“Sorry you made the trip for nothing,” he said. “I’d love to believe that you planted the keys as an excuse to see me—”
“I didn’t—”
“—but that would be too much wishful thinking, even for me. Sure you don’t want to skate?”
I nodded. My eyes lingered as he tied his shoelaces. “Do you always train alone?”
“This is not really training. Just playing around a bit.” He stood, hoisting the laces of his skates over his shoulder. “I don’t like crowds, that’s all. When the rink is available, I take advantage.”
“Do none of your friends skate?”
“Some of my former teammates have gone pro. None in the area—Austin’s no hockey hot spot.”
“What about the Harkness people?”
“Hark, yes, decently. I took Minami once, and she spent one hour on her butt. Sul didn’t even put on skates.” He smiled like they were beloved memories, and began heading out. I hurried behind him, feeling like an ugly duckling trying to catch up with an uninterested swan.
“What’s the story there?” I asked, unwilling to let the conversation end.
“What do you mean?”
“Hark and Minami, they’re weird with each other.”
“Good catch.”
“Obvious, if I picked up on it.”
He gave me a fond look, like my oddities were something he treasured. “Just your run-of-the-mill love triangle.”
“Like in The Hunger Games?”
He halted. “You read The Hunger Games?”
“Tisha wanted me to, but I’m not really the fiction type.” Made-up stories confused me. I preferred dwelling in facts. “I watched the movie, though. I enjoyed it.”
“Look at you.” He resumed walking, delighted. “Hark and Minami dated for a couple of years. She broke it off. Hark never got over it. She married Sul.”
“Fascinating.”
“Is it?” He gave me a pained look.
“Not as much as The Hunger Games, but yes. Sul seems . . . quiet.”
“He talks even less than you do.”
“I talk.”
“Hmm. Sure. Then my damn sister developed a very ageinappropriate crush on Hark, and the triangle became a square. I might just hate all of them.”
“You are clearly the real victim of the situation.”
“So glad that came across.”
“Are Maya and Hark . . . ?”
“No. God, no.”
“Well, as far as you know,” I added, just to annoy him. His glare had me laughing. “I’ve definitely had sex with guys ten or fifteen years my senior. And look how well-adjusted I turned out.”
He snorted at my deadpan delivery. I was a mess. He knew it. I didn’t mind. “As much as I wish all this wellness for my sister . . . not with Hark.” He gave me another half-hearted glare. “What about you and Tisha?”
“What about us?”
“Is it just the two of you?”
For me, yes. I’d had two college roommates, who’d not been fans of my “stuck-up, superior, bitchy airs” in the first semester, but had slowly realized that I was just stumped by social situations. They’d taken me under their wing, brought me to parties, come to cheer for me at skating competitions. We were still in touch, but life was busy, and they both had families. “Tisha has several other friends, whom she constantly introduces me to.” I shrugged. “Most people don’t like me very much.”
We stepped outside, into the oppressive heat of the dimly lit, deserted parking lot. Our cars were the farthest from the entrance—and the closest to each other.
“I’m not surprised,” Eli said.
My eyebrow rose. “You’re not surprised that people don’t like me?”
“You never try to be anything but what you are.” We stopped by his vehicle. “I think people are puzzled, and intimidated, and generally unsure of what to do with you.”
“You are not unsure.”
“No. Then again, I like you very much.” Another blinding grin that had my heart somersaulting. Then his expression sobered, folding into something that looked like sorrow. “You’re a wild ride, Rue. I’ve never met anyone like you, and never will again.”
Something swelled at the base of my throat. “That’s okay. You’ll meet plenty of better people.”
“Will I?” His Adam’s apple rolled. He opened the back seat and threw in his equipment. When he turned back to me, his cocky smile had reappeared. “Have a great rest of your night. Like you said, you’re not here to hang out, and this is not a date. The keys are not mine, so unless you want me to fuck you in my car, I’ll see you—”
“Yes,” I said.
Very quickly.
It was not premeditated. The possibility hadn’t even occurred to me. But now that it was on the table, I wasn’t going to be embarrassed at how eager I sounded.
I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
Eli looked surprised. And incredulous. And angry. And amused. And once he’d cycled through another handful of emotions, he said, “Part of me wants to feel offended. That you won’t skate with me for five minutes, but are okay with being fucked in the middle of a parking lot.”
“And the other part?”
Eyes fixed on mine, he opened the passenger door. “Get inside.”
I’d done it a few times in college—sex in cars, frat bathrooms, once in a locker room. Stupid, when discovery was always possible, and I’d grown tired of it early on, because nothing felt good enough to offset the anxiety of being caught.
But Eli did feel good enough. Eli was dragging me over the center console, arranging me to kneel on his lap, and the only things standing between us and something very embarrassing were air and darkness.
Foolish and irresponsible. But as always, things went from zero to incendiary, and stopping seemed impossible. “Did you wear these soft pants because you wanted to get fucked?” he asked when his hands slid into my leggings.
“I wore them because they’re comfortable—oh.” His thumb found my clit.
“Sensible. Pragmatic.” The tip of his finger prodded against my entrance. “That’s my type, apparently. Maybe once you’re out of my life I’ll just jerk off to budgeting plans.”
He was still sweaty, and maybe I should have found it gross, but he smelled divine, and I licked the salt off a spot at the base of his neck. And that was it, because by now he knew me. My body, my sounds, my pleasure. It was the only possible explanation, the only reason I was convulsing in his arms in less than five minutes, while Eli exhaled soft laughs against my mouth and whispered filthy little things into my ear, feeling my body clutching hotly around his fingers. “You’re really good, aren’t you? You’re fucking perfect.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded. “Do you have a condom?”
He bit my jaw. “We don’t have to—”
“I want to. I liked it.” I’d been thinking about what had happened in his bed for two days. At work. At night. At every hour. “I liked how much you liked it,” I added.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You liked that I wasn’t even able to put it in you before I came?”
I nodded. His fingers were still inside me, and I clenched around them.
“You like that I feel like a teen around you, don’t you?”
I nodded again, eager. He groaned. “Well, sadly I don’t have a condom, so—” He froze. “Hang on. Maybe in the glove compartment, from last year.”
I was the one who checked, the one who found it, the one who eagerly unbuttoned Eli’s pants while he tore it open with his teeth. He angled me so that I wouldn’t get banged up against the steering wheel, and gathered my ass in his hands in the dirtiest of ways, and then he was pressing upward. Inside.