Kalen's lips upon my own were a feverish blister of velvet softness cascading against my mouth with such a savage, untamed cadence that I was sure I'd wake up burnt from the inside out.

His arms were around my waist and holding me flush against his body, his warmth flooding my body until chills reverberated from my scalp down to my toes which were curled in my shoes.

My mouth opened of its own accord and suddenly his tongue was there tracing my own as he coaxed a reedy breath from my lungs escaping as a tiny whimper that he devoured in its entirety.

It didn't take long for logic to infiltrate my mind and pull me from his kiss, however, as I yanked myself out of his embrace all at once as it finally hit me who, exactly, I had been kissing.

His eyes wide in the bright moonlight high above, I took two deep, steadying breaths, and ran away from him. 

Again. 

This time, however, he was hot on my heels as I dashed through the party yet again. 

"Gracie, would you just slow the fuck down!"

Taking the stairs two at a time, I ended up on the second floor landing across from Colby's room and darted into a room closest to his, praying that it would be empty. 

With the door closed and the sounds from the party a mere thud against my eardrums, I placed my hands over my mouth and replayed the ill-timed kiss over in my head. 

Again.  And again.  And again. 

What was he thinking, kissing me like that? 

And...why had I liked it so much that I almost hadn't pulled away?

The door slammed open revealing Kalen there, his face like an avenging angel as his eyes burned to a temperature that I was sure would incinerate us both. 

"What the fuck do you want from me?!"

He stepped forward and shut the door with practiced patience, a self control so whittled down it seemed as if it took everything in him not to snap then and there.

"What do I want from you?  Now, there's an interesting question.  What do you think I want from you, Gracie?"

He stalked forward, his body coming nearer and nearer while all I could do was back up slowly, eyes firmly latched onto his.

"Honestly, I don't fucking know anymore!  First you act like you hate me because of what my mom did and you treat me like shit, and then you go off and kiss me!  So, I have no idea what I'm supposed to think, and I really don't have time to wonder what you want either, which is why I asked you in the first place!"

He was so close I could feel the heat emanating off him, and I had to do something to get him away from me for just a second so I could think—so I shoved him.

I pushed away from Kalen, my palms hitting his chest, and suddenly he stumbled into the door and then my hands were burning, my skin on fire like acid dripped from it as bile rose up in my throat.

Because he was looking at me with a mixture of loathing and want, a need embedded so deep within his being that he resented himself for the fact that he could never wash it out, never clean his hands of me because of that damnable thing dancing behind his eyes as he breathed me in.

But then, like a bad game of child's play, Kalen's hands were on my shoulders, edging me backwards further into his room with some strange gentleness to his touch that didn't match the ferocity on his face.

I backpedaled from his gentle touch, my back squaring up against the dresser on the other side of his room.

But Kalen didn't stop there.

His feet brought his every stalking step closer, closer, until the air was trapped outside of my lungs and I couldn't open my throat enough to inhale anything besides the terror and rage and confusion and downright impure things my mind was conjuring up.

Inappropriate things.

Things I shouldn't have been thinking about the man whose father had destroyed my parent's marriage.

The man who'd bullied me since my very first day here at this school.

The man who was still trying to make my life a living hell, just because of who my mother was.

Desire wasn't prejudiced, though.

No, desire was a living entity with claws and talons that scraped along the shell of your ear and whispered sweet nothings about your enemy until you looked into their eyes and wondered what they'd look like with you on top of them.

He came impossibly closer, eyes dancing to a raging inferno that bled his eyes black.

His warmth was a visceral laceration to my core, and I choked on a whimper as his hand came up and captured the curve of my jaw, forcing me to stare up at him in furious contempt.

My balled fists came up and slammed against his chest, but they were feeble attempts at pushing him away, because the feel of his skin against mine was sinfully exquisite, a balm to a burn that he'd scorched along my skin the first moment we met.

"Why—are—you—doing—this—to—me?"

"You're the one hitting me, Gracie. Is this what gets you off, then, huh?  Is it?"

There was a lethal calm hidden in the depths of his voice, but his words were level as smooth hatred poisoned them as they escaped his mouth.

"I hate you!"

The words exploded out of me like a pressurized canon finally going off.

"There it is, now how hard was that, baby?"

He leaned in so that the musk of his cologne infiltrated my senses and I was lost in a tidal wave of conflicting instincts—to push away or pull closer?  To destroy or to claim?

