Page 21 of Overruled

I can barely keep myself upright, leaning on my elbows as Ezra’s thrusts grow messy and unsteady—only seconds passing before his big body curls over mine, his hips pushing as close as they can to keep him deep inside me when he comes.

Even still I can just make out one hooded eye peeking at me from over my shoulder, watching me.

I can feel the warm huff of his breath against my neck as we come down from it, feel his arm curve around my belly to hold me tight as his heart races against my back.

We stay like that for a moment, and I wait for that familiar panic to settle, the one that tells me to get away from him as fast as I can as soon as we’re done, but for once I feel…

calm. Even with the way we’re still watching each other.

Like now that I’ve allowed myself to go there, I’m finding it difficult to stop.

He presses open-mouthed kisses to my shoulder lazily, and I don’t know who is more surprised that I lean into it slightly. “We’re in your parents’ bathroom,” he says.

“No one is more aware of that than me,” I huff.

“This is…” I feel his smile against my skin. “Not how I saw this night playing out.”

I turn my head to smirk at him. “It isn’t?”

“No.” He feathers another kiss against my skin. “I told you. I just wanted to see you.”

The fluttering in my chest is as confusing as it is alarming. I clear my throat, moving subtly so that he might separate himself from me. Ezra takes the hint, both of us wincing as he slips out of me.

“Don’t throw that in the garbage,” I tell him pointedly, shooting a look at the used condom he’s still wearing and then at the open trash bin.

He cocks his head. “What do you suppose I do with it?”

“Flush it?”

“Do you want to risk it stopping up the toilet? I don’t know about you, but that’s not something I want to explain.”

I frown. “Guess it’s going in your pocket then.”

“I…Shit.” He grimaces, pulling it off and knotting it, then wrapping it up in some toilet paper. I look away while he works, straightening my dress. “I cannot go back out there and talk to your dad with a used condom in my pocket.”

“No one asked you to get all chummy with my dad,” I snort.

I can hear the rustle of denim, and I turn back just as he starts to button his pants, wearing a sly grin. “I can’t help it that everyone finds me so charming.”

“Right,” I deadpan. “Sure they do.”

He leans in, and even though my first instinct is to pull away, I find myself rooted to the spot as his lips brush against mine. “I think you find me charming, Dani.”

“As if I would—”

We both startle as loud popping sounds begin to go off outside, jolting apart as I try to place them.

“Fireworks,” I say after a beat. “I’d better go check on them before Dad blows a hand off.” Ezra is still smiling that shit-eating grin, and I shoot him a wary look. “What?”

“You and I make sparks fly,” he says, looking proud of himself.

I groan. “That was awful.”

“You’ll laugh about it later.”

“I absolutely will not.” I frown at the floor, fussing over my dress. “Where’s my underwear?”

It takes me a second to look up and catch his grin, and only seconds more to follow the line of his arm to see my underwear hanging from his finger. “These?”

“Give them to me,” I grouse, holding out my hand.

“Mm. No.” He winds them around his fingers, haphazardly folding them into a little square. “I think I’ll keep these.”

“You will not.”

“Need a memento,” he says slyly. “Otherwise I’ll wake up tomorrow thinking I dreamed this.”

I could protest harder, probably, as I watch him stuff my panties into the same pocket he just stowed the knotted condom in, I know that. I’ll never admit that watching him do it sets off a flood of warmth in my belly.

“You’re an ass,” I mutter instead.

He leans in when he has my underwear tucked safely away, pressing a kiss to my cheek that leaves a tingling behind in its wake. “I know.”

I clear my throat as I pull away from him, checking myself over in the mirror.

My dress is straight and my hair looks less sex-mussed, and I realize I don’t know what else to say.

I’m not stupid enough to pretend that something didn’t…

happen here, I just don’t know yet exactly what it was.

So, like a coward, I reach for the door.

“Dani,” he says, stopping me.

I turn with my hand on the knob, biting my lip as his eyes meet mine. “Yeah?”

“You didn’t say this was the last time,” he points out, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

I swallow, my mouth dry. “I…” I take in a breath just to let it out. “I didn’t.”

His answering smile only elicits more fluttering beneath my ribs, so much so that it threatens to steal my breath.

I wait for him to say more, no idea what I’ll do if he does—so maybe it’s a gift from Ezra that he doesn’t.

That he just nods and lets me leave through the bathroom door to escape.

If I stay, we’ll have to talk about what just happened, what it meant —and I’m not sure I can do that. At least not yet.

We don’t talk for the rest of the party—in large part because of me, I think—as Ezra seems content to give me space while I work through the conflicting feelings I’m experiencing.

But I feel his eyes on me the rest of the party, our gazes catching too many times to count as he mingles and I chaperone my increasingly hammered parents.

When I spot my dad laughing loudly at something Ezra says at some point, I do my very best not to think about the fact that Ezra is talking to my father with my panties in his pocket.

Even if the heated look Ezra gives me over the crowd makes it almost impossible not to, especially considering how… breezy it is under my dress.

And when Ezra leaves sometime later, I watch him as he goes, casting me one last lingering look before he disappears through the wooden gate that leads out of the backyard toward the front of the house.

It only takes moments after that for a buzzing in the pocket of my dress to make me jump, and that one text ensures that I will be thinking about Ezra for the entire night, if not well into tomorrow.

Asshole: Next time I want you in a bed, and I want you for the whole night. Maybe it will be enough time to do the things I’ve been thinking about doing to you.