Hot Mess: The One Who Couldn't Get Away

The party was already too loud when I decided I was finished with him.

Not finished the way I always said it—drunk, dress riding up, meaning stop looking at me like that so I can pretend I have a spine. Finished like a door. Finished like I would walk out of Maya’s borrowed loft and not answer when he said my name in that quiet, amused way that made my stomach drop.

Armani found me anyway.

He always did. He had a talent for appearing in the exact square of space I had just cleared for myself, as if the room rearranged around his patience. Someone laughed in the kitchen. Bass crawled up the walls. I had a warm drink I didn’t want and a smile I was using like a lock.

“You’re hiding,” he said.

Not a question. He never wasted questions on things he had already decided.

“I’m breathing,” I said. “Try it. It’s free.”

His mouth tipped, almost fond. He looked like he belonged here—dark shirt, throat bare, the kind of handsome that made people give him excuses. I knew better. I knew that face when we were alone. I knew what he did with silence. I knew how long he could wait.

“Come here.”

“No.”

He didn’t grab my wrist in front of anyone. That was the trick of him. In public he was gravity, not a hand. He stepped in until the heat of him hit my chest and the drink in my fingers became a stupid little prop. His voice dropped to the register he used when he planned to win.

“Bathroom.”

“I’m not doing this with you tonight.”

“Then say it in there,” he said. “Where you don’t have to perform for Nia.”

Cruel. Accurate. Nia was across the room with a look that could cut glass. A scene would get me rescued. Following him would make me exactly what she already thought I was.

I followed him.

The hallway smelled like perfume and other people’s decisions. He opened the bathroom door like it was his apartment. Light. Lock. The fan kicking on. I set the drink on the sink and hated that my hands were steady. He turned, and the lock sounded louder than the music.

“I’m done,” I said.

Armani looked at me the way he looked at a lie he intended to keep.

“Say it again.”

“I’m done with you. With this. With whatever we keep calling it so we don’t have to say it’s rotting.”

He nodded once, as if I’d told him the weather. Then he came in close enough that my back found tile. Not slamming me. Placing me. His thumb traced the edge of my jaw, a habit dressed up as tenderness.

“You always say that after I let you out of my sight too long.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” His mouth was almost on mine. “Don’t know you?”

I should have shoved him. I thought about Nia. I thought about the version of myself that left parties with her dignity still attached. Then his knee slotted between mine, the hard line of his thigh pressing up against my pussy through my underwear, and my breath went stupid. The old hunger sat up like it had been waiting in the stall the whole time.

“This doesn’t change anything,” I whispered.

“I didn’t ask it to.”

He kissed me like he was collecting evidence. I bit his lower lip hard enough to taste metal. He made a low sound that was not pain and got a hand under my dress with the same calm he used to ruin evenings. His palm was hot on my inner thigh. His fingers dragged up until they found the damp cotton already clinging to me.

“Christ,” he murmured against my mouth. “You came in here wet.”

“I hate you.”

“I can feel how much.”

He rubbed me through the fabric first, slow, mean, two fingers riding the seam of my cunt until the cloth was soaked and my hips were chasing. I told him I meant it. My body did not care. He hooked the underwear aside instead of taking it off, because he liked me looking ruined and still dressed, and then there was no barrier—just his skin on mine, the slick heat of me coating his fingers on the first stroke.

“Blue.” My name in his mouth was a claim and a warning. “If you want me to stop, you say stop.”

I hated that he gave me the word. I hated more that I didn’t use it.

“I’m done with us,” I said against his teeth. “Not—don’t you dare stop touching me.”

His laugh was quiet, pleased, a little vicious. “There she is.”

He pushed two fingers into me without preamble. I was wet enough that they went in to the knuckle on one thrust, a stretch that pulled a sound out of me I didn’t authorize. He fucked them in and out with a rhythm that was almost lazy, curling until he found the spot that made my knee buckle, his thumb settling on my clit like he owned the timing. The heel of his hand ground against me every time he buried his fingers. I could hear how wet I was over the fan. I hated that too.

“Tell me again,” he said. “While you’re dripping on my hand.”

“I’m leaving you.”

“Mm.” He added a third finger, stretching me until the burn made my mouth fall open. “Say it prettier.”

I grabbed his wrist and did not pull him out. I held him there, grinding down, using him. “Fuck you.”

“Working on it.”

He went to his knees on someone else’s bathroom floor as if the party outside was a rumor. The tile bit through my dress. He shoved the fabric up around my waist, yanked my underwear down one thigh, and looked at me like he was going to take his time cataloguing a thing he already had. Then he put his mouth on my cunt.

No teasing kiss. He licked a full, filthy stripe from where his fingers had been up to my clit and sealed his lips around it, sucking until my head hit the wall. I grabbed the towel bar hard enough to hurt. He held my thigh open with one hand, fingers digging into the soft underside, and kept two fingers working inside me while he ate me like he’d been thinking about this since I walked away from him in the kitchen.

He knew the angle. He always knew the angle. He flattened his tongue and rubbed, then sucked, then pushed his tongue lower to fuck into me beside his fingers, messy, wet, shameless. Spit and I ran down to his knuckles. When my thigh jumped he bit the tendon there—not cute, hard enough that I hissed—and went straight back to my clit.

“Armani—”

He hummed against me. The vibration punched through my stomach. I told him I was leaving him. I told him I meant it this time. The sentences came out broken, filthy with breath. He didn’t let up. He crooked his fingers and sucked harder and I came with my heel digging into his shoulder, pulsing around his hand, shaking so ugly I heard myself whimper his name like a traitor.

He didn’t stop at the first wave. He licked me through it until I twitched too hard and tried to close my legs, then he stood, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and showed me the shine on his fingers before he sucked them clean.

His eyes were dark. He was hard; the outline of his cock strained his jeans when he caged me against the sink again and rolled his hips once, lazy, dragging that thick line against my bare, oversensitive cunt. I felt every inch of the threat. My wetness streaked his zipper.

“You can be done,” he said, voice wrecked. “You still soak my tongue like you belong in my mouth.”

I could have popped his button. Part of me wanted to drop to the same floor, take him out, make it even—get him down my throat until he forgot how to smile. I didn’t. I pulled my underwear up over the ache. They clung immediately. I fixed my dress with ugly, practical hands. I unlocked the door.

Music hit us like a slap.

He didn’t follow me into the hall immediately. He ran water, calm as a host. I walked back into the loft with my pulse still beating in my clit and his mouth still a fact I was wearing. My inner thighs were slick. When I swallowed, I tasted him—skin, my own come, the iron from his bitten lip.

Maya waved a bottle. Someone asked if I was okay. I said I was great. Nia found my face and narrowed her eyes.

I didn’t go to her. I went to the exit, down the stairs, into air that didn’t smell like him and still somehow did. My phone lit in my bag. I didn’t look. I already knew the kind of message he sent after a night like this: nothing. Or one line that would sit under my skin until I did something regrettable.

I stood on the sidewalk and said it out loud, just to hear whether it still sounded like a door.

“I’m done.”

It sounded like a girl who had just come on his tongue in a locked bathroom and then tried to rename the night as an ending.

I hated him.

I hated the part of me that was already clenching around the memory of his fingers, listening for his step on the stairs.