"Don't call me that."

His teeth nipped at the tip of my earlobe and a gasp fell past my lips, but the roaring of my blood in my ears drowned it out completely.

"Why not? You seemed to like it."

My back arched—unwillingly—into his body, my neck angling to the side almost begging for the same treatment he'd given to my ear.

Upon his words, however, some sense of sanity must've washed over me because I jerked back like I'd been slapped.

"I don't.  I don't like a thing about you, Kalen. Did you forget the part where your father and my mother ruined my fucking life?"

"I remember lots of things, Gracie. More than you do."

Pulling back to glance up at his shadowed face, I stared as the dim lights from the lamp nearby cast ghosts of grey against the hard planes of his face that had shuttered like boards over a house on the coast before a hurricane.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

For a moment, his body was unmoving and complacent, not even a feathering of his jaw to show that he'd heard my question.

He was so beautiful that it was unfair; sharp chiseled cheeks dusted in dark stubble traced the lines of his face and his piercing eyes so light blue they were almost grey, he was as devastatingly perfect as he'd been the day I arced my hand through the air and slapped his infuriatingly perfect fucking face.

If I could pretend, only for a moment, that my mother had chosen Kalen's father to be the catalyst for everything that had gone wrong in my life, then the hatred would dissipate and the clouds would part and the skies would clear until I could see him for what he was.

But this wasn't a 'what-if' scenario, and Kalen was the embodiment of that pain, wrapped up in a too-pristine bow.  

And he lived up to each and every thing Colby had said about him in passing complaints—sometimes even surpassing his descriptions.

Kalen allowed my silent perusal of his form as the space between our breaths grew longer and my body ached from where my back was pressed against the hard wooden dresser behind me.

Then, the bow snapped out of the quiver and he came to life once more.

His hands slammed against the dresser on either side of me.

"What are you doing?"

If only my voice didn't shake.

He took hold of my jaw with one hand, using it to leverage my gaze up to his when my eyes caught to the side of him instead of directly attached to his freezing grey eyes filled with rage in their interminable black depths.

I shoved him backwards, slamming my palms against his chest.

"That's it sweetheart, let it out. Show me you really mean it."

"Do you get off on this, is that what this is? You're so bored in your perfect life, you need to find pleasure somehow in fucking mine up, again? Like your life isn't already perfect, with your daddy buying everything you could ever want. You don't know what it feels like to have everything you ever wanted crumble in front of your fucking eyes!"

"I'm not the one responsible for fucking up your life, Gracie. That award goes to someone else. Talk about my father again, and this is over. Do you understand?"

His hand was on my jaw again, slinking lower until it was wrapped around my throat and I couldn't breathe, but he used his grip on me to force me to nod once as if I agreed with whatever he'd said.

He went to leave, letting go of me swiftly and all at once, and I yanked him back by his shirt, but instead of yelling at him again, I glanced at his lips once, twice, then pulled him in until our lips crashed into each other.

Fuck.

What was I thinking?

I wasn't, clearly.

Not as his lips roved across mine in a devouring, contempt-filled worship; some kind of backwards, iniquitous temptation of sin that curled my leg around his waist.

I captured his lower lip between my teeth and bit down hard enough that a small amount of blood flowed freely into my mouth, but Kalen's grip on me didn't ease up like I'd expected it to.

No, instead he pulled me closer, his body fusing to mine like it was made for me and I let go of his lip in shock, my mouth open in a gasp that gave him free reign over my tongue while he bit down on me this time, though not nearly as rough as I had with him.

His hands were capturing mine against the dresser, keeping me frozen against him while I was powerless and he did as he wanted.

Could I have stopped it, even if I wanted to?

Possibly.

Did I want to?

He rocked himself against my center and I realized with shocking clarity that, no, I didn't want to stop.

Not even as he pulled his lips from mine and began a trail of bruising kisses down along the side of my neck that would definitely leave a mark.

Multiple marks.

There was a bubbling torrent of emotions that I'd never felt the need to deal with that rose to the surface, strangling me with their force, begging to be let out of their cage.

I ripped the lock off the prison I'd tossed my denial in and reveled in the aftermath of its destruction.

Sanity was a thing of moments before as I suspended it indefinitely.

Who needed to be sane, anyway, when insanity felt so damn good?

Insanity hooked my other leg around his waist so that he held me up against his dresser with only one hand.

