Wrecked (The Blackened Window) (2 page)

I paused, turning to see Dr. Sanderson waving to flag me down before I left for the day. He taught Anatomy to the first years—cadavers, dissection, the whole bit.

“Yeah? Hi, Dr. Sanderson.” I waited, noticing Stacy waiting down the hall, watching me. The world of history I shared with Stacy flashed through my head and came back to what it always did with her, the way we’d nearly destroyed each other.

She doesn’t fucking get it.

Dr. Sanderson shook my hand as he spoke, “Xander, would you be interested in tutoring anatomy? We’re short a tutor and you were top of your class. It would really help us and the first years, and we could pay you. I mean, it’s just something like nine or ten bucks an hour, but still… Students can usually use it, right?”

I didn’t need the money and besides, I had a job at the Window anytime I wanted it. That paid better than ten bucks an hour, and you couldn’t beat the perks… Well, actually you could. Literally. But I was bored and needed something more to fill my time. Maybe I’d shake off some ennui if I got a little more involved, met more people. Something other than my simple routine.

“Sure. I could do Tuesday nights.” I worked out a few times a week and needed to study some too, I guessed. Tuesdays seemed like as good a night as any.

“Great! I’ll find you tomorrow with the paperwork. I usually let them get a little freaked out before having the tutors start. Usually the second week.”

“Cool. Just at the library, though. I don’t really want to be in the cadaver lab if I don’t have to be. I’m still having flashbacks of the smell.” I cracked a smile at him. He smiled and slapped me on the back as he turned to his office. I stretched my neck as I turned, knowing Stacy would still be there. I could feel her dark little flame of emptiness trying to pull me into her.

Deep breath.

“Hi, Xander.” She said it slow and kind of soft. I don’t know if she was trying to be sexy or shy or sweet. But none of it looked right on her, not believable at all.

“Stacy. How was your first day?” I was careful to keep my tone and facial expression neutral. The last thing I wanted or needed was Stacy at my door in the middle of the night. I couldn’t risk being even remotely unclear about how things were between us. There were no shades of gray with this girl.

“It was good. Not as bad as I thought. Tough, but I’ve been through worse.” She twitched her lip in the little smirk she knew I hated. It just looked jaded and tainted on her face. She was gorgeous. Textbook pretty, empirically, traditionally, conventionally beautiful. Her hair was a chestnut brown and her eyes were the color of a latte. Tiny little body, made for tossing around and flipping over to fuck anyway you wanted. She had a tan, probably spent the summer somewhere tropical, drinking herself stupid.

Cut that shit out, Stone. You know she’s bat-shit crazy. Don’t go there again.

She claimed to want me, to love me—still, a decade after what we’d done to each other. She couldn’t love anything. At least not anything like me, and I didn’t like what I had been like with her.

She stepped close to me, her hand on my chest, smiling up at my face. “Let’s get a drink tonight? I want to spend some time with you.”

“Can’t. I gotta study. And really, so do you.”

Her smile broadened as she rocked back on her heels. “There it is. I love that you think you can tell me what to do all the time.”

She doesn’t get it at all.
“I’m not telling you to do shit. Just telling you what I’m gonna do.” I sidestepped past her to the main doors out to the parking lot. The parking lot was hot as fuck. Texas could suck sometimes. Not the least of which was when I’d get into the C70―the black C70, with black leather interior. It was a sexy damn car, but I think I’d literally burned my ass a few times.

Even though I didn’t want anyone now—and especially not Stacy—I couldn’t stop myself from noticing the women around me. Such a range. Black girls, white girls, Hispanic girls, some Native American girls too. Big and small. None of that was all that important to me though—I just really liked women. Their curvy bodies, their softness, their toughness hidden in pliability. Girls I had been with in the past blew my mind. The things I put them through and how they would bend themselves for me. The incredible strength and fearlessness it takes to let someone else play with them that hard. To willingly and repeatedly let themselves be opened up, penetrated, violated. For them to want it as much as I wanted to give it to them. Absolutely breathtaking.

