Fireworks: A Holiday Bad Boy Romance (72 page)

“You’re even bossier than
I thought,” I tell her.

“Would you rather I
didn’t tell you what felt good?” she asks.

“No,” I answer.

That’s the end of that.

I’ve been paying her body
so much attention that I haven’t paid close enough attention to my own. I could
slow down and probably be fine, but she made her wishes clear enough: she wants
to come again and she wants me inside of her when it happens.

Still, as I lower my lips
to taste hers, I’m going to have a hell of a time lasting long enough to get
her where she wants to be.

“Shh,” she says, though
the only sound I’m making is that of my heavy breathing. Her fingers are in my
hair again and she’s all but cradling my head, saying, “Just keep going.”

Her legs are shaking
again, but I can’t contain the feeling any longer and she’s embracing me now as
I come and every wave and particle of light is blotted out of my sight and all
I can feel is her body and my body, and when my sight bends back, I’m looking
at her closed eyes.

She’s biting her bottom
lip and, although the stir in my own body is starting to break, hers is only
beginning to hit its critical mass.

“Just keep going as long
as you can,” she says. “It’ll be—” she takes in a sharp breath, “—enough. Just
keep…”

She doesn’t continue, but
she doesn’t have to, as I’m every bit as eager for her to reach that precipice
as she is, and her body melts beneath me as she bites her lip again, her eyes
open and fixed on mine until her mouth opens.

Mia’s breath catches in
her throat, and I’m kissing her lips now as she starts to relax her body, her
legs slowly easing off of my back and to the bed outside of mine.

I pull the rest of the
way out of her and our bodies simply reverberate together a few minutes.

After a while, I lie down
on the bed next to her and we kiss tenderly, if infrequently as we gaze at each
other.

“Yeah,” she says, placing
her hand easily against my cheek. “I think it’s safe to say that I like you.”

*
                   
*
                   
*

I wake up to a loud
banging at my door.

“What?” I shout, not
quite properly seated back in the realm of consciousness.

My eyes are still closed,
but I can tell that it’s light outside.

It’s light outside.

My eyes shoot open to
find morning coming through my window, illuminating the covered, yet naked body
of Mia.

The door to my room is
closed and locked, but it’s not like dad can’t get in here if he wants to.

“You’re going to be late
for class, Ian!” he shouts. “Get out of bed. If you hurry, I can give you a
ride!”

“Go on ahead, dad!” I
call back. “I still have to get ready for the day.”

I look over at Mia, who’s
not quite sure whether to stay as she is with her head above covers or to dive
between the sheets and try to tunnel her way to safety through the mattress.

“It’s okay,” I whisper to
her, “he almost never comes in here, mornings.”

“Very comforting,” she
more mouths than says. She looks at the door and then back at me, saying, “I
should go.”

“Better wait here a few
minutes,” I tell her. “Try to go down the stairs now or try going back down the
drain pipe and he’s bound to see you. My room’s right above the kitchen and
when he’s not bugging me to get up, before work, he’s hovering over the coffee
machine. Just hang out a minute and he’ll be—”

The lock clicks on my
door and Mia pulls the covers over her head and tries to make her presence as
indiscernible as possible as the door opens and my dad just lets himself in.

“What are you doing?” I
shout, trying to give Mia an extra moment or two to get settled before my dad
has time to really settle his focus on my bed.

“You’re going to be late,
Ian,” dad says, “again.”

“I know,” I tell him. “I
must have slept through my alarm.”

“Did you even set it?” he
asks, and I’m trying to remember where all of Mia’s clothes ended up last
night, because they’re sure as hell not on her body. “It doesn’t matter,” he
says. “What matters is that yet again, you’re throwing away your responsibility
just to placate your baser urges.”

For a second, I’m afraid
he’s spotted Mia which, although I’m nearly certain he wouldn’t actually kill
or injure either one of us, isn’t exactly the way I’d like to start the day
today, but he shifts his gaze out the window and begins again.

“You know,” he says, “we
didn’t always have a nice house a good neighborhood. I had to work for it, just
like how you’re going to have to work for the things you want out of your
life.”

“Would you mind going out
so I can get dressed?” I ask, but he doesn’t make any indication that he’s even
heard me.

“I see a lot of potential
in you, Ian. I know we’ve been butting heads a lot lately, and it’s
because
I see such potential that I’ve
been so hard on you recently,” he says, gazing out the window as if taking in
the view of some expansive empire. “I don’t begrudge you a little fun while
you’re in college, and I don’t mind you even taking some time, preferably on
the weekends, to indulge your hobbies, but I think the hobbies are starting to
look like a future to you when that future’s on the other side of law school.”

