Beneath The Skin (A College Obsession Romance) (29 page)

“I like my eggs
extra spicy
,” she whispers into the back of my neck, leaning forward and helping herself to a nibble of my earlobe.

Her hand runs up my side, sliding over my skin smoothly and causing goose bumps to chase her, then slipping under the upper part of my apron. Her fingers find my left nipple, grazing over it and causing it to harden in an instant. I growl in response.

“You stopped again.”

“This is so wrong,” I moan. “You’re corrupting my sweet, innocent eggs.”

She starts stroking faster.

“Oh god.”

“Your fault,” she tells me, “coming out here wearing nothing but this dumb apron. You expect me to keep my hands off you now?”

“This is our relationship dynamic, is it?” I ask, out of breath from what she’s doing to me. “Me, always your object, always your plaything? Am I just a piece of meat to you?”

“Yep.” Her other hand pinches my nipple, sending bolts of electricity down my body. “And hopefully more.”

“I like being your object.” I pour the egg mix into the pan, then stop with the bowl hovering midair. “Wait, what? … More?”

And then she jerks harder.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I moan, the bowl slamming down on the counter as I breathe heavily, trying to control my orgasm from exploding from me as she speeds up. I’m so close already, my cock a hundred times more sensitive in the morning, and every single slip and stroke and movement of her hand is driving me insane.

The eggs sizzle furiously. The agitated noise of breakfast being born fills the kitchen, combating with the tiny huffs of breath Nell emits into my ear and my own heavy breathing.

It’s inevitable. I’m going to come.

“Oh god. Careful where you aim the cannon,” I warn.

“What?” murmurs Nell.

And then I come, moaning out loud as I spill all over the inside of my apron, wave after wave. Just when I think I’ve finished coming, I come some more, and she jerks me dry, continuing to jerk long past my time of spilling over the edge.

When she finally stops, I look down at the huge wet spot in the apron. Then I turn my head, peering at her over my shoulder. “Look at what you did,” I accuse her.

She pulls her hand out, gives my exposed ass a hearty slap, then slinks over to the bathroom and runs the faucet.

I will never get used to this. And I don’t want to. She surprises me. Her moves are impossible to predict.

So I have to keep up with her.

By the time she returns from cleaning up, I’ve ditched the soiled apron, finishing breakfast in the nude. A pinch of spice here. A sprinkle of spice there. I lay out the tortillas on a plate, then offer two more plates for the eggs with a glass of orange juice each.

She sits at the barstool, eyeing the plates, then she glances up at me in all my naked, exposed, objectified glory.

I grin at her, lean against the counter opposite of her and start rolling up a tortilla with my spicy eggs, bring it to my lips—my eyes never leaving hers—then I give the whole length of the breakfast taco a demonstrative sniffing, like a wolf scoping a meal, then bite off the end with due ferocity.

Following the best night and the best morning I’ve ever had, this may be the best breakfast I’ve ever shared with anyone. I can’t stop staring at her face as we eat. She is gorgeous. Yeah, sure, I’ve had a one-night thing with many gorgeous girls, some of them a two- or three-night thing, but Nell has a special
something
that transcends beauty. I’m not even sure I know what it is yet. Maybe it’s the puzzle of that that intrigues me.

When I take the plates, a thing she said floats into my mind. “All in.”

Nell stirs out of some thought she was having. “Hmm?”

“You said you’re all in.” I set the plates in the sink, then run the faucet and look back at her. “About us. Last night. You said you’re all in, right before we left the
Throng.
What’d you mean?”

Nell presses her lips together, her eyes disconnecting. I’m just about to tell her never mind when she says, “You and I.”

I lift my eyebrows. “You and I?”

“Us.” She nods finally, as if making a decision. “I want to try it.”

I study her, making absolutely sure I know what she means. My heart rate is accelerating all over again. “You mean … this thing between us? This thing we didn’t want to name or label or box up or call anything? This nameless work of art we got going on?”

“Yes,” she answers right away. “This … thing … between us. I want it to be a thing. A real, acknowledged, certain thing. I … I don’t want to see other guys.”

“I don’t want to see other girls.”

She bites her lip. Then a smile creeps into it. “I want to call you my boyfriend. I haven’t … I haven’t really had one. Not a real one.”

“Me neither,” I say back, drawn in by the sudden seriousness in her voice. “I mean, a girlfriend. Like, a real one.”

She circumvents the counter. I slip my hands around the small of her back, pulling her against my naked body. Our eyes are so close, I see flecks of green in hers that I hadn’t noticed before.

We lean into each other and our foreheads touch. I smile at her, puckering my lips goofily. She bites her lip to fight off a grin.

“Girlfriend,” I murmur, tasting the word.

“Boyfriend,” she says, doing the same. “I’m super wet right now.”

“Noted,” I grunt.

Then I lift her onto the counter, earning a shriek of delight from her, before gripping her panties, yanking them down, and bringing my face in for an early brunch.

NELL

Don’t mistake my submission to Brant as some kind of sign that I’ve lost my mind.

I haven’t gone all noodles in the knees and butterflies in my brain. Please. Have we met?

No, I didn’t go soft and stupid.

I know
precisely
what I’m doing.

