CHAPTER 11

 

Three Years Ago—Secrets

 

Charis: Secrets. Are you good at keeping them?

Asher: I'm fantastic at it. You have a secret? Lay it on me.

Charis: Of course I have secrets. But, like, isn't the point of secrets not to share them?

Asher: You can share anything with me.

Charis: Oh, really. Anything. So like, you want me to tell you what feminine products I—

Asher: I knew it! I knew you were going there.

Charis: Do you want to know?

Asher: Sure.

Charis: What?

Asher: Sure.

Charis: O-kay. You don't mind hearing about my feminine products.

Asher: Is there an echo in here? You're a babe. You need me to go to the store for you? It wouldn't be the first time.

Charis: Oh. I forgot about your sisters.

Asher: Yeah, my sisters, too.

Charis: Oh. Oh, right. No, I didn't need, um…anyway…all that's very interesting…I'm gonna just check…oh, look, a text from Professor Constantine!

 

Charis

 

WHAT?

Fuck oh fuckery fuck fuck.

He could not know. How could he know?

"What—ah—what are you talking about?" My denial sounded so lame.

"I think you saw me and Aura and wanted what we had, or what you thought we had. You wanted a dude to be crazy about you and all the good shit women want. Romance. Passion."

I started to breathe again. "Oh, really."

"Yeah, oh, really." His tone was sarcastic. Crap, but he was sexy in this mood.

I could feel his breath, smell his spicy soap. Hopefully he couldn't read my reactions, my shuddering with waves of desire…and heartfelt relief.

Because he was way off. He'd guessed wrong.

Oh, I was jealous all right. But not of his relationship. I didn't want a relationship like he had, with all those crazy ups and downs.

No, it was Aura I was burningly, lethally jealous of. We're talking the bared teeth, unsheathed claws, fantasies of peeling her lovely freckled skin off one inch at a time brand of jealousy.

Aura, herself, is fine. A bit annoying, but not horrible or anything. She can't really help that she's irresistible.

It's the fact that Asher loves her that I hate.

Yeah, I'm kind of a wench.

Not that I've ever hinted I felt that way. It's not my place to feel jealous. I have no basis for it. We're only friends.

My feelings are my problem. Hell, he thinks of me as an older sister.

So I keep it to myself. Telling him would serve no purpose, and besides, I want him to be happy.

I really hoped he'd find that happiness with Aura. He was over-the-moon crazy about her, had been since he'd met her. If she was what he wanted, I wanted him to have her.

That was my thinking, anyway. In my selfless moods.

Sometimes I get selfish, though, and go all Evil Queen on her and wish I could poison her apple. Or at least beat her girly ass up. But as I tell my ethics students in the morality section, what we feel is one thing. What we do about what we feel is another.

It would kill me if he knew how badly I'd like to be in her place. I'd puke for a month if he expressed pity outright. So this was a secret that was going with me to the grave. (Or the urn. I'm still undecided about the best thing for my remains when my time comes. I wonder if any trace of DNA might ever be able to be extracted from charred human ashes, and if so, what would a person have to do now to—)

"So you thought, why not settle for Karl?" Asher brought me back to the issue at hand—his loony hypothesis. "Maybe he'll change. Maybe Karl will be the perfect husband despite all the evidence to the contrary. Then I go and break up with her. Come on, you said it, Sloane, we were the perfect couple, Aura and me. Obviously we were some kind of inspiration for you. Now my relationship is dead you finally see what a mistake you're making. If Aura and I had no chance as a couple, then you and Karl are dead in the water. Admit it, Char. You wimped out. And you regret it now."

"Look, you're in my space. Could you please back up?'

He didn't move. It was like I hadn't spoken.

I shoved at him. He caught my right hand and held it.

Oh, shit, now he was gripping my wrist. And kneeling between my legs and surrounding me….Lying there feeling his closeness, my body secretly burst into flames.

Forget my nipples, my pussy was involved now.

I hated when I responded to him like this. I am a very weak person.

"Stop intimidating me," I ordered, bringing in my lecturer voice. I consider it one of my superpowers, to be used outside of the classroom only in emergencies.

