You need a job?
Nolan read the message and then began chewing on his upper lip. I could see he wanted to deny it, but he nodded his head instead. Humiliation flooded his eyes and he looked away and then tried to turn around, presumably to escape me.
I pinned him with my body, since I needed my hands free to type.
I knew it was a mistake – knew it deep in my belly.
But that didn’t stop me from typing my message out and it didn’t stop me from grabbing Nolan’s chin once again to force him to look at me. I held his gaze for a moment before I stepped back and then put his phone in his hand. He studied me briefly, then started to turn, probably so he could get in his car, but stopped when his eyes fell on the phone and the message I’d written that I knew I’d probably come to regret, but couldn’t find it in me to care.
When can you start?
Chapter Five
Nolan
“Keep it together, Nolan,” I said to myself as I drove through the gates of the center the next morning.
I still couldn’t believe it.
Any of it.
Not the way I’d spewed all that shit at Dallas the day before.
Not that he hadn’t told me to get the hell off his property.
Not that he’d actually said yes.
Not that he’d pressed his big body against mine as his lips had skimmed the back of my neck.
I knew I’d imagined the last part, but that hadn’t stopped me from clinging to the phantom sensation of those warm, firm lips pressed against my skin. Or using it as part of a bigger fantasy as I’d jerked off in the shower this morning. I still bore the slight red mark on my arm where I’d latched onto my skin to keep from screaming out at the sheer pleasure my orgasm had torn from me.
Nothing about the day before had gone as planned.
Well, that wasn’t true.
Nothing had gone as expected after I’d arrived at the center to return Dallas’s jacket. Everything before had gone exactly as expected. The towing of my mother’s car to the shop had eaten up what little cash I had left. The estimate to fix the car had caused my heart to pound frantically in my chest as I’d handed over my credit card to pay the full amount before the work had been done since Bryce, the owner of the shop, had mentioned he’d need the payment up front since he knew all about me and “the incident.”
My trip to Ashburn had ended the same way it had started.
With me feeling more helpless than I’d ever felt in my entire life. I’d been trying to figure out how to tell my mother she and my father were going to lose the house and everything else they owned when I’d spied Dallas’s jacket on the passenger seat of the car. I’d told myself Dallas would need the thing back since the temperature this week was supposed to dip below the freezing mark each day, but in truth, I’d just wanted to delay having to go home.
I hadn’t missed the irony that had come with that realization.
That I’d rather be in the company of the man who’d made me miserable in so many ways in high school than spend any more time in the company of my parents or cooped up in my childhood room.
It wasn’t that Dallas had actually been the one to torment me in the two years we were in school together – it was because he’d always seemed to be around to witness my humiliation. I’d accepted from an early age that, despite what grown-ups told you, bullies didn’t forget about you if you ignored them. It had never really made sense to someone as invisible as me that I’d still been the target of endless persecution. Even long before I’d been deemed “faggy,” it’d been the same handful of boys who’d hated me on sight for whatever folly I’d committed against them. It had begun in kindergarten when I’d been excluded from the rough games the boys had played and the girls had just looked at me like they hadn’t really known what to do with me. Accepting that I didn’t fit and I never would should have been the end of it, but my persecutors hadn’t gotten the message, because the practical jokes and name-calling had followed me until the very day I’d left Pelican Bay. My only saving grace had been that I’d never fought back in any kind of way, so I’d never been subjected to the beatdowns I’d been threatened with.
I’d become oddly complacent with the abuse over the years, but things had changed when Dallas Kent had arrived in Pelican Bay. I’d already suspected I was gay at that point, but the strapping, gorgeous sixteen-year-old baseball star had sealed the deal for me. And suddenly all the humiliation had been amplified because Dallas had, more often than not, been there to see it.