Her legs lock around my hips, the heels of her feet pushing me forward, eyes heavy yet demanding. I enter her swiftly, thrusting in deep, and I can tell that she’s so close already, hissing at the quiver of her around me, tightening against my cock. I fight every instinct to drive hard and fast into her, instead clenching my teeth with the effort of keeping my movements slow, measured, purposeful. I want to savor her and the way she looks right now, her raptured gaze staring up at me, mouth agape with her panting breaths. I want to have this, and I want to keep this, and I want her to—
“Say my name.” I press my forehead to hers, hips twisting forward. She gives me a glazed, questioning look. I can’t help the way my voice sounds, low and ragged and pulled thin, when I ask, “Call me by my name.”
Understanding flickers in her eyes and she opens her mouth, but no words come out. I continue moving, slowly, almost pained with the restraint I need to stop my hips from just slamming mindlessly forward. She cries out and once more I plead, “I want to hear my name, Gwendolyn.” I want to make this real.
She shudders beneath me, nails puncturing my back. I buck against her, trying desperately to control myself, but every second pushes me closer to the precipice. She groans and presses her mouth to mine, the word “Hamilton,” a hot, keening whisper between our lips.
“Oh my fucking—” I shake, eyes screwing closed in pleasure, shocked at the effect it has on me, how much just hearing my name on her lips feels like a physical wrench. I bury my face into her neck as my orgasm draws helplessly near, hand cupped possessively around the long column of her throat.
Her breaths are thin and shallow in my ear, and she whispers, “Hamilton,” once more before trapping my earlobe between her teeth and tugging, just the way I like it. The combination sets off a wave of feral need that devours all sense. I grab her
knee and press it to her chest, spreading her, opening her thighs to me, and giving in to the impulse to thrust wildly into her.
There’s something all at once surprised and awestruck in her eyes when they hold mine, and the feeling of her clenching around me, orgasm rippling through her in a full-body convulsion, makes me grunt a low, “Fuck.”
I follow her over the edge, coming in a trembling final thrust.
Pleasure turns to ecstasy, and then flows into warm, consuming contentment. I look down at the girl below me, who is gazing at me with dreamy eyes. This isn’t someone staring up at me with reluctance and anger. The way her fingers card through my hair isn’t the behavior of someone refusing to forgive.
Even if I’m lying to myself, I have to believe that. Because the emotion that shoots through me is unexpected, entirely unfamiliar, but absolute and true.
I’m in love with Gwendolyn Adams.
Leaving Preston the next day is harder than I thought it would be. Sure, a huge part of it is going home to a dysfunctional family celebrating another empty, joyless holiday, but even I can’t deny the biggest factor is Gwendolyn. I really don’t want to leave her, but most of all, I can’t help the grip of fear that, the second we leave this room, the spell will be broken. That we’ll go back to being Adams and Bates, enemies. That we’ll return to ignoring each other, at best, and at worst...
I rub a hand down my face.
“Got everything?” she asks, glancing around her room. Her bag is packed on the bed. I’d watched her carefully pick out different shirts and jeans, skipping over the lacy underwear for the more practical—yet still sexy—white. At least that means she’s probably not planning on impressing anyone while she’s home. That thought made me both anxious and relieved.
“I think so.” I look around once more. I’d had to go back to my room once for a change of clothes, but everything fit easily in my backpack. There’s not much I need to take home with me, anyway. I have a full closet of clothes there. I look at her and something comes to me. “Oh, wait. Here.”
I take my hoodie—black and emblazoned with the crimson Preston Prep Swim logo—and pull it over her head. She quirks an eyebrow at me, but ultimately pushes her arms through, allowing me to tug it down straight.
“It’s cold,” I feebly explain. “It’d suck a bag of dicks to get sick again.” It’s ridiculously oversized on her small frame, and I feel a hot spike of possessiveness at the sight of her swimming in it. It doesn’t have my name on it, but anyone with two brain cells to rub together would see that it’s a guy’s hoodie. Despite that, she still has the element of validity on her side, were anyone to ask. She is on the swim team, after all.
If she realizes any of this, she doesn’t say so. She just nods, burying her hands into the hoodie’s front pouch. “I’m ready if you are.”
It’s a loaded statement. It’s obvious that neither of us want to go home, to part from one another. I slip an arm around her waist, sweeping her hair back from her neck to press a kiss into the sensitive skin below her ear. “Sure we can’t just stay here?”
She laughs, squirming away from me. “You need to shave, and yes. I’m pretty sure if we don’t go home, they’ll come looking for us at some point.”
I cling to her in a last-ditch effort to hold on to what we’ve got. Once that door opens, either everything changes or it goes back to normal. I want what we have here—now—even if it is impossible.
“Hey.” She cups her hand at the back of my neck and nudges my face downward. “It’s going to be okay.”
She doesn’t clarify what ‘it’ is. She doesn’t need to.
I search her eyes. “Are you sure?”
“We’re the two smartest kids in the class,” she says, smiling, “and you’re easily the most nefarious. We’ve gone this far with no one finding out, and at the very least, we can buy some time to come up with a plan for how we want to handle... you know. Going forward.”
I return her smile, some thread of tension deep in my chest suddenly unwinding.
There is a forward, and we’re going to it.
I kiss her once more before giving in, slinging my backpack over my shoulder and grabbing her bag off the bed. What she says makes perfect sense. We’re smart, and I’m the lead Devil. They’ll fall in line, or there will be consequences.
But figuring out what the consequences would be, and for whom, is what makes me so nervous.