Push and Shove: The Ghost Bird Series: #6 (The Academy) (29 page)

Then I realized my clothes were gone.

I blushed, realizing North had probably been inside the bathroom. Did I not lock the door?

As if North had heard my thoughts, there was a gentle knock on the door. “Sang?”

“Yes?” I asked, wrapping the towel around my body. “What is it?”

North opened the door poking his head in. His eyes caught my face, lowered quickly to the towel and looked up again. He had a towel wrapped around his waist, tied off at the edge of his hips. I got an eyeful of his muscular broad chest, and the lines of his abs. Dark hair trailed up from under the towel toward his belly button. It distracted me from his face.

“You good?” he asked.

I nodded, not too sure what he was asking of me exactly.

He entered, crossed the room and picked up a blow dryer that was plugged into the wall. He unplugged it, then left the bathroom, curling his fingers at me to follow.

I crossed my arms against my chest to keep the towel tight around me, walking out into the main room behind him. My skirt and shirt and his T-shirt and jeans were sitting on top of the heater against the wall. My underwear was spread out on the desk, along with a pair of black boxer briefs. He plugged in the dryer.

“I’ve washed everything,” he said. He pointed to our underwear. “But dry these and we’ll sleep in them.”

I blushed, taking the blow dryer from his hands. I wondered how he managed to wash the clothes. Did he do it in the sink while I was in the bath? I hadn’t heard him. He must have found a sink somewhere else.

I hadn’t thought far enough ahead to consider what to sleep in. There was a certain bit of comfort in the way Academy guys seemed to always be thinking ahead.

North left me to take his own shower. I swept the blow dryer on high across our underwear. I touched the material, testing it, wanting to put mine on before he got back.

I had my underwear on and was fumbling with shaking fingers to get the bra hooked behind my back when the bathroom door opened again. My heart skipped, and I stuffed my arms over my breasts, half turned.

North stood just outside the bathroom door. His intense eyes swept down my body before lifting to my face. “Sorry,” he said, his cheeks tinting. “I...”

“It’s okay,” I said. We’d been through enough. I wasn’t sure if it was my tired mind, or my eagerness to want to get to sleep, but I felt dismissive of some modesty for the moment, especially since he was in a towel and I’d just been blow drying his underwear.

North blinked at me for a moment and I stood frozen, unsure what to do next. North surprised me by coming into the room toward me. “Turn around,” he said.

Maybe it was because I was used to Gabriel ordering me about when it came to my hair and clothes, but I turned my back to North as if he were Gabriel. North stood behind me. I could feel the ripples of heat from him, fresh from a hot shower.

He caught the edges of the bra straps and straightened them before hooking the back into place. His fingers slipped over my skin, crossing over my ribs. I forced back the urge to tremble.

“Thank you,” I said softly, starting to turn.

“Keep facing the wall.”

I turned back, staring blankly at the window curtains. I ran my fingers through my hair, twisting it slightly to ring out the last bit of water.

From the noises, I could tell North was removing the towel and putting the boxer briefs on. “Okay,” he finally said.

I turned slowly. He’d seen me in underwear before, but it’d been a while and it wasn’t exactly the best of circumstances then, either. I kept my eyes focused on his chest and up, but it was hard not to catch glimpses of his frame below the waistline. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted lines from his hips that curved down toward his underwear, making almost a V. I tried not to pay attention to his crotch, but my eyes kept wanting to dart there. I mean, I knew the differences between boys and girls, of course, but I’d had a limited viewing from encyclopedia pictures and nothing from real life.

North didn’t hide the fact that he was scanning my body, his face intense, frowning. His fingers drifted out, and he touched a spot at my collar bone. “Where’d you get that?”

I flinched and felt the area with my finger, finding a bruise. “I don’t remember,” I said. “I think maybe when Gabriel accidentally knocked the brush into me.”

“And that one?” he asked, pointing to a small one on my left side by my ribs.

I shrugged. “Nathan.” I didn’t want to mention it was probably during the tickle fight. It looked fresh.

“And that?” He pointed to one on my forearm.

