One Hot Fall Term (Yardley College Chronicles Book1) (6 page)

Mmmm, I really want to have a shower with Ryan someday.

I would slide wet, soapy hands all over him. I would wash his ass first, because I want to touch him there, and because it would probably surprise him that I didn’t start with his delectable shoulders or his perfect chest.

Just like on the dock, he would be slick and wet. But so warm.

God, I wish I had seduced him months ago. So we would have had time to try all these things. But there’s nothing I can do about that except cry with frustration.

Rubbing two fingers through my wet pubic hair, I stroke my clit really gently. I like to start slowly, teasing at first. Even just the lightest touch makes my knees weak. Pleasure jolts through me.

I imagine pressing to Ryan from behind, my tummy against the hard, tight curves of his ass, my breasts against his broad back, my nipples totally excited by brushing his skin. I would slide my hands around him, wrapping his hips in soap and bubbles.

I can imagine exactly what it would be like…

His crisp pubic curls would tickle my hands. In my imagination, he sucks in a deep breath. It feels so real to me I can imagine his chest expanding with his sharp, fast breathing. I can almost see him bow his head and hear him let out a groan as I cup his balls in my soap-slick hand. I move my fingers and gently juggle the two firm testicles inside their soft, wrinkly sac.

My fantasy is to blow Ryan’s mind. I imagine running my hand up from his balls to the base of his stiff, upright cock. I wrap my fist around the hilt, squeezing tight, then I jerk my hand up and down. He’s so slippery I glide easily, and while I’m rubbing my hand along his shaft furiously, I put my lips to the head, gobble it into my mouth and suck hard enough to make him howl.

I’m rubbing my clit fiercely, wound up and ready to explode.

In my fantasy, Ryan draws his cock from my mouth and lifts me up, pressing me to the tile wall. I wrap my legs around his hips. He and I are soooo wet. His cock is so hard and I’m so wet and ready, it slides right in and fills me. He holds me up easily because he’s so incredibly strong.

I imagine the head of his cock stroking inside me. I make spirals on my clit, imagining its Ryan’s groin slamming into me with each thrust.

Oh. Oh God.

The orgasm is so close. I know I’m going to be there any moment. Water streams down my back, my ass. I want to hold off the climax, make it last. I slow the strokes, but I’m right on the edge, and one tiny brush makes me come.

I swallow my scream of pure delight. My legs shake and I slap my hand on the shower wall so I don’t fall down. Wave after wave rushes through me. I rub my clit again, and another orgasm explodes on the tail of the first.

Even in just fantasy, Ryan does things to me that no one else has done. He consumes me.

I step out of the shower. I towel off, blow dry my hair. When I’m done, I discover Ryan has sent another message. It reads:
Can’t sleep. How am I going to survive without you, Mia?


I don’t know how to answer him. It touches my heart, but makes me realize I don’t know how I’m going to survive without him.

Since the first night Ryan and I got together, he’s completely changed my life.

***

Within an hour and a half, I’m frustrated again.

Lara and I do a junk food run which involves sprinting downstairs to one of the common rooms of our residence—a room filled with chairs, racks of magazines, two tables with computers and another flat screen television. One entire wall is covered by vending machines. Healthy-ish choices are noted by large green circles. After spending a quarter hour marveling at the junk food deemed healthy (baked yet still high-fat corn things), Lara opens up her purse and starts to feed in the impressive amount of change we gathered. We begin at the lowest item number that we figure is healthy and work our way up. With armloads of baked chips, fruit bars, and diet soft drinks, we race back upstairs.

“This is how we will avoid the freshman fifteen,” Lara says as we dump our loads on her bed. “By eating healthier.”

I lift a brow. “Yeah, but a truckload of stuff isn’t going to help, healthy or not.”

She sticks out her tongue, looking gorgeous even while doing that.

She fires up her laptop. “Pride and Prejudice. The BBC version.
The
version,” she says.

I feel a pang. Lara is taking English Literature. She pointed out, over dinner in Res, that a math or sciences degree didn’t guarantee a job anymore either. And she knew more people getting work with an arts degree than with a science or engineering degree.

