Page 19 of Privilege
Chapter Fifteen
Rich
Dane is back and I don’t like it.
Cara says I’m scowling too much, but it’s making me nervous having him in the house.
I can’t put my finger on it, but something is different between the two of them.
I don’t know if I’d call them friends, but there’s some kind of armistice happening because I’ve never seen Dane be so unironically polite to anyone in my entire life.
It reminds me of how it used to be, with us. The only good memories I have of this place are all tangled up with him .
Racing up the lattice on the side of the house, before I fell and he caught me. He dislocated his shoulder making sure I didn’t eat dirt.
Pissing in the fountain at the front entrance, dicks swaying in the wind and middle fingers up. When the staff told our parents, he insisted it was just him. Mother took away his Audi for a week.
Trying to grow pot in the greenhouse. Martha, my SAT prep tutor, figured it out right away, but Dane talked her out of tattling. He never did tell me how.
School was always best, though. I lived for varsity sports at Waldron Prep: the teams were a place to channel my energy, my frustration, my everything .
Dane spent more time with the caretakers tinkering with the campus golf carts than in a classroom, and was definitely in the Headmaster’s office a hell of a lot more than I ever was.
But he did well enough in school, which seemed to infuriate both his teachers and my mother for reasons I never understood.
Cara is stunning, sprawled out on the sun lounger with a giant floppy hat, wearing a teeny white string bikini that she bought at a boutique shop at the beach that is very unlike her and that I suspect has a lot to do with the fact that Jamie is also lounging poolside, trying not to stare at her .
This was a mistake.
I feel like an idiot. She said it was fine for Jamie to come, and I know she meant it, but you’d need a chainsaw to cut through this tension.
Part of me wishes I had Dane’s intuition for handling women.
Sure he’s a dick about it, fucks anyone with who’s conscious and forgets their name as fast as I’m sure he makes them come, but he’s always had some secret radar for what girls not to fuck around with.
Or what ones to bag on purpose, just to cause a scene .
Dane is sitting several loungers down, unusually focused on his laptop but clearly also eyeing Cara every chance he gets.
Yeah. I’m a fucking idiot.
“What are you reading?” Jamie asks Cara.
Cara peers over the tops of her sunglasses and holds up her book. Jamie wrinkles her nose.
“ Educated?” she says. “Isn’t that about Mormons, or something?”
Cara shrugs and pushes her sunglasses back up her nose, resumes her reading, one of the tiny straps of her bathing suit slipping off her freckled shoulder.
Why did I let Jamie come here? I could be spreading Cara out on that lounger, right now .
“Wait, it’s about Mormons?” I ask Cara, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s about a woman who was raised Mormon.”
“Don’t they have tons of wives?”
“Not in this book.”
Jamie sits up and straddles the chair. It irritates me that she is intentionally trying to get me to look at her crotch. Even if Cara and I weren’t together, even if Cara weren’t right fucking there, I have no interest in Jamie like that. Not now. Not after last summer.
Was she always like this? I don’t remember her being so… desperate. I guess she didn’t have to be since we were already fucking. God this is uncomfortable.
I’ll hand it to Cara, she’s taking it all with grace.
She hasn’t been overtly friendly, but she hasn’t been cold either.
She’s always quiet when she’s reading, and I usually leave her to it.
But I can tell that Jamie is struggling, unsure how to proceed with someone who is giving her neither positive nor negative attention.
A surge of pride warms my chest. Cara doesn’t need superficial confirmation from fake friends that she’s a good person. She doesn’t even have social media—says it aggravates her and that posts are vanity exercises. And she’s not wrong.
I envy this. Her ability to be uncomfortable. To take it in stride, and to unfailingly continue existing exactly as herself.
Cara is the first real woman I’ve ever met.
The words start bubbling up in my throat, the ones that burn in the back of my throat when I’m inside her. But they always retreat, three little soldiers returning to base. We do not have the tactical advantage here.
