The Score (Off-Campus #3)(104)

I enter the room with timid strides, still wearing the simple, high-necked black dress I chose for the memorial.

“Just couldn’t stomach it, baby.” It’s a whisper. Ringing with misery. “I kept picturing his parents…and Joanna…seeing their faces…” Dean sets the vodka bottle on the dresser and slowly sinks to the edge of the bed.

Taking a breath, I sit beside him and rest my head on his shoulder. “She sang.”

“What?”

“Joanna,” I say quietly. “There was a stage set up with a piano. She sang ‘Let It Be’. It was beautiful. And sad.” I blink through an onslaught of tears. “It was sad and beautiful.”

Dean makes a choked noise.

I stroke his cheek with the pads of my fingers. His skin is hot, but he doesn’t seem as inebriated as he was last night. He leans into my touch, his unsteady breaths puffing against my hand. “I couldn’t do it,” he says again.

“I know. It’s okay, sweetie.”

Is it, though? He should’ve been there, damn it. Beau’s family was there. If they were able to ‘stomach it’, then so should Dean.

The harsh recrimination sparks a flutter of guilt. Who am I to decide what someone should or shouldn’t do? People skip funerals and memorials all the time, for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they want to grieve for their loved ones in private. Maybe it’s too hard for them. Maybe they just don’t believe in funerals. It’s not my place to judge, and I force myself to remember that as I gently run my palm over Dean’s cheek.

“I can’t believe Beau is dead,” Dean says dully.

I’m momentarily startled because this is the first time he’s said Beau’s name since it happened. I’m even more startled when I tip my head and glimpse the unshed tears in Dean’s eyes. He blinks, and a couple drops spill over, sliding down to where my fingers are stroking his jaw.

His tears trigger mine, in the way yawns are said to be contagious. Suddenly we’re both crying, Dean burying his face against my breasts as his whole body shudders in silent sobs. I don’t know who kisses who first. Or who undresses who. Or how we wind up tangled together on the bed, naked, gasping, sticking our tongues in each other’s throats and frantically touching each other’s bodies. Megan told me some crazy statistic once about how eighty percent of people who were interviewed for a grief survey admitted to having sex right before, during, or directly after a funeral.

I guess it makes sense if you think about it. Celebrating life in the face of death. Needing someone to hold on to, a tangible connection to another living, breathing person.

We release simultaneous groans when he slides inside me. No condom, but we haven’t been using them since the new semester started. We both got tested before the break, and I was already on the pill.

I welcome his thick, pulsing cock into my body, arching my hips to meet his desperate thrusts. The orgasm that sweeps through me stuns me with its force. I didn’t think it was possible to feel this kind of pleasure, raw, all-consuming, when I’m so overcome with sadness.

Dean makes a deep, tortured noise as he comes, trembling violently as he pulses and spills inside me. His breathing low and shallow, he collapses on top of me, then shifts us over so my sweaty back is plastered to his sweaty chest. I feel moisture on the back of my neck. Not perspiration, but tears. All the tears he would’ve been trying to hold in if he’d gone to Beau’s memorial.

I roll toward him, wrapping my arms around his broad shoulders as he cries for the friend he lost. I don’t know how long we stay in that position, but eventually Dean goes still and falls asleep with his cheek pressed up against mine. For the first time in seven days, I feel a tiny flicker of hope. Hope that the emotional release he’d just experienced will ease some of his grief, lead him closer to the road of acceptance.

The worst thing about hope, though?

More often than not, it leads to disappointment.





31




Allie


Over the next two weeks, all I can do is stand idly by and watch Dean spiral. He has a new routine. He wakes up in the morning. He goes to class. He goes to practice. Then he comes home and drinks or smokes himself into a stupor.

Amazingly enough, he still finishes his course readings and turns in assignments. When I sneak a peek at one of the papers he’s written, I discover that it’s good. It’s like he handed the reins over to the intelligent brain he doesn’t like people knowing about, and is now operating on autopilot. He’s doing it on the ice, too. Just letting his strong, athletic body and his years of training take over and do the job for him. His heart—hell, his consciousness, I’m starting to think—doesn’t play a role.

Neither does his libido. That’s gone, too. Well, no, not quite. It rears up at a certain threshold of his f*cked-up-ness, somewhere between buzzed and unconscious. But I turn him down every time, because the guy who’s flashing me those cocky grins? Who’s whispering dirty things in my ear and whose skillful hands are attempting to work under my shirt or into my pants? It’s not my boyfriend.

My boyfriend doesn’t want to f*ck me only when he’s drunk, and my boyfriend’s carefree grins aren’t drug or alcohol induced.

Dean Di Laurentis f*cks because he loves to f*ck, and he smiles because he goddamn loves to smile.