Page 43 of Winter Break Up

Clyde cackles along with his family members, and I want to shrivel up into a hole in the ground. Yeah, he’s a drunk asshole, but he hit my insecurity nail on the head.

“If you don’t shut your fucking mouth right now, I’ll do it for you.” Mercer’s voice is deadly quiet, but the brutality in it spears my gut.

Clyde and his goonies don’t catch on though. “Aw, shucks, Russell, I’m just fucking joking. Loosen up, get motherfucking merry!”

The rowdy crowd with him whoops and hollers, but Mercer stays rigid beside me.

“You talk about Emily like that ever again and I’ll make sure you’re drinking that beer through a straw, got it?” His jaw clicks like he’s grounding down his back molars.

“Yo, Clyde, let’s get out of here.” One of his cousins must see the cagey look in Mercer’s eye and begins to pull his oaf of a relative back to their golf cart.

Mercer and I are left standing on a lawn decorated like The Nightmare Before Christmas, the mood between us completely zapped. Clyde’s words echo over and over again in my head. I broke up with Mercer in high school along the same lines; I thought that at some point, he’d find someone prettier, funnier, better than me. I see those girls in his Instagram stories or paparazzi pictures he’s sometimes in as an up-and-coming sports star, and my heart would sink. I can’t compete with that. I’ll never be able to.

“I promise, that’s not what I think at all. Em, look at me.” Mercer’s voice sounds pained as he reads my mind.

Reluctantly, I turn my head to look at him. “It’s fine, Clyde is just being a drunk jerk. It doesn’t matter anyway. What you do back at school is your business, Mercer.”

His jaw flexes in anger, and I watch as he shakes his head like I’m dumb for saying something like that.

“Do you understand how beautiful you are? How I’m drawn to every part of you? That the only person I feel like talking to most of the time is you? Yeah, Clyde is a fucking piece of shit, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t see your face when he said that. It doesn’t make it okay for someone to speak to you like that. And if you think, for one second, that I feel any of what he said, you’re dead wrong.”

Those baby blues bore into mine, as if he’s trying to will me to accept what he’s telling me.

“And you don’t have to say all of that just because he insulted me.” Because now I’ll never be able to get Mercer’s words out of my head, and that will only break my heart worse.

“Yes, I do. You deserve to hear them every damn day.” Mercer swallows, and I can tell he wants to say more.

A golf cart zooms down the street, playing a rowdy country Christmas song, and everyone around us laughs and cheers.

“Can I take you back to my place? Please, I want to get out of here. I need to be alone with you.” He doesn’t touch me, but with how his words wrap around my heart, he might as well be.

“Yes. Please.” There is nowhere I’d rather be than alone with him.

We don’t have much time left, and if we aren’t going to spend it saying the things that need to be said, I’d rather spend it naked with him.

Both of us are walking on eggshells when it comes to feelings, but the connection between us during sex is something we don’t have to talk to death. I need that with him at this moment.

Mercer takes my hand and walks us back down the street, away from the crowds and straight to our cart. My heart beats double time the entire way to his grandpa’s house. All this pent-up frustration and lust between us is about to go off like a bomb.

With the way Mercer’s jaw has been locked since he told off that group, I know I’m about to be at the receiving end of some hot, angry sex. Between that and the compliments he just paid me, I am more than ready to get him alone.

19

EMILY

Mercer’s hand is firmly laced in mine as he unlocks the door to his grandfather’s house, and my heart stutters as his keys jingle coming out of the lock.

“What if he hears us?” I press myself against his broad back as his feet shuffle onto the living room carpet.

He wraps my hands around his waist, and we move together through the familiarity of this house that used to be like a second home to me.

“Remember? He takes his hearing aids out at night, couldn’t hear if the planet was falling on our heads and aliens were taking over,” he reassures me as he turns me, and his lips fuse to my neck.

“Why do I feel so much more reckless doing this now than I did in high school?”

It’s not as if we haven’t hooked up and had sex in Mercer’s childhood bedroom dozens of times throughout our relationship. We were one of the only couples back then who had a guaranteed make-out spot because his grandfather could barely hear and went to sleep at eight thirty. But we aren’t together anymore, not like that. This feels dirtier or somehow more scandalous.

“Because we’re much better at sex, therefore louder. Harder. Faster.” His growl sounds in my ear as he presses me to the closed front door.

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