Page 11 of Slick & Spooky
My smile falters. I glance toward where Knox had been standing, but the space is empty.
My stomach drops.
Bodies surge and sway around me, but every face I scan blurs together, faceless, useless. My pulse spikes, frantic, because I know better.
“He’s gone,” I mutter, eyes raking over the crowd like I expect him to lunge out of the shadows, some nightmare made flesh.
When I turn, he’s there. Right behind me. Close enough that I feel the heat of him before my eyes even catch up, closeenough that my whole body jolts like I’ve been caught in a trap I should’ve seen coming.
I jolt hard enough to choke on my own breath. “Jesus.”
Emily laughs, oblivious, but even she feels the shift in the air. “Hey, Knox.”
He tips his head in a curt nod before locking on me. No mask now. Just a stare that strips me bare where I stand.
“Emily,” he says evenly, “Can I borrow him? Pledges are needed for shift change.”
“Oh! Of course.” She pats my shoulder, kisses my cheek. Knox goes rigid at the touch. “Come find me after,” she chirps, vanishing back into the crowd.
Before I can breathe, his hand clamps around my forearm. He yanks me off the dance floor with enough force that my feet can barely keep up. We barrel through bodies too fast, too rough, shoulders slamming against us, curses following in our wake. My skin burns under his grip.
I wrench free, stumbling back into the sea of heaving bodies.
The staircase to the brothers’ rooms blocks one side, the crowd the other. I’m trapped, boxed in on every angle, but it isn’t the mob that steals my air.
Up close, there’s no escaping the details of him. The faint sting of alcohol clinging to his breath. The clean bite of shaving cream mixed with something darker, something earthy, all of it wrapping around me until I can’t tell if I’m suffocating or inhaling him on purpose. Heat radiates off his skin so much that every inhale feels stolen.
He spins on me, ready to tear me apart. “What were you doing?”
My lips curl, the brat in me refusing to back down. “Dancing.” I nod toward Emily, still swaying in the pit, hair wild, lipstick smeared. “Keeping the girls happy. Isn’t that the point tonight?”
He steps closer, “Like the one you were throwing yourself all over for my benefit?”
He doesn’t even seem to realize how close we’ve drifted. His breath fans across my cheek, every exhale a steady reminder that he’s right here. From a distance, it probably looks like he’s chewing me out. Maybe he is, but not for the reasons anyone else would imagine.
“You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”
“That was the point,” I say as I hold his stare.
The crowd surges around us, bodies colliding, and somehow we’re swaying in time with it. Tethered and moving together like there’s a line pulled tight between us.
“It can’t happen again.”
My fingers drift up his arm, settling against the thick muscle of his shoulder. The excuse is the music so loud that I have to lean in, but when my lips graze his ear, my voice comes out as a low purr against his skin.
“Can’t… or won’t?”
His body betrays him before his mouth might. A shudder runs through him and I feel it travel straight into me.
“Both,” he breathes.
I blink. “Why?”
His eyes flick up to meet mine. “You know why.”
“Because I’m a pledge,” I scoff.
He shrugs, and the movement is infuriatingly casual. “That’s part of it.”