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BETT

The night I stopped getting hard for my girlfriend was the night I heard my new roommate fucking his.

I should have put on my headphones. Should have left the room. Should have done anything except lie there listening to Elliot fucking Vaughn destroy someone else’s composure while my own body somehow thought it was supposed to fall in line, too.

“That’s it. Just like that, babygirl.”

Vaughn’s voice cut through the darkness of our dorm room, low and commanding, and I pressed my pillow harder against my ears. It was useless. Every word seemed designed to crawl under my skin and light fires there.

Christ, I fucking hated this guy. And for the past year or more, it had been clear the feeling was mutual.

I hated Vaughn’s arrogant smirk, his low taunts, and the way he seemed to suck every molecule of attention in a room. And now I hated myself a little bit because I should have been able to ignore the provoking asshole…

But I couldn’t.

The girl whimpered, and Vaughn chuckled, the sound dark with satisfaction.

“Yeah? You like that? Bet you can take it deeper, though, can’t you? Fuck, yeah.”

His voice was a cross between Barry White and a damned hypnotist. Deep, sensual, and drugging. I couldn’t get it out of my ears.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

His voice was rougher now, edged with something that made my brain buzz. The girl’s responses had dissolved into soft, continuous sounds that vibrated through the space between us and settled deep in my chest.

This was ridiculous.

I was a twenty-one-year-old man.

I’d heard people have sex before.

I wasn’t some blushing virgin—my girlfriend and I had been together for over a year, and Arden was a wildcat in bed. A preacher’s daughter through and through. She’d blown me in her car after church yesterday, for fuck’s sake.

So why was my heart hammering against my ribs at this guy’s nasty shit? Why was heat pooling low in my stomach, spreading through my body like I hadn’t come in a month?

Maybe I was coming down with something.

“God, Vaughn, right there, please⁠—”

The low rumble of Vaughn’s approval made the little hairs on my arms tighten.

I bit down on my lip hard enough to taste copper, my free hand fisting in the sheets. This was torture. This was invasive and inappropriate and everything I’d been raised to rise above.

You are stronger than this. Focus. Football practice is at 6:00 a.m. You need sleep.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was probably Arden returning my frantic messages from earlier, when I’d discovered that the punishment my father had arranged for me was worse than I’d thought—and even worse than he’d planned.

Wet, sucking sounds filled the air, and my cock hardened beneath the sheets.

I told myself it was only natural. A subconscious reaction to the smell of sex in the air and thoughts of my girlfriend. But I cursed my fucking father for the millionth time today anyway. He and his “punishment” had landed me here.

If you can’t act like a McNeely, Corbett, you don’t get the privileges afforded to McNeelys.

Never mind that “acting like a McNeely” would have meant turning my back while an innocent person got their ass handed to them in a bar over the summer. McNeelys weren’t supposed to get into barroom brawls that got their names splashed across the internet. Not when it was shaping up to be a tough re-election year for law-and-order, family-values-loving Senator McNeely.

My father couldn’t control his legislative failures or his opponent’s burgeoning popularity, so he was more determined than ever to show he could control me.