13

13

KADE

FLASHBACK

I roll a joint while we walk, Stacey holding both leads as we take the dogs around the front of the manor grounds. We have acres of forests and a dug-up golf course – zero chance of walking the full vicinity as planned when we woke from our nap earlier.

Once I finish rolling my joint, I tuck it behind my ear and take a lead.

Stacey is glowing, her face highlighted by the moon, and wears both my cap and a permanent smile that keeps drawing me in. As well as my hoodie, she has on the tightest fucking yoga pants, but, annoyingly, my hoodie drowns her so I can’t stare at her ass.

I take her free hand and lead us through the rose garden while the pups sniff around. Before, I would’ve hated this. Holding hands. I barely ever held my mother’s hand or Luciella’s when we were kids – it wasn’t something I wanted. But I always have Stacey’s hand. Either in my lap while I play online games with Base and Dez or when I drive, or interlaced as I push into her.

Once she woke up and saw the dogs hugging into her, she relaxed, and I kept my eyes on her while she played with them. We sat at opposite ends of my room and threw toys at each other – both the pups running between us.

She squealed when I said we own them. Hugged me when I said I’d rehomed them and that they’d be with us from now on.

Us. I said “us” and she didn’t correct me.

Not going to lie, they prefer her to me – she suits having them on each side as she walks. I wonder if they’ll be around when we have kids.

Woah, slow the fuck down.

“When do their ears point up?” she asks me as she crouches to pick a rose, sniffs it then tucks it behind her ear. “I’m so glad they have their tails. Why do people crop them?”

“I read that some owners dock them for shows or to make them look how people expect. But I also read that their tails are really thin, so they’re easily injured. It depends, to be honest.”

She nods, and Mum beams ear to ear when she sees me and Stacey holding hands as we walk up the entrance steps, the two pups jumping around happily at her feet.

Ewan takes them into the main sitting room, Mum follows and Stacey’s eyes nearly blow out of her head as she whips the joint from behind my ear. “She could have seen this!”

“She didn’t,” I say. She would’ve killed me. She knows I smoke, but if she found out how regularly I smoke joints, she would lock me up with my dad.

I snatch it back, tuck it behind my ear then gesture to her to go out the back, and we walk over to the pool house.

It’s dark out, but it’s not cold. In my shorts and T-shirt, I sit at the bench near the dock, and Stacey sits beside me, both of us looking out over the loch. “I need to go home tonight,” she tells me. “I haven’t been home in two days.”

I groan and roll my neck until it cracks. “Stay one more night.”

Resting her head on my shoulder, she huffs. “I wish. My brother would kill me if I stayed out again.”

“What’s your brother got to do with you staying out?”

She’s silent, chewing her lip and then shaking her head. “Kyle will say to my dad, and he won’t let me stay over with a boy.”

“Maybe I kidnapped you?”

She buries her head into my neck, her body shaking with a chuckle. “Please do.” She attempts to take the joint from my ear, and I steal it away. “Let me try it.”

“This is a joint.”

She gives me a look. “Duh, I know. Let me try it.”

I shake my head. “Not a chance. It’s weed, Stacey.”

She narrows her eyes, and instead of coming across as scary, she’s cute. I want to kiss the frown from her face.

“And? You smoke it all the time. I just want to try it.”

I contemplate, thinking of ways to stop her, but she takes it from my fingers, gets to her feet and sprints to the dock where Ewan’s boat sits.

I scramble up and chase after her, and instead of being pissed, we’re both laughing as she hides behind a tree, going left when I go right, right when I go left, and finally spinning and running again when she manages to dodge me.

“You can’t even catch me!” she bellows, inches from the dock.

I do catch her, both of us falling to the ground, and I protect her as we roll on the grass, down the hill so we’re hidden, both laughing and out of breath.

“Fuck, you run fast.” I lie on my back, her doing the same, and we both look up into the sky.

“I train a lot.”

“I try to,” I say. “Dez made me go running with him before and I nearly died.”

I can feel her grinning. “He’s got the build for a runner.”

My head snaps to the side. “Meaning? Do I not?”

She rolls her eyes. “He has an ectomorph build. He’s lean and slender. You have muscle, therefore you’re more of a mesomorph.”

