Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy) (12 page)

It basically sprung free of the cotton prison of his boxers, and it was already glossy with precum, hard and ready. “Do you want me to suck your dick?” I asked.

“No, don’t you dare,” he practically growled, as if he was a dog and I’d threatened to eat his food. Wow. Skylar could get defensive. “Would you want me to eat your pussy? Or are you already wet enough?”

“Actually...yes, that’d be great,”  I said meekly.

Skylar got onto the bed, pushed my knees up and spread by thighs, finding my sex with ease.

I gripped one of Skylar’s pillows and hugged it as he inserted one of his slim guitarist fingers into me. “You’re right. You’re nowhere wet enough for me to fuck you, not yet.” He then pulled his fingers out and made the shape of a V, but this wasn’t a peace sign. This was an act of war, of war on my lust, and he was going to destroy it.

He pressed his tongue into me and it was hot, warm, the way it had been when he’d kissed me before, and the way that I wished he would kiss me now. Although this was such an intimate act between lovers, right now, we weren’t lovers. We were fuckers. I was getting tongue fucked by him, and expertly. He’d obviously had a lot of experience with this because he was so good at it.

He moved up, to suck and kiss at my clit, making my pussy wetten and release its own juices, juices he spread around like jelly on toast using two fingers he slid into me and pressed up against my walls, finding my G spot with ease as if he was a vibrator, made to do this, and then practically digging the juices out of some strange sexual mine that was hidden to me but to him, marked on a map of desire.

Skylar didn’t look up to see my reactions. He didn’t need to. He knew he was doing a good job. But if he had?

He would have seen that I was squirming, that my torso was contorting and that I needed him on top of me.

He would have seen I was biting the pillow not out of pain, but to stop myself from moaning too loud with pleasure, and that the feathers weren’t muffling a lot.

He would have seen that I needed him.

“Please, Skylar, I want your dick.”

“I already knew that. You’ve made it extremely clear,” he snarled, getting up on top of me and entering me gingerly. His face changed and mouth opened as he entered me. I smiled to myself and knew I still had it, the ability to please a man. “Jesus, you’re tight,” he swore.

“For a sorority girl?” I teased.

He laughed. “Ha. That’s a myth. People don’t just get looser over time or with experience or from being a quote unquote slut. By now, you should know I hate stereotypes, Emma,” he said, as if my name was a curse word. Fuck.

Skylar lifted me up with ease. I was so much smaller than him and from this position, he looked even larger than usual, his tattoos rippling across his chest. I wished I was on acid or at least high on weed so that I could watch his tattoos move like a sexy hallucination, a burlesque made of chemicals and ink.

Of course, that’d never happen, because that’s why I’d gotten his dick in the first place.

I’d only received this gift from him for agreeing to stay clean.

What I hadn’t planned on? Was having a release.

I’d wanted him inside me, that much as true, but a release of my own? I’d never expected that. Although of course, I’d had orgasms before, I usually had to do most of the work. I didn’t have a man like Skylar in my life that would make me orgasm, that took pleasuring me as a challenge, that could dominate me with desire. I’d mostly just lain back and taken a dicking.

But this was different.

This was Skylar.

And my body knew that and reacted appropriately, sending out waves of pleasure only minutes after he’d entered me. It wasn’t fair: I’d wanted to have to make him fuck me for hours until a release. I’d wanted to control this, but he was just too good, too skilled, and my body was too desperate and wanting.

My back arched up and I grasped around Skylar, who kept pumping away at me. I felt my inner walls clench on his cock but he kept pulling out of me and pushing back in steadily, keeping the rhythm strong and powerful, not letting my body stop feeling what it was feeling, although it would keep needing what it was needing.

Finally, my orgasm stopped.

But so did he, even though he hadn’t cum, at all, and wasn’t getting any softer. He got up from the bed and took the condom off, throwing it away, into the trash, empty.

“We’re done,” he said cooly.

“Wait, what? Like, I have to leave?”

“No, like, I have to go take a cold shower. Now.”

“Skylar, are you...are you going to cum?” I asked as he pulled away, from my grasp.