“I don’t know.” I really couldn’t remember. I hadn’t noticed them before. When I saw certain ones, it just triggered a memory of one of a number of times the boys bumped into me for one reason or another.

He grunted. “We’re too rough with you.”

“I’m not a China doll,” I said. “I can handle a few bruises.”

North rolled his eyes and turned toward the large bed. He yanked off the top blanket, dropping it to the floor and kicking it out of the way. Underneath was a thinner blanket. He pulled it back, and the sheet below it before turning back to me. “Ready to sleep?”

I tiptoed forward, crossing my arms over my stomach. I’d slept in the same bed with him before. I’d slept in his bed. This was someone else’s bed and we were so many miles away from anyone we both knew.

And we were both in our underwear.

I climbed in quickly, tugging the sheet and blanket up around my shoulders.

North collected our phones to put on the night stand. He climbed into the bed next to me and clicked the light off.

In the darkness, I felt myself sinking into the bed. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was in an unfamiliar bed in a place where other people slept. I inched over closer to North, wanting to feel him there since I couldn’t see him. I didn’t want to be alone.

My fingers brushed his arm. It seemed to be all he needed. His arms encircled me, dragging me over until he had his bicep tucked under my head. He pulled our pillows closer together. He drew me up until I was close enough that he could dip his face into my hair.

What caught me off guard was when our stomachs touched together. A hunger ignited inside me. Sensations swept through my body. I was desperate for some sort of distraction so I didn’t have to think about it. “North?”

“Yeah, Baby.”

“Did you let Kota know we were here?”

He blew a sigh against my head. “Yeah. I told him.”

“Are we in trouble?”

He smirked against my head. “Probably. But you don’t have to worry about it tonight.”

“Are they going to be okay?”

“Last I heard, they managed to clear everyone out without the cops getting called in. The house is a wreck, though. I’ll have some work to do tomorrow. You’re going to have to have a chat with little miss Danielle and that sister when we get back.”

I let my lungs fill up, a mix of the bleached sheets and his faded musk, the soap we’d used. “I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice.

“For what?”

“For letting Rocky get that close. I didn’t know what he wanted and I knew you all were trying to get along with him.”

“It’s not your fault and it doesn’t matter,” he said. He wrapped his arm over my waist, with his hand splayed out across my back, tugging me close. “To be honest, I kind of like the way things turned out.”

“Oh?”

His head dipped down slightly, until his lips were against my forehead. “It made a perfect excuse to come out here with you. Next time I might get into a fight with Silas. Maybe we were wrong about how to handle this. Maybe I should pretend to be your boyfriend.”

My heart tripped over itself. The darkness gave me some courage and my mouth spit out the words, “We’ll be only pretending?”

The silence that followed felt like a lifetime. His chest shifted and his fingers against my back tightened, pulling at me. My own heart stopped, terrified at what I’d just said and the implications of what it meant. The other half of me wanted desperately for something to make sense to me, something that everyone else at school seemed to understand better than I did. Maybe instead of faking, if it became real, maybe the Academy rules could change, too. The ones I wasn’t sure about, but felt existed.

North pulled back, moving to hover over me. My eyes had adjusted enough that I caught the outline of his face. While I couldn’t see his eyes, I felt the intensity of him looking at me. My hands drifted up, catching his shoulders. My skin tingled from head to toe, electrified.

“Sang,” he said in a low tone, nearly a whisper. “You want to be mine?”

My tongue danced behind my lips. I don’t know what I’d been thinking before, but now I was desperate for just the right words. What did it mean? Was he asking me to be his girlfriend? What did it mean for Nathan? Or Kota? Or Victor? My heart trembled with the thought of disappointing any of them again. I’d taken North’s advice. I’d let them worry about who did what with me, dating or otherwise. North’s question felt like something more decisive. And I had no way of knowing the full implications of my answer.

Maybe it was because he was right in front of me, or because of the moonlight and the sea, and the magic of the North Shore still lingering in the back of my mind. Maybe it was my curiosity and my own need to feel closer to them, any of them, when I often felt like I was on the outside looking in.

And I was embarrassed to answer, as if saying a flat out yes would draw out some form of rejection from North. Would he say no? Did he think it was silly? “If you want me,” I said when I managed to find my voice again.

