Filed to story: Brace Face Betty Drama Story
“I’ve wondered about the rest of them. Your tattoos. How many do you have? Do they all mean something to you? Where are they?” She trails off, twin patches of red staining her cheeks. She’s fucking ridiculously adorable when she’s embarrassed.
Leaning into her, unable to resist the chance to make that blush spread a little further, I brush my mouth lightly against hers again. “Are you asking for a guided tour of my body, Betty Branson? Because I will happily oblige.”
The change in her body is very noticeable. Her back straightens, her hands tightening around my wrists.
Great job, asshole. You’ve freaked her out. “I’m only teasing,” I say quietly, nudging the end of her nose with my own. “I’m not suggesting we get naked and run around the cabin like animals.”
Her eyes are like mirrors when she looks up at me, pale blue, almost silver. “I’m not upset. I-I would like the guided tour. So long as the rides are optional.” She seems pretty pleased with her euphemism.
“Oh. So you’re a dork? Good to know.” I grab the beater from her and toss it underhand into the sink behind her, pulling her closer to me. Our bodies are pressed up against each other, and I spend all of a heartbeat trying to figure out if I should try and angle myself in a way that might hide the fact that I have a raging hard-on, but I run out of time. Betty feels it-she has to. It’s digging into her fucking hip like a reinforced steel baton. I expect her to flip out, at least get a little weird, but she doesn’t. Instead, she gives me a slightly scandalized open mouth smile, coolly arching an eyebrow at me.
“If I’m a dork, then you must get turned on by some pretty weird stuff,” she says breezily.
“You don’t know the half of it.” I gather her hair in my hands, reveling in the weight and the feel of it as I brush it back over her shoulders and I expose her bare neck. There is a line in the sand where physical contact with Betty is concerned; I made it myself, so I know how far to go and when to pull back. Kissing her neck is definitely not on the right side of the line, but I allow myself one slow, careful graze of my lips against the porcelain column of her throat. Just one…and it’s enough. The identical flushed patches of red on Betty’s cheeks have grown, but I don’t think they’re caused by embarrassment anymore.
“I’ll show you my tattoos, and you can grade every single one of them,” I tell her. “But I think we’re gonna have to hit up that diner I noticed on the way up here to grab some more food,
Dolcezza.”
She frowns at me. I don’t know if she’s noticed, but her hands have found their way to my chest, palms resting familiarly against my pecs, and the contact is making me want to fucking sing. She cants her head to one side, and asks, “Why?”
“Because the French toast you were making is on fire,” I reply.
She nearly jumps a foot in the air as she spins around, rushing over to the stove, swearing loudly like a sailor. “Fuck! Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit, fuck! Shitshitshit, nooooo….” She turns the burner off, shoving the frying pan off the ring, and then proceeds to bat at the flaming, blackened pieces of French toast with a kitchen towel. Not really a good idea. I intervene, physically picking her up by the waist and setting her down by the kitchen table, then I take the towel from her and use it to pick the pan up by the handle. The whole thing goes in the sink. I turn on the tap, blasting the contents of the pan with water, and the mini fire immediately gutters out.
Betty stands next to me in front of the sink, regarding her destroyed attempt at breakfast with morose resignation. “Probably for the best,” she says. “I’m a horrible cook. I’m sure you’d have been the one that ended up poisoned if you’d eaten that.”
BETTY POV
I pinch myself repeatedly while Marcus is in the shower, hard enough to bruise. This doesn’t feel like real life. I can’t bend my head around the fact that he’s here, with me, at the cabin, and we’re actually doing this. I’m letting him in, for fuck’s sake, and he…god, for some, unknown reason, he actually wants to be here with me.
By the time we get to the caf? on the other side of the lake, the heat blasting on full inside Marcus’s Camaro, we’ve missed breakfast and have to make do with lunch. People halt their conversations, forks freezing halfway between their plates and their mouths, as Marcus and I make our way to a booth. No one really comes up here in October, and the caf? crowd today are mostly locals; they’re not used to someone like Marcus showing up in the middle of their BLTs and their gossip sessions.
We both order a sandwich each and two coffees. The waitress, Layla, who I’ve known since I was eight, shoots me a wide-eyed look as she scribbles in her notepad. I think she’s trying to signal me in Morse code with her furious blinking.
Do…you…need…help? I laugh, shrugging at her, and Marcus reaches across the table and takes my hand.
Such a normal, everyday thing that people do, and yet it feels monumental to me. Marcus’s smile is tight when I look at him, though.
I kick him gently under the table. “What’s the deal?”
“I know you’re tough as old boots, but you sure you can handle this?” He dodges the balled-up napkin I throw at him in response to the boots comment.
“What? People noticing that you’re a bad boy heartbreaker?”
He pulls a face. “It doesn’t bother me, people looking. Never has. But it might end up bothering you if you can’t even go out to grab some food without feeling eighteen sets of eyes lasering into your back.”
Layla brings our coffees. I take a sip, watching, a little horrified, as Marcus dumps four packets of sugar into his mug. “I think you’ve forgotten who you’re talking to. I’m stared at way more than you are every day at school. No one thinks twice about your ink there. Well, actually, they do. They probably think it’s hot. Me, on the other hand? Being a lying whore who tries to ruin Ravenshire Royalty is not hot.”
Marcus’s expression turns stormy. He looks out of the caf? window, out onto the lake, deep lines furrowing his brow. “Don’t say that.”
I shrug. “It’s just the truth.”
“You’re not a lying whore.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I am or I’m not, though, right? People believe what they want to believe. They believe what everyone else believes, because they’re too scared to stand apart from the crowd. In the end, I am whatever they say I am, Marcus.”
He picks up the salt shaker, his hand closing around it into a fist, still staring out of the window. “I’m gonna need to know exactly what happened that night,” he says in a monotone voice.