I feel dumb. “I have no idea what you mean, but by all means, continue.”

“I like learning about the human body when it comes to fitness. I’d love to go to uni and do human biology one day. Do you think you’d ever study?”

I shrug. “Ewan wants me to work for him, but I like just doing jobs here and there with him for extra cash. I think I’ll look into aeronautical engineering.”

She whistles. “Please tell me you’ll wear glasses while you’re studying?”

“I have perfect vision, Freckles.”

The water lapses nearby. “Wear lensless ones then.”

“Only if you wear them while riding me.”

Stacey tries not to laugh but fails. The first time she climbed on me and sank onto my cock, we both had no idea what to do. It took a few minutes of moving around, her gyrating in all directions, and then me thrusting upwards until we were comfortable.

I say comfortable, but I got a cramp in the back of my thigh, and we had to rub it out and start again.

I think it might be my favourite position now. Her above me, me beneath her, especially as she turns into a bag of bones after her orgasm and falls asleep on my chest.

Last night, she was straddling me, ordering me to go harder and faster, until I was fucking up into her and shaking the bed, the headboard smacking the wall. She screamed my name, and I poured every drop of cum inside her.

My dick needs to stop twitching.

“I like this,” she says, her voice soft as her fingers link with mine. “Us lying in the grass and watching the stars.”

I turn my head to look at her, her eyes dancing as she keeps them on the moon. I smile, but it drops when she says, “You’re usually a moody prick.”

I narrow my gaze, pulling at the grass and throwing a handful at her.

“Hey! I was kidding!”

Little shit.

She melts as I cover her mouth with mine, sinking my teeth into her lip teasingly, but then she shoves my chest to get me away, and we settle on our backs again.

“I just mean it’s relaxing. I think if I ever took my last breaths outside, I’d like to be able to see the moon.” As grim as that statement is, she lets out a peaceful sigh. “It’s beautiful.”

With my eyes on her, I say, “So beautiful.”

I want you forever, I say in my head.

“Have you thought of names for the pups yet?”

I smirk, because I know she’s going to kill me. “I named one; you can name the other. The small one is called The Destroyer.”

Stacey sits up, eyes large. “You aren’t serious…”

“Very. He suits it, doesn’t he?”

She disagrees. “He’s scared of the TV, jumps when someone sneezes and has fallen over his two front paws too many times to count. No, he doesn’t suit it.”

“What would be a better name then?”

She thinks for a second, pressing her hand to my shoulder so I lie back again then rests her head on my chest. “Maybe Hopper. He hops around a lot.”

I snort. “Fine. Hopper it is. And the other?”

“I had a dog when I was younger, and my mum wanted to call him Milo, but my dad refused and called him Bruce instead.” She’s silent for a beat. “She died a year later, and my dad rehomed him before I got home from school.”

Her dad’s a dick. “Milo then.”

She smiles, her eyes glassy. “Milo and Hopper.”

I curl my fingers into her hair then stroke my thumb against her cheek. I’m not the best at comforting, mainly because I don’t experience the emotion that requires it. I know how it should feel, since I witnessed Luciella breaking down when our family dogs died when we were kids, but I felt nothing.

I wanted to, but it was more of an urge to fit in with the rest of the house.

But I want to comfort Stacey, to grieve with her as she tells me about her mother. She got into dancing because her mum was a dancer, played the piano and made Stacey feel like a princess. She was Stacey’s best friend, and when she was diagnosed with cancer, Stacey witnessed her mother slowly dying, her father pulling away from the family and having an affair with Nora. And it was Stacey who held her hand while she took her final breaths.

“I want her to see how far I’ve come with my dancing and for her to tell me she’s proud of me. I miss her so much, Kade.”

There’s a squeeze in my chest as I hear her sniffing and wiping away tears. “Hey,” I say, shifting so I can see her, taking her face in my hand and capturing another tear. “Don’t cry.” I hate people crying – it makes me feel awkward. But with her I know what to do. “You know she’s proud of you. You’re talented as fuck and amazing, beautiful and strong.”

“I like when you’re cute,” she says, the corners of her mouth curling up towards her wet eyes. “Keep going.”

“You have nice tits and a cracking ass.”