North’s fingers clasped at my hand, pulling my palm to his lips. He kissed, his lips spreading across my skin as he puckered. “Baby, we’re a bad match,” he spoke into my hand. He kissed it again. “We’re night and day. You’re so fucking cute, and sweet.” He kissed my fingertips. “And soft. And then you’ve got me, and I’m...”

Was he trying to be nice to tell me why we shouldn’t? I yanked my hand from his grasp, hurt that it sounded like he was rejecting me and just trying to be nice about it. “Are you saying you don’t want to?”

North jerked his head back, easing up higher as he propped himself up on his hands in like a push up over me. “I didn’t say that.”

“Why did you ask me if you didn’t want to?”

“That’s not what I fucking said, Sang. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

The panic I’d been fighting all evening bubbled to the surface, consuming me. “You just said we were a bad match.”

North grunted, he pulled back until he was sitting up, pulling the blanket away. He sat back on his heels, kneeling on the bed. “I was trying to warn you that we’re different.”

“So you don’t want to.”

North shoved a palm against his face, rubbing. “Sang, I didn’t fucking say that.”

I drew myself up until I was sitting, leaning back on my hands. “I don’t know what you want from me. First I’m supposed to be with Silas. Then we thought I might have to be Nathan’s girlfriend. Now you say we should switch and I should be with you. With Kota’s mom, I’m dating him. With your Uncle I’m with Luke. You ask me if I want you, and then tell me you think it’s a bad idea.”

“We’ve been trying to make it easier on you,” North said. “The whole fucking set up is to keep your ass out of trouble.”

“I don’t even know what that means. What am I supposed to do? What do you want from me?”

North growled in a way that at first scared me, startling me out of my hyper rampage. He bolted forward, grasping me by the hips and pushing me until I was flat on my back against the bed. My thighs split, making room for his hips to wedge between them. He sank down until he was hovering over me.

His lips met my skin at the corner of my mouth. He kissed me again down closer to my chin, and started a trail of kisses along my jaw. I gasped, my hands drifting up until my arms encircled his neck. My fingers weaved their way through the hair at the back of his head. My breath caught, my body reacting and I felt nearly paralyzed. I didn’t want to move, scared to death that he’d stop.

“Why are we like this?” He breathed against my skin, then planted another kiss along my jaw. “Even when I’m pissed off at you, I want to kiss the shit out of you.”

“North,” I whispered, suddenly unable to think of anything to say. I clung to him, desperate.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, his lips making a trail along my jaw, sparking up my skin with every touch. His mouth parted, until his teeth grazed against my earlobe. His hand held the side of my face, encouraging me to tilt my head to expose more of my neck to him. “Baby, don’t let me.”

I didn't want him to stop. Kota had said he couldn’t. I’d seen the way Luke, and Nathan, and even Victor hesitated. Whatever Academy rule prevented them from doing whatever it was they really wanted, I secretly hated. I thought if I could get anyone to break the rules, to show me exactly what they weren’t allowed to do with me, North would be the one.

The darkness made it easier to find my courage. I leaned up, planting my lips against his cheek, close to his ear. I did what he did. I opened my mouth a little, running my lower teeth across the soft flesh just under his jawline. The coarse hair his jaw dragged against my lips. I moved my head a little, wanting to kiss his skin again, when his head tilted.

At first I thought he was trying to pull away. In a desperate move, I gripped at him, trying to pull him back in. My mouth was open. He lowered himself again.

My teeth met with his neck and I bit.

The next growl that erupted from his lips didn’t scare me. A thrill crept up my spine. I didn’t know what I’d done. Confusion set in and I released him.

“How did you do that?” North’s voice was guttural and low against my neck. “Fuck, Baby...”

“Did it hurt?” I asked.

“No.” His breath heated against my neck. “Do it again.”

I hesitated at first, but my need to do what he so desperately wanted overtook me. I kissed at his neck, trying to find the right spot. I opened my mouth, my teeth met with his skin and I bit.

“Harder,” he seethed.

I sank my teeth in, enough to make indentations, but not enough to break the skin.