I’ve never had the tactical advantage. Everyone has a secret strategy, a plan, an agenda. Everyone but Cara. Still, it’s hard to unlearn what you’ve known all your life: it’s a trick.
She dog-ears a page and tosses it on the ground. I know that look—the I give up, I can’t concentrate on this face she makes that usually means she wants to masturbate or fuck. In this case, Jamie narrows her eyes and nods at the book.
“Are you studying religion?” she asks sweetly. “The Rich I know would never survive celibacy.”
My shoulders tense, wishing Jamie would just shut the fuck up.
I glance at Dane, half-hopeful that he’ll say something.
He could shut this down in a heartbeat, make some snide remark that would get Jamie out of our hair, have her so pissed at him for the rest of the summer that she’d never come sniffing around again.
But he’s busy frowning at his computer and frantically texting someone back and forth.
Cara looks Jamie right in the eye. “Celibacy is not a concern.”
God, I really do love you Cara.
Her face at the garden party on our first day bounces around in my head like a ping pong ball.
I forgot how quickly the piranhas descend; I’d gotten caught up with my friends and left her to these joy-eating leeches.
But she’d taken it all in stride as good as she takes my cock.
When Jamie had started pawing at me, I’d felt Cara’s eyes on me from across the lawn but didn’t know what to do.
And then Dane was hitting on her, and I bulldozed my way over and—
Was he hitting on her, though?
I frown, my brows pulling together. I wonder if he saw what Jamie was doing, saw me floundering like always under social pressure, and tried to bail me out.
Did he save my ass? Prevent a fight with Cara ?
“Do you have a religious kink or something?” Jamie continues.
Cara shrugs. “It’s really not that kind of book. But if you’re curious about religious kink, you should listen to Jacob Morgan narrate Priest. ”
My lips twitch and the warmth in my chest expands.
I’ve never known a girl with less sexual hangups than Cara.
She has a huge bookshelf full of all of her favourite smut.
She’s even played some audiobooks in the car a few times.
And I remember Priest. The part with the sacramental oils—I had to pull us over for a not-so-restful stop.
“Right, figured you’d be into that kind of thing,” Jamie says dismissively.
Cara looks genuinely confused. “Into having sex with my boyfriend?”
Jamie rolls her eyes in open exasperation. “Into freaky shit.” She turns to me. “You never needed all the bells and whistles with me, Richie.”
I blink in shock, and so does Cara. She looks like she’s been slapped in the face. The skin beneath her freckles reddens, and for the very first time she starts to lose her cool.
“Rich always did do me right,” Jamie says .
“Thanks for warming him up for me,” Cara snaps back.
My heart is thundering in my ears, anger boiling in my gut.
“We knocked off a lot of firsts together, didn’t we Richie?” Jamie says, not looking away from Cara. “Everything he knows, he learned from me.”
I start to rise from my seat—
“Thank you for making me squirt so often then,” Cara says sweetly.
I literally choke on my tongue, coughing like mad. Jamie huffs a breath and gets up, stomping off towards the poolhouse.
I start to go after her but Cara puts her palms gently on my shoulders and shakes her head.
“I got this,” she says softly.
She pauses, gives me an opportunity to ask her not to go, because I know whatever she’s about to do probably isn’t good. But if it means Jamie will be off our back for like, forever, then I give her my blessing.
I nod. She tosses her hat on the lounger and waltzes off after Jamie. My eyes are glued to her ass, sweet and round, cheeks hanging out of her bikini bottoms.
I love you .
They disappear one after the other into the poolhouse, and I run my hands through my hair. My skin prickles with awareness, and I turn around to face the pool again.
Dane is watching me, and even though his face is completely expressionless, I know he’s disappointed in me.
My chest tightens, and I take off across the lawn. I should have taken care of this for Cara. Or better yet, I shouldn’t have let Jamie talk me into having her here in the first place.