Page 3 of Reckless At Raleigh High
Fiercely competitive, Zen was always willing to take things that one step too far. By rights, she should have been Kacey’s favorite. It never worked out that way, though. I laughed along with the jokes, I made spiteful comments under my breath whenever Kacey prodded at me to tease someone, and I made sure to mock the girls on the cheer team whenever one of them fucked up. In hindsight, I was the John Lennon to Zen’s Colonel Gaddafi, but that was irrelevant.Iwas Kacey’s favorite.
I never felt guilty about the malicious acts I participated in under Kacey’s reign of terror. Not until long after, once Jake and his bastard friends held me down and hurt me.
This morning, however, I’m choked with guilt. I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t constructed a fake body in my bed out of lumpy pillows and a wig and snuck out of the house in the middle of the night. Mom and Max are in Toronto for the next six weeks, visiting my Aunt Sarah. Dad gave his permission for me to stay at Alex’s apartment. I don’t have to be home until midday, but…it’s Christmas morning. It feels like I’m breaking some kind of rule, waking up here in bed with Alex, blissed out and deliriously happy.
We spent last night with Dad, decorating the entire house, arranging our gifts by the fire place, wrestling ornaments out of Nipper’s mouth and drinking eggnog, but I still feel bad that my father’s going to wake up this morning to an empty house for the first time in twenty something years. It just doesn’t seem right.
The sun ekes in through the window next to the bed, washing my skin in cool winter light. It’s still early, just after dawn. If we get up and get dressed now, there’s still time to make it back to the house before Dad’s finished with his morning shower. God knows what Alex is going to say about leaving his warm, comfortable bed, though. His arm tightens reflexively around me, his body hot as a furnace, his smooth, hard chest rising and falling beneath my head as I lay nestled into his side. For the past fifteen minutes, I’ve been lightly tracing the tips of my fingers over the lines of the extensive ink that covers his torso and spreads down his arms, admiring the complexity and the beauty of the work, and he hasn’t even stirred. Once he passes out, there’s very little that can wake a sleeping Alessandro Moretti.
I take the opportunity to study him. Usually, I’m careful about the length of time I allow myself to stare at his handsome, artfully drawn features. When he’s awake, he’s highly sensitive to the weight of another person’s eyes on him; he knows the moment he’s being watched, and he isn’t afraid to call me out on it when he catches me scrutinizing him. Plenty of times I’ve done it unwittingly—risked a sidelong glance at him, just to see what expression he’s making, or to gauge the look in his eyes—only to wind up mortified when he curves one of his dark eyebrows and angles his face toward me, smirking like the bastard that he is.
“Thirsty,Argento? Need something to quench your appetite?”
I shiver against the mere memory of such a suggestion. Ialwaysneed him. Ialwayswant him, his hands on my waist, roughly kneading my breasts, his sharp-edged, filthy tongue between my legs…
Moments like this, when Alex is asleep and dead to the world, are the only times I get to feast on the sight of him without having to fend off hot embarrassment, so I seize them with both hands.
His eyelashes are so long, ink-black and perfectly curled. They look like they’ve been drawn on individually by hand. The deep dimple in his cheek is missing. His mouth, the tool he uses most to convey his amusement courtesy of that damned smirk of his, is relaxed, his full lips slightly open. The cupid’s bow cut from his top lip is so pronounced that scores of women have likely envied it since he was old enough for them to notice him.
And boy-oh-boy do they notice him. He doesn’t play on it, or really acknowledge it, but the truth of the matter is that Alex turns women’s heads wherever he goes. In the grocery store; at the gas station; in line for popcorn at the movie theater. Even at school, I sometimes catch the eyes of the female faculty members inadvertently following after him as he walks down the hall or across the cafeteria.
Basically, he’s sexy as fuck. Good looking, in a rough-cut, edgy, overtly dangerous way that turns people on and scares them at the same time. And, somehow,Iam the one he’s decided to claim as his own. The math doesn’t quite add up.
His pulse throbs evenly in the hollow of his throat, making his tattooed, vine-covered skin tick there. His nose, arrow straight and in perfect proportion to the rest of his face, wrinkles slightly as he swallows, turning his face toward me in his sleep. It’s as if he can tell I’m assessing the individual parts of him that make him whole and he’s trying to give me a better view.
God. How have I ended up so entangled in this person? I try to play it cool as often as possible, but I’m sure he sees right through me. I’m addicted to him. Obsessed. I never wanted to be that girl, the girl who loses herself in her high school crush, but I find myself unravelling day by day. If someone asked me to find the thread where I end and Alex begins, then I honestly wouldn’t be able to pinpoint it. It’s too interwoven with him now. I’m lost to his dark eyes, and the gravel of his voice, and the callouses on his hands that match my own.
I go very, very still when his breathing hitches. It’s weird that you can tell when a person wakes and their consciousness comes flooding back in, even if their outward appearance doesn’t change. Alex looks like he’s still asleep, his eyelids closed, facial features relaxed and loose, but he’s awake. I canfeelhim there, like the answer to a question that I’ve been asking for a really long time, reaching out for me.
