Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy) by Brooke Jaxsen Read Free Book Online Page B

patted his lap and it was obvious he’d let bygones be bygones, let cock teases be cock teases, so I went to sit on his lap. He was wearing workout shorts and I could feel his big, stiff cock through his pants. So cliché: we’d made out under the bleachers until we were busted by the soccer coach, but seeing as it wasn’t high school, we were just told to get lost instead of written up. I had to go to class so we hadn’t gone further. I’d left him needing, wanting.
    Tonight that could change.
    DeAndre was a member of the Beta Rho Omega class who had a different girl on his arm every night. A football player, he was at the college on an athletic scholarship, majoring in a three-two program in business administration. However, he didn’t need the money: he was a legacy member of Beta House, his father a member back in the eighties, and the scholarship was a lure to accept him to the UCBH campus instead of his father’s alma mater so that the school could get a donation. It had been explained to me by Kim when I’d asked about him before, and she said that although he was fun, I should see what the other guys were like before pursuing him. However, I’d checked out my other options and they were terrible, especially the one that wouldn’t get the fuck out of my mind: Skylar, Skylar, Skylar, his name popping in and out of my head like an annoying notification on my phone that I just wanted to smash against the floor so it’d break and disappear but right now, it was all about DeAndre.
    And DeAndre? He was Perfect with a capital P. He wasn’t anyone’s boyfriend and as far as I knew, nobody had brought him back to the Omega House, the only place relationship sealing sex counted, so he was free game. I said we should do something that weekend, and of course, he agreed, giving me a squeeze on the ass and a kiss on the cheek. Whenever I ended up at Club Grit, it was going to be the easiest night ever.
    “Take a line, babe,” he insisted, leaning down to the table.
    There were so many. Some were thick, some thin. There were short lines and long lines. There were lines that had something else smashed in making them a pastel color and others that were pure snow white. I really didn’t care. I just wanted to forget about Skylar. Knowing his name just made me so mad. I wish I hadn’t, I wish I’d never seen that stupid name tag on the shirt and that I hadn’t let the image of him burn into the back of my eyeballs as if my retinas were a used CRT screen that had run the same screensaver over and over so many times that when the display was off, the image remained.
    That first line was the hardest, but it always is. It’s the one that feels weird, and I know people say that cocaine gets better and easier to use and more fun, but really, it doesn’t. Every time, it’s like inhaling sand in a desert of pleasure, but that’s still sand. Every time, it burns your lungs, your nostrils, whatever it touches, and it burns away the icy paralyzing pain and helps you relax. It’s so fucking bad, I know it is, but I really just don’t even care at this point.
    Because in college?
    Your parents aren’t around to give you a hug when the mean professor gives you a C instead of the B+ you knew your paper deserved.
    Your friends only give you hugs for group photos.
    You have to play the stupid games people play, throwing around words you find offensive and don’t believe in, words that degrade you, or your friends, or your family, to see how far you can go and how edgy you can be.
    You have to play the stupid games.
    You have to win.
    Maybe I took the coke to keep from crying or maybe I took it to become more fun or maybe I took it because without it, I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough for Skylar, and he was a fucking bouncer. A bouncer! How had I been unable to get what should have been the easiest lay of my life? What had happened to the persona I’d built up, of being the unattainable blonde chic chick that