Page 31 of Riot House
Damiana tasted like desperation. It coated my tongue and left an oily residue in my mouth that three days’ worth of Listerine couldn’t budge. I thought about sterilizing my junk in bleach after I was dumb enough to fuck her, but I figured my dick had already suffered enough and settled with a scalding hot shower instead. A master craftsman should take better care of his tools.
I did complete a full profit and loss assessment the night I allowed Dami into the house and I screwed her over Pax’s poker table. At the time her neediness was something I deemed manageable, but that was after a bottle of vodka and two Percocet. It was also before I knew Elodie Stillwater even existed. And now I find the consequences of my little tryst with Wolf Hall’s resident viper were not worth the twenty-one minutes of bare flesh and porn star approved moaning that she offered in exchange for a ride on my cock.
ME: Let it go. Some mistakes aren’t destined to be repeated.
DAMIANA: MISTAKE? U weren’t calling it that when I swallowed ur cum, motherfucker.
I pocket my phone and jam it into my back pocket, growling out loud. Crazy bitch isn’t worth another megabyte of my data. I shouldn’t have replied in the first place, but I figured there was a chance she’d walk away and let this thing go gracefully. Girls like Damiana never know when to give up, though. They persist and they persist until they’ve thoroughly embarrassed themselves, and even then they won’t fucking drop it.
The land surrounding the house is a bog. It rained all week, an incessant downpour that only paused long enough for Dashiell to talk me into a race up Mount Castor (which I won). This morning’s the first day that any of us have woken up to blue skies, and the pale, almost white dawn has made me unreasonably irritated. I liked the dense, angry cloud cover and the charged, threatening energy that’s been hanging over Wolf Hall. It exacerbated the roiling tension that’s been building between me and Elodie. It felt like that moment right before you come, when you hold your breath and you feel that pleasure mounting, and you’re riding this wave that will crest over you any second. This morning’s sunny, fresh beginning feels like that wave failed to crash, leaving me left unsatisfied and wanting.
Using sex metaphors is a mistake. I just have to think the word and my mind goes overboard, painting graphic images of Elodie, naked and spread out for me. I haven’t let myself imagine what it would feel like to fuck her. Ican’timagine it. In my daydreams, I get as far as hovering over her with my dick in my hand, rubbing the tip against her pretty, pink little pussy, and my mind just fucking blanks.
She isn’t a virgin. She’s been fucked before, I can tell, but that doesn’t matter to the cock-blocking bastard inside my head, who keeps telling me that she’s pure and my cock has no business being anywhere near her cunt.
Pax whistles through his teeth as he pulls up through the black, sucking mud in front of the house at the wheel of his Charger; he’s chewing on a tooth pick that he shuttles from one side of his mouth to the other, left to right, left to right, left to right. “You’re gonna owe me a car wash, you know that, right? This baby was clean when I pulled out of the garage and now look at her. She’s fucking filthy.”
“If you took as much care in your presentation as you do in that car, people wouldn’t mistake you for a vagrant all the time,” Dashiell says in a sunny voice.
“Fuck you,Lord Lovett.” When anyone else calls Dashiell by his full title, it’s typically said with a certain amount of gravity and respect. When Pax uses our friend’s full title, it sounds like he’s chewing on wasps. Dashiell’s impervious to Pax’s foul moods, though. He gracefully slides himself into the front seat next to Pax, folding his body like a fucking dancer as he crams himself into the car.
All of us are painfully aware of the fact that none of us should get along. Pax is the spikiest, angriest, poutiest guy I’ve ever met. The chip on his shoulder is glaringly obvious and kind of sad, really. Dashiell’s spoiled rotten and so hopped up on Valium and Xanax that his world is fluffy and so mellow through his medicated rose-tinted lenses that he barely exists in the same plane of reality as us at all.
And me. I’m the recluse. The pressure cooker. The guy who hardly speaks, who’s skin begins to itch if he has to say more than three sentences in public, in fact. Who hates almost everyone, and finds theideaof having friends hanging around utterly repugnant.
Pax and Dashiell somehow worked their way under my skin, though, until it felt normal that they were just there all the time, bickering and sniping at each other, roughhousing and calling on me to mediate their dumb, affectionate arguments; now it would be weird if they weren’t around, taking up space and irritating the shit out of me.
Pax cackles like a deranged hyena as he peels out of the driveway and heads in the direction of the academy. Any other day and the three of us would have run the two miles to Wolf Hall and wouldn’t have broken a sweat, but it’s Friday. We’ll be burning down the mountain the moment the final bell of the day rings, and we won’t be coming back until the early hours of Monday morning.
“How many people are gonna be at this thing anyway?” Pax grumbles.
“Five hundred and change. The crème de la crème of East Coast society. My father hasn’t set foot on American soil for three years, so even the most pampered, blue-blooded snobs, from the old money to the nouveau riche will be crawling out from under their rocks to pay tribute to the old man.”
Inwardly, I groan. Five hundred people, all crammed into the same ballroom, waiting for their turn to bow and scrape at the feet of a man most of them have never even fucking met. Sounds like pure fucking torture. Add in the fact that it’s a black-tie event and I’m looking forward to tonight’s charity dinner about as much as a root canal, sans anesthetic.
“You’re quiet back there,” Dashiell accuses, looking over his shoulder at me where I’m sprawled out across the back seat of the Charger. “Goddamnit, Jacobi. Are you physically incapable of sitting up straight?” He curves one of his dirty blond eyebrows into a question mark. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you utilize a chair correctly. You know you’re supposed to bend in the middle and sit at a ninety-degree angle, yes? Your posture’s atrocious.”
“My posture is directly correlated to my level of interest in my surroundings.”
“Ouch.” Pax fakes a sniffle of hurt. “Sorry if we’re boring you, Your Highness.”
Dashiell angles the rearview mirror to face him, using it to check his tie in the mirror. Ties are not mandatory at Wolf Hall; Dash wears it of his own volition, which is just fucking sick in my book. “He’s bent out of shape about the new girl,” he says, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror. “He’s taking his time with this one.”
“I’m not taking my time. I’m laying the groundwork. There’s a difference.”
Dash ignores me. “How long did it take him to sully Erica Judge when she first showed up?” he asks Pax.
“Two hours, thirty-eight minutes. From setting eyes on her for the first time, deciding he wanted her, getting past the small talk, actually fucking her in the art room, and her parents turning around and coming back to get her.Two hours and thirty-eight fucking minutes!”Pax crows. “Living fucking legend. Pretty little Elodie’s been here for two whole weeks now, an’ he’s barely even looked at her. Waste of fresh meat, if you ask me. If you’ve changed your mind about our deal, man, we can trade back, y’know. Corsica’s one of my favorite places in the world, but that girl looks like she’s got one of those perfect, tiny, neat little porn star pussies. I’d love to crack that oyster open and go hunting for the pearl.” He holds up two fingers, flicking his tongue between them, making a grotesque slurping noise, and the back of my neck prickles. I kick the back of his headrest hard enough to make his skull bounce off the calfskin leather.
“Hey! What the fuck, man!” Pax glares at me over his shoulder. “If you’re having trouble getting your dick hard, I got plenty of meds that’ll help you get the job done. Pullthatshit again, though, and you can get out and fucking walk.”
“Fine,” I hiss.
“Fine, you want some dick pills?”
“Fine, pull over. I’ll get out and fucking walk.”
“Don’t be a little bitch, Jacobi. We’re five hundred feet away from the entrance.”
