Chapter 14
Hunter
12 years ago
I had no real interest in the party. Not even in the cute little redhead who used her elbows to squeeze her enormous rack together every time she batted her eyelashes at me while we spoke. But Jayce asked me to stick around, at least until the girl he wanted me to meet showed.
My big brother wasn’t a love ’em and leave ’em type of guy. I could count on one hand the number of girlfriends he’d had, even though attracting them was never an issue. Jayce was just the serious type. A lot of that came from the weight he’d carried on his shoulders the last few years before Mom died. He’d refused to live on campus, even though he’d snagged a full ride, including room and board. After she passed, he still wanted to stay home to make sure I had a place to come back to for holiday breaks from school. Our uncle pretty much had to force him to live on campus and try to enjoy himself.
“You want another beer?” Jayce yelled to me from the other side of the kitchen. People were playing beer pong between where the two of us stood.
I shook my can from side to side. Since I’d been nursing it, I still had half left. “I’m good. Thanks.”
He grinned. “Lightweight.”
Jayce made his way back over and leaned against the kitchen sink next to me. He followed the plastic ball bouncing in front of him as he spoke. “Have you talked to Derek lately?”
“Yeah. He’s building a robot or some shit that they do over there in genius land. I’m hoping it’s an anatomically correct female robot he can hump because he never seems to do anything other than study.”
My brother tilted his beer at me. “It’ll all pay off one day. Derek’s gonna be loaded, with a hot wife who thinks his geek ass walks on water. You’ll see.”
I laughed. “We’ll see.”
“How are your classes going?”
Always the big brother. “Good. You?”
“Easy. Nothing left but electives, so I’m spending most of my time tutoring underclassmen for cash.”
Jayce had met the girl he liked through his tutoring job.
“Cash? Are you still charging Pearl, too? You should be taking a different kind of payment by now,” I joked and chugged the rest of my beer. “By the way, who named a girl Pearl twenty years ago? Every time you say her name, I picture you dogging some blue-haired old lady like Mrs. Whitton who lived across the street.”
My brother shook his head and chuckled. “You’re a sick fuck. Mrs. Whitton was eighty-five with a cane. But Pearl is actually her middle name. Probably was her grandmother’s or something. It’s just what everyone calls her.”
One of my brother’s roommates yelled from the yard. “Delucia, come out here. We need someone smart to settle something.”
Jayce tapped his beer can to mine. “Ain’t hard to be the smart one in this crowd. I’ll be back.”
After beer sloshed on my shoes twice from players bumping into the beer pong table, I decided to get some fresh air. Since the backyard was packed, I went out the front, figuring I’d check my phone to see if Summer had left her party yet. Walking out onto the porch, I stopped digging for my phone when I saw two girls strolling across the lawn.
Summer.
She was walking with another girl, deep in conversation, when she looked up and our gazes caught. Her eyes flared wide before she took off running for the porch. The girl she’d been talking to looked confused as to why she’d been suddenly left hanging mid-chat.
Summer darted up the stairs and jumped into my arms. Thinking back, that might have been the moment I fell in love with her. My heart was so full from her reaction, not to mention my hands were full of a pretty spectacular ass. We hadn’t kissed that first day—just sat in the fountain and talked for hours. Then we’d spent the last six weeks getting close on a level I’d never explored with a girl before sleeping with her. Hell, who was I kidding? I’d never bothered after sleeping with them either. After a big hug with long legs wrapped around me, I pulled my head back to take a good look at my girl. I wasn’t even sure when I’d started to consider her my girl, but she was all the same. Plump, smiling lips invited me to taste them. Wrapping both hands around her soft cheeks, I sealed my lips over hers. The party in the background faded as she kissed me back, pushing her full tits up against my chest.
I had no idea how long it lasted, but eventually the sound of someone clearing her throat knocked us back to reality. We smiled like goofballs at each other when the kiss broke. I swiped my thumb over her bottom lip to fix her smeared lip gloss.
“Umm….do you two know each other or is this one of your stupid dares?”
Summer smiled. “Hunter here picked truth the first time I asked him. And actually, he has every time since.”
Her friend shook her head. “You and your tests. I’ll let you two go back to what you were doing. I’ll find us something other than cheap, gross beer to drink.”
“Okay. Thanks. We’ll meet you inside in a few.”
When her friend disappeared, I asked what she’d meant by you and your tests.
“When I was in eighth grade, a bunch of boys asked me to play truth or dare. Turned out that was their little trick to get girls to do stuff. Eventually one of us would pick dare because we wanted to sound cool, and then they’d dare us to kiss them. So I started using the game to weed out the boys who were only interested in one thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I think a guy is cute and has potential, I ask him to pick truth or dare. If he goes immediately for dare, it’s because he wants me to reciprocate and pick dare, and then he’ll dare me to do something with him or to him—shows he’s more interested in fooling around than us getting to know each other.”
Her logic was untraditional, but I suppose she sort of had a point. And shit, was I glad I’d picked truth that first day. “Do most guys pick dare?”
“Almost all of them. Well, not Gavin from my art conservation class. He picked truth. But I realized he didn’t really count a few days later when I met his boyfriend.” She tilted her head and smirked at me. “You’re not gay, are you?”
Her ass was still in my hands with her legs wrapped around my waist. I responded by grinding my hips into her so she could feel my erection. “What do you think?”
Summer giggled. The sound was damn awesome.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I asked. “I thought we were meeting up after you went to your party?”
“I was just going to ask you the same thing. Did you already hit your party?”
My brows drew down. I thumbed toward the house. “This is the party I was going to. This is the party you were going to, also?”
She smiled. “Yep. That’s so funny. You said you were going to a frat party, and I said I was going to an off-campus party. It didn’t dawn on me that we were both talking about an off-campus frat party.”
My eyes fell to her lips. “I want to get out of here. Take you…I don’t know…anywhere but here. But my brother wants me to meet someone.”
“I have to meet someone, too. Maybe we can sneak out right after.”
“Definitely.”
As much as I hated to, I lowered Summer to the ground. The house was too mobbed with drunk people to maneuver while carrying her. I took her hand. “Come on. Let me introduce you to Jayce. Maybe his girl is here by now.”
“That’s funny. The guy I’m meeting is named Jayce, too.”
Sometimes you just know. Like the first time Mom fell down. I helped her up and asked if she was okay. But something inside of me was certain she hadn’t just tripped, even though that’s what she’d said.
I knew the answer before I asked Summer.
“Any chance your middle name is Pearl?”
She wrinkled her little nose. “How did you know that?”