She scoffs, but she’s grinning, glancing down at her chest. “I wonder if they’ll stop growing. I’ve gone up like two cup sizes in a month.”

“Is that normal with the pill?” I ask, trying to tug down the hoodie at the front to see her cleavage then dodging the hand she tries to whack me with.

“I think so. Tylar said she just got really spotty, and Luciella has the implant, so I guess her side effects are different. Her boobs are shrinking if anything.”

I grimace. “Less details on my sister please.”

“I might change my contraception, I don’t like how sick it makes me. I’m nauseous all the time.”

I hum. “We can look into other forms and see what works for you. Or I can wrap it.”

“I’ll think about it,” she says, leaning up and pressing her lips to mine in a chaste kiss. “We need to be careful again if I do change. Imagine we fell pregnant? Lu would lose it.”

That’s her concern?

I stare at her, unsure what to say in response. For a second, the thought of her giving me a child one day flashes before me, and I hope that in years to come, that comes true. We’re only teenagers, so I need to not overthink this.

“One day,” is all I say.

Instead of running for the hills, Stacey kisses me again, somehow happy with what I said. “One day.”

Fuck, I love this girl.

With me still on my back in the grass, she leans over me, her hair a curtain around us. “I’ll stay one more night, but promise to drive me home first thing in the morning.”

I brush both sides of her hair behind her ears, holding her face as I bring her mouth to mine. “I promise, Freckles.”

The taste of her tongue as I push mine through her parted lips has me needing more. I grab her leg and pull her on top of me, deepening the kiss. She lets out a little whimper, and I suck on her tongue.

“I can’t fuck you here, can I?” I ask against her mouth, palming her ass and squeezing as I grind her against my hardening cock. “Because I really fucking want to.”

She glances up to see our surroundings, hidden by grass and bushes next to the water. “Will anyone walk by?”

“The house guards already did their perimeter check,” I say, bringing her mouth back to mine. With one hand on the back of her head, I drop the other between us, cupping her pussy. She gasps against my lips, and I can feel how soaked she is already.

“I want to try again,” she says, pulling back to look down at me seriously. “I want to try.”

She’s not confident with going down on me, and when I didn’t come within two minutes of her mouth around my cock, she got paranoid and said she was doing it wrong. No matter how many times I said she was doing it perfectly fine, she refused to believe me.

“It’s just practice, so if it’s terrible, don’t laugh at me.”

“You’re good at it. And I would never laugh at you for that. You made me nearly pass out the first time my dick was in your mouth, or did you forget?”

Shyly, she shrugs.

So fucking gorgeous and mine.

Mine. I want her to be mine and no one else’s.

“You know,” I start, swallowing down my building panic, the tightening feeling in my chest gripping my fucking heart like a vice, “you need to be my girlfriend now. You’re all I can think about.”

Relief fills me as she blushes and giggles. “And that means I need to be your girlfriend?”

“Yep.” I take her face and kiss her, stroking my thumbs on her freckled cheeks. “Seems boyfriend-ish to think of someone as much as I think of you.”

She pulls away, sliding her body down mine to collect the joint dropped on the grass. She lifts it to my lips, pulls my lighter from my pocket and lights it.

“Are you asking or telling me?” she says. Green eyes lock on mine while she tugs at my waistband and I inhale deeply.

I blow out smoke to the side of her, making sure it doesn’t go in her face. “Telling.” I raise my hips, allowing her to yank both my shorts and boxers down, completely freeing my hard, thick cock. “But if you prefer I ask, I won’t be accepting no as an answer.”

“How gentlemanly of you.” She takes me in her hand, stroking each inch. My breath hitches as the head of my cock lines up to her mouth. “Good thing I like being told what to do.”

She drags her tongue up the underside of my dick, and my entire body tenses, the joint nearly slipping from my fingers.

“What shall I do now?”

I wrap my free hand around her hair, keeping it out of her face, then place the smoke between my lips at the corner of my mouth. “Suck.”

“You want me to suck your cock?”

Fuck. The innocent voice and the way she’s looking at me… fuck.

I give a firm nod, my teeth clenched as my chest rises and falls heavily.

“Fine.” She smiles, and my heart stutters in my chest. “Since you’re my boyfriend.”