CHAPTER 1 - A LITTLE TASTE

"Unghh—"

"Don't stop until I say so."

His hand tightens in my hair and pushes me back down, and my knees ache against the cold tile floor and my jaw is sore and my eyes are watering and I am, without question, losing my entire mind because I am in the back row of a lecture hall with my stepbrother's cock in my throat while his father — our lecturer — sits at the front of the room and watches a documentary on Victorian literature like he can't see exactly what's happening fifteen feet behind thirty oblivious students.

Except he can. I know he can because I just caught his eyes glow amber over the glow of the projector, and there was nothing in them except something dark and heavy that made my stomach drop and my underwear stick to me in a way I'll be thinking about for the rest of the week.

The film plays on. Something about industrialization and the working class. The projector hums. A girl in the second row is texting under her desk and the guy next to her is half asleep with his chin on his fist, and I am on my knees behind the last row of seats with Knox Voss's hand fisted in my ponytail while he sits sprawled in his chair with his legs open and his head tilted back like he's bored of the movie and not actively getting his dick sucked in his father's classroom.

I take him deeper and he makes a low sound in the back of his throat that sends heat pooling straight between my legs. He's big enough that my jaw aches every time, and I still haven't figured out how to breathe properly around him, and none of that matters because the way his thigh tenses under my palm when I swirl my tongue makes me feel like the most powerful person in this room, which is insane considering I'm the one on my knees.

And the most insane part? Six weeks ago, I was crying on my dorm room floor over a boy named Ryan Parker who told me I was too sweet for him.

***

Six weeks earlier.

Ryan Parker breaks up with me in the campus coffee shop during my shift, which is a choice that says more about his character than anything I could add editorially. He sits at the counter with his hands wrapped around the latte I MADE HIM — the latte I made with the little heart in the foam because I'm the kind of person who does that, the kind of person who memorizes drink orders and dots her i's with circles and folds her boyfriend's laundry when he leaves it in the dryer — and he says the words that rearrange the furniture in my chest.

"You're too sweet, Ivy. You're just... not my type."

Too sweet. Not his type. I'm standing behind the counter in my apron with milk foam on my wrist and he's dumping me over a latte I drew a HEART on, and the humiliation is so specific that it circles past painful and lands somewhere adjacent to absurd. He doesn't even finish the coffee. He leaves it on the counter with the foam heart slowly dissolving into the surface, and I watch it collapse and think about how my mom always said I was too much of a pushover and how I always told her that being kind wasn't the same as being weak and how Ryan Parker just proved her right with a four-dollar latte and eleven words.

I go home. I cry on my bathroom floor for forty-five minutes, which I feel is a reasonable and proportional response. Then I wash my face and stare at myself in the mirror and the girl looking back at me is the same girl who has been looking back at me for nineteen years — quiet, careful, invisible, SWEET — and I decide that being sweet has gotten me exactly nowhere and that tonight I'm going to be something else.

My roommate's friend is throwing a party at the Sigma Kappa house two blocks from campus, and I put on a skirt that's shorter than anything I've ever worn and a top that shows more collarbone than I've exposed since birth and I walk into that party with the specific energy of a girl who got called "too sweet" four hours ago and has decided to become everyone's problem.

The party is loud and dark and crowded and smells like cheap beer and body spray and bad decisions, and I drink two cups of whatever is in the red cups by the door and the alcohol hits my empty stomach like a warm fist and suddenly the music is louder and the lights are softer and the tightness in my chest from Ryan's words starts to loosen into something that feels less like sadness and more like recklessness.

I dance. I don't dance — I've never been the girl who dances at parties because dancing requires being seen and being seen requires confidence and confidence requires being someone's type, which I am apparently not — but tonight the alcohol and the humiliation and the short skirt are combining into a chemical reaction that makes my hips move in ways they've never moved and I don't care who's watching because the whole point is that someone SHOULD be watching, someone should see me and want me, because Ryan Parker didn't and the rejection is sitting in my bloodstream like venom that I need to metabolize through the body of someone who finds me interesting enough to stay.

Someone is watching.

I feel him before I see him — a shift in the density of the air behind me, a heat source that's too warm to be a normal body, and then hands on my hips that are large enough that his fingers nearly touch at my navel. He's behind me and I don't turn around because turning around would make this real and right now I want it to stay in the blurry, reckless space where consequences don't exist and I am not the sweet girl from the coffee shop but someone braver and darker and WANTED.

He pulls me back against his chest and he's tall enough that my head barely reaches his shoulder, and his body is hard and hot through his t-shirt and his hands are guiding my hips in a rhythm that the alcohol has made me pliant enough to follow. I can feel his hardness against my lower back, and the knowledge that a stranger is turned on by the girl Ryan Parker found too boring to keep sends a surge of vindication through me that mixes with the alcohol and the bass and the darkness into something potent enough that I reach back and grip the back of his neck and pull his face down toward mine.

He kisses the side of my neck and his mouth is hot — hotter than a mouth should be, hot enough that the temperature registers through the haze of the alcohol and the music — and his lips drag from beneath my ear to the curve where my neck meets my shoulder in a slow path that makes my eyes close and my back arch against his chest. His arms tighten around my waist and his mouth opens against my pulse point and the kiss deepens into something wetter and more deliberate, and I can feel the scrape of his teeth against the tendon of my neck and the pressure is building toward something that my drunk brain interprets as intensity and my sober brain would probably interpret as danger.

He bites me.

Not a nibble, not the playful graze of teeth that boys do when they're trying to be sexy. His teeth sink into the muscle at the junction of my neck and shoulder hard enough that a bolt of pain shoots down my arm and into my fingertips, and I jerk forward and gasp and my hand flies to the spot and my fingers come away wet and I twist around to look at him for the first time.

He's gone.

The crowd has closed over the space where he was standing and I'm turning in circles in the middle of a dance floor with my hand on my neck and blood on my fingertips, and the music is pounding and the lights are strobing and nobody around me seems to have noticed that a stranger just bit a chunk out of my neck at a frat party and disappeared into the dark like he was made of smoke.

I push through the crowd and out the front door and the cold air hits me like a wall and I press my hand against the bite and it stings under my palm and I should go to the hospital, probably, or at least find a first aid kit, but the alcohol is making everything feel distant and muffled and the walk home is only four blocks and I just want to lie down and figure out what the hell just happened in the morning.

I make it to my apartment. I don't check the bite in the mirror because I'm too drunk and too tired and too full of the strange, buzzing energy that's been humming under my skin since his teeth broke the surface. I fall face-first onto my bed and the room spins and the last thing I think about before I pass out isn't Ryan Parker or the dissolved foam heart or the word "sweet" being used like a synonym for "boring."

The last thing I think about is the heat of his mouth on my neck and the sound he made right before he bit me — a low, vibrating sound that came from somewhere deeper than a human throat, a sound that I can still feel resonating in the wound on my neck like it was implanted there along with his teeth.

I pass out with my hand pressed against the bite and my blood drying on my fingers and a stranger's growl echoing in the dark behind my eyelids.

The bite is still stinging when I wake up. By Wednesday, it's just a scar.