"You are not intimidated."

He sounded so sure. But how wrong he was. I was intimidated. I wasn't afraid of him. It was my own reactions I feared.

But I knew what he meant.

"I am, too," I lied, and scrambled to get my feet under me. That only made the situation more crowded, trapping my knees against my own chest.

So then I used the ultimate weapon—my megawatt Big Sister look. "You're being super-pushy, Asher. I—would—like—to get up now."

"If you want to get up, why don't you just push me away?"

"What? I seriously just did."

"That was a baby pat, not a real push. You're fully capable of tackling me if you want to."

My mouth was hanging open. Why was he arguing with me? He was supposed to just do what I said, as part of the UFC (Universal Friend Code) as it pertained to friends of unequal strength.

"Well, I, uh, do want to get up." But my words were absent-minded. I wasn't protesting anymore, I was thinking. Something new was going on with Asher, and I needed to understand it.

"If you want my opinion, I'd say you definitely don't want to get up, Char." His voice had taken on a suggestive tone I'd never heard from him before, and I saw his nostrils flare.

I automatically sniffed. And then I smelled it.

Myself.

Oh. Lord.

No, no, no, no, no.

Mortified, I realized I could smell my own wetness. My legs were splayed and he was right there, and, oh crap, he'd caught me basically displaying in his arms with a sexual response.

Some guys wouldn't have a clue. Not Asher. Stud that he was, of course he'd notice with it staring him in the face, or the nose if you will.

CRAAAAAP.

So humiliating. Sure, it's only the primal biological reaction of a fertile female to a potent male. Totally natural. But WRONG in this particular case.

I'm a closet cougar.

Not to mention how awful it feels—the pinching hurt, the emptiness, the frustration—so familiar, so aggravating, so devilishly distracting.

Lust.

Normally I have a decent sex drive, nothing major. Around this man, though, my body goes haywire.

It's a real trial, the worst thing about my otherwise fantastic friendship with Asher. I hate it even more than I hate my unreasonable possessiveness.

He's cost me hundreds of dollars in adult toys.

I'd hoped he'd never know.

But now it had finally happened. Asher, the one man—no, the boy, he's a boy relative to you—that I should never want, had noticed I was a perv who got wet around him.

Mel's little brother. Still in college.

Cringification.

Should I apologize for being inappropriate?

I couldn't meet his gaze anymore. I turned my face away, trying to distract myself. Was that a spot on the wall? Maybe a spider or just a smudge from the time I accidentally kicked the wall in a dance move—

His fingers settled on my jaw, turned my head like he'd done before. And like before, I didn't know what to do.

Without closing my eyes, I couldn't avoid his gaze. And I couldn't close my eyes, not with the way he was looking at me. What was he searching my face like that for, anyway?

He shook his head slowly, like he was saying no to something.

Then his finger stroked along my cheek.

Well fuck. An arrow of electricity darted down my body, arching my spine.

And there went my nipples again.

"Whoa!" I gasped. "What are you doing? Dude!"

I saw his Adam's apple move as he swallowed. "Just wondering about your mouth."

"My mouth?" That husky note in his voice—I'd heard him use it with girls he was into. He never used it with me. What in the name of Marilyn Vos Savant was going on?

"Open your mouth for me, Charis Sloane."

Something shameful exploded in me. My brain said, there-must-be-a-mistake-and-you-didn't-hear-him-right. Maybe he actually said "All in the house with me." Mouth and house were really quite similar sounding words…

"Mouth. Open." No mistaking that.

And his voice…he didn't sound young at all. That deep, rumbling voice stroked me all over.

"Mouth," I said stupidly, stalling for time.

"Yeah. Tilt your head back and open—your—mouth. I want to check something out real quick."

Okay, this was getting weird. Now I was curious. I lifted my chin and pretended I was at the dentist. "Like thish?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

I closed my mouth along with my eyes, and when I opened my eyes again, he was even closer, if possible. "What was that about?"

His nose almost touched mine. "I wanted to see the inside of your mouth," he whispered.

"Why?"

