Harley's POV
The kiss needed only a few moments to deepen from something tender into something hungrier. The careful gentleness of the first contact burning away as his mouth opens against mine and the sound I make erases whatever boundary we were pretending still existed.
Tate’s hands slide from my jaw to my neck, fingers threading through my hair, tilting my head back to change the angle. His lips go more demanding, and when his tongue traces my lower lip, sliding against mine, the heat that floods my body is so immediate it steals my breath.
I grip his shoulders and pull him closer, needing the weight of him, the proof that this is real and not some fever dream I'll wake from being humiliated.
He eases me back onto the narrow bed without breaking the kiss, his body settling over mine—not fully, but enough that I feel the solid warmth of him everywhere.
His hips press against mine, and even through layers of fabric the contact makes my spine arch off the mattress. His mouth leaves mine and trails down my jaw, my neck, finding the spot beneath my ear that makes me gasp, my fingers dig into his back.
His hands find the hem of my shirt and he pauses there for a moment—a question in hesitation before I answer by pulling at his shirt first, dragging it up his torso until he leans back just enough to yank it over his head.
The sight of him steals the air from my lungs—golden light skin, the defined lines of muscle carved by years of football, the way his chest rises and falls with breathing that's nowhere near steady.
I press my palms flat against his stomach and feel every muscle tighten beneath my touch, a visible shudder running through him.
Then his hands finally slide beneath my shirt, warm palms tracing my ribs, the dip of my waist, moving with a patience that's almost cruel against how badly I want him to move faster.
When his fingers graze the underside of my bra, my breath hitches audibly, and I feel his mouth curve into a smile against my collarbone.
"Off," I whisper, and I barely recognize my own voice.
He pushes my shirt up and over my head, and for a moment I feel exposed in a way that has nothing to do with skin. But his eyes move over me with something that is reverent.
Hungry and reverent, and the combination makes the heat pool low in my stomach.
His hands cup my breasts through the thin cotton of my bra, thumbs tracing circles that tighten my entire body into a knot of sensation. When he tugs the fabric down and his mouth replaces his hands, warm, wet, deliberate, I arch into him so hard the bed frame creaks.
The sound I make is something between a moan and his name, and it seems to break something in him. Tate’s breathing fractures, his hands grip my waist harder, his mouth works against my skin with an intensity that turns every nerve ending into a lit fuse.
My hand slides over the front of his jeans, pressing against the hard length of him through denim, and the reaction is immediate. His hips jerk against my palm as a low, guttural sound tears from his throat.
"Harley." My name in his mouth sounds like a warning and a prayer simultaneously. "If you keep doing that, I'm going to…"
"Good," I breathe, and squeeze.
Something snaps and his mouth crashes back to mine—messy, desperate, all pretense of patience abandoned. We move against each other in the dim room, grinding together with a friction that builds and builds and builds.
His hand slides beneath my underwear, fingers finding me with a certainty that makes my back bow off the mattress and a moan spill from my lips that I couldn't contain if my life depended on it.
He touches me like he's been studying for this, reading every gasp and shudder like a language he's determined to master. My hand wraps around him over his boxers, hot and hard, pulsing against my palm, and the sound he makes against my mouth is wrecked, desperate, barely human.
Then a single hit at the door shatters everything.
"Harley! What the hell is going on in there? Open this fucking door right now, and If you’re doing what I think you’re doing, I'm wrecking the pretty boy’s neck.”
Diego. Of course it's Diego.
I scramble upright so fast I nearly fall off the bed, my heart slamming against my ribs. Tate rolls the opposite direction, grabbing a pillow like it's a shield.
"Clothes," I hiss, scanning the floor in pure panic. "Where the hell—"
My shirt is somehow on the other side of the room. Tate's is tangled in the sheets. We both dive for our respective items like it's a timed obstacle course.