“Dad, I’d really
appreciate it if we could talk to this after I’ve had a chance to get dressed,”
I tell him.

“I have to go, Ian,” he
says. “I don’t have time to wait for you to decide to crawl out of bed. You’re
running out of time, too, you know. If you keep putting distraction before your
studies, you’re not going to end up in a good law school and you’ll end up as a
public defendant for tweakers in Nobody Cares, Michigan, while someone else has
made themselves very comfortable in the life that was supposed to be yours.”

“My life is whatever life
I choose to live,” I tell him, feeling a little like the teenage version of
myself, though I don’t remember having a naked girl pressed next to me beneath
the covers too often back then. “It’s not that I’m ungrateful for everything
you’ve done, but I’m not going to live your life.”

“The thing I’m starting
to realize about your generation is that you think gratitude is the same thing
as saying thanks,” he tells me. “Gratitude is recognizing that someone is going
out of their way for you. Anyway,” he says, “I’ll go so you can get dressed.
Wouldn’t want to be late, would you?”

He leaves the room, not
bothering to close it on his way out.

After about a minute has
passed and I haven’t heard anything that would indicate he’s still upstairs, I
get out from under the covers and grab a loose shirt to hold in front of my
more private sections, and I close the door.

The lock clicks back in
place and Mia cautiously peeks out from underneath the covers, mouthing, “Is he
gone?”

I walk back over to her,
letting the shirt drop as I look for something clean to put on for the day.
“He’s still here in the house, but I don’t think he’s upstairs.” I look at the
clock. “He should be on his way out of here before too long.”

As if on cue, I can hear
the familiar sound of my dad’s car starting and, when the sound of the engine
fades into the distance, my blood pressure starts to return to a less alarming
level.

“All right,” I tell her.
“I guess that’s it. We can get dressed and get out of here.”

“Just a minute,” Mia
says. “Come over here for a second. I have a question to ask you.”

“Go ahead and ask,” I
tell her. “He’s gone. We can talk as much as we want.”

“Just come here,” she
says.

“Okay,” I tell her,
though I’m slow to act as I’m taking in the vision of Mia in the light of
morning.

She’s still holding the
top of the blanket tight against her breast, but the view couldn’t feel more
intimate as she looks up at me, her hair out of place and her lips pulled back
into a knowing smile.

“Come on,” she says. “Sit
down a sec.”

I go to sit, but I’ve no
more than hit the bed when Mia makes her move, wrapping her arms around me in a
playful half-tackle, and we fall off the bed onto the floor.

“You know,” she says,
straddling me, her hands holding my wrists, “your dad’s right: You really need
to stop being late to class so often. That said,” she continues and smirks
before giving me a quick peck on the lips, “it’s too late to make that change
today.”

Now she’s kissing me
deeply, even deeper, it seems, than she did last night.

It’s looking like I’m
going to miss my first class entirely.

Chapter
Eleven

The Slow Crash

Mia

It’s been a long time
since I’ve been this excited about, well, anything.

Things between Ian and me
may have gotten off to a bit of a rocky start, but I think the course has been
corrected. It’s all I can do to wait for my last class to be over.

I’m meeting Ian at the
skate park and, come hell or compound fractures, I’m going to help him get
comfortable dropping in. Really, it’s about the only thing left I’m finding
unattractive about Ian.

I get a text from Abs,
asking what I’m up to, but I’m already running behind schedule—my last
professor kept us after to talk about the implications of gravity and other
forces in the near-void of space. It would have made a little more sense if he
was an astronomy professor or a physics professor or basically any science
professor, but I guess people in the English department get bored from time to
time—so I respond with a quick, “Running late. Talk to you later.”

I’m out in front of the
humanities building in time to see the taillights of my bus a couple blocks
down.

Great.

Oh well, I still have one
idea.

“Sorry about that.
Professor’s driving me crazy. What are you up to?” I write Abs.

Maybe it’s not the
coolest thing for a friend to use another friend for a ride to go spend some
time with a third party who the first friend had sex with last night and twice
this morning, especially after that first friend told the second friend that
she, the first friend, that is, was in some kind of rush and couldn’t talk,
thus blowing off the second friend, but I have to see Ian and I have to see him
now.

As far as my brain is
concerned, Ian is a drug called oxytocin and he’s pretty much settled in for
the foreseeable future.

The phone vibrates in my
hand and I pull up the new message. “Not so busy after all, eh?” Abby writes.

