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“Come on, Luk. I know you think she’s hot. You said so.” Silence. “And I see the way you look at her.” A buzz of unease bursts in the back of my skull. “How do I look at her?” “You know how.”
“Want to get it out of the way?” he asks. Rich. That’s what I’d call his voice. Rumbly, maybe. “Get what out of the way?” “The elephant in the room.” I swallow. Is he referring to…? “The one with the ball gag in his mouth.”
“Maybe the elephant’s just…blindfolded?” He nods slowly. “And tied up.” “And doing as it’s told.” He looks like he might find that more appealing. “What a good elephant.”
“Come closer,” he orders. Lukas stopped a step behind me. I turn and frown up at him. “Why?” “Because I just asked you to, Scarlett.”
The thing is, I love reading Mafia erotica as much as the next girl with daddy issues, and my attraction for fictional guys making scenes in iconic, over-the-top ways is among my most virulent traits.
The subject line just reads What you need. The body: If you decide to go for it, I think it should be me.
I power walk to his office. Every door in biology is wide open—except the one of Dr. Adam J. (Jackass?) Carlsen,
I’m starving, but my walk to the athlete dining hall is slow, because I’m busy writing an email to one Dr. Olive Smith.
“You really do like your authority figures, don’t you?”
Would you like me to pretend I don’t know about your perversions?” “You’re just as much of a perv as I am.” “Oh, no.” My eyebrow lifts. “Way more,” he adds. “I guarantee it.”
“You know, you’re right. Let’s just own it.” “Let’s.” “One of us gets off to…flogs?” “The other, to calling people ‘Doctor.’ ”
“Earlier, in the hallway, you kept putting barriers between you and Zach—me, mostly. Then your face, with Kyle and Hunter. It’s not hard to guess, if one cares enough to pay attention.”
Scarlett: Do you really want to be reminded of my computational superiority that often? Unknown: I do. I have a thing for women who are smarter than me.
“Come on, Scarlett.” His mouth twitches. “You know who I want to have sex with.”
“You know what fucks with my head?” It must be a rhetorical question, because he continues: “You’re at ease with me. I don’t think you realize it, but you tend to move closer when others are around. Sometimes you look to me, for reassurance maybe. And we’re alone right now and there are no signs of distress, and—at some point you chose to trust me, and you get why that gets me going so hard, right?”
“Listen.” His thumb and forefinger find my chin and lift it. His eyes are a level, impossibly pretty blue. “I spent the last few years with someone who had no interest in any of this, and have lots of experience with mismatched sex drives. I can handle you not wanting the same things as I do, and I’ll never judge you for what you’re into. Fuck, some of the things that I want—”
I don’t get to finish that sentence. Because Lukas Blomqvist takes a long step, pushes me into the wall, and kisses me.
“Hard for me to buy that you don’t like me taking charge, given what I just read.”
“The second thing is that I’ve read your list. And there is not a single thing you want that I don’t want more.” He leans into me for a kiss that’s at once chaste and clinging. By the time he pulls away I’m off-balance, confounded by his heat and his smell. “No need to repeat this one to me.”
“You are beautiful, Scarlett.”
Plus, with my luck, I’d swipe right on someone who stormed the Capitol and hates routine vaccinations.
“I dreamt about fucking you.”
“It’s like I made you up in my head, Scarlett.”
“Because sometimes I can’t breathe when you’re around.”
“Abysmal timing,” Lukas groans before closing his teeth around my collarbone. “Coming home while I’m having the best fuck of my life.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” My belly swoops at the endearment. His tone lives somewhere between sympathy and amusement. “If you don’t think that I’m very aware of your presence, always, you have no idea what’s going on.”
“Do you want to have sex?” His smile is quiet. “With you. Yes. But that’s my default setting, so don’t read too much into it.”
“You’re sounding more like my therapist, and less like a fun guy who threatens me with ball gags when I’m mouthy.” “We’ve established that neither of us is into those, and that I have better uses for your mouth.”
“I love that you opened up to me,” he says, pressing his mouth into the side of my head. I feel his inhale, and something sweet and thick drips inside me, warms me in my very core. “But they’re sides of the same coin. I get to take you apart and split you open—but if anything else, anyone else makes you feel sad, upset, cracked, I also get to be the one who puts you back together. Until you say stop. You get it?”
“I know that you are a perfectionist, and studied to the point of being overprepared. And that you’re anxious, which clouded your perception of your performance. Above all, I know how much you want to get into med school, and I’m starting to suspect that you might be unstoppable—”
I have no interest in having sex with anyone but you. Haven’t in…a while.”
“I fuck you because you’re the most perfect thing I’ve ever felt, Scarlett.”
“I swear, Scarlett. I think about the ways I’ve fucked you all the time. Replay them in my head so much, I’m afraid they’ll wear off.”
“My brilliant, beautiful girl.”
“Shut the fuck up, you brilliant, beautiful genius.”
“I knew you wouldn’t mind. Being my precious toy. My girl. Mine to use. Mine to fuck. Mine to destroy and to fix.”
“Christ. I can’t believe you fucking exist, Scarlett.”
He probably thinks we’re dating. We should set the record straight. Lukas: Or maybe we should just start dating.
Lukas: I checked. This year Midsommar overlaps with the US Olympic trials, and as much as I want you in Sweden, I want you to come to Melbourne with me more.
How dark Sweden is this time of year, but every message from me felt like a little burst of sunlight. He tells me what he’ll show me when I visit in the summer, and that he doesn’t want us to be apart for as long as we have been in the last couple of months, because it feels “cruel, Scarlett, to know that you exist, but I can’t touch you and fuck you and be with you. You get it, right?”
“Okay. We’re at a major competition. I won’t ask you to have this conversation right now.” What conversation? “But if you’re ready, I can tell you why I want you here.”
“For a while, I thought I needed to have some over-the-top goal, something comparable to the Olympics, but…” He stops. Runs his thumb over my lower lip. “I want to spend four years in med school, fully knowing that it’ll be hell. Do a fellowship and a residency. Corpse stuff, sure. I want to travel to places that don’t have a fucking pool. See my family more than once a year. Sleep in. Go on hiking trips. Stay home for long weekends and have morally bankrupt amounts of sex with someone I’m in love with. Kinky, vanilla, I want it all. I want to adopt rescue animals with her. I want to take care
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“Do you want me to fuck you while pretending that you’re not the person I feel closest to in the whole fucking world now, Scarlett? Or another day?”
“Oh. What about the rumored yearning glances at the pool?” “I don’t know. Were you in it?”
“I want to do this with you every day and night for the rest of my life.”
“Pen and I aren’t together,” Lukas interrupts her. “Haven’t been for months.” He turns to Pen. “I went along with what you asked and kept our breakup a secret, because Scarlett knew, and she was the only one who mattered. This is where it ends, though.”
“To me?” He smiles, amused. “What have you done to me? You made me happier than I’ve ever been, Scarlett, that’s all.” He tilts my face up, until our foreheads press against each other. “Pen is not heartbroken. She’s not in love. This is just possessiveness. She’s lashing out because she lost two of her favorite toys, and she wants someone else to hurt as bad as she does. And I—I’ve been trying to tell you how I felt for months. And I know it’s hard to hear, I know this stuff doesn’t come easy to you, but it’s out there now. You don’t have to be terrified of it anymore. I love you. I’m in love
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“Scarlett.” His fingers come up to my chin. Grab it gently, but tight. “The only time wasted is time we are apart.”
