Endgame Romance, page 9
Not one to be outdone, Chasm scoots close, pressing his body all along the naked length of my back. He pets me with gentle, questing fingers, drawing the breath out of me with each touch. At the same time, my gaze is all for Parrish, my fingertips brushing and tickling over his most sensitive parts.
“Shit,” he breathes finally, losing the slightest edge of his arrogance as I lift the condom up to my lips and tear the edge with my teeth. I pause briefly there to examine it.
“That’s sort of a rule of cool move,” I admit, looking up from the package to his face. “It’s honestly not a smart move to use your teeth to open a condom package, just in case a hole gets—” Parrish cuts me off by grabbing my face and kissing my mouth. He yanks the condom from my hand and tosses it aside, only to have Chasm put another in his hand.
This time, it’s already open.
I remove the slick ring from the package and put it on while Parrish lays there with half-lidded eyes, breathing heavy, his charcoal slacks pushed down below his ass.
When he pushes my shoulder back and climbs on top of me, I’m completely past the point of rational thought. My fingers dig into his hair as he slides into me. I’m beyond ready thanks to Chasm, and it’s easy for Parrish to bury himself fully inside of me.
“I can’t believe I’m watching this,” Chasm chokes out, putting a hand up to cover his face. But he doesn’t leave. He eventually drops his hand down as Parrish curls our fingers together the way he likes, looking down at me as he moves his body. He doesn’t look at anything else. Just me. There’s wonder, too, in his expression, devotion, promise. “Shit.”
More cursing from Chasm, some strongly worded sentences in Korean that I feel like I can almost understand through the sheer emotion in them. And yet … right now, it’s as if Parrish is the only person that matters.
He’s back. We brought him back.
And I can never forgive Justin for taking him.
Never, ever.
Sex with Parrish Vanguard is a whole-body experience. He knows how to touch and pet, how to smile, when to press his face to the side of my throat and chuckle.
“God, I missed you so bad. Doesn’t matter how many times I say it, it’s true.”
“We missed you more. That much I know for sure.” I lick the side of his face, and he pulls back slightly, seemingly surprised. That smirk on his face amps up even more, and then he’s rocking against me hard and fast and furious.
“You surprise me every day, Dakota Banks,” he whispers, and then we’re writhing together in a way that I can’t spend too much time worrying about how it looks to Chasm. Instead, I let Parrish wrap me up in his arms and his essence, his dewy clover smell thrilling me as much as his touch. I love the way he smells. I’m a creeper, I already know that, thanks.
When he’s getting close to his own climax, I encourage him by squeezing him between my legs and murmuring sweet things in his ear. I really don’t expect him to take me with him, burying his body deep and driving me right back to that tender edge.
“Kill This Love” is playing now as Parrish rolls off of me, both of us panting heavily, sweating, heartbeats thundering. Chasm stays right where he was, stretched out alongside of me. When I turn my face toward him, he reaches out with a single finger and runs it along the edge of my jaw.
“Was that good for you, Little Sister?” he asks, and then pauses, offering up an apologetic cringe. “Yeah, you’re right: I need to scrap that nickname, don’t I?”
“Was it good?” I repeat, still breathing hard, and then swallowing the pre-embarrassment I’m feeling from all the things I haven’t yet said. “We’re not done yet, are we?”
Chas’ eyes go wide, and then he’s rolling over and scrambling for another condom. I help him out of his towel, shoving it off his hips and onto the floor, and then the condom is on like magic.
“I don’t know if I can stay here for this,” Parrish breathes, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes. Both Chas and I pause to look over at him.
“I don’t want you to leave,” I say, and I wonder if I’m being selfish here. Or if I care. Do I? I mean, I do, but I’m also really happy. The happiest I’ve been in a long, long time. The only thing that might make this moment better would be if Maxim were here …
Whoa there, Gamer Girl. Put the brakes on. You’re already dreaming of a foursome?! That’s sort of a lot to think about. I push the idea to the side—I’m not sure where X fits into all of this anyway—and roll over toward Parrish to offer him at least some sort of encouragement or comfort. When Chasm follows me and pulls my hips back, an excited and shocked gasp escapes my lips.
