Page 2 of Our Secret Moments

Everyone on the other side of the door is laughing, turning the music down to listen in on whatever is happening in here.

I pin my arms across my chest as he continues thrusting his hips into the door, pretending he’s giving it to mereallygood, his hands cupped around his mouth as he continues groaning.

He is the most ridiculous person I’ve ever met in my life.

I don’t think he realises that no one else canseehim other than me. Regardless, he’s putting on an Oscar-worthy performance. He stops for a split second, turning to me, that signature Bailey grin hanging on his mouth, that stupid dimple on his left cheek.

I cock my head to the side. “Are you done?”

“Not quite yet. I was just getting to the good stuff,” he says.

“There’s more?” I gasp, sarcastically. His eyes light up as he leans against the closed door of the closet. “Here I was, thinking that saying you’ve got a golden dick was the cherry on top. But if you knew me at all, you’d know I’d never say anything like that.”

“Trust me, Cat. Forming words would be the last thing you could do if I had my way with you,” he whispers.

The air between us fizzles, the shots I had before leaving my dorm churning in my stomach with the leftover pizza I ate.

Connor is not an intimidating person.

Not to me anyway. But when he leans down, his breath hot in my face, those whiskey eyes staring directly in mine, you could say he’s a little intimidating.

He’s toying with me, obviously. But with the heat, the words coming out of his mouth and his proximity, my body doesn’t know that and everything — and I mean,everything— starts to ache accordingly.

Think with your brain, not your tits.

Think with your brain, not your tits.

“Are you done?” I ask again, needing some sort of response to his blatantly obvious remark and attempt at flirting. My voice is breathy and strangled, unlike my usual poised self. He finally takes a step back, allowing me to breathe, but all I can smell is him.

All I canfeelis him.

Jason Bassey’s parties are famous for two things. One, somebody usually ends up pregnant by the end of the night and two, his magical Manifestation Chamber. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds. There’s an empty utility closet at the end of the hall of Jason’s parents house, where he notoriously throws parties every week for the students at Drayton.

Trust me when I say that this closet isnotspecial. It’s barely two feet wide, but when you’re stuck in here between a six-foot-three football player and some shelves, I might as well be trying to fit through the small doors at Brandy Melville.

In short, Jason’s Manifestation Chamber was originally a fragment of his own imagination that nobody believed for a while. He has the strongest intuition in the entire school. According to his friends, he’s also had a perfect Gaydar since he was in middle school, so everyone started to believe him when he said he knows that two people will fall in love by the end of the semester, or by the end of the school year.

He gets two of his minions to blindfold said participants and shove them into his chamber. You’d think he’d try to decorate it with dream catchers, incense and crystals, but it’s just as sterile as the cafeteria floors on a Friday night.

The crazy thing is, it has worked.

Every. Single. Time.

The couples that come out of here are rocky for the first few weeks, but then they bounce back and most of them are still thriving to this day. My best friend, Nora, believes it’s some sort of voodoo shit that Jason is pulling, but I can’t see what reasons he would have to do that, or if that is even possible.

I always thought it was interesting how he had such an eye for those things, how he managed to see two people that were destined to find each other and put them in the right place at the right time. It’s beyond me how he manages to do it, but it’s an art I appreciate, no matter how cynical I am about love.

Now, stuck in here with Connor Bailey, I can dub it as completely insane because there is no way in this universe that I could ever fall for him. The only energy between Connor and I is purely platonic, sickly sweet annoyance.

I might have had a crush on him growing up, but that wasyearsago and the crush has yet to reemerge. Since then, he has constantly been testing that friend boundary, making me want to shove the word friend right up his–

“Oh, come on, don’t act like you haven’t been dreaming about this since we were kids,” he drawls, glancing down at me again.

“Bythis, you mean being stuck in a closet with you while you pretend that we’re having sex?” I ask and he nods, clarifying his stupidity. “That sounds so wrong, forsomany reasons.”

“Okay, then,” he draws out, looking around the tiny room and then back to me. “What else are we supposed to do? They clearly put us in here for a reason.”

“It’s a stupid party ritual that doesn’t mean anything. We were both at the party for different reasons and we ended up here. It was a pure coincidence,” I retort. His eyes narrow, the usual brightness in them dimming as he pins me with a defiant stare, the heat between our bodies crackling like cinder rocks.

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