“Penn! Wait!” Adriana lets out a shriek.

I lift my head from his triangle back and watch Adriana jogging behind us before stopping, like she knows she shouldn’t. Gus and Colin stand to interfere, but Knight yanks them both down by the back of their collars. “Sit.”

“Are they, like, happening?” Esme whisper-shouts, her mouth agape.

Knight snorts and throws a french fry at her. “Nah. Just an old childhood beef.”

He doesn’t know anything—he is just covering for me—but he nailed it.

Penn throws the door to the diner open and stalks me into the alleyway behind it, sandwiched between an auto shop and Lenny’s. He puts me down and takes a step back, like he, too, can’t control himself. I lean against a huge Smock Test sign with coffee stains all over it and fold my arms.

He paces back and forth, waiting for me to say something. But I shouldn’t be the one explaining myself.

“You need to apologize to Adriana,” he clips.

“You need to apologize to me,” I say, still tucked firmly in the role of the cold-ass bitch. “You put your hands on me when you had a girlfriend. I’m not that kind of girl.”

“You’re definitely that kind of girl.” He stops, staring at me through hooded eyes. A vicious smirk twists his lips as he sticks it to me.

“You’re the type of girl who would fuck a married man without batting an eyelash just to prove she can. You let me put my hands and tongue on you, already knowing that I have a girlfriend, so don’t play the fucking saint.”

For the first time since I learned how to talk, I’m at a loss for words. I know he actually believes that. He would always think the worst of me. He is slowly morphing into my mother, losing faith in me, too.

I turn around and stomp my way back into the diner to get my phone and call an Uber. He clasps my wrist and jerks me back. I twist toward him and slap him in the face. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, and he doesn’t see it coming. He stumbles back—not from the slap but from the shock. His eyes burn my face as they drink me in. There’s a current dancing between us, and I’m afraid to move, knowing it could electrify me.

“I will never touch someone who isn’t mine to touch. But you did. Don’t turn this around on me, Scully. You screwed around behind your baby momma’s back with the ice princess because you wanted to prove you could. But you know what? You are right about one thing. I’m selling myself short. Kissing you. Stripping for you. Humoring you. I’m done ghosting my wake-up calls.”

With that, I try to dart back to Lenny’s, but he scoops me up from the ground like I’m a toddler, and this time, my back crashes against the wall. He grabs my throat and squeezes, kissing me so hard my lips bruise. I ball my fists and rain them on his chest, ripping his holey shirt farther and dragging my fingernails across his exposed skin.

“I hate you,” I cry. “Marx, I do. I hate you so much.”

His hands meet the back of my knees, and he hoists me up. I knot my legs around his waist. He cups my face and squashes it as if he is milking this kiss out of me.

“Yet you’re still fucking kissing me. With the girlfriend. And the baby. And the sister who will always be better than you. You’re kissing your foster brother who hates you, Followhill. A whole fucking lot.”

“Fuck you.” My tears are unstoppable, raining down hard and fast. My body shudders violently as the sobs rip through me. We’re swallowing each other’s words and secrets and lies with our mouths. My body moves with his. He groans into my lips as though it’s painful. As though he wants to pull away, but he can’t.

He unbuckles his tattered rope belt and unzips his jeans, grabbing his cock through his briefs and grinding it over my slit through my Daisy Dukes.

“Eat me,” I moan. “You don’t deserve to enjoy this. I’m the one who should be taking everything in this situation.”

He drops down to his knees and tugs my Daisy Dukes and panties aside, stretching the denim against my skin and causing me delicious pain. He throws one of my legs over his shoulder and presses his nose into my slit, inhaling deeply.

A feral growl rips from his throat, coming from somewhere deep and primal, and he bites my inner thigh.

“Blythe might be pregnant, so good luck paying child support for two children at eighteen, asshole.” I groan. His tongue drags along my slit, then his mouth clamps on my clit, and he sucks on it hard. I moan. He grinds his straight teeth along my pussy, creating delicious friction. “Marx,” I mutter.

He laughs a gruff, grown-up laugh that makes my bones quiver. I don’t know why this eighteen-year-old feels like more of a man than my almost forty-year-old principal.

“Will you babysit?” he taunts me. I grip his silky, light brown hair and pull hard, wanting to inflict pain.

“It’s not funny.”

“She’s not pregnant,” he says between lazy strokes of his tongue, eating me so willingly and happily, I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. He is driving me crazy. No one has ever gone down on me, and when I asked him to, I was expecting him to laugh in my face and say no. I couldn’t deny myself it, either. All my friends get action at Lenny’s. I wanted to, too.

“So why is she having a meltdown?”

“Because she saw Vaughn before the game with Las Juntas fucking some other chick’s mouth under the bleachers.” After another flick of his tongue across my clit, he’s back to sucking on it hard. My thighs begin to shake around his beautiful head.

“H-how do you know that?” My teeth are chattering. It feels too good to be legal. I want Penn to go down on me for the rest of our lives.

“Because I was doing something similar at the time under the same bleachers. You know, to get rid of all the stress.”

Yeah. I know. With Adriana, most likely.

I throw my head back and squeeze my eyes shut as his lips clamp on my clit and suck hard while he rubs his chin over my opening. It’s messy and hungry and beautiful. He squeezes my ass, and my body breaks into small spasms, a wave of heat blanketing me from head to toe.

My orgasm gallops through me like wild horses. I’m shaking all over. I’ve never come so hard in my life, and on someone’s face, no less.

He sucks my clit between his lips one more time as I come down from the high before he rises to his feet. His whole face is glowing with my lust for him, his chin dripping my juices.

I want to tell him that he is an asshole, but his mouth crashes down on mine, and he demolishes me with a kiss, forcing me to taste my sweet, earthy musk. I hate myself so much for letting him do this to me over and over again when he has a girlfriend. It makes me sick to my stomach. I touch his chest through the hole in his shirt and tug at his lower lip until I suck all of it into my mouth. I take everything he is willing to give me, and then steal some more moments, watching his gorgeous silhouette under the starlit sky.

“This is the last time,” I promise. To him. To myself. It’s not about Adriana; it’s about me. I’ll never be a cheater. And taking someone who doesn’t belong to you knowingly—that’s cheating.

He tears his lips away from mine and grins. “You really thought me going down on you is you winning?” he mocks, dragging his palm across his chin and sucking the rest of my juices from his finger.