And if I’m being blunt, I think it takes a certain amount of
bravery
, in fact, to engage in any semblance of a relationship with a person like Brant who is known campus-wide for being a man of fleeting pleasures (that’s putting it kindly, isn’t it?) and opening myself up for potential heartache.

Sure. There is a risk that he will do to me what he’s done to countless lustful ladies before. And that’s a consequence that I’m half-expecting, even walking into this as brazenly as I am. So if it happens, I simply won’t be surprised; I’ll accept the time I had with him, huff at the inconsequence of letting anyone into my heart at all, then put it all into some tortured art piece I’ll pass off as my means of “getting over it”. Reluctant praise and dark, concerned glances will be my reward.

And if it
does
happen to work out … well, then I suppose it was worth leaping in headfirst.

And face first.

And cock-into-pussy first.

And hands-all-over-my-tits first.

It may seem counterproductive when building a sustaining, deeply meaningful relationship to have sex all of the time like a pair of high schoolers who just discovered their private parts, but that’s precisely what Brant and I seem to be doing.

And unapologetically, at that.

Sometimes when Eric and Dmitri are out, I come over for an innocent after-class dinner which gets half-eaten, the rest forgotten as Brant and I lose our clothes on the couch and make a meal out of something else instead.

After my Tuesday studio class, we’ll rendezvous by the grassy knoll of the psychology building and have lunch, which very quickly becomes a gross display of affection against some outside wall, under a tree, in a closet, or at our table in plain sight.

Simply put: we cannot keep our hands off each other.

I’ve never been this wild and reckless with anyone before. The feeling is indescribable, but here I go trying to describe it: I feel free to do whatever I want, oddly terrified all the time, and insatiably hungry for his taste. It doesn’t matter if we fuck eight times in one night; I’ll need a ninth and a tenth.

I can’t get enough of Brant Rudawski.

One time, I surprised him outside of one of his digital media classes, pulled him into the women’s bathroom, then assaulted him in one of the stalls. The look of fear in his eyes was both an extreme turn-on and highly amusing. I may be stooping to all-time lows with him.

And all-time highs.

Then, on an unassuming Thursday, he comes into a condom inside me with a taut arm on either side of my head while his face hovers over mine, eyes scrunched up in that painful ecstasy-riddled expression that happens at the precise time of orgasm. When his eyes open, he’s out of breath, staring down at me like he can’t believe he’s still alive after an experience like that.

I love that bright, beautiful, almost terrified look in his eyes.

“What are you doing to me, Nell?” he breathes.

The question is rhetorical, but I feel compelled to answer anyway. “Same thing you’re doing to me.” I raise my face to his, sucking his lips into my mouth, then nipping his bottom one playfully before I drop back to the pillow. “I’m kind of addicted to tormenting you.”

“You tease me all the time,” he murmurs, and it would sound like a complaint if it weren’t for the lustful look in his eyes, even after coming. “You always leave me wanting more. You make me sweat. You consume every fucking thought I have. You make me work … make me
slave
for every little morsel that you give me.”

“Do I?” I ask innocently.

He licks his lips, as if to taste me on them. Then, in a deep voice that causes his abs to flex, he adds, “
And I love it
.”

A week after that, Minnie tells me she’s swinging by the campus and wants to meet up for some coffee. Since Brant’s been asked to photograph something at the School of Theatre for Clayton, I take her up on the spontaneous offer. Minnie has avoided Klangburg ever since her departure from it, so I was curious what inspired her to meet up with me.

“The Showcase.”

I lift an eyebrow, the coffee sitting in front of me growing cold.

“The Showcase,” Minnie repeats, her curls of blue-and-green-tipped black hair bouncing when she nods at me, as if I’m supposed to know what she’s talking about. “What’s your progress?”

“You’re asking about the progress of the piece I’m submitting?”

“Piece? No,
pieces.
And yes, they’re
still
due at the end of next month, just before Halloween. You haven’t submitted a damn thing.”

I frown at her. “How do you know that?”

She rolls her eyes. Minnie is a very frail-looking woman, thin to the point of assumed emaciation, and her face is very pointy and angular. Her mad hairstyle of dark curls tipped in a different color of the rainbow each week is so big, it sits like a second head on top of her own. An enormous pair of white-trimmed sunglasses sit in her hair like a mother bird squatting in her nest.

“You
do
realize I’m chummy with the head of the art school,
plus
I curate the Showcase myself with Brian, Yuri, and Esmeralda.”

“Esmeralda?”

“Essie. Lord, you are clueless, Nell. What has happened to you? By now, you’d have six things submitted already and working on six more.”

I’m not about to have a conversation with Minnie about Captain Big Dong who has consumed me for the past however many weeks. I’m not going to blame my lack of artistic progress on a budding relationship. Besides, I
have
made progress. The problem is …

“There’s really only one piece I want them to consider.”

Minnie gawps at me, speechless.

“Seriously.” I fiddle with my coffee cup, annoyed that she questions everything I do ever since she graduated. She used to admire my choices and ask about my inspirations and desires. Now she scrutinizes everything, like I’m her child who needs constant artistic guidance. “I don’t want anything else in the Showcase. I want just the one piece. It’s the most important thing to me.”