His thumb drifted from my chin to trace my lips.

Shock reverberated through me, paralyzing me. Whatever this was—practical joke, payback of some kind—I couldn't seem to stop it. I couldn't move at all. My heart was doing its damnedest to break out of my ribcage.

"I wanted to know what it was about your mouth that makes me…"

He shifted closer. His hand was curling around the back of my head, pressing me forward.

Oh, fuck, no. He didn't just…

"…want to do this."

Now his finger was probing at my lips, tracing the moist inside, and my tongue came out and tasted him.

I couldn't help it. I had to. Besides, I knew, in a burst of relief, that there was no harm. None! For it had suddenly occurred to me what was actually happening. Blessed be! Hallelujah!

This was obviously an honest-to-God hallucination.

I was in bed right now, having a lucid dream.

Almost certainly.

Possibly someone had slipped me a pill in my water bottle. A student, worried about a late paper—sometimes those undergrads really went too far. Why hadn't they talked to me? I had generous office hours.

Right, so clearly I'd stumbled home and the whole Thai food thing hadn't really happened. None of this was happening…

"And this," said a deep voice.

Then the hallucination who seemed to be Asher put his mouth directly on mine.

Warm. Soft. Assertive.

Male lips moving expertly, sending tingles along the nerve endings of my mouth.

Tiny, teasing nips.

Wonderful, luxuriant sucks.

Holy crap.

This was starting to be real.

He lifted his head and sucked in his breath. "Char. Fuck. Kiss me back."

It was Asher. I wasn't imagining anything.

I shook my head, aware of breathing hard and feeling dizzy. "No. What are you doing? You're acting crazy!" I shoved him away, hard enough to budge him this time. And immediately he released me.

I scrambled to my feet, twisting the fabric of my sweater in my fists. I think I was kind of insane right then.

He seemed to be thinking along the same lines. He ran a hand through his hair. "What's wrong with you?"

I pointed. "You. That. What was that that just happened?"

His chest rose with his breaths, like he was breathing as hard as I was.

"Technically, it's the friction encountered when epidermis meets epidermis, with a bit of mucosal tissue thrown in. If you want the layspeak, Sloane, I was kissing you with tongue."

I scrounged up all my reserves to glare at him. "Not cool."

"What's not cool?"

I knew that innocent look and didn't trust it a bit.

"That. Whole kissing me. Thing." I backed up as if he were coming after me, when all he was doing was staring at my chest, the lord knows why. Had I spilled espresso on it?

"This is some kind of backlash, isn't it?" I blabbered. "You're not over Aura yet. What do they call it in the lexicon of relationships—the rebound. You're on the rebound. Or maybe it's the next stage of grief. I think there are five or seven stages total. Obviously you're in one of them and it's making you act loony. Unless—high! You're high! You decided this one time you'd…no? Or, or, wait, I got it, it's that you're dealing with understandably hostile feelings because I went and got engaged to your brother."

The words were pretty much spilling out with no way to stop them.

"Hostile? You think what just happened was hostility?" He started to laugh.

"It's not funny, Asher."

He sobered. "No, it's not at all funny that you've managed to get yourself engaged to a fucking commitment-phobe. At least now you'll be calling it off."

"Huh? No, I'm not calling it off." I was furious. "The engagement is on."

"After what just happened?"

"You mean the way you kissed me? That has nothing to do with anything." Then realization dawned. "Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Was that what that whole thing was all about? Was that why—you don't want me marrying Karl and so you think if you give me a big ol' smooch I'm going to just call it off!"

"Oh for—yeah, I don't want you throwing your life away like that. But that has nothing to do with what just happened. I took your mouth, Char, because you wanted it. You were leaning into me and you were so ready for it you were practically hyperventilating."

My jaw dropped and I just stood there. Really, what could you even say to such over-the-top arrogance?

Then:

"Go. Get out. Get out!" I was screaming. Me, cheerful lecturer, the epitome of reason, a bastion of control…what can I say, he'd pushed my red button. I grabbed a spring roll off the counter and hurled it at him. "And take your stupid pity kisses with you!"