“I was running to try to
catch my bus,” I write. “I didn’t make it.”

The favor’s implied in
the explanation, and I still haven’t settled on an explanation for leaving
Abby’s house after she went to sleep, so this should be a pretty entertaining
response.

It’s not that I mind
walking, but the skate park is nowhere near the university and I don’t know how
long Ian’s got before his nerves start getting the better of him and he decides
to back out of vert practice today.

As much as I love skating
and skating culture, I’m not an expert when it comes to telling someone how to
do anything on a board, much less something like prepping one’s self for a vert
competition. That being said, I do have another specialty that might prove to
be just as valuable: the human mind.

I know Ian probably
thinks he’s something special because he got my head with the condom wrapper
thing last night, but when it comes to hardcore psychology, I’ve got the bigger
assets.

My phone buzzes. The new
text reads, “That blows. Wanna do something?”

I sigh and look around,
hoping to spot an acquaintance, only to realize that I really don’t have that
many of them to choose from and none of them seem to be in this general area at
the moment.

I write, “I told Ian I’d
help him with a thing down at the skate park. I don’t suppose I could weasel a
ride from you, could I?”

We’ll just have to see
how that’s going to go over. Until then, I’m not going to let Ian know that
anything’s changed. He didn’t really seem that enthusiastic about going back to
the park in broad daylight—at least as far as that one little area of the park
with the really long drop in goes.

My phone buzzes and I
check the message. It reads, “You know the toll for taxi service.”

Good. She’s still trying
to bilk me for cat food money. There’s no surer sign that things are status quo
when I’m asking Abs a favor than a play for free cat food. It’s her favor
currency.

“How much do I already
owe you?” I write back.

Some favors, naturally,
are smaller than others and don’t always necessitate the purchase of a full
bag. That being the case, Abs measures her favors in ounces.

A one-ounce favor is
something like passing the salt where she’s just as likely as not to count it.

Most favors tend to be
more in the three-to-five ounce area. This accounts for everything from, “Hey,
could you run to the kitchen and grab me a soda?” coming in at three ounces of
cat food and, “I’m short on tampons, could I get one from you?” at a solid five
ounces worth of cat food.

The good news here is that
Abs only ever buys cat food in quantities of five pounds or more. That being
the case, a person such as myself has eighty ounces to work with before any
repayment ever need be made.

Unfortunately, she can be
a little stingy when she’s feeling unappreciated, and it usually comes out in
the form of extreme favor tariffs.

The biggest payout I ever
gave was a result of borrowing Abby’s car for a couple of weeks while my dad
was out of town. For that, I agreed to a twenty ounce fee. When I ended up
running her car into a thankfully-empty phone booth three days into that rental
period, well, I’m not sure I’ve paid off that particular tab yet.

My phone buzzes.

The message reads, “I
think we’ve whittled it down to six or seven forty-pounders. Call it seven and
tack one more on and you’ve got yourself a ride.”

I write back, “Why so
steep?”

I’m only asking for a
ride. I can see her tacking a few extra ounces onto the bill for choosing to
hang out with Ian instead of her, but a whole forty-pound bag is ridiculous. I
don’t know if I can live in that kind of favor economy.

She writes back, “Take it
or leave it.”

This is so annoying.

*
                   
*
                   
*

“All right, do you know
what happened last time?” I ask.

“I lost my focus and my
confidence?” he asks.

“That’s right,” I tell
him. It helps that I’ve been repeating that to him for the last twenty minutes.
“Try running through it in your mind again.”

He closes his eyes and I
look down over the park.

More than anything, I’m
trying to give Ian a few seconds’ break from the small crowd that’s grown to
watch the Incredible Falling Man. I can understand the allure of people
falling, don’t get me wrong: seeing people fall is one of life’s most precious
treasures, but at some point, it’s just mean-spirited.

“Okay, are you ready?” I
ask.

“I’m still falling off at
the bottom every time,” he says. “If I can’t even get my own imagination to—”

“We’ve been over this,” I
tell him. “You’re expecting something and, because it’s what you’re expecting,
you’re getting it, over and over. Try expecting something else: expect that
you’ll drop in and roll out without a problem.”

The advice is a little
pop-psychology for my tastes, but I’m seriously running out of ideas with Ian.
He cannot get past his own image of failure. Every time he looks like he might
get it, he either comes off his board or overcorrects in some bizarre way he’s
never been able to sufficiently explain to me and crashes.

The last two times he’s
managed to run out, much to the chagrin of the still-growing audience. If I can
convince him that running out is somehow an improvement, maybe I can get him
past his mental block.

