Hard to Resist (13 page)

I place the plates in the sink but as I turn around, Nolan is stepping in. With is head slightly tilted, it looks as if he’s about to eat me alive but there’s something else in his eyes. Something extremely seductive. “It’s been two weeks since I’ve felt your lips against mine,” he says, taking a small step forward. “Two weeks since I’ve seen you or tasted that tongue of yours. What are we waiting for again?”

“Um . . .”I grip the edge of the counter as he takes his last step in and presses his groin against me. My body tenses as I stare into his eyes.

“Does this feel natural?” he asks.

“Does what feel natural?”

“The way I touch you. The way I make your body coil with pleasure. The way your lips pucker when you know you really want to kiss me.”

I pull my lips in quickly, realizing that they are a bit puckered. I do want to kiss him, and I didn’t even realize it. To be honest, I want to do more with him. But we’re taking this slowly. We’re taking it easy.

“You don’t have to resist it anymore, Natalie. Just do it.” His lips stretch softly. He’s tempting me in every way possible. His voice is low, deep, and is causing my legs to quake and stiffen at the same time.

Oh, forget it. I’m going for it
. I reel him in but before our lips touch, I see him smile. But that smile is pushed aside immediately as I crush my lips against his. Wrapping his hands around my waist, he picks me up to place me on the counter. Pressing in further, his firm chest pushes beneath my breasts as he pulls me in by my hips. His lips trail from my lips to my neck. I pant heavily while twisting my fingers through his hair. He releases a soft groan but he doesn’t stop kissing me. Heat slithers from my chest to my panties. God, what is he waiting for?

A door creaks open from the living room and he pulls away from me quickly. Keys jingle and we both try to ease up on our heavy breathing but it’s impossible. It’s almost like we’ve just run a marathon. It takes only a few seconds for Harper to come around the corner. She spots us and her eyes widen quickly as she clutches her keys in her hand.

Even though she hasn’t said anything, I wince. I know it’s coming. This is Harper we’re talking about. I’ve been avoiding conversations with her about Nolan purposely throughout the past two weeks but now that she’s seen this, she’s going to believe that I’ve lied about being upset with him.

“On my counter? Really, Nat!” she screeches. Nolan and I finally breathe again. He chuckles as he pulls away from me and straightens his crumpled tank top. The tank top that I had a tight grip on.

“I’ll give you two a minute,” he says as he looks from me to Harper who is still scowling at us. He turns to step around her with a smile still glued to his lips. He is truly getting a kick out of this.

As soon as Nolan is out of the kitchen, Harper steps towards me and grabs me by the wrist. “A serious talk in my room.
Now
,” she demands as I hop down from the counter and she drags me out.

When we pass the living room, Nolan is sitting on the sofa and shaking his head with a small smirk. He winks and I flush before she rounds the corner, swings her bedroom door open, and then slams it shut behind us.

“What in the hell is going on?” she asks, crossing her arms tightly. “You told me he was a cheating scumbag!”

“I’m sure I didn’t say it like that, Harper.”

She flicks her hand, pushing my statement aside. “Well whatever. You were so depressed these past few weeks but I come home to this—to you getting dry humped on
my counter
. This is just weird, Nat.”

“It’s not weird!” I argue as I smooth my hair down. “I’ve agreed to let things be natural between Nolan and I. You should be happy about this. At least I wasn’t sucking his dick!”

Harper gasps as her blues eyes stretch. “What are getting at?”

“Why didn’t you tell me about Max?” I ask. “Since when have you kept things from me?” Her face depresses only slightly as she looks away from me. But just in the same amount of time that her face saddened, she perks back up, her face full of life again.

“I’m afraid you’ll look down on me for the things I do now, Nat. Most shit that I do, I do it out of stupidity. Most times I’m drunk out of my mind and sometimes I don’t remember what in the hell happened during the night before. That’s kind of why I eased up on taking you out. Because I don’t want you following in my footsteps.” She reaches for my hand and leads me to her bed. We both sit at the same time but my eyes don’t drift from hers.

“Ever since Bobby and I split, I just feel the need to take control. I feel the need to suck-then-fuck every guy that I come across. I want each and every one of them to remember how great I am and then regret the way they are. Just like Max. Max has millions of whores in the office of his clubs. He tried to treat me like one of them but I refused. He liked my attitude and asked me to go on a date with him. I agreed to do it. That’s how I got the pass for you. It was a few weeks ago, actually.

“Max is a cool guy, but he takes women for granted. He thinks that if he snaps, they’ll come running . . . but not me. I fucked the shit out of Max and then left his house during the middle of the night. I show up at his club just to remind him that he’s a dick and that he will never have me. I want to be hard to resist and hard to let go of. So far, I feel like I’m doing a damn good job at it because they constantly call me. Guys love when you give them a good BJ and then jump on top of them. It’s like their fantasy or something. I read it in a magazine once.”

My head shakes as I stare at Harp with the widest eyes ever. “But why?” I never would have thought that she would turn into a one-night-stand kind of girl. I can’t imagine how many men she’s actually had sex with during the course of these two years.

“Bobby really fucked me over, Nat. I hate the idea of settling again. It terrifies me to even think about how hurt I was. I don’t want anyone to have control over my heart.”

“That’s completely insane, Harp. You give them your all for one night and then just leave them alone?” My face scrunches. I refuse to judge my best friend but this behavior is ridiculous. “You don’t find that kind of . . . odd?”