Erm. On my hand and knees, him behind me. It’s a good deal.
My mouth crashes against Parrish’s just as Chasm is pushing into me. Strange emotions flicker through me, the taste of Parrish on my lips, the feel of Chas’ hands on my hips …
“Kwang-seon …” The name slips out of me, but Parrish doesn’t seem to mind. “Pear-Pear …”
We’re kissing hard, Parrish’s hands in my hair, my body on fire from Chasm’s movements. Parrish is the one who sneaks a hand between us, finding my clit and working the tender flesh with his fingers. I can barely stay upright as I am; it’s only Chasm’s hands on my body, Parrish’s bracing palm on my rib cage, that keep me from tumbling forward.
Even with my shaking limbs, even with my uncertainty, I’m catapulted into bliss. Having them both here with me isn’t just twice as good as having one of them, it’s … “exponential.” I actually breathe the word aloud against Parrish’s lips, and he pauses the intricate dance of his fingers. Chasm slows his thrusts, and I swear that Parrish is looking past me at his friend.
“Oh, Naekkeo,” Chas whispers, part humor, part infatuation. Parrish smiles against my mouth, and then his tongue is taking control of the situation, diving deep, tasting me. Savoring me. Tears prick my eyes because I’m just so happy he’s back, that he’s here, that he isn’t forcing me to choose between him and his friends.
It almost … sort of … feels like we’re a little family.
Or something.
Chasm tightens his fingers on my pelvis, firing up that wild heat in my blood the way only he can. My reaction to him is so different from my reaction to Parrish, but complementary at the same time. One is red-hot and fervent; one is the cool kiss of a soothing breeze.
My brain is certain that I won’t be able to come again, that three times in one night is laughably excessive … but then it’s happening, and Chasm is grunting and groaning from behind me. He moves deeper, harder, rolling his hips against me over and over, and then we’re both collapsing onto the bed.
I hear Chas rustling around as he removes the condom and grabs the loose throw from the end of the bed to cover us up with. Then he’s curling up beside me while Parrish remains comatose on my left, one arm thrown over his face. I turn my head—not an easy thing to do since I’m lying on my stomach—to find Chasm watching me. He manages a smile on that beautiful mouth of his.
He reaches out a hand as Parrish rolls over, throwing an arm around my waist.
“We should clean up …” he murmurs, and Chas makes a sound of agreement.
Next thing I know, the three of us are asleep on one of Laverne’s guest beds.
Happy prom night, Dakota Banks.
And what a prom night it was.
Our happy bliss is broken by a shrill, warbling scream.
In an instant, we’re all awake and moving. Me, I glom on to the throw blanket, wrapping myself up in it. Chasm is on his feet, snatching the lamp from the nightstand and tearing the cord from the wall in the process. He wields it like a weapon before he sees who it is that’s just screamed us all back to the world of the living.
“M-mom,” Parrish chokes out, sitting on the edge of the bed and frantically buttoning up his pants. He’s shaking, his face chalk-white, his eyes as wide as I’ve ever seen them. Chasm very quickly grabs the towel off the floor and covers his junk with it.
Wait, what? It takes my sleep and sex addled brain a moment to recognize what—and who—it is that I’m staring at.
Tess.
I’m staring at Tess. It was Tess that screamed. Tess who is standing in the doorway to the guest room, both of her hands clamped over her mouth, back to the wall, quivering like a wild thing as her eyes flick from Chasm’s nearly naked form, over to me (also naked beneath my blanket), and then to her adopted son, his hands shaking so badly that he’s missed the button on his slacks about three times already.
Tess’ gaze takes in the two booze bottles, the open box of condoms spilling across the nightstand and onto the floor, us. Yeaaaah, mostly she stares at us …
“Oh my God.” She turns away suddenly, a bag clutched tightly in her left hand. “Put your clothes on and get out here now.” She’s panting as she storms off, and I’m panicking because I don’t have any clothes but for the robe, and oh, I know it already looks bad (it doesn’t just look bad, it is bad) but won’t it look worse if I come down in a robe?
