Chapter 4: What He Wants 🌶️🌶️

There was nobody anywhere near them. No footsteps in the hall. Nobody walking past.
As long as they didn’t stop, nobody was going to interrupt them, and nobody was going to see them.
A single deep kiss — that was all it was, technically — but the wet sounds of the tongues moving in their mouths were dirty and slick. It pulled at things underneath her she hadn’t known were there. They started to grow.
Thorns of wanting wrapped around her heart. Reason had been kicked out somewhere into a wilderness.
June could barely breathe. Her tongue kept getting pulled into his mouth and rubbed. He curled it. Every now and then he caught it between his teeth and dragged it across into his own mouth, like he wanted to swallow her down.
She gripped the front of his shirt tight. Her whole body was being held up by the arm he had hooked around her waist.
He was a boy, after all — his arm was hard. Veins crossed under the skin. His long bony fingers were sunk deep into her side. He was pressing her in so hard that the softness of her flesh got squeezed out between the gaps of his fingers, even through the wet cotton of her shirt.
She had no experience. She didn’t know that not every grown man kissed like this. To kiss like this you either had to have done it a lot, with a lot of women — or you had to want it so badly that you taught it to yourself.
Tate, obviously, was the second.
He felt like he was about to blow up.
The pressure of needing her was running through every vein in him and it had no place to go. All he wanted to do was push her down and do something dirty to her. He didn’t have the moral fiber to stop. He knew he didn’t.
Before he’d had a girlfriend, he’d handled this by going on long night runs. He’d run himself into the ground until he was so tired he could shower and sleep through it.
Now that he had a girl he wanted, every time he ran, he was thinking of her instead. And the last bit of energy he had left at the end of a night could only be handled with his hand on his cock and her face in his head.
He’d ended up adding a pre-sleep step that was slowly destroying him.
There was something wrong with him.
Why was it that the second he hit puberty and fell for a girl, he turned into this?
He was supposed to be patient with her. He was supposed to be careful. He was supposed to look at her and think about nice things.
But every time he looked at her, his mind slid somewhere else.
He wanted to put her body in positions that didn’t have names. He wanted to spread her thighs and find the wet split of her and fuck himself slow into the softest place inside her. He wanted to know if she’d sweat for him during sex too. He wanted to know the edge of what she could take — the moment when she’d say I can’t anymore. And then, in his head, that was when he’d drag her back by the ankles, hold his cock, and shove it back in.
He wanted to kneel behind her and knead the soft of her ass and pound into her. He wanted to be near her ear and say —
Baby, don’t run. Be a good girl. Or I’m going to fuck you ruined.
The shit in his head made him feel like a freak. He was supposed to be polite with her. He was supposed to be polite with everyone. He was supposed to be especially polite with his girlfriend.
He was never going to become that guy. Whatever this was, he was going to keep it in his head.
A girlfriend wasn’t going to like a boyfriend who was rough in bed. June Halsey wasn’t going to like Lockwood if he came across like he wasn’t easy to be around in private.
Tate was thinking nothing but ugly things, and his mouth was getting more violent on hers because of it.
June’s legs were giving out. Her palms were against his shoulders and at first she’d been trying to push him back — but somehow her hands had drifted up to cling to him. She couldn’t breathe. She was making small muffled sounds into his mouth.
He kissed her against the wall. Her inner thighs trembled against each other and then squeezed shut tight, but his knee came in and pried them open again.
She slid down his body to the floor. He came down with her. He kept her head in one hand and arched his back over her and kept kissing her, like he was chasing her down all the way.
“Tate,” she said. “Not — no more. I can’t take this.”
Her eyes were red. There was a wet shimmer in them. She’d finally found a half-second between his mouths to push the words out.
He licked his own lower lip. Looked at her, dark-eyed, careful.
“You want to take a shower?”
“…You go first.” She got a real breath in finally. The panic in her chest started to ease.
She watched his face watching hers, and her eyes dropped. Her long lashes drifted down. There was a tightness in her gaze she didn’t have a name for. Her whole face was flushed pink.
“Don’t look at me. You go.”
He laughed, low, like he hadn’t expected that. “Okay.”
But he still didn’t move. He kept his arms where they were.
She glanced up at him, and found his eyes had that meaning in them again — same as the afternoon he’d kissed her after the test.
She finally figured it out.
The first answer that came into her head was: she was not going in there with him. Absolutely not.
Steam was practically coming out of the top of her head. She pushed him off, pulled the bathroom door open, and basically herded him in by the elbow. Then she stood in the middle of the room, the backs of her ears burning red. She put her hand over her mouth. Her body felt like it had been chewed on.
After a while the shower started up inside.
She thought about sitting down on the edge of the bed. Then she remembered she was still soaking wet and stood back up.
Boys must shower fast. Or maybe just this one. Before she’d recovered her head, he was out of the bathroom — towel wrapped low around his hips, his clean clothes from earlier in one hand.
Tate’s waist was streamlined and clean. Eight clear ridges of muscle ran down his stomach. His shoulders were broad. His hips were narrow. He had the kind of frame you couldn’t get without years of training, and he had it without overdoing it — the cuts were sharp but in proportion. He didn’t have to flex. He just looked like that.
She lifted her chin and looked.
His jaw came into a clean point. His mouth was beautiful. Two long deep collarbones cut across the front of his shoulders. Even without a shirt on, he had that cold, kept-apart quality. Going to bed with him would feel like she was leading him into trouble.
He was still Lockwood.
She wasn’t supposed to do bad things in front of him.