Munching chips, we stretch out on Lara’s bed and watch.

We reach the part where Elizabeth takes a wrong turn in Netherfield and encounters Darcy in a billiards room, preparing to do some serious work with his cue.

Lara sighs. “I think Jonathon looks like Darcy.”

I have to admit he does, but Jonathon is even more gorgeous. I’m mesmerized by the look shared by Darcy and Elizabeth. It’s filled with awareness. There are a few heartbeats of awkward intensity, then a moment where they surrender and stare at each other, completely wrapped up in each other. At that point, Lizzie bolts.

It leaves me wanting to the scream: “There’s a pool table. Throw him down on it already.”

But nobody does that in Regency England.

In my head, I’m doing it. I am not focusing on Pride and Prejudice anymore. In my head, I am in bar with Ryan; a country-style bar in Milltown with a row of pool tables illuminated by low hanging lights. The warm, honey-yellow light caresses Ryan’s profile, washing over his straight nose, high cheekbones, and his full lips. I love to watch him when he’d engrossed in thinking—there’s an incredibly sexy vibe about him when’s totally focused on something.

When I used to tutor him, I’d be completely turned on watching him work on math problems or his English homework. My panties were always wet when I helped him study for his final exams, and sometimes I had to bite down on my fist to keep myself from jumping his bones.

But back to my fantasy…

The lights play all over his body, highlighting the bulge of his biceps and the definition of his triceps. He’s wearing a worn white t-shirt and jeans that cling to his hips, but have room around his tight butt, so you just get hints of how gorgeous his ass must be.

I love the way he moves when he plays pool. He takes slow, easy steps because his mind is calculating his shot. He doesn’t say much, just nods when his opponent is trying to distract him or trash-talk him. He leans over, back muscles rippling under his shirt, jeans tugging tight against his butt. Most female conversations in a bar come to a complete halt when Ryan plays pool.

He doesn’t notice. He’s not pretending—he really doesn’t notice. His focus is only on the game. Except when I’m there. Then he’ll look up at me before he does his final line up for the shot and he’ll grin. I’ll almost melt at the way he looks at me.

Ryan is only nineteen but he always got into this bar. He was never carded. His father had apparently served two years in prison in place of the guy who owned the bar, and in return for his father’s magnanimous gift (taking two years of his life away from his son rather than ratting out a drug dealer), Ryan was allowed in whenever he wanted. His drinks were on the house, but Ryan never touched anything except water. Ryan’s father had driven an irreparable rift in their family so his son could score free bottles of water.

I managed to get in because I was Ryan’s girlfriend and I never drank anything but diet Coke.

But right now, I imagine coming up close behind him while he’s lining up his shot, and I press my crotch tight to his hard ass. I imagine taking Ryan’s pool cue out of his hands and setting it aside. I reach around and stroke his erection through his jeans. Grasping his zipper, I draw it down—

Oh god.

Okay, I’ve got to do something. I want to play with myself, but I can’t do it with Lara in the room. I can’t pretend I need another shower, not two in one night.

I jump up off the bed. “I’ve got to go for a run.”

She hits a key and pauses the movie. “It’s eleven.”

“But it’s a warm night and I like late-night running. It’s so quiet and mysterious. And it’s better than when it’s hot in the day.” I can’t tell her I just need to burn off sexual steam.

I started running in the evenings because Ryan ran to train for college. I had to stop going with him because he had to push himself beyond his limits and there was no way I could keep up. So I’m a bit out of shape as I jog down the drive that leads from the residences to the one of the main campus roads.

It’s one of those peculiar nights where the heat of the day and the damp cold of evening mix together and produce a wispy, low-lying fog. It rolls down the street like tumbling barrels made of steam. It darts around tree trunks and slithers around the residence buildings. The night is still warm, the perfect night for sex. This would be a night to drag Ryan outside and have him do me from behind while I lean over a bench or hold onto a tree trunk.

Mmmm. I’d love to do that. A quickie where I just drop my shorts and lean over, and he pulls his cock out…

Damn. Really. Why do I keep doing this?

