I cannot tell him the truth. I cannot hand him Dylan Cooley like a loaded gun.
But I also cannot give him my real dream — California, the life I have been hoarding in the back of my mind like a secret too precious to speak aloud. He does not deserve my honesty. He does not deserve my vulnerability.
He deserves nothing from me except the sharp edge of my tongue. So I can give him that instead.
"You want to know what I think?" My voice drips with contempt. "I think you're a spoiled little brat who has never worked for anything in his life. I think you coast on your father's name and your pretty face and your ability to charm your way into passing grades—or fuck your way into them when charm isn't enough."
His jaw tightens. My heart slams against my ribs, blood rushing loud in my ears. We're both breathing harder now, and I can't tell if what's coursing through me is fury or ugly, disgusting want.
"I think you hate that your father brought me here because it means he thinks you are pathetic. He looked at his son—his heir, his legacy—and decided the only way to salvage you was to hire outside help."
"Shut up." He says it through gritted teeth, jaw clenched so hard I can see the strain in his neck.
The charming boy is gone. What's left looks like a man who's been gutted and is trying not to show it.
"And I think you can't stand me because I'm a mirror. You look at me and see exactly what you're afraid of becoming—someone with nothing. Someone who had everything taken from them and couldn't do a damn thing to stop it."
His grip on my arm turns bruising. "I said shut up. You don't know anything about me."
"I know enough. I know you're twenty-three years old and failing classes a child could pass. I know you spend more time fucking teachers than reading books. I know your father is a good man who deserves a better son than—"
His mouth crashes into mine like he's trying to win a war I didn't know we were fighting.
I kiss him back like I'm trying to make him lose.
My hands shove at his chest—not to push him away, but to push back, to establish that whatever this is, I am not surrendering.
He responds by gripping harder. His fingers dig into my waist, pulling me closer even as I resist.
His teeth catch my bottom lip, and the sting of it makes me gasp against his mouth. He swallows the sound like a trophy.
I fist his shirt and yank him toward me, then twist away when he tries to deepen the kiss. He chases my mouth. I let him catch me, then bite him—hard enough to hurt, hard enough that he makes a low sound in his throat that vibrates through my chest.
"This is wrong," I breathe against his lips.
"I'd call it amusing," he mutters back, and kisses me again before I can respond.
I shove at his chest again. He catches my wrists and pins them behind my back with one hand, his grip firm but not painful.
The position arches my body into his, and I hate how good it feels—his chest against mine, his breath hot on my face, his control absolute and infuriating.
"Stop fighting me," he says. His voice is low and rough.
"Let go." I try to free my hands.
"No."
"I said let go."
"And I said no." He leans in, his mouth brushing my ear. "You don't want me to let go. You want to pretend you do so you can tell yourself this isn't your fault. But you're here. You're kissing me back. And you're not screaming for help."
I try to wrench my wrists free again. He holds firm.
We stumble. My back hits the edge of the desk and he presses into me, one hand braced beside my hip, the other still tangled in my hair.
The position is obscene—my thighs parted around his hips, his body a solid wall of heat between my legs. I can feel him. All of him. The evidence that whatever this is, it's affecting him as much as it's affecting me.
It pisses me off—how fast it happens. How easily my body betrays me. The kiss turns rough, all teeth and heat and too much pressure. Messy. Wrong. Way too intense for someone I met just days ago.
I should stop. I should end this before it goes further. I should remember who he is—my stepbrother, my student, the son of the man who gave me a job when no one else would.
I do none of those things. The fight drains out of me in stages.
First my hands stop pushing and start pulling—gripping his shoulders, sliding up the back of his neck, fingers threading into his hair. Then my mouth stops resisting and starts responding—matching his rhythm, opening for him, letting him take what he wants because I want it too.
"This is your last chance to stop," he says against my lips.
"And why would I do that?" I whisper.
"Because I'm about two seconds from doing something we can't take back."
I look at him and see the restraint coiled tight in his shoulders, the want he's barely holding in check.
He's giving me an out. A last chance to stop this before we cross a line neither of us can uncross.
"Then don't take it back."
The words leave my mouth before I can catch them. I feel him go still against me—a held breath, a suspended moment. Then his hands slide up my thighs, pushing my skirt higher, and his mouth finds my ear.
"Say that again."
I cannot. The words are lodged in my throat, tangled up with everything I should not be feeling, everything I should not be doing. Six months since anyone touched me. Six months since I let myself be touched, since Travis hollowed me out and left me too raw to want anyone's hands on me.
But Kai's hands are on my skin, and his mouth is on my neck, and for the first time in months I feel something other than numb.
"Skye," he says. My name in his mouth sounds obscene. "Say it again."
I kiss him instead of answering. It's easier than words. Safer than the truth.
We're tangled together on the desk—my legs wrapped around his waist, his hands in my hair, both of us breathing hard—when the familiar question slips out.
"Why are you doing this?"
He pulls back and looks at me. His expression is open in a way I've never seen in men before—unguarded, almost vulnerable. I can see the want in his eyes. I can see tenderness underneath it, a softness that scares me more than the want ever could.
Then the corner of his mouth curves up. "Because you talk too much, sister."
The word detonates in my chest.
Sister.
I see it all at once—the classroom, the desk, the scattered papers beneath me. Kai between my legs, his shirt untucked, his lips swollen from my mouth. My skirt hiked up around my hips. My hands on his skin.
I see myself the way someone else would see us. The way Heinrich would see us if he walked in right now. The way I saw Kai with Ms. Dotson earlier today.
The way the faculty would see us—the new tutor, the one with the scandal in her past, wrapped around a student. Around her stepbrother.
Dylan Cooley's face flashes through my mind. Nineteen years old, from a family with lawyers on retainer. The fabricated messages.
The internal review that was less investigation than damage control. The resignation I signed with shaking hands.
The whispers that followed me from school to school, poisoning every reference, killing every opportunity.
I cannot do this again. I cannot let another rich boy destroy me.
I shove him hard.
He stumbles back, caught off guard, and I use the distance to slide off the desk and yank my skirt back down. My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking.
"Skye—"
I slap him.
The sound cracks through the empty classroom. His head snaps to the side.
When he looks back at me, there's a red mark blooming across his cheek and shock in his eyes that might be hurt or might be anger or might be something I don't have time to decipher.
I don't stay to find out.
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