Brutal Precious (Lovely Vicious #3) (24 page)

“It’s okay,” I insist. “Really. Didn’t hurt at all.”

He looks doubtful, and I smile and bite his arm near my head playfully.

“I’m telling the truth.”

“Promise?” He asks.

“Promise,” I say with a mouthful of skin. “Just…maybe don’t move all that much. For a while. It’s kind of new territory.”

“
Virgin territory
is the term I believe you’re looking for.” He smirks. I punch him with my pinky. We stay like that, him breathing and me breathing and me getting used to the feeling of someone else in me. Finally, the pressure lessens. I use the opportunity to do the thing Kayla advised me to. Jack’s reaction is a startled gasp he manages to swallow halfway, and he glares at me.

“That’s…t-that’s hardly fair. Where did you learn that?”

“I have friends,” I say smugly. “Who are girls.”

He laughs and I do it again, and this time he comes up growling, biting my neck lightly.

“Stop. That.”

“
Whyyyy
?” I singsong.

“Because I’m – I’m –”

I do it a third time, and Jack kisses me, hard, panting as we pull apart.

“I’m on the edge of losing it already, you saucy piece of work. If we want this to last anywhere beyond a few minutes, you’re going to have to stop that.”

I reach up and run my fingers through his hair. “I thought you were, like, the stamina expert. Wasn’t it your job?”

“Was. I’m very out of practice. It doesn’t help I’ve had a thing for you for months, now.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” He moves with a series of slow, experimental thrusts. “It means you…”

His words get lost as I feel him, for the first real time, and moan.

“Jack, ah –”

“Say it again.”

“Jack,” I curl around him, my legs moving higher of their own accord, linking around his back.

“Oh hell,” He groans into my shoulder. “I missed you. I missed you, Isis. It feels so fucking good to hear you say my name.”

I say it many, many more times. Loudly and involuntarily.

0 Years

0 Weeks

1 Day

Jack does not especially appreciate me taking all the blankets in the conceivable universe.

Or staring at him while he sleeps.

I know this because A. I know Jack, and he doesn’t like being ogled unless he’s being paid for it, and B. Every time I pull on the sheets tangled around his legs, he grimaces a little more in his sleep. So I do what any decent human being who respects another person would do, and keep pulling.

Jack groans and shields his eyes, the early morning sun painting his tousled hair gold. It slants down his chest, making shadows on his bare belly, his neck, his throat. I want to nuzzle into the hollow of his shoulder and live there forever. It feels so surreal – like any second an annoying teen-movie alarm clock will start chirping in my ears and I’ll rouse awake into the real world, in my real bed, alone and cold and sad and convinced no one will ever love me.

But he kissed me.

He kissed my stretch marks, and my scars.

He treated me like a person to be respected, like a thing to be worshipped and handled gently as precious glass.

He kissed the most frightened part of me, and it isn’t so scared anymore.
 

He’s here. And I can hardly believe it.

I can hardly believe a boy so handsome, so regal and smart and kind and interesting wanted to – burned to – sleep with me.

No one else is going to want you.

Jack wants
me
, for who I am.

And it’s even more amazing he stayed after, that he’s still here, that I wasn’t so horrible he didn’t change his mind and leave. He’s not a figment of my imagination. He’s here and he’s real, and he smells the same as his room smells, and I wallow in it, try to drag out every second of the luxurious golden haze that is this warm disheveled bed with this warm disheveled boy in it whom I happen to like an annoyingly huge amount.
 

Finally, Jack cracks one sleepy blue eye open, sees me staring, and laughs hoarsely.

“Good morning you creepy, beautiful thing.”

“I was plotting,” I say. “How best to murder you in your sleep.”

Jack leans in, planting a soft kiss on my palm. “Make it long, and drawn out. I love suffering.”

“Exactly why I’m making it short and snappy. Neck-snappy, to be precise.”

He pokes at my forearm. “You couldn’t snap my neck if you tried.”

I scramble up and sit on his pelvis, trying to wrap my arms around his neck. He fights me off weakly, and finally pulls me down into him, laughing.

“You are vicious.”

“I believe the term you used was ‘hellion’,” I correct in his ear.

He runs his hand lazily up and down my spine. “How are you doing? Pain-wise?”

“I’m broken in two and will never walk again,” I deadpan.
 

“Yes,” he hisses, tightening his hug and pressing me harder against him. “Now you can never escape.”

I roll my eyes and roll off. “Let’s go, creepster maximus. The day awaits, glorious and full of future disappointment. And food.”

He doesn’t get up, watching me pull on shorts and a t-shirt instead. He groans, and shoves his face in the pillow.

“I don’t want to go. I hate it out there. I want to stay here forever.”

“I don’t have enough Doritos in this room for ‘forever’,” I insist, and wince when an ache shoots through my pelvis. Jack jumps out of bed, balancing me on his arm.

“Are you alright?”

“Everything is sore and I’m dying.”

“I warned you.”

“No you didn’t! There was no warning involved! Just a lot of gross dirty talk!”

“And laughing. A lot of good laughing.”

I blush, and he wraps his arms around me and pulls me back down onto the bed. He sighs into my hair.

“It’s been years since I’ve laughed like that. Thank you.”

“Tsk tsk, what kind of escort are you? I’m supposed to thank YOU for sex. Or pay you.” I lean over the side of the bed and fumble around for anything other than dust. My hand finds the bra-dime Yvette gave me, and I press it into his palm. “Here. For your services.”

Jack growls and bites my neck. “I think I’m worth a little more than that.”