“My dress.” Those are the only words I can squeeze out. Chasm puts the lamp down, raking his fingers through his hair over and over.
“I’ll get it,” he offers, glancing over at Parrish with a wide-eyed gaze of his own. “What are we going to do? How do we get out of this one?”
“There’s no getting out of this.” I know immediately that we’ve just made a mountain out of a molehill. Okay, well, it was already a mountain, but we’ve just like, Everested the fuck out of this situation. “She’s going to send me back to New York; she’s going to make me live with Justin full-time.”
I’m panicking now, truly and utterly panicking.
Parrish scrubs his hand down his face before looking over at me.
“No. I won’t let that happen.” He pushes up to his feet, collecting his shirt and slipping into it. He’s doing up the buttons as Chasm snaps up his slacks and suit jacket, yanking them on before he leaves to fetch my dress. Meanwhile, I sit there wondering if I might actually die because of this. Either due to extreme embarrassment or at the hands of my biological mother.
With a groan, I do a double facepalm and wish fervently for some sort of natural disaster that might get me out of this. A tornado? Not on the West Coast … What do they have over here? Earthquakes? Too passe. A wildfire? Too depressing.
“Zombies.” I lift my face up, eyes glittering. “Yeah, that’d do it. If a zombie outbreak were to occur right now, we’d be saved.”
Parrish pauses to snort, but the sound dies off as quickly as it came.
“No such luck this time,” he says with a sigh, checking the old-fashioned clock on the wall for the time.
It’s just past three in the morning.
“We really blew it, didn’t we?” I mumble, tucking the blanket more tightly around myself. Only, it’s hard to think of what just happened as a mistake. I enjoyed every single second of it.
“If you have to,” Parrish begins, looking over at me with his shirt rumpled, the buttons completely mismatched, several of them not even buttoned at all. “Use the kidnapping card. Use it right off the bat. Use it liberally.” He slips out the door as Chasm is on his way back in, tossing the gold dress over to me.
I very quickly hop off the bed, discarding the blanket and trying not to focus on the intensity of Chasm’s stare on my bare ass. He’s looking, make no doubt about that.
“Aish,” he growls out. “I should be scared, but …” I turn around just in time to see his face soften up. “I’m not. I’m too happy right now.”
“Happy?” I ask, and he moves over to me, reaching around me to help zip up the back of my dress. My heart thunders like crazy, and I swear, I can feel every single spot on my body that he touched. Each one is a sense memory that I’ll hold onto for the rest of my life.
“Because we have a chance, you and me.” Chas smiles and pats my cheek, pausing at the sound of the door creaking open. I look over to see Tess, arms crossed over her chest, face in a severe frown. If I’d thought I’d seen her angry before, it was nothing like this.
“Get downstairs. Now.” She turns and sweeps past Parrish, leaving me and Chasm to follow behind.
That’s how the three of us end up sitting at the kitchen island, all of us barefoot and in some post-coital state of deshabille.
Tess has a bottle of red wine open beside her but also a cup of steaming coffee in her hands. It’s very, uh, Millennial of her. Wine and coffee. As I said, I just hope that the killing people thing isn’t generational.
“What did I just walk in on?” she whispers, and I try my best to conjure up an image of what she must’ve seen.
Chasm, naked, but with a scrap of blanket over his bare butt cheeks. Parrish, shirtless, his pants in a highly inappropriate state (basically tucked up under his ass). Me … in my birthday suit. On my stomach. A boy on either side.
I put a hand over my mouth, staring at the counter instead of Tess’ face. Her phone lies nearby, so Justin could be listening in. Not that it matters. It’s not like he isn’t aware of the situation with the boys; he’s the one that pushed me into this.
“A consensual act between three people—”
“Three children.” Tess interrupts Parrish and then sets her coffee aside, snagging the bottle of wine by the neck and chugging it while we stare at her.
