Paper Airplanes (31 page)

“Dad, calm down. We’re just going to go see Marley, and then we’ll probably get breakfast.”

I didn’t want him to have a coronary.

“I didn’t say a word,
” he told me, trying to mask what he was really feeling. He was too overprotective for his own good sometimes.

“Okay,” I said, giving my mother a knowing look.

“Come on, Joel,” she said, taking his arm.

Jared and I stepped to the side and let them pass out the front door.

“Whose car is that?” my mother asked then.

Oh crap.

“That’s my friend Scott’s car,” I told her. “He and Marley went to a party together last night, and he gave her a ride home. He’s probably sleeping in the guest room.”

My dad just shook his head as he turned to my mother. “My own daughter stays out all night with a boy, and my adopted daughter brings a guy home with her. What’s a heart attack feel like again?”

My mom laughed and shook her head, turning around to wink at me. I smiled back at her.

“Love you, Dad,” I called out to him.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “And I love all this gray hair you’ve given me. Thanks so much.”

“You’re welcome,” I told him playfully as I shut the front door and turned to Jared with a smile on my face.

“Are you trying to kill me?”
he asked, a painful expression on his face.

“Well, I didn’t know they’d be here?! They usually work on Saturdays. It’s a rare day off for both of them, I’m sure.”

“And now they know you spent the night with me. Fantastic.”

I waved him off. “Oh, it’s fine. Like my mom said, it’s not the first time I’ve done that.”

“Great, what I wanted to hear even more,” he said sarcastically.

“Seriously? Like you thought I was a virgin or something?”

“No,” he said softly, as he looped his arms around my waist and pulled me against him. “But I’d rather not think of anyone you’ve been with before me – especially since we’re not even sleeping together yet.”

“Well that’s not my fault,” I said
. “I’m not the one who gave all my condoms away.”

H
e looked at me sheepishly. “Yeah, fine. I’ll take the blame for that one.”

I leaned up and kissed him. “Good things come to those who wait.”

He smiled. “I’m very good at waiting.”

“Good to know. Now come on, let’s figure out
what’s going on with Marley and Scott.”

I took Jared’s
hand and led him up the stairs. When we reached the second floor, I could see that the guest room door was open, and the bed hadn’t been slept in. Marley’s bedroom door was closed. I knocked softly on it and called out her name. She didn’t answer me, but I could hear rustling. Then I heard voices, but I couldn’t make them out. She was in there with a guy, but I didn’t think for a second that it was Scott. I was concerned all over again that he was missing.

“I don’t think she’s alone,” Jared said to me when I put my hand on the doorknob.

“I know she’s not,” I said as I pulled my hand back. I didn’t want to walk in on anything that would scar my vision.

I
truthfully didn’t care if she was with a guy. I needed to talk to her. If Scott was missing, and she knew anything about where he was, I needed to know. And in all honestly, I wanted to know who was in there with her. As far as I knew, this was the first guy she’d been with since Aiden. I wasn’t sure when she’d decided to start dating again, but apparently she’d dove back in headfirst.

“Marley?
” I called out to her.

“I’m kind of busy,” she responded.

“Yeah, I get that, but I need to talk to you. We can’t find Scott. He’s not answering his phone. His parents are worried.”

“Shit,” I heard from the depths of her room, and weirdly enough it sounded like Scott.

I glanced over at Jared who just raised his eyebrows at me. He’d heard the same thing.

“He’s fine,” Marley finally called back to me.

“How do you know?” I asked her.

“Because he’s lying right next to me,” she said, the guilt and embarrassment apparent in her voice.
“Didn’t you see his car in the driveway?”

“Oh,” I said, not sure what to do with that
information. “Yeah, I did, but I, um, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

I looked desperately at Jared who just shrugged. I couldn’t say out loud that the last thing I actually thought was that Marley had hooked up with Scott. That idea hadn’t even crossed my mind.

“Um, Scott, you should call home,” I continued.

“Yeah, I will,” he said, not sounding like his
usual cheerful self at all.

I looked over at Jared. “
What the hell? Do you think they slept together?” I hissed at him, and he just shrugged.

“How should I know?” he whispered back.

“Um, okay, so, I guess we’ll be in my room if you guys need us?” I said, my statement totally coming out in the form of a question.

I wasn’t sure I’d
ever felt so awkward in my life. This even beat out the charming interaction we’d just had downstairs with my parents. I’d even heard Marley having sex and then come face-to-face with Aiden the next morning and not batted an eyelash, but this was different. I couldn’t wrap my head around her and Scott.

But then again maybe he’d just crashed on her floor. Maybe they’d been drunk, and he hadn’t wanted to go home.
That was much more plausible than imagining them together.

