was really starting to cloud my judgment. If he had just stayed on the couch with the chastity wall of garbage between us, like I’d begged, maybe I would have actually finished my invitations.
Instead, I decided to fight flirty with flirty. “We’ll see about that. Give me your hand.”
Harley gave up his right hand with an arched brow and an achingly coy little smile. I stroked the back of his hand with my thumb while I went to work, penning my best Old English across his knuckles. When I finally released him, he turned his fist around, so he could admire the word LADY I’d scrawled upon it. His expression went from curious to elated to something else…mischievous? He briefly opened his fist before closing it again, this time gripping a handful of my shirt in it as he pulled me up and onto his lap.
“I’m never washing this hand again,” he teased before stealing a kiss that wouldn’t end until sometime well after dark and well after my curfew.
I woke up, adrift on a scattered sea of envelopes, sore and sated. Two thick and thoroughly tattooed arms were clamped down around my waist, the only things keeping me from floating away on a foggy cloud of pheromones and bliss. That is, until I realized that the ridiculous Jamaican accent coming from the TV belonged to the one and only Miss Cleo.1 Miss Cleo’s presence in the room could only mean one thing. It was after midnight. And I was fucked.
I wriggled out of Harley’s embrace and darted around the room, gathering my belongings and snatching and swatting at the square pieces of paper that were stuck all over my naked body as if I’d been tarred and feathered. Where each envelope had been an intricately penned name or address was left behind, in mirror image, on my skin.
I felt like I was that guy in the movie Memento. He couldn’t form new memories, so he had all his most pertinent information tattooed on his body backward, so he could bring himself up to speed every morning when he looked in the mirror. Only, my particular affliction wasn’t that I couldn’t remember. It was that I just wouldn’t fucking learn.
Maybe what I should have had stamped all over my body was, Your parents are going to beat and sterilize you if you break curfew over Harley fucking James one more time, you stupid dick addict!
I was fucking livid. This was exactly what I’d known was going to happen if I came over because it was exactly what had happened every time I came over. Harley would wait until it was almost time for me to leave, and then he’d get all flirty. If that didn’t work, he would go straight for pouty—wrinkling his brow, puffing out his already full to bursting pierced bottom lip, and blinking his beautiful blue puppy-dog eyes at me—until I was riding his cock.
I had to roll Harley’s massive, hard snoring body over to snatch up the last of my invitations, but that easygoing motherfucker just snorted and curled up around one of my skull pillows like it was a teddy bear. (During the height of my decorating obsession, I’d figured out how to use my mom’s sewing machine to make a couple of throw pillows for Harley’s couch. They were shaped like skulls and had black fringe Mohawks. I remember being afraid at the time that Harley would think they were too cutesy, but he liked them so much that he gave them all names and regarded them as if they were his pets.) He really was just a big kid.
I took one long last look at Harley’s sleeping baby face, pompadour of sunny-blond sex hair, and inked-up muscles clutching my pillow, and I choked back a sob. This man was trouble with a capital rubble. Even though he’d said he wanted the best for me and supported my plans, Harley had been slowly chipping away at the stable, secure future I’d been working so hard toward. In just a few months, I’d let my obsession with this modern-day rebel without a cause destroy my perfect 4.0 GPA and ruin my relationship with my parents. Now, I’d let him come between me and my freedom.
With the sting of unshed tears in my eyes and the grip of a vise around my chest, I took one last mental picture of the cuddly sex machine at my feet, turned on my unlaced boot heel, and drove the