James Games (6 page)

“Are you insane?” I spit at him.

He answers in the affirmative by kissing me. 

He kisses me hard, pushing me up against the wall. The flyer slips off the wall and flutters to the floor, but I don’t notice because I’m kissing him back, moaning into his mouth and burying my hands in his hair as his lips furiously claim mine.

This is bad. This is really, really bad.

But it’s also fucking hot.

He picks me up, slinging me over his shoulder instead of carrying me the way he did at the concert with my legs around his waist, and moves with an intense purposes down the empty hallway. He carries me into the nearest classroom—the classroom we just left. He brings me to that desk in the center of the room, the desk I selected to carefully to make it look like I had no interest in him, and lays me on it, flat on my back. I don’t even have time to sit up before his mouth is on me, dragging heat from my collarbone, my neck. He shoves up my blouse and kisses my flat stomach like a starving person.

The alarm is still going off, and an alarm is going off in my abdomen as well, pulses of
yes, yes, yes
…I don’t care how wrong this is. I don’t care that anyone could see us. I don’t care that I’m sworn not to touch him.

I don’t care that I’ve decided to hate him. Because nobody could hate the things he’s doing to me.

This is different from that night at the concert. This isn’t a war. This is a massacre. He’s dominating me and I’m too shell-shocked that this is happening, that James Reid just pulled the fire alarm and then carried me into a classroom to pull my skirt off with his teeth, to clash swords.

And maybe I like the way this feels.

We have bare minutes before they send somebody in to check that the building is fully evacuated. He knows that, and I know that. This is crazy. We should stop this. We should leave…

He yanks down my panties. His tongue finds me, and I am undone. I cry out and clutch the back of his neck, my hips bucking as he sucks my clit and administers wave after wave of pleasure. My back arches and my shoulders dig into the back of the desk.

“Scream,” he orders. “It’s too loud for anyone to hear you.”

“If you want me to scream,” I pant, “you have to make me.”

His eyes darken, and a thrill races through me. He grabs my waist, flips me and bends me over the desk.

I shouldn’t let this happen. I’m Fiona Arlett and I only have sex on my terms. This is so wrong. But then he slides into me from behind, and all the shouldn’t’s fly out of my head.

His hands slide around my front to cup my breasts as he slams into me roughly, a new noise added to the deafening alarm: the screech of the desk sliding across the floor. He’s not pushing randomly. He’s angled me in just the right way so that he plows into my G-spot, a place that I usually have to spend at least ten minutes coaching a guy before he can reach it. The onslaught is so sudden and unexpected, the pleasure so fierce, that a third noise is added—my scream.

He’s not screwing around. He hits my G-spot once. Twice. Then three times. He wants me to come. I hold out as long as I can, my whole body quaking with the desire to keep from giving him that satisfaction, that he could make me come with just four strokes, but I can’t stop it. It’s like fighting gravity. I tumble over the edge just as his mouth finds my neck, biting it as his muscular stomach grinds against my back, our bodies fitted together.

I have to be dreaming.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

I was supposed to stay far, far away from James Reid.

~6~

“Are you sure?” I demand. “No heat exhaustion? No fever? No reason I might have experienced any sort of hallucination recently?”

The school nurse glances down over her clipboard again. “Nope. All your vitals are normal. If you’d like, we can do a blood test. What kind of hallucinations have you been experiencing?”

The one where James Reid pulls the fire alarm and fucks me in the classroom where we argued about the meaning of life.

“Oh, you know. I thought I saw, like…a big…never mind.”

I slide off the nurse’s table, the paper crinkling underneath me. The burn between my thighs when I hit the floor proves to me that it really wasn’t a hallucination.

I just had sex with James. Again.

“Thanks,” I mumble to the doctor. I should ask if she has any cures for temporary insanity, because apparently that’s what happens to me when James is around.

“Stress can make people feel strange. I’d see how you feel after a good night’s sleep.” She hands me my purse. “Are the fire trucks gone yet? I wanted to go take a picture of one for my son.”

“Yeah. They didn’t stay long. There was no fire.” Except the one in my pants. “Some jerk probably just pulled the alarm as a joke.”

“That happens a lot on weekend nights, but we don’t usually get false fire alarms during weekdays. I hope there wasn’t an emergency.”