“No, no, I’m not Emma.”

“But why?”

“I promised to fuck you. I never said I’d cum.”

S
KYLAR FOUND THE DRUGS. He found the pills, the powders, the syringes, the tubes, the capsules, the rolling papers, the tablets, the pap tabs in neon colors, the paraphernalia, the bomgs, the oils, the everything that made me into the nothing.

And he wasn’t snooping.

He caught me red handed.

Or rather, with a handful of pills and my flask in the other hand, about to head out to a different club across town, not Club Grit where I knew he’d see me, but somewhere where nobody knew me where nobody knew about Skylar or Omega Mu or about any of that, somewhere I could go to forget.

Somewhere I could go to not be myself.

Somewhere I could go to go, away.

He’d come back from his shift just minutes after he left because he’d forgotten to take a shirt with him for the bouncer that had covered his ass (or rather, his back) the night before and lent him a spare that Skylar had made sure to have washed before this shift. I was in our bedroom with the pills on the sheets.

“So is this what you do, when I’m gone?” he asked.

“No, it’s not like that, you don’t understand,” I lied, because I knew that he did understand, that he understood it better than I understood it, that he was the only one in the room that really knew what was going on because in my state I couldn’t say what I needed to say, I couldn’t do what I needed to do to convince him I didn’t have a problem. Because I did.

“I can’t, Emma, not when you lie to me, all the fucking time.” He picked up an empty box meant for his vinyl records and started to put all the stuff away into the box, before taking a plastic plate we’d used a few nights before for sushi or something, and dumping all the drugs out into it, a plate he filled within minutes, working as fast as a factory worker at a pharmacy, opening up every syringe and dumping out the contents, until he had a plate worth thousands of dollars, a whole Dior handbag, and I watched as he walked away with it.

To do them, all at once?

No, to flush it, a sound I cringed upon hearing. Didn’t he know how much those went for, what I’d had to pay for them?

Skylar came back in and sat on the bed, head in his hands.

“Do you want me to be rough with you, to treat you like a child, to treat you like my dad treated me? Is that what you want, Emma? Because that’s not what you’re going to get, not ever. I’m not going to tie you to a bed or a chair and make you sober up that way, I’m not going to fuck this addiction out of you or make you into my personal sex slave or something, do you know how fucked up it is that you want me to sleep with you while you’re in this condition? What happened to staying clean, staying sober? Was that an act to get me to sleep with you?”

“S-Skylar,” I stuttered, but I didn’t know where to start, which of his questions to answer first.

So again.

I blacked out.

T
HE NEXT WEEK, SKYLAR AND I DIDN’T HAVE SEX. We didn’t make out. We didn’t hold hands or cuddle. He was still mad about what I’d done and he mostly holed himself up in his room and although we still slept in the same bed, it was with his back turned to me. I knew I’d fucked up but had no idea how to make it up to him. Actually having to work for someone’s respect and forgiveness was hard, and I couldn’t solve this with flowers and a gift card. Skylar wasn’t that kind of person.

But that’s when I saw the flyer.

Printed on rough paper with black glossy ink as if made from a screen printing place instead of a laser jet printer, was information about a show that night.
Friday Night Only: The Eldritch Poets Society
was circled in red. That was Skylar’s band. They had a show and he didn’t tell me? Didn’t matter, I was going to go. I checked my phone: I had ten minutes to get across LA. Fuck.

I got to the venue late, missing the first band, but it ended up being okay: Skylar’s band had been pushed back another set, so I caught them as they were still setting up. The crowd was too thick for me to get to the stage, so I sat on an empty bar stool.

“Ahem,” coughed the bartender.

“Hi,” I said, and turned back away, but he rapped at the table with a knuckled fist.

“If you’re going to sit at the bar, you have to buy a drink,” he explained.

So of course, I bought one.

And when that one ran out, another, and another.

But, I would have bought a thousand drinks if it meant getting to watch Skylar’s band play.

They set up and I swore I saw him look at me but then away, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t here to watch me: I was here to watch him. I was here to see him on stage, playing the electric guitar I’d never heard him play around me, the one that changed positions in the room when I was in classes, either because our schedules were incompatible or because Skylar was keeping something secret from me.