With my hand still in Jared’s I pulled him into my room and closed the door. Before I could start to
process what I’d just learned, he was kissing me and pushing me back on the bed. I fell, and he landed on top of me.

“Should
n’t we talk about this?” I asked in between his kisses.

“No. What’s there to talk about?”

“Scott and Marley! I want to know what happened,” I insisted.

“
I’d rather do this,” he said as he deepened the kiss.

His tongue pressed into my mouth, so I gave in to the need to kiss him back and wrapped my arms around his back, holding
him against me. I loved kissing him.

But, to go along with the
apparent theme of our morning, we were interrupted before we could take things further when Marley flung my door open a few seconds later.

“Oh! Sorry. I guess you two made up.”

Jared rolled off of me then so he was lying in the middle of my bed, staring up at the ceiling.

“Hi Marley,” he called out to her. “Nice to see you again.”

“Aww, you’re sweet, Jared,” she said, not picking up on his sarcasm. “I actually need to talk to Cassie. Can you give us a few minutes?”

Jared sat up and looked at her. “Sure. Should I just wait in the hall?” he asked, looking over at me.

“You can hang out in my room,” Marley offered. “Scott’s still in there.”

“Is he dressed?” Jared asked, which I thought was a completely valid question.

“He is now,” she told him, giving me a visual I just didn’t want and confirming what I’d suspected.

“Great. I’ll
be in there if you need me,” Jared said, turning to me.

He leaned over and kissed me, lingering much longer than was appropriate in polite company, but I honestly didn’t care.

On the way out of my bedroom, Marley stopped him, putting her hand against his chest. He looked down at it and then at her with raised eyebrows. “Can I help you?”

I stifled a laugh.

“Yes, you can,” Marley said to him, removing her hand and crossing her arms over her chest. “You guys stayed out all night, didn’t you?”

I watched Jared’s face color as she asked that. He was so cute when he was embarrassed.

“You’re one to talk,” he said in response, making me giggle.

Marley’s mouth dropped open and then closed a few seconds later. “Okay, fine I guess I deserved that. So am
I to assume that everything is good? That you’re both finally on the same page?”

I walked
over to Jared and wrapped my arm around his waist. “Marley, this is Jared,” I said, playing her little game. “My boyfriend. And we’re great.”

I expected him to stiffen when I said that, and I’d half-said it to see what he would do, but I should have known he wouldn’t react. Jared wasn’t like the other guys I’d dated. He didn’t play games. He was monogamous, and after what we’d said and done the night before, he’d probably been expecting me to
call him my boyfriend. It was one of the nicest things about him.

He pulled back to look at me, an adorable smirk on his face
as I was pretty sure he momentarily forgot that Marley was standing in front of us. “Boyfriend, huh? I like the sound of that.”

“Well, considering we said ‘I love you’, I’m assuming you’re okay with us being exclusive.”

His smirk deepened. “Yeah, I’m good with it.”

“Good. Me too
,” I said as I leaned up to kiss him.

“C
an I tell everyone you’re my girlfriend?” he asked against my lips.

I smiled
when he pulled back from the kiss. “You’d better, but just so you know, Brooke’s probably going to take my knees out with a baseball bat or at the very least slash my tires, so you might not want to tell her.”

“I don’t care if she knows, and she’s more bark than bite. You don’t have to worry about her.”

I gave him a skeptical look. “Please, just two days ago, she was glaring at me from the bar and flirting shamelessly with you whenever you picked up drinks from her. She loved that we were fighting. She completely wants you back.”

“Then maybe she shouldn’t have cheated on me,” he said. “Besides, she’s the last girl I want when I can have you.”

“Aww, well said, boyfriend.”

“Damn that sounds
so hot when you say it.”

“Ahem,” Marley said, forcing us both to look over at her. We’d been so lost in our little moment, that even
I
forgot she was standing there.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, my arms still wrapped around Jared. I looked up at him. “Give me a few minutes.”

“Just a few,” he said before he kissed me.

Once he
left the room, Marley shut the door and turned to face me, a wide smile on her face.

“Yay,
I’m so happy for you, but I cannot wait to tell you what I did last night.”

I was afraid she was going to tell me
who
she did last night, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. Scott was my friend after all.

“
Please spare me the details,” I told her as I went to sit on my bed.

She perched next to me a
nd grinned. “Now I wouldn’t be a very good friend if I did that.”

“Actually, you’d be an excellent friend, and in turn, I’ll reciprocate and not tell you what I did with Jared.”

She pouted. “You’re no fun.”

“You’ll get over it.”

Chapter
Twenty

Jared

The door to Marley’s room was open, and Scott was lying shirtless in the middle of her
bed, his hands behind his head and his eyes closed, so I knocked lightly on the door.

His eyes popped open, and he grinned when he saw me. “Hey man!
What’re you doing here? Did you and Cassie make up?” he asked, sitting up.