“There might have been a small one, but I bet it was taken care of.” I smile.

Outside the nurse’s office, I pause and take a deep breath. So I can’t deny that that just happened. I just won’t let it happen again, that’s all.

I’ve had lots of sex since I’ve come to college. Lots of easy, meaningless sex. Sex that never left me shaken. What just happened in that classroom was different. For the first time, I feel unsure. Scared. Scared of how much I wanted him. So much that I was willing to let that insanity happen.

James Reid is exactly the man I thought he would be. Arrogant. Harsh. And the kind of person who takes what he wants, whenever and wherever he happens to want it.

But I’m Fiona Arlett, and I don’t doubt myself. Not for him, and not for anybody else. I won’t let myself get swept up in James’s tide again. He better have enjoyed that fire alarm sex, because it’s the last sex he’ll be having with me.

Reaffirmed, I stride out into the sun, only to be jumped.

“Grab her arm. No, her other arm.” It’s Iris, latched on to me with the kind of grip that only pro wrestlers and supervillains have.

“She’s so slippery! Like a fish,” Mags complains as I wrench out of her grip and twirl away.

“What are you nerds doing—mmph.”

Iris claps a hand over my mouth at the same time that Mags reclaims her grip on me, and the two of them frog-march me across campus. A few boys get bug-eyed as we pass, probably assuming that we’re off to have kinky lesbian sex. Which, for all I know, could be the truth. Might not be too bad. Shouldn’t I include a couple girls in my wild college experimentation phase?

They drag me up to our dorm room and slam the door. I raise an eyebrow at Iris. She’s sulked every time I’ve tried to bring a new friend to our room, but suddenly Mags is allowed? They’ve been scheming. This suspicion is confirmed as Mags plops me down on my bed and Iris sets up her laptop in front of me.

“I thought you were supposed to be the shy, sweet character,” I accuse Mags.

“This is for your own good,” she stammers, keeping a tight grip on my wrists. I let her. Girl looks like she needs to succeed at something.

Iris finishes messing with her computer and when she steps back, an outgoing Skype call is ringing. She speaks over the sound. “Someone saw you chatting up James outside the Philosophy department, Fiona.”

“Really? Is that all they saw?” I ask, the picture of innocence.

A scowl forms on my roommate’s face that could make prison inmates cry. “They had to leave because the fire alarm went off, but I know you were hitting on him. You’re a goddamn idiot.”

“As a matter of fact, I was telling him off—” I start, but I’m interrupted by an image flashing to life on the screen.

“Hello? Hello?” a new voice calls. Even through the grainy image that our shitty internet gives us, I can see that the dark-haired twenty-something is beautiful. She’s wearing eighties pastels, winged eyeliner, and a delighted expression when she catches a glimpse of my roommate’s grumpy face. “Iris! When you said you were going to call I wasn’t sure to believe you or not, but—”

“Daisy,” Iris cuts her off. “We need to talk to you about—”

And then I cut
her
off. “Iris, is that your…sister?” The girl onscreen is about as far in aesthetic from Iris as it’s possible to be.

“You didn’t tell her about me?” Daisy screeches. “What was she gonna do when I came and visited, assume there was a gorgeous stranger breaking into her dorm room?”

I sense a kindred spirit and smile, but Iris is turning stonier-faced by the second. “I need you to tell us about Catherine Rivers.”

“Who?” I ask. Daisy’s brow twists up.

“We need to scare my idiot roommate away from James Reid,” Iris clarifies.

“Ahhh,” Daisy breathes out. “Well, then. Catty was…”

“Wait!” Mags switches the lights off and then attempts to hold her iPhone flashlight under Daisy’s digital chin, presumably to create a scary-story campfire mood, but that tactic doesn’t really work over Skype. Mags seems to realize this and sheepishly withdraws her phone.

“…Anyway.” Daisy steeples her fingers and glances apprehensively at her sister. “Catty was in Phi Delta Chi with me—”

“Yes, yes, revelations all around,” mutters Iris as I open my mouth to scream at her. Her sister was in Phi Delta Chi! That explains why Iris was so determined to join it, even though sororities didn’t seem like her thing.

“She was a freshman when I was a senior,” Daisy continues. “I liked her. She was kind of wild, reckless, you know. One of those girls who hits college and just goes crazy.”