“Again, ladies and gentlemen, we’re The Eldritch Poets Society. We’ve got a few more songs for you all tonight, and our lead guitarist, Skylar “The Kraken” Brown, is going to be singing this next one, an original work by him. You’re in for a real treat, everybody,” said the short, pudgy lead with glasses and abeard, and the voice of an angel, as Skylar went up to the mike.

“Thank you for that, Jared. This song is dedicated to a special lady that I wish was here for this tonight. Thank you.”

Skylar had...a girlfriend? My heart sank. Probably not, but he had someone special to him, and he’d written her a song. This was for her, and although I half felt like leaving, I stayed. I needed to hear the song she’d inspired him to write, to sing.

What I didn’t expect was to be drawn in like a moth to a flame, and what was I but a vulnerable moth, easily burned by this brightest of flames?

“I see you dancing on tables like an RPG,

Last thing I’d believe is that you’d lock eyes with me,

But sometimes my heart won’t let me breathe,

But nightclub girl, you can’t come with me”

I understood why he couldn’t be the lead singer now. His voice was filled with passion as he started out but by the end, with tears streaming down his face and his voice growing hoarser, I could tell he couldn’t last long up there, but luckily, he finished the song before he went back to just playing guitar. The lead didn’t have to do that, have to manage two instruments at once, and in that way, had nothing on Skylar, the same way he had nothing on Skylar’s passion.

But, as the set continued, Skylar saw me.

Our eyes locked from across the room, there was no mistaking it for anything else.

And he looked away.

The audience had been silent as he played but at the end, clapped louder than they had for anything that night and the stage was crowded with people asking about the band’s next album and future shows.

“Hey, Skylar,” I said as he started to walk off the stage. He saw me and rolled his eyes.

I chased. “Don’t ignore me!”

And he sighed. Wasn’t that always how it was, with cat and mouse, the chase, the sigh? “I saw you at the bar, Emma. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing. Maybe you want me to give in but I’m not going to. If you need that stuff to talk to me, I don’t want to get that involved with you. I’m already letting you stay with me. Don’t embarrass me here.” He sounded exhausted, not like how he did on stage.

That’s when I showed him the back of my hands, holding them up like hipsters posing with their cat headbands made of wire, pretending to ironically reenact a music video about being young. That’s when he saw that they matched his in one way, but he still put his hands next to mine to compare.

“You actually did it? You went straight for the night?”

“Yeah. Maybe, you don’t know me as well as you think, Skylar,” I said. “I just drank waters and sodas the whole night. Ugh, my teeth feel so weird now, there’s a lot of sugar in that organic cane sugar cola stuff.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I know. I guess you really had it. Come on. Let’s go back stage, there’s some people I want you to meet.” He took my hand again, like he had that time at the club, except this time, it wasn’t an act. This time, I was really that girl he was with at the club, and this time, there was nobody watching, nobody we had to impress, and he was the one proud of me.

In the back was the rest of the band as well as two other women, one short and plump, in pin-up style retro clothing and jet black hair in victory rolls, a few tattoos of nautical symbols like an anchor that read “NEVER SINK” on her arms. On another girl, dressed in all black with a heavily pierced face, with parts I didn’t know could be pierced like her eyebrows and the middle of her cheeks, was heavy neon makeup. Her hair was half shaved off like a dub step artist, the remaining half dyed a mix of purples, pinks, and blues. She had a more industrial or punk or Goth look, I really had no idea how to label her. Maybe that was the point.

Everybody chatted for a few minutes about things I didn’t really understand. Paleo organic co-ops focused on sustainability? Proto seapunk resurgence in underground raves? Witch hop becoming passé? I wasn’t really part of Skylar’s world, and this was another reminder of that. Standing there and looked cute just made me look stupid. How did these other girls know about this stuff? I guess inside, I knew. It was because they weren’t girls, they were women, or, that word Skylar just loved to use to refer to people instead of “bro” and “bitch”: they were people.