Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 80643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
“Right,” I say. “Cancun was fun.”
“Took them off with your teeth, last time,” Bree tells me before sitting back down on her chair.
“TMI,” Rayne protests.
“No such thing,” Oliver says, holding up a hand. “I might be in a happy relationship, but I’ll listen to sex stories every fucking day.”
“You want to know the craziest place Noah fucked me?” Bree asks Ollie.
He lights up, of course.
“Tell me everything, girl.”
Bree launches into a shameful story of when I got drunk and we had sex at an electronic music festival, literally behind the speaker as the DJ was playing his set. We could feel the vibrations of the beat as we fucked, and while it was certainly an interesting experience, I can barely remember most of it.
“You haven’t lived until you’ve felt a cock inside you match the beat of a Tiesto song, let me tell you,” Bree says, grinning at Ollie.
Oliver grips Niko’s arm. “One word, Niko. Need. Fucking need.”
Bree laughs. I adjust myself on my chair, wishing I had any feeling about that memory other than shame about how drunk I was.
I look out at the blue glow that the pool makes in the night, and I hear the house doors open behind me.
Suddenly, a figure walks past my peripheral vision.
Somebody’s heading right past us toward the pool.
Torin.
Holy fuck.
It’s such a shock that for a second I wonder if I’m hallucinating him now, and that’s how bad my mind has gotten this week.
Except it’s real.
Torin’s blond hair reflects the warm glow from the string lights on the porch.
It’s like the air changes the moment he’s there.
The electric feeling before a thunderstorm.
I don’t move an inch in my chair.
If he’s going to act completely unaffected by this, then I am, too.
Asshole.
God, if only you were capable of feeling even a shred of what I felt this week.
But you don’t feel anything at all.
“Torin!” Rayne says, waving at him. “You’re back.”
Torin gives Rayne a nod and greets the table quickly, but he doesn’t meet my eyes once, and doesn’t stop as he continues on to the pool. He’s in his black swim shorts that hug his body like a glove.
“How is it possible that he looks better in person than he did in his Lumber Depot pics?” Bree says, leaning over to whisper in my ear. “That core. Those fucking biceps.”
“Yeah, and he has the vain ego to match,” I mutter. “Acting like he hasn’t been gone for days, then just waltzing back in.”
Bree hums. “That’s how he’s always been, right? Mr. I’m-so-independent, never telling anyone else his plans?”
“And he’ll never change.”
He dives into the pool on the deep end, the water splashing around him. He begins doing laps, as if nothing has changed and he hasn’t been missing in action for the past five days.
Like you haven’t ignored my goddamn text.
“Noah,” Roman says, tapping the table in front of me. “In or out?”
I look back over. “In. Definitely in.”
Rayne deals another round and I try my best to act unfazed by Torin’s return.
But as we play round after round, my eyes keep getting drawn to the pool.
Twenty minutes pass as he does lap after lap in the pool and we finish more rounds of poker.
When I next glance over, Torin’s bringing his arms up to rest on the pool deck behind him, staring over at our table for the first time.
Watching us.
His face is illuminated by the pool’s blue light. It makes his cheekbones look even more pronounced, and his soaked hair drips down onto his pecs.
He may as well be resting there smoking a goddamn cigarette for how removed he looks, like he’s chill, uncaring, and above it all.
I feel like he’s staring into my soul again.
And already, I had forgotten how much it fucks with me when he does.
“Still can’t believe he’s here,” Bree tells me. “Never thought I’d see the day.”
“Trust me, I didn’t think he’d ever be here, either.”
Bree’s run into Torin before a couple of times at Dad’s charity events, and I’ve never been quiet with her about my distaste for him.
“How is it having a stepbrother?” she asks me. “Have you two gotten any closer?”
Something clenches in my chest. “Fuck no.”
Liar.
Lying liar.
“Yo, Bree,” her cute friend calls out from over by the fire pit, where she’s been drinking with her buddy. “Are we busting out the foam when we get back?”
“Hell yes,” Bree says. “Noah, are you in?”
Luros Sorority has a foam machine that they’ve used at various parties in the past. They pour a shit ton of it into an inflatable pool out back and people wrestle, in various states of undress.
My instinct is to say hell no.
Foam fights at parties are the exact kind of shit that is way more fun when drunk.
But right now, any excuse to have even a tiny bit of fun and get the hell out of Torin’s field of vision sounds like a good idea to me.