CHAPTER 7 - LIAR

IVY’S POV

I didn’t sleep after the growl.

That low, vibrating sound sat in my chest for the rest of the night. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know why the sound of it made me press my thighs together instead of reaching for my phone to call someone.

My mom slides a plate of toast across the counter on her way out the door and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and says “Love you, baby, you look tired” and I say “Love you too, Mom” and eat her breakfast with Knox’s taste still in my throat and the guilt sitting in my stomach heavier than the food.

I’m still thinking about it when Knox appears in the driveway, sitting on that bike with a helmet in his hand.

I am not getting on that motorcycle.

This is what I tell myself while I stand in the driveway with my backpack over one shoulder and my car keys in my hand and my stepbrother sitting on a matte-black bike that looks like it was designed specifically to ruin the lives of women with poor decision-making skills.

He’s holding a helmet out to me with one hand and resting the other on the handlebar, and he hasn’t said a word because he doesn’t need to because the helmet IS the word, and the fact that he’s already wearing his means he decided I was getting on this bike before he even rolled it out of the garage.

“I have a car,” I say.

He doesn’t respond. He just sits there with the helmet extended and his thighs spread wide on the seat and the morning sun catching the silver of his belt buckle – the same belt buckle I heard coming undone in my bedroom two nights ago – and I hate that my body responds to the sight of a belt buckle now, hate that he’s conditioned me to associate a piece of metal with the sound of my own knees hitting carpet, and I take the helmet from his hand because apparently my self-preservation instinct has filed for early retirement.

I swing my leg over the seat behind him and the moment I settle my weight the position forces my thighs open around his hips and my chest presses against his back and I have to wrap my arms around his waist because there’s nothing else to hold onto, and the entire arrangement feels less like transportation and more like foreplay with an engine.

He kicks the bike to life and the vibration hits me right between the legs and my arms tighten around him involuntarily, and I swear I feel his stomach muscles contract with a laugh he doesn’t let out.

He takes the long way to campus. I know this because I’ve driven this route every day for a year and the turns he’s making are heading away from Ashworth, toward the outskirts where the roads get quieter and the houses thin out and there’s nobody around to see whatever he’s about to do, and the certainty that he’s about to do something makes the vibration of the bike feel ten times more intense against the seam of my jeans.

He pulls off onto a dirt shoulder next to a stretch of road that’s lined with trees on both sides and completely empty in both directions. The engine idles but he doesn’t kill it, and the vibration continues humming through the seat and up through my body while he turns around on the bike to face me.

He grabs my thighs – both hands, fingers digging into the denim hard enough that I can feel the bruise forming underneath – and pulls me forward along the seat until I’m pressed against him.

My legs are wrapped around his waist now and the angle has changed so that every vibration from the engine is pressing directly against my clit through my jeans, and the combined sensation of the rumbling bike and his hands and his body heat makes my hips roll forward before I can stop them.

His mouth curves into something that isn’t quite a smile as he rocks me against him, slow and deliberate, using his grip on my thighs to control the rhythm.

The friction of denim on denim combined with the constant vibration underneath us is building pressure so fast that I grab the handlebars behind him just to have something to hold onto, and my knuckles are white and my head drops back and he watches my throat like he wants to put his mouth on it.

“I can feel you through your jeans,” he says, and his voice has that low, rough quality that it gets when he’s turned on but trying to sound casual about it. “You’re grinding on my bike like you’ve been thinking about it all morning.”

I have been thinking about it all morning.

I’ve been thinking about it since he revved the engine in the driveway and the sound went straight through me like a bassline, but I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of admitting that so I dig my nails into the rubber handlebar grips and press my lips together and refuse to make a sound even though his hips are rocking up against mine now in counterpoint to the engine’s vibration and the dual rhythm is turning my brain to static.

He pulls me tighter against him and grinds up hard enough that I can feel the full thick length of him through both layers of denim, and the pressure against my clit spikes and my whole body clenches and I make a sound that I will deny making for the rest of my natural life.

His hands slide from my thighs to my hips and he takes over completely, rocking me against him at a pace that’s faster than before, and the vibration of the idling engine is doing half the work while his body does the other half and I am going to cum on a motorcycle on the side of the road at 8:30 in the morning and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

“You want to cum on my bike?” he says, and he’s watching my face the way he always watches my face, like he’s memorizing the exact sequence of expressions I make when I’m about to fall apart. “Do it.”

My body listens to him instantly, and the orgasm crashes through me hard enough that my thighs lock around his waist and my back arches and I bite down on the collar of his leather jacket because his shoulder is the only thing close enough to muffle the noise.

Knox holds me through it, still rocking gently, still letting the engine’s vibration draw it out, and when it finally passes I slump forward against his chest with my forehead on his shoulder and my arms shaking and my jeans absolutely ruined.

He turns back around on the bike without a word, kicks it into gear, and pulls back onto the road. He drives one-handed. The other hand rests on my thigh for the entire ride back, his thumb tracing slow circles on the inside of my knee through the denim, and I press my face against his back and breathe him in and hate myself with a consistency and enthusiasm that is honestly kind of impressive.

We pull into the main campus parking lot and he cuts the engine and the sudden absence of vibration between my legs makes me aware of exactly how sensitive I still am. I climb off the bike on legs that feel borrowed from someone less structurally stable, and I hand him the helmet and he catches my wrist just like he did in the kitchen.

His thumb finds my pulse. He counts for two seconds.

“I’m cold,” I say, because I need to say something, anything, to regain some scrap of control over this interaction.

He looks at my flushed face and my bitten lips and the visible tremor in my hands and the corner of his mouth twitches.

“Liar.”