Bracing, I wait for the caustic comment that’s about to come out of his mouth. He’ll tease me any chance he gets, especially if he’s caught me swooning over him. Seconds pass, and then a minute. But Alex remains silent. I begin to think that maybe I’m mistaken and he isn’t awake after all, but then his eyelids flutter and he slowly, languidly opens them. The dark pools of his eyes meet mine, and my breath catches in my throat. He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t say a word. He stares back at me with the intensity of a thousand burning suns, his gaze searching and curious, his expression fierce, and for the millionth time since I met him, I have to steel myself, forcing myself not to look away. He’s so damn serious. I’m eaten alive by his thorough examination, stripped bare and left stupefied.
The crisp cotton sheets whisper as Alex turns onto his side to face me properly, sliding himself across the pillow so that his forehead is little more than an inch away from mine. Still, he doesn’t say anything. We face one another, chests rising and falling, hearts beating in time, locked in this weird staring contest that’s both intimidating and incredibly satiating. I’m dying of thirst, and Alex is an ice-cold glass of water. I’m burning alive, and he is the flood that douses the flames. I’m falling so fast, so hard, so dangerously out of all control, and Alex is the one who reaches out and catches me. This man, who has been nothing to so many, is absolutelyeverythingto me.
Suddenly, I can’t bear the silence anymore. Dad can make it through breakfast without us. I have to have Alex. I have to absorb him into me somehow. In the very least, I have to press myself against him and feel his heart quicken. We move at the same time, sharing the same thought, needing the same thing. His mouth meets mine, and it’s as though my soul’s just been cut loose and is flying free. His lips press against mine, not rough but firm and insistent, and he blows out a long, hot breath down his nose, sighing softly. Our bodies gravitate toward each other, closing the small space between us, and Alex slides his free arm around me, pulling me up against him.
He isn’t like other guys our age. They’re all still transitioning into manhood. Their bodies might have filled out and made it through the other side of puberty, but they’re still swamped in confusion and uncertainty as people, trying to figure out what part they are going to play in the theaters of their own lives.
Alex isn’t confused. He knows himself. He’s confident in his beautifully decorated skin. When he holds me the way he’s holding me now, kisses me the way he’s kissing me now, he’s so sure of himself that he leaves no room for doubt. I belong to him.He’s staked his claim, and he isn’t planning on relinquishing. Ever.
He forces my mouth open, slipping his tongue past my lips, not caring that neither of us have brushed our teeth yet, and the bed feels like it’s tilting, tipping sideways, my head spiraling out of control. Only he can unbalance me like this when I’m fucking horizontal.
Winding his fingers into my hair, he cradles my face in his hands, pressing his hips against mine, and any kind of chill I might have been cultivating up until this point flies out of the window. His morning glory really is fucking glorious. I can’t wait for him to thrust it deep inside me. If that’s not where this is going, then there’s gonna be fireworks…
Pulling the duvet down, I slide my hand up Alex’s side, relishing the delicious shift of the muscle beneath his skin as I stroke up his back, between the flat blades of his shoulders. From there, I don’t have far to reach for the back of his neck. I dig my fingernails into his skin, savoring the prickle of the freshly shaved, close cropped hair at the back of his head, and Alex groans breathlessly into my mouth.
“Fuck,Argento. You’re sure you wanna be pulling that shit this early in the morning? You’re gonna get yourself into trouble.”
I love the sound of that. I’ve learned from past experience that trouble with Alex always ends in an orgasm or three—the kind of brain-melting orgasm that leaves you boneless and sated. I laugh, pulling my bottom lip through my teeth. “What if I like trouble?”
Alex grins, arching his back like a cat as I scratch the back of his head again. He reacts the same way without fail whenever I do this. He can’t help himself. His eyes, dark as midnight pools, roll back in his head as he angles his chin up, exposing the column of his throat, and I have to refrain from sinking my teeth into the curve where his shoulder meets his neck. Like me, my Alessandro isn’t averse to a little pain every now and then. He’d enjoy the press of my incisors against his jugular, I’m sure, but we’re going to be seeing Dad soon and my old man has G.I. Joe grade eagle eyes. He’d spot a hickey a mile away.
Alex’s hand snaps up out of nowhere, grabbing hold of me by the wrist and wrenching my hand up high over my head. His eyes open lazily, traveling up and down my face, his gaze finally settling on my mouth.
“You woke up feisty,dolcezza. Careful. I could get used to this.” In a split second, he shoves me onto my back, pulling me away from the cold wall so that my body is in the center of the bed and he holds himself directly above me. The arm I was lying on gets repositioned, my other hand joining my one already above my head, and Alex bears down, burying his face into my neck. Apparently,hehas no aversion to using his teeth on areas ofmybody that my father will likely see.
“Alex!Alex!” I pant, wheezing the words out, squirming underneath the satisfyingly heavy press of his body, but I’m only making things worse. The more I writhe, the more fired up he’s going to get. No way will he leave me unmarked with me responding like this. Once upon a time, that thought would have scared the ever-loving shit out of me. Pinned to a mattress, hands locked over my head, restrained, with nowhere to go and no way of getting out? My body would have forced me to bolt and run, as memories of Jacob Weaving’s leering face assaulted me from all angles.
But Alex isn’t Jake. He’s nothing like any of the sick, twisted, evil fucks who trapped me in that bathroom. One word from me—stop—and he’ll stop. He’ll be on the other side of the room before I can even register that he’s let me go. I participate in this kind of roughhousing with Alex, because I know without question that he’d never do anything to hurt me.