At the beginning of that semester, my mind would wander like that sometimes. Over that summer, I had been the regular Dungeon Master at the Window. It’s a kind of cheesy old-school BDSM name for the job of the guy in charge, making sure everyone followed the rules. And the only rules that really mattered to me were consent and relative safety. People call it by a few different names—Risk-Aware Kink, practicing Safe, Sane and Consensual kink—whatever. The key was consent. But all the facets of consent had to be there—the
ability
to consent,
informed
consent, as well as the
actual
consent, because consent from someone who was too incompetent or ignorant didn’t mean shit. Informed and enthusiastic consent, that was the key.

Being the DM for the summer let me see everything—all kinds of insanity—but I didn’t have to actually take care of anyone. No aftercare, no worrying that I was fucking something up and harming someone rather than just hurting her the way we both wanted. Of course, I got propositioned all the time. But I hadn’t actually played at the Window in over a year.

I didn’t have anyone I wanted to play with.

* * * *

The week passed in a blur of classes, labs, studying. Stacy kept trying to get me to do something with her. She flirted in that way she thought was sexy and I thought bordered on a caricature of sexiness, like Betty Boop mixed with Jenna Jameson. I blew her off.

On Friday, I saw
her
for the first time in the library, studying late. The girl that was gonna ruin me. I didn’t know it then. I just thought she had an ass I wanted to bite. That was the first thing I noticed about her. She had a jiggly ass, and her scrubs were thin enough that I could see how it moved when she walked through the library. Scrubs can be a little deceiving sometimes, but she had a snug T-shirt on and she had a smallish waist that flared out for her hips and a generous ass that I just wanted to put my hands on. She was short—a short, curvy girl was always fun.

She walked across the library and stopped at the desk, turning as she spoke with the clerk. Her hair was twisted up off her neck and as she turned, her profile was visible—smooth skin, a full lower lip, small button nose. But her body looked like sound waves, like some crazy vertical graph from calculus. Her tits balanced out her plump ass and she had the tiniest little tummy her scrubs were hanging low on.

She smiled at the clerk and that was it, I was fucked. Her smile was like getting kicked in the balls. She had that first-year look—vague panic hovering at the edges of all her gestures. But when she smiled, she was fully present in the moment and the panic, the nerves, melted away. Her whole face shifted in a pattern of amusement, and it looked comfortable on her—not contrived, just real. The clerk answered her question, pulling a clipboard over for her to sign. He didn’t have a pen and they both looked for one for a few seconds, before she giggled and waved him off as she pulled one from her hair.

Her hair was dark gold with honey and sunlight highlights.
I’m so fucked.
She pulled the pen out and her hair fell down, to the little gap where her T-shirt had pulled up revealing the soft curve of her lower back. The waves of her hair looked a little bit like a shampoo commercial and I wanted to wrap it around my fist, bend her back until tears gathered in her eyes.

Jesus, she’s just a girl. Settle down, Stone.

The clerk blatantly stared at her chest while she was writing and the little fucking pervert even started to bite his lip. When she finished writing, she shifted her hips in my direction and I could appreciate why he was drooling—her T-shirt had a low V and her breasts were pretty much phenomenal, but still, he could’ve had a little class.

Like me right now? Staring at her ass and dreaming of making her yield? Yep. I’m a huge hypocrite.

The clerk watched her walk out, but I watched the naked lust on his face as he pulled the clipboard back to himself. When she was out of the library, he looked down and grabbed a piece of paper, copying something from the form.

I knew I had no focus left for studying and wanted to punch that fucking guy, so I grabbed my stuff and started to leave. But as I passed the counter, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, adjusting his dick. The dude had wood. Before I thought it through, I turned on my heel and went to the counter.

He was skinny, with stupid thick-rimmed hipster glasses and too-tight jeans. His hair was so intentionally casually bedheaded that I wanted to slap him. He had a tattered messenger bag that he was tucking that piece of paper in and a patched-up Army surplus jacket hung over the back of his chair. The former soldier in me wanted to punch him even harder now.

“Hey, man. I requested a copy of the new edition of Sabiston’s. Is it in yet?”

“What’s your name?”

“Xander Stone.”