“Wow, definitely doesn’t sound like anyone we know.” Iris elbows Mags, who giggles nervously. Great. Iris has a new best friend.

“Sigrid was a freshman that year too. She was totally gorgeous and all the boys were obsessed with her. But she wasn’t interested in any of them. They said she came to UCSD for one reason and one reason alone: because James Reid was rumored to be with the entering class.”

I tick years off on my fingers. That would make James a senior.

“Sigrid claimed it wasn’t her idea, but everyone said she approached the head of Phi Delta Chi at the time and proposed the James Games. I guess she didn’t want anyone else getting their hands on him before she did. The head accepted. Probably because Sigrid intimidated her. She was one scary girl.”

Scary, schmary. Scary to people who are baby birds, maybe.

“I’m sure you guys know about the rules of the Games, now that you’re initiates—and congrats, baby sis, I knew you could do it! So none of us were supposed to touch James. But one night, at a party, Catty got drunk and kissed him. Just a peck. Just a joke. The next morning, she disappeared.”

“Dun dun dunnn,” I can’t help but intone. Iris pinches my ear. “Ow!”

Daisy hasn’t even noticed us. It’s like she’s lost in a different time. “It took me a while to track down Catty after she left school, but when I did, I got the whole story. Sigrid and her cronies drove her six hours into the desert, shaved her head, took her clothes, and left her there. Alone.”

Suddenly there is something lodged in my throat. That wasn’t what I was expecting. “That’s a bit…harsh.”

“And it’s not all. When Catty finally made it back, she went straight to the dean, of course. But Sigrid is the dean’s daughter, and she’d already got a bunch of girls to corroborate her story that Catty hated her, had hated her for ages, and had cooked up this whole false story and shaved her own head to get Sigrid kicked out. In the end, Catty was expelled for slandering another student.”

“No way!” I stand straight up. “There’s no way she got away with that. Evil masterminds don’t exist in real life.”

“Except when they’re named Sigrid,” Daisy sighs. “Take my advice and stay as far away from James as possible. The only way Sigrid wouldn’t murder you if you got near him was if you won the Games, and even then…besides, he’s kind of a jerk. He’s probably not worth it anyway.”

“And all Catty did was kiss James,” Iris says loudly, elbowing me in the chest because she apparently hates subtlety. “Imagine what Sigrid and her minions would do to someone who
slept
with him.”

I make a mental note to drool on her pillow next time she’s not in the room.

“They would probably get stabbed in their sleep,” says Daisy in awe.

Mags shivers and hugs herself. I make a show of tossing my chin up, but secretly my skin is prickling. I’d figured Sigrid was a mean girl, but I hadn’t counted on flat-out insane.

“Well, anyway, you’re all too smart to mess around with James anyway.” Daisy perks up. “Iris, tell me about your classes! I’ve barely heard from—”

Iris reaches over and pops the lid of her laptop shut. Mags winces.

“See?” Iris demands. “This is why you need to take this seriously.”

“You don’t need to worry. I’m done with James,” I yawn. “I wouldn’t want anything more to do with him even if Sigrid wasn’t on my tail like a homicidal beauty queen.”

“If I know that you were chatting up James, then Sigrid knows too. She already doesn’t like you. You have to show her you’re not a threat and lose the Games. As decisively as possible.”

I roll onto my stomach and stick my head under my pillow. “I don’t like losing.”

“Do you like living?”

“Think about this.” Mags gently removes the pillow from my face. “If you make it really obvious you want to lose the Games, it’ll show everyone that you couldn’t care less about James. You’d be making a point.”

“I do like making points.” I sit up. “You know what? The Games are so stupid. I’m going to show everyone exactly what I think of them by doing the opposite for every challenge.”

I catch Mags nodding knowingly at Iris and frown at her until she stops. It’s not like I’m doing this because of I’m afraid of Sigrid. I’m not afraid of anybody. It’s that I can’t think of a better way to prove to James that I don’t care about him than trying my hardest to lose his stupid contest.

“So the first challenge is combining modesty with sexiness,” says Mags diplomatically. “So you probably want to wear something short and low-cut—”

She’s interrupted by a knock on our door. I answer, glad to have a reason to escape this conversation, but it turns out to be a leap from the frying pan into the lobster pot, because standing in hallway is the Wicked Witch herself.