Insanity arched into his touch and bled into the cracks between kisses where my rationality used to live.

He carved a path of my devastating destruction and I begged for the scars that he would leave in his wake because at least it was better than feeling that damned emptiness that had tried to suck me under its depths.

I hated the man who was making me shiver and moan beneath his touch and that was the only reason I let myself go completely, allowing him to rip my shirt off in one fell swoop and capture my chest in his devouring eyes with hungry strokes of need painting his pained features.

His lips veered back to mine and he kissed me like he was starving, kissed me like a crazed man as my mouth parted and fell open for him, inviting him in, gasping and writhing against him in a wanton display of heated lust and uncontrollable desire.

I really should've pulled away. Stopped this, stopped all of it...

But then his fingers delved beneath the waistband of my jeans, and I released his mouth to throw my head back against the dresser while he made a sound of desperation in the back of this throat, not quite a groan but not a growl either.

Something deep and rumbling that showed his effusive approval.

"Do you have any idea how wet you are right now, Gracie? I didn't think you were someone who liked it rough."

His tone was mocking as his fingers played across my panties, rubbing me in smooth, rough strokes that had me twitching against his hard body keeping me pressed unforgivingly against the dresser.

"Shut the fuck up and kiss me."

And then I brought his lips back to mine while he chuckled darkly against me, my core clenching at the sound and my entire being rocketing off to space as his fingers dipped inside of me.

He moaned low and deep at the feel of me while resting his forehead against mine, our panting and labored breaths mingling together while I could only remain still, suspended in the air with my legs around his waist, one of his hands curled around my neck and the other forcing me to shiver in want and desire as his finger plunged in and out of me.

"Tell me you hate me, Gracie."

"I—I—oh, god," I tried. The words wouldn't come.

That didn't mean that I didn't feel it.

I stretched wider as he added a second finger and my moans turned into careless whimpers of abandon and could barely glimpse his amused smirk at my reaction to him before he latched his lips onto my neck and sucked.

His fingers curled inside of me and stars exploded across the backs of my closed eyelids, the entire world falling around me in a hazy cloud of lust filled panting breaths and shimmering, keening desire that threatened to unfurl from my mouth in desperate, aching moans, whimpers, whispers and pleas of more.

"What was that?"

He stopped immediately his ministrations on my body when I couldn't answer him.

"Pl-please—"

"Please, what? More?"

To punctuate his question, he pumped his fingers inside me and curled them at the same time and I cried out uncontrollably, head thrown back as Kalen's lips reattached themselves to my neck and I held on tight for the waves of pleasure to burst...but they never came.

He'd stilled once more, though there was still that tight pressure building within me that I couldn't stand to pull away from.

He was the personification of hate and everything I shouldn't have wanted, but in that moment he was my escape—my desperate attempt to unravel and destroy myself just like I'd already been doing with the alcohol every night, only in a different, much more catastrophic way.

Because once Kalen Rush made me come on his fingers, there was no going back.

I would be ruined, tainted, demolished and wrecked and shattered into a million tiny pieces of who I thought I used to be.

But I'd let him ruin me for just another taste, because the pieces of me were already stained to begin with.

Might as well let the person who soiled my pieces in the first place finish the job.

"More," I demanded, and he pulled away to let me glimpse that feral, wicked smile of his that had always turned my insides to mush even though I tried to deny it so vehemently to myself.

He'd had his hooks in me far deeper than I ever wanted him to discover.

He obliged me and resumed his blissful torture on my body, but it wasn't until his lips returned to kiss my own that I whimpered helplessly into his mouth and shattered beneath his touch.

His tongue invaded my mouth and I let it.

His free hand caressed my cheek and I allowed it.

He crushed his body against my own and I welcomed him.

I shivered against him and came back down from a high that had my head spinning so fast I forgot that the man who held me had done irreparable damage to me, to my family—and that I was a terrible person to have ever let him touch me that way—to have pulled him to me in the first place in a kiss that I never should've initiated.

He pulled away and the blazing hunger in there had never dissipated, only strengthened, and as he pulled his hand from my jeans to stare at me, I didn't look away.

Not even as he pulled his fingers to his mouth and sucked them clean.

There were...not enough words in the Oxford English Dictionary to describe that sight.

My legs shook, my back ached, and my throat pulsed with the memory of his lips attached to it.