I run harder. It’s not long before I’m working to suck in breaths. Probably people in the dorm rooms can hear my heavy breathing. At first I hear people laughing and shouting, though the sound is partially absorbed by the fog.

Then I’m running along the road and I don’t hear anything but my panting and the slap of my soles on the pavement. The swirling mist evaporates as I run through it, but ahead it looks thick, white, and impenetrable. Street lamps make yellow disks of light that reflect off the fog.

This would be the perfect night for a reincarnated Jack the Ripper to step out from behind a bush, grab me, and drag me away.

Just what I needed to think about.

My heartbeat speeds up, and not just because I’m in terrible shape. I get a stiff, tense feeling, as if something bad is going to happen. I know this feeling. I used to get it all the time when I was in the house alone with my stepfather—

It’s just my imagination.

But bad things do happen on college campuses.

Footsteps. I hear them behind me. For one moment, I feel relief: I’m not alone out here.

Then panic hits. I’m not
alone
out here.

I try speeding up. Of course, the footsteps do as well. Is it possible I’m just hearing a strange echo of my own sounds through some weird phenomena caused by the fog?

I could slow down. That would let me know pretty fast whether someone was following me, because the person would catch up. Hmmm. Not exactly a brilliant strategy.

But I can’t run this fast for much longer. Whether I like it or not, I’m slowing down.

In this fog, how could anyone have seen me to decide to chase me? But my labored breathing must have given me away. To a predator, my heavy panting would scream: slow-moving prey, close to exhaustion, easy to take down.

Now I can hear the other person’s steps more distinctly. That person is running, but not accelerating. Do attackers run at a leisurely pace? Maybe they do if they’re biding their time, and waiting for the prey to reach the place they’ve already calculated is the ultimate spot for an assault.

Light cuts through the fog up ahead. There’s a building there, a refuge, a place I can race to and take shelter inside.

It’s one thing to say I’m on my own and independent and I need to fend for myself. It’s another thing to be a complete dumb-ass and get myself attacked or mugged or killed because I’m trying to prove I have the right to run around the campus late at night.

Sucking in a deep breath, I sprint. The sucking was a bad idea because my stomach cramps in response, but I keep going, panting as the fog thins and I see what I picked as my shining beacon in the foggy night.

The lights are on in a coffee shop at the base of one of the buildings. Outside, there are dozens of students. I slow down only when I’m at risk of plowing into the groups of chatting people. I stop and fight both dizzying relief and a vicious cramp that locks up my right calf. The footsteps come at me through the fog. Then, before I can see who it is, the sound stops. I spin around but there’s no one there, of course, as if the person who was behind me melted into the night.

Creeped out, I go inside, haul my Starbucks card out of the pocket of my hoodie, and get a decaf latte.

Chapter Four

Thinking I was being followed cools my lust, which actually lets me sleep a little. But I do wake up every hour and blearily look at the numbers on Lara’s alarm clock from across the room. At five, I give up, have a shower, and at six-thirty, I venture back outside wearing my hoodie and sweats.

In the early morning sun, the campus looks beautiful. There is no creepy fog, no weird sounds bouncing back against a wall of mist. Sunlight streams over the White Mountains, sparkles on dew-covered grass, and turns the yellow leaves into something ethereal. I walk around, my hood pulled up over my hair as I didn’t bother to blow-dry it.

I do a coffee run, then explore the campus. I call up my class listings on my phone, check the names of the buildings, then do the walk I will do every day for the fall term.

“You do like torturing yourself,” I mutter to myself. “Don’t think about this being five years. Don’t think about being twenty-four when you get out.”

Sunlight glints along the many windows of the architecture building. Shading my eyes, I press my nose against the glass and peer into one of the rooms. Drafting boards are set up, which surprises me as I thought most of the work would be computerized. Then I see piles of wood, strange shapes made out of white plaster, models built with some kind of white board, artwork on the walls, tools lying on many of the tables. This is the studio, where hands-on-work is done.

I’m going to be in there—potentially right in that studio—at the beginning of next week. I’m almost leaping up and down with excitement.