“It not odd. Think about it for a sec,” she says, standing from the bed to justify herself. “Men do it all of the time. I do it for the fun of it—but don’t think that I do it every weekend. The maximum number of men that I’ve slept with is seven since I’ve been here. All of them beg for a real date with me . . . including Dawson.”

“Ugh,” I groan. “I seriously need to meet this Dawson guy. Does he know that you do this?”

“Yeah,” she breathes. “This is what I wanted to keep from you. When I saw him again at that beach party, I wanted to ignore him so damn bad. I wanted him to remember what we’d shared and how great our sex was but Nat,” she says, reaching for my hands to grip them. “There is just something about him that is making me want to stop what I’m doing. I don’t get how he can do it to me, but now I regret sleeping with those guys. He had practically given me a lecture about my behavior. I was still drunk when he gave it to me but I remember every single thing that he said. He wants to change me. But I can’t change. I’m too accustomed to partying my ass of and being single. I’m too used to hurting them for hurting girls like
us
.”

As Harper says that, my mind circles back to Nolan. She and Nolan are exactly the same. They can’t help the way they are. They’re so used to their flaws that their flaws turn into bad habits. I can’t believe this. For two weeks, I’ve been living with someone that hurts others for no reason as well. There is no reason to hurt people that actually want more. But I guess I can understand why Harper is the way she is now. She’s broken, just like Nolan. Just like me. She’s torn and she refuses to be mended by anyone else. But unlike her, Nolan wants to change. He wants the help.

“I think you should give Dawson a chance,” I finally say.

Her forehead creases over as her nose scrunches. “Why? He’s too . . . mature,” she groans.

“Maybe maturity is what you need, Harp. You should do what Nolan and I are doing. Take things naturally, day-by-day.”

“Um, I’m sorry but humping and kissing on my shiny counters is not natural. That’s just plain disgusting. I’ll be sure not to make my food on that side of the kitchen again.”

I chuck a laugh as I stand. “I’m being serious, Harp. Nolan is going through something that I’m going to find out more about . . . just as you are. I’m willing to help him, just as Dawson is willing to help you.”

Groaning, she flops backwards and her blonde hair stretches along her white sheets. “Do I have to?” she whines.

“You don’t have to . . . but I’m sure that you’ll love it.”
Because I love how things are going already.

She props herself up on her elbows to eye me. “Okay. But if he gets out of hand with his, I’m calling it quits. I don’t want him thinking that we’re getting serious anytime soon. This will take some getting used to. I know what I do is bad but it can’t be worse than having someone nag at me about the way I am all of the time.”

Nodding, I turn for the door. I know if she feels that way, so will I. I’m still getting used to this idea. I’m practically setting myself up for something to fail. But I’ll go through with it. I’ll do whatever I can to keep Nolan in my grasp. I refuse to let him slip because if he slips, I slip. And if I fall again, I may not get back up. If my heart is ripped out of my chest by Nolan—someone that I want to get to know—I’m not sure what I will do.

Chapter Fourteen

Bryson started to drift away from me about three weeks before he had officially cheated on me. Those three weeks dragged by and made me doubt how strong our love really was every single day. Bryson would pick me up from home to take me to school. We would ride together in his mud-green Jeep Wrangler. I knew something was wrong. I could feel it. Especially on the night that we were supposed to go out for dinner together.

“I have something to do for my mom tonight. We might have to reschedule dinner,” he said as he parked in front of my driveway. We were coming from Mark’s house where we would lie to our parents and say that we were having a study session but in all reality, we would be fooling around. But that night at Mark’s, Bryson barely touched me. He barely looked at me. That entire night he played XBOX with Mark until he was ready to drop me off. I nodded and swallowed the bulge in my throat as I reached to unbuckle my seatbelt. The fact that he wasn’t even looking at me bothered me deeply.

“What does she want you to do?” I asked. Bryson’s mom is a lawyer. She’s hardly ever home so I should have known that he was lying to me. I was just too blind to see it. I loved him. Bryson’s dad was a complete asshole so his mom kicked him to the curb immediately. Bryson lives with a single parent—a parent that barely spends time with him. On graduation day, she’d told him that she was going to be showing up late. After the ceremony was over, we came to the conclusion that she wasn’t going to show up at all.

“She wants me to babysit some kids of a friend of hers while they go out. I don’t know. It’s kind of stupid,” he muttered with a careless shrug but he still wasn’t looking at me.

“Bryson.” I reached for his hand and gripped it. “Are you okay?”

He finally turned to look at me. His emerald green eyes pierced through mine as he examined every aspect of my face. It was as if he was debating on whether he should have gone through with the devious plan that he had started.

I guess he decided to go through with it because he pulled his hand away to place it on the steering wheel. I’m sure he thought it was an unnoticeable gesture but I noticed everything that was wrong with it. Usually when I felt that something was wrong with him, he would cup my face, kiss me, and then tell me that he’s more than alright when we’re together. But not that night. Facing forward, he looked through the windshield again. “I’m alright, Nat. Go ahead and spend time with your dad. I’ll call you tonight when the kids are gone.”

I nodded as my hand recoiled. He was making small excuses for me just to make his escape. But now that I think on it, he was only trying to get rid of me to most likely spend his night with Sara. It puzzles me now to think that he may have cheated on me more than once with her. He had to. I hopped out of the car but hesitated on shutting the door behind me. He was still facing forward, still glaring out of the windshield.