny. I slide my gaze down at his fingers, tight and digging into the bones of my hips. I twist around to look at him, and discover, to my astonishment, eyes hungry with lust.

It’s shocking. It’s as shocking as a foot slammed against me. Danny doesn’t ever get like this, those soft brown eyes don’t darken with prospects he needs to keep locked in his head for fear of freaking me out. He never looks at me with that serious expression, more like Rory than not, and he never, ever watches me with an underlying thread of lust.

I wonder what he’s thinking. But then, as he spins me slowly around, the answer to that becomes quite clear.

He doesn’t talk to me. He doesn’t say a single word. But he leans his mouth against mine, and only at the very last moment, before our lips meet, is there a perceptible tremor from his body. I make a noise of surprise when we kiss, overwhelmed by an unknowable emotion that hadn’t been there for anyone else. Instead of hands winding around me, I wind my arms around Danny and cling him close to me. I’ve wanted him like this for so long, I’ve fantasized about this so often since our first kiss in the chiefs’ bedroom, that tears begin to prick my eyes. The love and care I feel for Danny tangles with the absurd lust radiating throughout my body. Our kiss is warm, needy, noisy. He matches me groan for groan, and for the first time all night I feel like I’m on even footing, that I’ve finally discovered my equal, and of course my equal would be the soft, freckled boy who shares my physics class and the daily torture of Lochkelvin, who I’ve dragged into this world of insane luxury and insane boys. The boy I’ve dragged along for the ride like my own damn teddy bear.

His tongue strokes mine with surprising adeptness. He may act like the sweetest unkissed virgin boy, but the kiss we’d enjoyed last term had been anything but, and the kiss I’d seen him share with Finlay had been the exact opposite: a dark, dirty, sinful conjunction over a bottle of alcohol on a lonely hill, two broken souls begging for release, for restoration.

To my surprise, Danny’s tongue nimbly scoops the pill into his own mouth, and he swallows it while kissing me, as though not daring to break this moment, not doing anything to shatter the kiss. The only time he pulls away is when the shallow breaths we take while kissing isn’t enough, and he leans away, gazing up at me with shocked brown eyes, his hands firm on my forearms, his chest heaving for air.

This changes things.

This changes everything.

As the bassline thunders around us, a live wire of noise, I realize how fucking in love I am with all of them. Each of them, with their own weird tics and lives, so different in how they kiss me, in how they express their affection. Oxytocin is bursting through my veins. All I want to do is shout that I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m so fucking in love with the four guys whose hands are sliding down my dress, outlining the shape of my body, holding me as tight to them as they can.

My mind is soft, fuzzy, silky. It’s an ever-changing thing that alters, refocuses, depending on what I’m looking at. My gaze is caught, dazed, on the play of the neon lights swinging directly above. It seems as though they’ve expanded in number, that they cut through the crowd like colored rain. As hands surround me in the dark, as I sink and submerge to the sensation, I become hyper-aware of my tight dress, of how unnecessary a creation it is. I want to remove it and throw away my shoes, dance naked under the moonlight and starlight. It’s primal. It’s embedded within me as deeply as the love in my heart.

But we dance. We dance until the air dissolves around us, until the club scorches from a lack of oxygen. We dance as the crowd shouts, as one single unified mass, “Here we, here we, here we fucking go!” We leap into the air as though trying to catch stars, catch the slamming beat of the music with our own too-small hands, because the music’s too big, it’s too vast, you just want to fuck under it and live inside it.

I grind against my guys. I moan into listening ears and am kissed by darkly laughing mouths. Wave after wave, I’m hit with being on the verge of something explosive. And I give in. I cry out into the crowd, I chant with the rest of them, and in my mind I enter Heaven as my body enters Hell.

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