It was then that
I noticed the bruising under his right eye. “What happened?” I asked instead of answering his question.

The smile slipped
from his face as he reached up, touched his eye and winced. “Oh, this. Yeah, I sort of got into an altercation with Brock Thomas’s fist,” he said shrugging. “Just like old times.”

“Why
did he hit you?” I asked, the protective part of me having the sudden urge to storm over to Brock’s house and sucker-punch him in the nose for doing that to my best friend.

Scott shrugged. “Some things never change, and apparently he wasn’t thrilled that I was
at Nicole’s party with Marley. I guess he wanted to hook up with her or something. I don’t know. I think they have history. Something about her visiting Cassie a few years ago and hooking up with him while she was here. I don’t really know the specifics, but he cornered me and told me to get lost. He called me a loser and a freak, we had words, and then I hit him.”

My eyebrows rose as he said that. “
You
hit
him
?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, he was being a dick, and he called Marley a whore. I wasn’t about to stand there and let him do that. She’s a really cool girl, so I punched him, and then he punched me back. Marley intervened before either of us could do any real damage, and
then we left.”

Damn, I was so proud of him.
Neither Scott nor I had ever fought back in the past. We’d just let those guys take advantage of us however they could, figuring once they got it out of their system they’d leave us alone. And they always did . . . until the next time. The relentless torture hadn’t ended until we graduated and had been able to avoid them on a regular basis. But here Scott was taking a swing at the guy who’d been a dick to both of us for years. It was about time. I wished I could have been there.

“It felt good, didn’t it?” I asked him, and he grinned.

“Hell yeah, it did. I might have bruised my hand, but it was totally worth it – especially because Marley felt bad for me, and she was all happy that I’d defended her honor, so we went to Steak ‘n Shake, got milkshakes at three in the morning, and then we came back here.”

I could figure out the underlying messages he was sending me from the shit-eating grin on his face, so I decided to cut him off before he could say anything else.

“Your parents are worried. You’ve never stayed out all night before.”

“They’re fine,” he assured me. “
I called my mom a few minutes ago and told her I stayed the night with the girl I’m seeing. It’s cool.”

“
Dude! You did not tell her that. Tell me you didn’t tell your mom that you spent the night out with a girl.”

He ran
a hand back through his messy blond hair. “Of course I told her that. What was I supposed to do, lie?”

I laughed. He was so innocent in so many ways.

“Yes! Tell her you stayed with me. That’s not as graphic. You do realize the image you most likely conjured in her mind, right?”

“Of me having sex?”

Okay, so we were being blunt, apparently. “Yeah, I’m going to say that’s probably spot on.”

He shrugged. “Dude, I’m twenty years old. I’d say it’s about time I started having sex. My mom should be glad she doesn’t have to worry about me being a virgin for the rest of my life. I know
I
was worried about that.”

I couldn’t help laughing. That was so Scott, and as much as I didn’t want details about what he and Marley had done, I was sure I’d be hearing all about them. And truthfully, I’d let
him tell me, because he was excited. And I was kind of proud of him. He’d had a big night.

“I did sleep with her,” Scott
confirmed.

“Yes, I assumed that.”

He grinned and lowered his voice. “Dude, it was so cool! I loved it.”

I nodded. “Most people do.”

“And she was so cool about the whole virgin thing. She said the first time would probably be fast, and it was, sort of embarrassingly fast, but doing that is so much more intense that jacking off. I didn’t realize.”

“Yes, that’s typically the case.”

Yeah, I really didn’t want to have this conversation.

He shrugged. “Who knew?”

Pretty much everyone.
He was so clueless it was comical.

“Anyway, once we got that out of the way, the second time was much better. Definitely longer.”

“Good to know,” I told him, hoping my tone would be his cue to stop telling me details.

Quite honestly, a part of me was a little jealous that he’d gotten to sleep with Marley, and I was still waiting to do that with Cassie. Not for lack of trying on both our parts – damn me for giving away all my condoms
and not buying more. Of course I’d never imagined in a million years that Cassie would have come over the night before, not to mention tell me she loved me and call me her boyfriend. A lot had happened in eight hours, but it was exactly what I’d wanted all along. It was worth the agony and the wait, that was for sure. And I knew when we finally had sex, it would be worth the wait too.

“Yeah, and we did it again this morning.”
Scott stretched his arms over his head. “I could get used to this.”

Hearing him say that, and hearing the confidence that a night with a pretty girl had given him, I was afraid Marley was going to hurt him. She was wild, and Scott was as docile as they came. I didn’t think she’d be interested in him for more than a one night stand, and that would bother him. I could already see that he was i
nvested, because I knew how what he was feeling went. I’d been the same way with Brooke, confusing my feelings of lust and the fact that she was the girl to take my virginity with so much more than they actually were.