“All right,” I tell him,
“you’re doing great and you’re making progress—I know you may not see it right
now, but you really are. You haven’t started bleeding once.”

“Do you think they’re
taking bets?” he asks.

“I haven’t seen any money
changing hands, but we have been standing up here for about five minutes, so
maybe they’re just waiting for your next run,” I tell him. “If it helps at all,
if they are taking bets, I’d put five bucks on you nailing this thing in the
next three tries.”

“Really?” he asks, every
inch of his posture in some way drooping.

I gotta feel bad for the
poor guy.

“Yeah,” I tell him,
“really. So, why don’t you give it another three tries and we’ll see how quick
I’d win.”

“Okay,” he says. “I got
this shit.”

“That’s right,” I tell
him.

After the excruciating
and rather public collection of humiliations he’s racked up today, I don’t
think I’m going to chastise him about the language for a while. It’s just
simple mercy.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m
going to show everyone down there that I’ve got this. This isn’t a problem.”

“You show ‘em,” I tell
him, remembering the heights of ecstasy he’s brought me to in the last
twenty-four hours to refill some of the patience and understanding I’m
presently hemorrhaging.

“All right,” he says.

He just stands there.

“Ian?” I ask.

“Yeah?” he returns.

“You’re not going,” I
tell him.

“I know,” he says. “I’m
just waiting until the mood is right.”

I just purse my lips and
nod. If that’s what it’s going to take for him to take another run so that we
can be one step closer to putting this whole grating process behind us, then
that’s what it’s going to take.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m on
it.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I
say after he stands there another twenty or thirty seconds, “you keep trying
and I’ll make it worth your while.”

“What?” he asks, shaking
his head a little.

“Did I pull you away from
something?” I ask.

“I’m sorry,” he says.
“It’s just, don’t you think they’d have better things to do with their time
than hang around here waiting for me to fall on my ass?”

“I’m serious,” I tell
him. “Give it three more tries, and I will make sure you are very handsomely
rewarded.”

He looks over at me, his
eyes wide at first, but after a few seconds, I see his eyes drift from my face
downward and I finally know that he’s paying attention.

“Yeah?” he asks. “How
so?”

“You’ll have to find
out,” I tell him. “It’s a surprise, but I can promise you will like it.”

I have nothing planned,
but I’m sure I can throw together some sort of sexual favor he’ll find as
suitable reward for his efforts.

“Okay,” he says. “Three
tries.”

“Don’t think of them as
tries, think of them as opportunities to practice your new skill,” I tell him.
“Just think of it like you’ve already done it a million times before. You know
what to do, right?” I ask.

“Yeah?” he more asks than
answers, but it’ll have to do. Money actually
is
starting to change hands down below and it’s going to be
difficult convincing him it doesn’t have anything to do with him.

“All right,” I tell him.
“First run, you’ve got this thing.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve
got it.”

He puts his front foot on
the board, leans in, rolls down, and runs out just as he’s about to be on level
ground.

“That’s all right,” I
call down. “You’ll get it next time.”

I’m not unaware that I
probably sound like one of those perma-optimist parents who are always telling
their kids—who are always, always,
always
,
just terribly bad at everything—that any shortcoming is just a hiccup in an
otherwise impeccable career of doing things right. It’s got to be a little
extra dose of humiliation, but at least it’s getting him up the ladder a bit
quicker.

“You don’t have to do
that,” he says as he finally reaches the top.

“Do what?” I ask dumbly.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says.
“Two more and then we can go, right?”

“Two more and then you’ll
have a reward coming to you when we’re in a much, much less public place,” I
tell him. “After that, we’ll see where you are with things and go from there.”

“Okay,” he says curtly.

It’s unclear whether his
clenched jaw is a signal of determination or just annoyance that I’m being such
a dictator. I’m not going to make the guy keep doing this if it’s just going to
screw with his head more than his head has already been screwed with, but just
up and leaving in shame isn’t going to do him any good, either.

He’s just become my new
psychology project.

“We’re probably going to
have to figure out a time to figure out where and how we’re going to do
interviews,” I tell him. “You know, for school.”

“Is there any way we
could not talk about school right now?” he asks.

“Well, I’m still waiting
for you to take your second run, so…” I just let the sentence hang, crossing my
arms over my chest.

Before last run, I was all
advice and modest encouragement. This run, I’m unimpressed and stern. Next run,
I haven’t really thought it out, but I’ll probably just end up in some stage of
groveling just to get him down the ramp one more time.