Page 24

Rae's eyebrows shot up in surprise at his remark, not that Quinn could blame her.

Why was he acting like such a dick? She was giving him an incredulous look he was sure she'd never given him before and then let out a hollow laugh and turned back to Liam.

"I'd love to go with you. I'd hate to hold Quinn back from his numerous other prospects. "

"Great!" Liam flashed a megawatt smile at Rae and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "I'll see you this weekend at the club, right? Tennis tournament, I think. We can go over the details then."

The subtle mention that their families were members at the same country club felt like a slap to Quinn's face.

Rae gave a nod to Liam with a "see you then".

Quinn fully understood the meaning of Liam's smirk as he bumped his shoulder unnecessarily hard into Quinn's when he walked by.

Checkmate . Quinn felt his nostrils flare as he physically bit his tongue to keep from saying anything else.

Rae turned around and assessed Quinn briefly before blurting, "What the fuck, Quinn?"

"What?" It was more a clipped statement than a question.

"You're being an ass," Rae said as she tossed her bag in the back seat, holding the door open for him to do the same.

Apparently I am an ass. A fucking stupid one.

Quinn let out a sigh, though the anger he felt didn't fade. He walked around to the passenger's side of the car. "It's just been a long day."

They got into the car and Rae started the engine. "Maybe you're hangry. I'm sure food will help. I'm always ravenous after swim practice."

"I'm really not that hungry," said Quinn, unable to take the attitude out of his voice .

"You just said you were starving," Rae pointed out. She paused then sighed. "If you didn't want me to go with him, you should've said something."

This annoyed him further. "You didn't have to say yes.

..and I don't see why it should be my choice who you go with.

" He could feel himself glaring at her. "You're telling me if I'd made the decision for you and told him to back the fuck off because we were going together, you wouldn't have punched me in the balls for being a controlling dickhead? "

"Is that what you wanted to do?" Rae asked, seeming genuinely curious.

"No," Quinn lied. After a beat he finished, "I wanted you to choose for yourself."

Rae considered him and his response for a few moments before turning her car out of the parking lot. She let out another sigh, "Don't say dickhead . It makes me think of that creepy thumb guy from Spy Kids , but instead of thumbs he's just all dicks."

Quinn let out a quick snort of laughter and shook his head, though there was little humor to his clipped laugh.

Leave it to Rae to be able to make him laugh even when he was fuming.

He turned his attention to the window and ran a hand through his now cold, half-wet, full-messy mop of hair.

He thought about what Chris had said in the locker room about his and Rae's routine.

Well, apparently they weren't going together this time, but they were definitely sticking to the routine of ignoring their actual feelings for each other.

Only for the first time Quinn felt like he wasn't the only one putting on an act.

The Trojans won their homecoming game 56-28, which meant everyone was ready to really celebrate at the after-game mixer and of course at the dance the next day.

Chris was flying high, loving all the attention he'd gotten from his plays. Jett had made some solid tackles that earned him a lot of recognition which he was basking in. Jett loved all sports, but hockey was his number one. It wasn’t often he received the same high praise and admiration he got on the ice, and he was loving it.

As Quinn got ready in Chris's room, the guys talked about some of their better moments the previous night. It was strange to Quinn that they were still going to dinner and the dance in a group, but Rae wasn't part of it.

He'd ended up asking Britney Garrett, a sideline cheerleader who’d been flirting with him in several of their classes after Rae had made the decision to go with Liam.

He wondered if Britney had always flirted with him like this, but he'd been so focused on his crush on Rae that he hadn't noticed before.

She was pretty, Quinn thought. She was short, a flyer on the cheer team, with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and she seemed to have a sun tan year round. He was starting to think he had a type.

"Did Britney make you coordinate with her?" Jett asked, tying his necktie for the fourth time.

Quinn was dressed in navy blue dress pants with a matching blazer and a white dress shirt.

It was a simple outfit for homecoming, but he had to admit that now that he'd surpassed the six-foot mark and his muscles had really filled out over the last year, he didn't look like the raggedy kid he'd always felt like.