He walked to the reserves on the other side of the counter and I leaned forward, grabbing the clipboard and glancing at it. Her name was Leda Collins, and she was signing up for anatomy tutoring. On Thursdays.
Fuck.

The perv-clerk came back. “Not in yet, man.”

“Okay.” I started to walk away, but turned back, adding, “Dude, just a word of advice. That chick is beyond you, but even if she wasn’t, you were so fucking obvious that
I
felt molested ten feet away. Your need to work on your game.”

It wasn’t fair and I knew it. I was probably eight to ten years older than him, had half a foot in height and had a military build to his scrawny emo-kid physique. We both knew I could kick the shit out of him, barely trying.

He blanched and sputtered. I stood up taller, feeling an awakening in my blood. I smiled as I walked away. These kids who hadn’t lived at all were just so ridiculous, and that the girls their age put up with it just reinforced that kind of behavior. Us older dogs had to educate.

I heard him mutter, “Fuck you” as I passed through the door and I chuckled as I reached for the second door of the vestibule. But there she was, kneeling next to a bike, yanking at the lock, which seemed stuck. Each time she yanked back on it, her tits would bounce and it made me smile. I was about to go out and offer to help when she got it and fell back on her ass. She was cute as hell.

She dropped her head in her hands for a second and I thought she was laughing, but when she stood she brushed at her eyes and her lips were pressed in a line.
Shit.
I wanted to go out and make it better somehow, like she was mine. And I laughed at myself, watching her. She was tough, though, grabbing her things and leaving—riding her bike, in the dark, in the borderline shitty neighborhood the school was in.
That shit was gonna change.

As I pushed through the door finally, I pulled my cell out and dialed.

“Hey, Dr. Sanderson. It’s Xander Stone. Just looked at my schedule and I can’t tutor on Tuesdays. I actually have Thursdays open.”

Chapter Two

Leda

Krewella,
Enjoy the Ride

I met Xander in the second week of classes. In retrospect, I was floundering. Classes were overwhelming. I felt lost all the time and I was crying myself to sleep almost every night. But there was Xander, sexy as hell and a lifeline of sorts. He was in the class ahead of mine, at the top of his class—rankings were published—and was a tutor for anatomy. But it was more than his achievement. It was
him
—how he carried himself, how he pulled the world into him, rather than meeting it on its terms. I knew when I met him that he would be a surgeon, the same way I knew I wanted him to touch me. It was in the way he handled things, like they were his, no matter what he was holding
.

I was the first of my classmates to arrive to the first tutoring session, but he was there already, sitting at a table in the back of the small medical library, leaning back in his chair with a long piece of black suture tied through his shoelace. He was practicing two-handed tying and his hands moved so smoothly, the knots lining up perfectly on top of each other. As I approached the table, he looked up, but his hands kept going, only faltering slightly when our eyes met.

The thing that drew me to him was intangible. He was attractive, with dark brown hair, cut short, crisp. His eyes, hazel with flecks of orange and gold, were hard, observant, flicking over my face and body as I approached the table. He had a strong angle to his jaw, covered with a day or two of stubble, and his skin didn’t have that newness to it that college boys had. He was a little weathered, tan, with a small scar marring his right eyebrow. He had broad shoulders and his faded black concert T-shirt was just shy of being too tight over his chest and shoulders. He had loose jeans on and old Converse. But none of that was
it
. The package was gorgeous, but what was arresting about him wasn’t what he looked like. It was how he looked at me. He looked at me the same way he handled the suture—with confidence, unshakable, direct. Almost cocky. We held each other’s gaze for a few beats too long to be entirely normal before I found my voice.

“Hi, I’m Leda. Are you the anatomy tutor?” I’d like to say that I said it with confidence to match his, but my voice faltered a bit, thinking about studying bodies with him, his confident hands touching me. I held my breath, waiting for his answer, hoping he’d say yes.

He answered me with a glint in his eyes and a small, suggestive smile on his lips, like he knew where my thoughts had gone. “I’m Xander. Sit down.”

It was a command, not an invitation, and I moved immediately to sit. He watched me thoughtfully and raised a single eyebrow as I settled myself across from him. He caught himself, clearing his throat and adding, “A few more of your classmates are joining us still.”