Chapter 76: Step Up

Ana rang the bell like she wanted to break it.

David opened the door in a t-shirt and shorts, already smiling the small, private smile he wore when a plan was going the way he had pictured it. Ana did not smile back. She stepped inside, kicked the door shut with her heel, and stood in the middle of his living room with her arms folded.

“What do you want?” she said. “Say it. I’ll do it and I’m leaving.”

David’s eyebrows rose.

“That’s a mood.”

“I’m not in a mood. I’m done wasting time.” Edward’s kitchen was still in her body — the glass on the counter, the quiet refusal, the way he had picked up his keys like she was an appointment that had run long. “So collect the promise and let me go.”

David gestured toward the couch.

“Sit. Relax. Nobody said you had to sprint through it.”

“I don’t want to relax.”

He went to the kitchen anyway and came back with two glasses and a bottle that was already open. Ana looked at it, looked at him, and then took the glass because her hands needed something to do that was not hitting anyone. The first drink burned. The second sat warmer. By the third she had her shoes off and one foot tucked under her on the couch and the sharpest edge of the afternoon had blurred into something she could stand.

David drank slower than she did.

“I want to fuck you,” he said, as if he were telling her the time.

Ana let out a breath that might have been a laugh. The room tilted a little. Anger and alcohol made a useful combination. She did not feel careful. She did not feel like a girl who had just been told she was not marriage material.

“Aren’t you already fucking Elena these days?” she asked. “Why me?”

David shrugged.

“Change of pace. Nothing much.”

That did it.

The sentence was small and lazy and it landed on the exact bruise Edward had left. Nothing much. Another man treating her like a variation. Another man with Elena already in his mouth when he talked.

Ana set the glass down hard enough to click.

“Oh yeah?” she said. “Well, you’re going to realize I’m way better than her.”

She stood up and pulled her top off before David could answer. Her bra followed. She shoved her jeans down, kicked them aside, and dropped to her knees between his legs. David’s surprise lasted only as long as it took her to get his shorts down and his cock into her hand. He was already halfway hard. Ana took him into her mouth with none of the hesitation she might have had sober and unspurned.

She sucked him like the comparison was a dare she intended to win.

David’s head dropped back against the couch. One hand found her hair. Ana used her tongue, her hand, the wet heat of her throat, working him with a focus that had less to do with wanting him and more to do with erasing Elena from the sentence he had just said. When she pulled off, a string of spit connected her bottom lip to the head of his cock.

“Get on the bed,” she said.

They did not make it as far as manners.

David pulled her up, kissed her once, and walked her backward into the bedroom. Ana pushed him onto the mattress and climbed on top of him, guiding him inside her in one drop of her hips. She was wet enough that it was easy. Anger did that too. She started riding him hard, hands on his chest, hair falling forward, the slap of skin filling the small room.

David held her waist and let her set the pace. Ana did not want tenderness. She wanted to be better. She wanted him to say it. She fucked him through the first stretch of heat until her thighs burned, then let him roll her onto her back and take her with deeper, heavier strokes. His mouth was on her breast. Her nails were on his shoulder. She came with a sharp sound she did not try to swallow, and he kept going until he finished inside her with a groan against her neck.

They were not done.

Ana pushed him onto his back again after a few minutes and took him back into her mouth until he was hard. Then she straddled him a second time, slower, grinding down so he filled her completely. The alcohol made the edges of the room soft. The anger made her mouth honest.

“Now tell me,” she said, still moving on him, breath broken. “Aren’t I better than Elena?”

David laughed.

It was not cruel exactly. It was worse than cruel. It was assessing.

“You’ve got potential,” he said. His hands slid up her sides. “But to get on the professor’s level, you need to step up.”

Ana’s rhythm faltered.

“What does that mean?”

David reached for his phone on the nightstand without pulling out of her. He typed one word. Or maybe he just hit a call. Ana did not see the screen. She only heard the sound of another door in the apartment opening — not the front door. An interior one. A room she had not realized was occupied.

Max walked in first.

Behind him came three more guys Ana recognized from campus in the vague way you recognized people who existed in the same hallways. They were already in the room. They had been in the room. David had never been alone.

Ana stayed on top of him, still filled, still half-drunk, the comparison to Elena suddenly much larger than a sentence on a couch.

Max looked at her the way he had looked at Elena in a lecture hall the day the deal was made.

“He told you,” Max said. “Time to step up.”

The other three spread out along the wall and the edge of the bed.

Ana’s promise sat in the air with them — one request, any request — and David’s cock still inside her, and five faces waiting to see whether she was going to climb off or prove the thing she had just shouted.

End of Chapter 76

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