"I think she said her dress was white, or off-white.” Quinn replied.

Jett snorted. "Way off, by the sounds of it."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Quinn asked.

"Usually a girl in a white dress is a symbol of purity," said Jett. "And Britney, well, let's just say that's not the word I'd use to describe her."

Quinn paused, looking at Jett in the mirror. Turning to Chris he asked, "Is that true? Am I the only one who didn't know this?"

"You miss a lot when you let one girl become the center of your world," Chris replied. "I mean, they're only rumors, but I've definitely heard she gets around. So, I wouldn't be worried about what you're wearing. Probably won't be for too long."

Looking at himself in the mirror and fixing his hair, Quinn wasn't sure how to feel about this. He'd sort of always imagined his first time would be with Rae, and hers would be with him. Okay, so maybe that was more of a fantasy he liked to play on a loop in his head when he was alone. Regardless, he couldn’t admit his feelings to her, and if she had any toward him- which he highly doubted- she hadn’t stepped up either, so it seemed unlikely that fantasy would ever come true.

He told himself to just treat homecoming as any other night and not think of it as a big deal. Life would go back to normal on Monday and he'd have his chance to tell Rae how he felt then.

Now with the prospect of sex looming over his head, he was both heart-racing excited and brick-in-his-stomach nervous. What if he did have sex with Britney? How was he supposed to handle his feelings with Rae then? What if she had sex with Liam?

Oh, fuck, don't go there.

Quinn shook his head of the thought. No, he and Britney were not having sex.

Rae and Liam were definitely not having sex.

He told himself again that it was just one night of dancing and then he'd go straight to Rae's house tomorrow morning and tell her the truth.

Why wait until Monday? That way he wouldn't have the whole weekend to talk himself out of it.

He'd tell her that he'd been planning to ask her, but Liam got there first, and that's why he'd been such an ass, but with homecoming behind them, they'd be able to start something for real.

Homecoming was just a big show, anyway. He didn't need to see Rae in a fancy dress to know she was all he wanted.

Quinn, Chris, and Jett finished getting ready and hung out until Mrs. Watson called them down to let them know their ride was out front.

They'd pitched in together and rented a limousine for the occasion.

It was a splurge for homecoming, but it was the best way to fit six of them in a vehicle, and now it felt like their way of celebrating their big win the night before.

Lana, Britney, and Jett's date, Melanie, were all picked up at Lana's house where they'd gotten ready. The girls all had their parents there waiting to take pictures before heading to the restaurant for their dinner reservation .

At the table, Britney insisted on sitting next to, rather than across from Quinn and he'd barely started on the free bread when he began to suspect the rumors Chris and Jett had heard about her were true.

He felt her hand on his leg and looked down briefly to confirm that it was in fact Britney's perfectly manicured hand grasping his right leg. Not thinking anything of it, he dipped his Italian bread in the olive oil mixture in the middle of the table and took a full bite.

Britney's hand slid slowly up his thigh and back down, adding pressure.

This was not simply trailing a lazy hand up and down in an affectionate gesture.

This was a massage. An upper thigh massage.

An upper, inner thigh massage. And then- yep.

She found it. Not that it was a difficult task.

He had little control over how his body responded to a sensual inner thigh massage- he was a seventeen-year-old boy, after all- and once it decided it liked something, there wasn't anything he could do to hide it.

Quinn was grateful to have a mouthful of bread when he groaned, eliciting curious looks from the rest of the table. He gave a muffled, "So good," pointing to his mouth.

Everyone quickly got back to their conversations, and Quinn leaned his forearms on the table as Britney continued rubbing the length of his hard cock through his dress pants.

A few times he had to stifle a moan or turn it into a cough.

He made the mistake of briefly catching Jett's eye as he looked around the table self-consciously to see if anyone was watching.

Jett quickly figured out what was going on and had to bite back a laugh, turning toward Melanie and becoming suddenly very interested in her earrings.

Running out of ways to disguise his obvious arousal at getting an over-the-pants hand job at the table, Quinn found himself immensely relieved when Britney stopped abruptly, though he was throbbing and his balls were aching for release.