Chapter 2: The Frat Boy and the Forbidden Thrill
The thump of bass was a physical thing, a pressure against Beatrice’s sternum that made her teeth ache. The frat house basement swam in a kaleidoscope of neon and strobe, a sweaty, heaving mass of grinding bodies and sloshing plastic cups. The air was thick with the smell of spilled beer, cloying perfume, and the underlying salt of young skin. She stood by a makeshift bar—a plank on two kegs—and threw back another shot of something cheap and viscous. It burned a path down her throat, a welcome fire.
She was trying to burn him out.
Four days. Four days since Nathan’s office, since the door had creaked and he’d frozen inside her, since he’d made her come apart on his desk until she wept. Four days of silence in seminar, of his eyes skating over her like she was just another student, of the memory of his mouth between her legs flaring up at the most inconvenient moments, hot and shameful.
“Hey.” The voice was close, loud over the music. A body slid next to her, all hard muscle in a tight t-shirt. A frat boy. Blake? Brad? He had the generic good looks of someone who spent more time on a bench press than a bookshelf. “You look like you need another.”
He was already pouring, his fingers brushing hers as he handed her the cup. His hands were big, blunt instruments. Not like Nathan’s, which were long-fingered, ink-stained, precise.
“Thanks,” she said, her voice swallowed by the music.
“I’m Bryce.” He leaned in, his breath smelling of mint and whiskey. “You’re in my Poli-Sci 101 lecture. Bea, right?”
She nodded, taking a long gulp. The room tilted pleasantly. She let her gaze wander over him, this stranger. His smile was a white, even slash. He was simple. He wanted simple things. The thought was a relief.
“You wanna get out of this sweatbox?” Bryce shouted into her ear. His hand settled on the small of her back, a presumptuous weight. “Upstairs is quieter.”
She looked at his hand. Imagined Nathan seeing it. Imagined the cold, furious stillness that would settle over his face. A sharp thrill, barbed and ugly, cut through the alcohol haze. “Yeah,” she said, louder than necessary. “Quieter sounds good.”
His grin widened. He took her cup from her hand, set it down, and led her through the pulsing crowd, his hand a firm guide. They ascended the sticky, carpeted stairs, the music fading to a dull throb. The upstairs hallway was dim, lined with closed doors and the muffled sounds of other people’s bad decisions. He shouldered open a door at the end of the hall.
The room was a cliché of masculine neglect: unmade bed, dirty laundry mound, a faint smell of weed and athletic tape. A single lava lamp bubbled on a desk, casting grotesque, undulating shadows. Bryce kicked the door shut with his heel.
The silence was sudden, ringing.
“So,” he said, turning to her. He didn’t bother with pretense. His hands went to her hips, pulling her against him. She could feel the hard line of his erection through his jeans. It was eager, uncomplicated.
Her mind flashed to Nathan’s desk, to the slow, devastating build of his touch. This was nothing like that. This was a transaction. She arched into Bryce’s touch anyway, a mocking performance. “So,” she echoed.
He kissed her. It was all tongue and pressure, wet and aimless. She kept her eyes open, staring at a poster of a sports car on the wall behind him. She imagined Nathan’s furious face if he knew where she was, what she was doing. The thought made her moan into Bryce’s mouth, a sound she didn’t recognize as her own.
He took it as encouragement. His hands slid under her skirt, his blunt fingers hooking into the waistband of her underwear and yanking them down her legs. They pooled around her ankles. He broke the kiss, breathing heavily. “Fuck, you’re ready,” he grunted, his fingers pushing inside her with a rough, clinical efficiency.
She was. Her body, traitorous and wired, responded. It was just physiology, she told herself. Just nerves and synapses firing, meaningless.
“On the bed,” he said, not asking.
She stepped out of her underwear and backed toward the bed, the coarse comforter scratching the backs of her thighs. Bryce was already undoing his belt, his jeans shoved down in one hurried motion. His cock sprang free, thick and ruddy. He wasn’t gentle. He knelt on the bed, pushed her knees apart, and drove into her in one brutal, shearing thrust.
The air punched out of her lungs. He was bigger than Nathan, in a crude, filling way. There was no finesse, no building rhythm. Just a hard, piston-like fucking, the bed frame slamming against the wall in a frantic, jarring tempo. Each impact jolted through her.
“Yeah, take it,” Bryce grunted, his hands pinning her hips down, his face a mask of slack concentration.
She turned her head, her cheek against the stale pillow. The lava lamp blobbed and morphed. She focused on that. She let the sensations wash over her—the raw friction, the slap of his skin against hers, the cheap smell of his cologne mixed with sweat. She detached, floating somewhere near the ceiling, watching this girl named Bea get railed by a stranger.
But her body, that stupid, honest animal, began to climb. The sheer, mindless intensity of it, the degradation of it, sparked a low heat in her gut. She heard herself make a noise, a tight, choked sound.
“You like that, you filthy slut?” Bryce rasped, his pace becoming erratic, brutal.
The word should have killed the mood. Instead, it fanned the embers. Slut. It was what she was, here in this bed. It was what Nathan had made her, in his office. She was just living up to the title. She moaned again, louder, throwing her head back, offering her throat. She pictured Nathan’s face, not furious, but cold, watching. Disappointed. It pushed her closer.
“Gonna come,” Bryce warned, a animalistic groan. He shoved into her one last, deep time, his body locking, a guttural cry tearing from his throat as he emptied himself inside her. She felt the hot, wet pulse. It was impersonal. A biological function.
He collapsed on top of her for a second, heavy and damp, before rolling off. He lay beside her, breathing hard, staring at the ceiling. “Shit,” he panted, a satisfied laugh in his voice. “That was awesome.”
Beatrice didn’t move. The wetness between her legs was already cooling. The room smelled of sex and boy. She felt hollowed out, scraped clean. The buzzing in her head had stopped. For the first time in four days, the memory of Nathan’s mouth, his fingers, his quiet intensity, was just a picture. Faded. Manageable.
She sat up, swung her legs off the bed. She found her underwear on the floor, stepped into them, smoothed her skirt down.
“You leaving?” Bryce asked, propped on an elbow. He looked confused, almost offended.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice flat. She found her purse by the door.
“Hey, we should do this again. I got your number from the class list.”
She didn’t answer. She walked out, down the hallway, past the thumping bass of the party still raging below. The night air outside was a cold slap. She breathed it in, the clean scent of cut grass and asphalt, trying to wash the party out of her lungs.
Her phone buzzed in her purse. She pulled it out. The screen glowed in the darkness.
A single text message, from Nathan.
My office. Tomorrow. 4 p.m.
The hollow feeling vanished. It was replaced by a different kind of emptiness, a yawning pit of dread and something else, something that felt terrifyingly like hope. She stood on the sidewalk, the distant pulse of the music at her back, and stared at the words until they blurred. The chill of the night seeped into her bones, but the space between her legs still felt warm, claimed, messy.
She started walking, the text burning a hole in her hand.