I yank my shirt over my head while Tate hops on one foot trying to get his pants back on. He nearly crashes into the desk. I twist, trying to adjust my bra strap that's completely twisted, and my knee lands between his legs.
Tate makes a sound like all the air just left his body and doubles over.
"Oh shit, sorry—"
"Just…" He wheezes, waving me off while clutching himself. "Fix your…"
I reach behind my back, struggling with the clasp that's somehow migrated to my side. "I can't—it's stuck—"
"Here." Still wincing, Tate moves behind me and tugs the band back into place with quick, efficient movements that suggest this is absolutely not the first time he's handled a bra.
"Your hair," he mutters, already smoothing down his own disaster.
I shove mine behind my ears, check myself one more time and open the door with every ounce of forced casualness I can manufacture.
"Look." I block the doorframe with my body. "We're not doing anything. We were just talking."
Diego's eyes sweep from me to Tate and back—a slow, devastating inventory that misses nothing. "Yeah, I see." His voice is flat as concrete. "His boner is about to break through the fucking ceiling right now. And there's no way to hide that with a pillow."
"Nothing happened!"
"Your shirt's on inside out, his hair looks like he fought a hurricane and lost, and the noises coming through that wall were definitely just an aggressive debate about student council policy."
"You're being unreasonable."
A shuffling sound from the hallway, and Aro materializes from the shadows like a half-asleep specter of righteous indignation. His eyes are barely open, his hair plastered to one side of his head, his expression communicating a very specific grievance.
"If they did it on my bed," his voice’s thick with sleep on a couch and the gravity of a man defending his last sacred possession, "and left anything on my sheets… I'll end them both. Those are my sheets, Harley, mine. I just washed them yesterday, for fuck’s sake!."
"Nobody did anything on your sheets, Aro! Oh my God…"
"Aro, language!" Mom’s voice carries from the hallway with the practiced projection of a woman who's managed four sons and missed nothing in the process.
Footsteps approach, and then my mother rounds the corner in her bathrobe, takes one look at the scene, Diego's fury, Aro's sheet-related trauma, my crimson face, and Tate's pillow-fortified position on the bed, and her expression undergoes a transformation.
First, maternal concern. Then, slowly, something else.
Something that looks horrifyingly like poorly concealed hope.
"Honey, we've never had that conversation about the importance of contraception, and I take responsibility for that." She says, her voice gentle in a way that makes my stomach drop. "Boys, she’s a grown young woman, and these things happen naturally between two people who care about each other. But Harley, maybe it's time we sat down and discussed…"
"Mo-o-om, please!"
The word comes out as a groan so deep it originates somewhere near my kneecaps.
"I beg you, please stop talking! Nothing happened. Nothing is happening. Nothing will happen tonight or any other night while the entire Valdez family is apparently conducting surveillance outside my bedroom door!"
"I'm just saying, mija, there's no shame in…"
"Tate is staying the night because it's too late for him to walk through Southside in the dark, and he'll sleep on the couch, and everyone in this hallway is going to mind their own business and go to bed. This conversation is over!"
I meet Diego's eyes, then Aro's, then Mom’s.
"Goodnight," I say, with the finality of a judge delivering a sentence, and close the door in their faces.
The latch clicks shut. I lean my back against the wood and press my palms flat against the door, breathing hard, my face burning so hot I'm surprised the paint isn't peeling.
The silence stretches. I stare at Tate across the small room. He stares back—hair wrecked, shirt still twisted, the pillow clutched against his lap with a death grip.
His face is flushed, and my shirt, I realize with dawning horror, is indeed inside out.
Neither of us can hold it anymore and we break at the same time—laughter erupting so hard and so fast that I have to press both hands over my mouth to keep the whole apartment from hearing.
Tate buries his face in the pillow, his shoulders shaking, as I slide down the door until I'm sitting on the floor, tears streaming down my cheeks.
The kind of laughter that hurts your ribs and steals your breath and feels, somehow, like the most honest thing that's happened all night.