“I don’t know,” I singsong. “You gotta prove it first.”

He flips me on my back and I squeal. He leans his forehead on mine.

“Prove it? Then what was last night?”

“A warm-up,” I decide. “Appetizer. Except ew, let’s not bring weird food analogies into this please, I don’t want to be compared to a restaurant.”

“You’re the best restaurant ever. Four Michelin stars,” Jack asserts. I push him off and he laughs, pulling his pants on. Yvette chooses that exact moment to walk in the door and get a face full of Jack-dick. She stares at it, then at me, then at Jack’s face, and nods like an art appreciator.

“Nine out of ten.”

***

I, Isis Blake, have decided sex is okay.

I have a
little
large mental book of what is okay and what is not okay, and sex gets lifted from the ‘not-okay’ book and slapped into the ‘okay’ book over the course of two weeks. Jack and I shuttle back and forth from my dorm to his, alternating when our roommates are out and stealing quiet moments and making them not-so quiet. I learn his every mole, every tiny scar from his childhood, every weak spot. There are so many huge dumb problems looming, like the tape and the camera footage of me that Nameless has, but I shove them and Nameless aside and bask in my newfound Jack-obsession. The former Ice Prince is ticklish behind his ears and his knees and his hips (his sharp, delicious hips) and also he is still very much the Ice Prince – cool and collected and logical. Nailing me hasn’t changed that. In fact, nothing about us has really changed. I thought sex would break us apart, or change us into a formless sappy mush. But that’s not the case at all. I retort something, he snaps something back. I force gummy bears into his begrudging mouth, he holds me back from tackling the idiot who ran over my shoe with a skateboard. We fight. We fence. We argue the finer points of the most complex and delicate debates in history.

“Santa is real,” I say as I pick up my burrito from the food counter.

“He’s not.” Jack corrects, sidestepping a cafeteria worker with a full stack of dishes.

“Two words have never convinced anyone ever of anything.”

“Yes they have.
‘It’s shit’
,” Jack says.

“What’s shit?”

“The prequel Star Wars films.”

“Oh, see, now you’re
right
, and I have to take back what I said because I was
wrong
and you’ve convinced me utterly with only two words. Ugh. I hate being wrong.”

“I love being right,” He sighs, and I kick him under the table, except he is too fast, so all I kick is wood. With my shinbone.

“Ow.”

He kisses my head. “You brought this on yourself.”

I throw my face on the table and fake-sob. “I have bruises everywhere. I’m a bruise farm. Magnet. Bragnet. One day the future people of the world
 
- who won’t know what bruises are because technology will be so advanced no one ever gets one - will come to me, and I will show them my butt, and it will be my greatest contribution to human civilization.”

This impresses Jack so much he takes a sip of soda.
 

Sometimes I catch him smiling at me when I’m jabbering on about stupid shit. But that’s the only thing that’s really changed.
 

Sex used to be this weird scary blob of lace panties and ladies who scream like they’re being hurt in porn all the time and
‘what if I smell funny what if my chin looks fat from any angle ever during it’
. It used to be me thinking I’d have to shave everything smooth like a dolphin every single day of my life for a guy to not be grossed out by me. It used to be me, angry at sex, and hating it, and bitter because the only person I thought I loved used it to hurt me. Sex was a sword I didn’t want to be cut by again, a tiger that mauled me once before and I’d gladly walk into a pit of corrosive tar before I’d go in that tiger’s pen again.

So I suppose Jack Hunter is a pit of corrosive tar. But we already knew that.
 
  

“Objection, your honor,” Jack contributes. “I am not a pool of base acid.”

I kiss him on the cheek and stand. “I’m going to the library to taunt an animal dumber than me. Boys count.”

“Don’t encourage them,” He rolls his eyes. “They might develop a crush on you and then I’d have to end them.”

I stare pointedly. He sighs.

“Gently. And in accordance with UN humane procedure.”

Jack leans up for a kiss, and I lean down. He nibbles playfully at my bottom lip before he pulls away.

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“Your room or mine?” I ask. He smirks knowingly.

“I was thinking something a little different tonight.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I have to report to my superior,” He says. “But we’re trying to make it look as casual as possible. So she’s put me on a dinner reservation with her. If you came, I’m thinking it would look even more natural.”

“See, hell no, I’ve seen enough movies to know this is where you bring me to the CIA and they kidnap me for experimentation.”

“There’ll be no kidnapping. But there will be crème brule.”

I consider this proposal for an astonishingly lengthy two point five seconds.

“Yes.”

“Meet me in my room at eight, and wear a dress.”

“You just want to see me in a dress, perv.”

He smirks. “I want to see you in everything. And nothing.”

The library is much quieter and contains less sexiness than wherever Jack is currently, but I’ll live with it. For now, I have someone decidedly less sexy to bother.

I see her sitting at a table, studying, and slam my hands down on the opposite side. Heather jumps, dropping the book.

“Jesus Christ,” She pants. “You scared me, Isis!”

“You scared me,” I say calmly. “When you locked me in the room with the guy who raped me.”

She freezes, eyes wide and wary. “He…he what?”

“Raped me,” I repeat. Saying it now just gives me a rush of power, of reality, of assertiveness. “When I was fourteen.”

“H-He…” She bites her lip. “I didn’t know that, honestly Isis, you have to believe me. He just told me it would be a fun prank, I didn’t know –”

“Even if he didn’t do what I said he did, locking a girl in with a guy like that is bullshit, and you know it. If I catch you doing it again, to any other girl, or if I hear you did it to another girl –”