I had to escape, had to get out of there and away from that look in his eyes—

"...know she's up there!"

"It's your funeral, man."

I shoved off from the dresser, backed away from Kalen, threw my shirt back on from where Kalen had tossed it aside, affixed my hair over my neck to hide any love bites and turned just in time as Colby burst through the doors with some of Kalen's teammates on his heels.

"What are you doing here?"

Maybe my voice had been a bit too harsh. Maybe Colby put the pieces together of what we were doing in here together all by himself, or maybe it was none of those things.

It didn't really matter, anyway.

"I saw you run up here and how he followed you, but that doesn't matter. You need to get home, now."

Kalen stood silent and still, a sentinel in a hurricane, an anchor in a storm while he was battered in a storm of his own making.

His fists were clenched at his sides, his eyes mocking toward Colby, refusing to meet mine as a sneer overtook his face.

The world spun on its axis at the look on Colby's face, though, and I found that it was hard to meet his eyes.

Staring at Kalen was easier. It reminded me of the mistake I had just made.

"What's wrong?"

"It's your dad, he..."

Ice water dumped down the back of my neck.

While I'd been throwing myself at the person who'd destroyed him, my dad had tried to kill himself. Again.

"Oh."

Someone was pulling all the oxygen from the room with a vacuum because suddenly I couldn't pull enough air into my lungs.

I couldn't tell the truth from the lies and I couldn't discern friend from foe.

I still couldn't look at Colby.

"He's at Pinecrest right now, I can drive you."

"Okay."

But I didn't move. I couldn't. The gravity wasn't working; instead of letting me take a step, it rooted me to the ground.

If it let me move, I would bound up into the atmosphere and never come down.

"Snap out of it, Gatlin."

There was a hand in front of my face, palms out, trying to get my attention.

Right?  Didn't he already have my attention?  

Why weren't my ears working properly anymore?

Nothing made sense anymore.

Maybe I didn't want it to.

I swayed and arms as strong as bricks captured me along the waist.

My skin tingled from where he touched me.

"Get your hands off her," Colby barked out from where he stood, moving closer to me like he had any say over me anymore.

He moved forward and I flinched inwardly, but that just so happened to mean that I curled into Kalen's body as well.

"What the fuck—Gracie, we don't have time for this!"

"I'll find a ride myself Colby. You can go."

"Seriously? You—I'm trying to help you Gracie. I'm just trying to help."

Kalen came to life at Colby's words.

"Yeah? You were helping by throwing that new girlfriend of yours in her face, too?"

"That's none of your fucking business, Rush.  Gracie, come on. Let's go."

"I—no. No, I think I'm going to find another ride."

"I'm not leaving you here with him."

"What? Scared his dad will try to follow me to the hospital and finally finish my dad off?"

Kalen flinched in my peripherals. It wasn't noticeable, but I'd seen it. My words had hit home.

Colby seemed to think to think better of whatever it is he was going to say next and went with something else.

"I'll meet you at Pinecrest."

"Fine."

Colby left and the room was only silent for a moment.

"What are you still doing here? I thought you 'hated' me."

Flinching, I stood back out of his embrace, trying to make some kind of space in my mind for the place where Kalen had used to be.

I wanted him to go back to being the evil enemy, in his evil enemy box, the box where the person whose family destroyed my life was supposed to be in, but he'd punched a hole in his box.

No, he'd set the box on fire. The box didn't exist anymore.

He'd infiltrated my mind and laid waste to all my defenses.

I took one final look at Kalen and stood in the doorway of his room while the sound of the others who'd been snooping slowly faded down the hall.

"That's the thing, Kalen—I do hate you. I'll always hate you, and nothing—not even what we just did here, will change that."

I had to hate him, because if I didn't, then wasn't that the betrayal my father would never recover from?  Wouldn't that be the thing that finally pushed him over the edge?

My mother left my dad for his father, and if I chose that man's son then what would my father think?

No, I had to hate Kalen.  Had to hate him for every reason except for the fact that I didn't even know what the word 'hate' meant anymore.

I had just turned to leave when his deep rumbling voice filled my ears.

"Wanna bet?"

***

Author's Note:

Phew, this was a spicy one!

What did you think of this chapter?

What do you think will happen next?

What do you want to happen next?

What do you think of Kalen and Gracie's relationship so far?

How do you think this will resolve itself in the future?

Until next time my lovely readers,
Kristen :)