To her, I was probably just a summer fling, but to me, she was everything. It was why she’
d been able to hurt me so badly. I was completely invested in her, in us. But now that I knew what it was like to truly be in love, I knew what I had with Brooke was a lot of smoke and mirrors on her part and a lot of hope mixed with the fact that I was enamored with her on my part. It wasn’t anything like what I had with Cassie.

“That’s great, man,” I told Scott, because I knew anything I said to caution him would fall on deaf ears. If
I told him Marley was going to use him, he wouldn’t believe me. He had to learn on his own.

“So, we’re thinking about getting breakfast?” Marley said then, appearing in the doorway. Her arm was extended up the doorframe, her chest on display
in her little purple tank top, and I could see the lust in Scott’s eyes as he looked at her. He was already addicted. “You boys in?”

“I’m starving. Like, seriously hungry,” Scott said, and Marley grinned at him.

“Me too. We worked out hard last night, didn’t we, baby?”

He grinned back at her. “And this morning.”

“We can’t forget about this morning,” she said, as she released her hold on the doorframe and stalked toward him, covering his body with hers before she started kissing him.

They were soon lost in a moment, probably forgetting I was there, so I slipped out of the room before things turne
d from PG13 into R rated, which I was fairly certain was going to happen. The last thing I wanted to see was Scott’s bare ass.

I closed the door behind me and walked back into Cassie’s room. I could hear the shower running in her adjoining bathroom, so I closed the door to her room, stripped down and walked into the bathroom.

She jumped when she saw me, but then a wide smile slid across her face. She opened the glass door and let me step inside with her.

“Well this is a nice surprise,” she said as she slid her hands up my arms.

“It’s a three-fold tactic,” I said, and she looked at me in amusement. “One, Marley and Scott are about to have sex again, and I want to drown out the noises they’ll no doubt make.”

She smiled. “Good for them. And good for Scott.
But good call. I don’t want to hear that either.”

“
Yeah, I know. He seems happy, but I have a feeling this is going to end badly for him.”

Cassie shook her head. “Marley
said she really likes him. She thinks he’s funny and cute and brainy. She keeps talking about how he makes her laugh, and how he’s really adorable. I think you might be wrong. You haven’t seen them together all week. I’m actually not surprised that this happened.”

“We’ll see. I’m not holding my breath.”

I’d believe it when I saw it for real.

She shrugged. “I guess we will see, but I’m rooting for them.”

“Me too,” I told her, even though I was skeptical as hell.

Cassie
stepped closer to me then, so her wet, naked body was flush against mine. Damn, why did I never have a condom when I needed one?

“So what were your other two reasons for coming in here?”
she asked.

“Well, I needed a shower, but more than that,” I said, as I sunk to my knees and looked up at her. “I came to return the favor I owe you.”

She grinned at me. “I can’t think of a better reason for you to have surprised me. Do your worst.”

I reached out and stroked her a few times
with my thumb, watching the expression on her face as she started to relax into my touch. Her eyes closed and then opened slowly, she swallowed hard, and when my mouth descended on her, her hands shot out to either side of the shower, bracing her as her head fell back. I moved both hands to her hips to hold her in place while she started to writhe in my grip as I slowly tortured her.

“Jared,” she cried out
through a moan, and I’d never liked the sound of my own name so much. “Oh, God!”

Jesus, the sounds she was making were practically my undoing. I’d never wanted her more, and I wanted everything with her. This wasn’t nearly enough, and we both knew it.
I told myself all in good time. She was mine. I could have her whenever I wanted, and we’d get to the main event eventually. This was only the beginning.

“You didn’t perhaps steal a condom from Marley, did you?” she gasped out
suddenly, and I pulled back and looked up at her, enamored by the look of sweet anguish on her face coupled with the water from the showerhead streaming down  her naked body. It was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.

“I think I get the award for the world’s biggest dumbass today. Seriously,” I said as I slipped my finger inside her, wanting
her to keep riding the high she was on and simultaneously trying to mask my stupidity in her eyes.

I should have
borrowed a condom from Marley. Dammit.

She just grinned. “
What you’re doing now is just fine. Trust me, I’ll be alright.”

Yeah, but I won’t be.
I was so turned on I was about to shoot my load all over the shower floor – and it was all my fault.

Keeping my finger inside her, I slowly rose to standing. She smiled as she snaked one arm around my neck and kissed me. Her other hand slipped between us an
d wrapped around me, stroking me with sweet, torturously wonderful strokes.

“For the record, I’m going shopping today, and I’m buying a lifetime supply of
condoms,” I said against her lips as she smiled. “We’ll never be without them again.”

“Sounds great to me,” she said,
as I lowered my mouth to kiss her again and we both sought release like a couple of inexperienced teenagers.