“Hardly.” Parrish crosses his arms and goes for that princely air with gusto. “There’s a lot of pent-up tension between us. Seeing as I went missing for nearly three weeks and almost died …”
“Oh no,” Tess begins with a harsh laugh. “You. And you.” I look up to see her point from Parrish to me. “Are not going to use your kidnapping cards against me. Not on this one.” She laughs again and takes another swig of the wine. “Is this because of porn?” she asks, as if she’s truly trying to understand before she explodes. I don’t know what to make of that. She’s angrier than she’s ever been and yet … not? “Have you all been watching too much porn?”
I rear back like I’ve been slapped.
“My grandmother used to say that porn is as similar to real sex as High School Musical is to a real high school experience. As in, not at all. Less than ten percent of the most popular clips on the internet at any given time actually show people smiling and laughing. People should smile and laugh when they have sex.”
“Is that so?” Tess demands, and my face blanches. Oops. She didn’t ask for a dissertation on the evils of modern-day pornography. Sometimes when I get nervous, I blurt facts. It’s just a thing. It happens. “And you’d know that how? You are … you’re my daughter. You don’t know anything about sex.”
“Um.” I scratch at the back of my head and try to figure out a clever way to escape whatever punishments she might be dreaming up over there. “Then I’m not sure what just happened upstairs …”
Tess groans and puts her head in her hand.
“I should never have let the three of you come back here. I knew it was a mistake before I even did it.” She looks at the wine, curses, and then sets the bottle aside, grabbing her abandoned coffee mug. “As soon as I finish this cup, I’ll be taking you home, Kwang-seon. I’ll let you know as soon as I get news about your car.” Ah, right. Because it was parked in the garage back at the house.
“Understandable,” he agrees, hanging his head slightly. But when I catch his gaze out of the corner of my eye, he smiles, and I can’t help but smile back.
“Do you think this is funny?” Tess demands, and it’s Parrish who answers, certain that he’s the most capable of absorbing her wrath. He’s probably right, but I don’t want him getting into any extra trouble.
“It sort of is, if you think about it,” he offers up, trying to lighten the mood. “Mom, it’s not like we were doing anything crazy. Just safe, consensual sex.”
“I’m going to be sick.” Tess chugs the coffee and then sets the mug aside, pacing a tight circle on the kitchen floor. She’s barefoot, too, her feet shushing on the ground. She pauses to turn and stare at us. “I can’t even believe this. Dakota, was this consensual?”
Well, at least she uses the right name this time. And that’s a fair question, considering the liquor and all.
“I didn’t drink. Only they did. But I don’t think either of them was drunk …” I trail off and wet my lips. Tess just stares at me, like she has no idea who I am. To be fair, she really doesn’t.
Her face was a mess of emotion, rainbow splatter on a ruined canvas; it was hard to tell where the red of anger began, and the purple of disappointment ended. There were more colors there than I’d ever seen in that woman’s face, and it changed so many things between us all at once.
The pink parts—the love and affection—those began to show through in the strangest and most obscure of ways.
I never expected a threesome after prom to bring me closer to the woman who had given birth to me.
Those are the things I’d write, if I were to put pen to paper later on and describe this moment.
Let’s be frank: Tess was never going to laugh and shrug this off. She’s definitely not Regina George’s mom from Mean Girls, not a ‘cool mom’ whatsoever. But also, compared to her actions in the past (like taking Parrish’s and my doors), this isn’t so bad. Proportionally speaking.
“From now on, you and me.” She points between the two of us. “We’re attached at the hip. If you’re on my time, you’re by my side.” Tess turns to her son next. “When Dakota is with us, you will be with Paul. In fact, I’m going to encourage him to hire you on part-time for the summer.”
“I don’t want to work at a plastic surgeon’s office,” Parrish scoffs out, but Tess clearly couldn’t care less. “What exactly are you upset about? The three of us being up there? Sex in general? Or is it just because you called me and Dakota your lost babies?” He’s breathing hard, but I can see that this is a test for him, too. Because he never liked the way Tess treated me; it bothered him. Her actions toward me, in his eyes, did not match up to the mother she was to him.
The two of them stare one another down before Parrish pulls out another trick.
