Your Fault (Culpable Book 2)

My girl had graduated. I was the proudest guy in the world. I couldn’t help it: not only was she gorgeous, but she was smart as a whip. She’d come out near the top of her class, she’d had all kinds of schools begging her to attend, but she’d chosen to stay in Los Angeles with me. I don’t know what I’d have done if she’d decided to go back to Canada the way she’d been planning at first.

I couldn’t wait for her to move into my apartment. I hadn’t told her, but I wanted her to live with me. I was tired of dealing with all the bullshit restrictions our parents had imposed on us as soon as we’d started going out. Since Noah had been kidnapped, her mother had turned super-paranoid, and both my father and Raffaella had made it known they didn’t like us being in a relationship. I’d thought everything would go back to normal once I moved out, but actually, the opposite had occurred. They hardly ever let Noah come see me, let alone stay the night. We had to make up all kinds of dumb excuses and stories to be able to spend time together. I really didn’t care what my father or his wife thought; I was twenty-two years old, almost twenty-three, and I would do whatever the hell I wanted. But it was different for Noah. I always knew the five-year age difference would cause us problems at some point, but I never could have imagined all these headaches.

Still, now wasn’t the time to think about all that. Now was the moment for celebration. I’d agreed to take Noah to the stupid bonfire on the beach her classmates had organized. I wasn’t particularly into the idea, but at least it meant we’d be together. The next day, Noah would be busy with graduation, and her mother wanted to take her out to dinner afterward, so either we went out today, or I would have to go back to sharing her with everyone. I knew it was selfish, but those past few months, between her school obligations, my travels to San Francisco, and the roadblocks our parents were throwing up, I hadn’t seen her even half as much as I’d wanted to. So I was going to make sure tonight counted.

The ride to the beach was pleasant. Noah was so happy about graduating, she couldn’t stop talking the whole twenty minutes it took us to arrive. I liked the way she moved her hands around when she was excited about something. Just then, they seemed to have a life of their own.

I parked as close as I could to the masses of people gathered there. It wasn’t just Noah’s classmates on the beach. It looked like every graduating class in Southern California had shown up.

“I thought there were just going to be a few of us,” Noah said, no less perplexed than I was.

“Yeah, just a few million, maybe…”

Noah smiled, tried to ignore my response, and turned to look at Jenna, who appeared just then in a bikini top and skintight shorts and shouted, “Let’s start drinking!”

A group of guys who had been trailing her cheered, raising their glasses in the air.

After getting out, Noah hugged her and cracked up laughing. Then I walked up. Towering over Jenna, I leaned down, snatched her drink away, and poured it out in the sand.

“Hey!” she protested, indignant.

“Where’s Lion? He should be here,” I said, not concealing my amusement at her irritated expression.

“Idiot!” she growled, turning around and ignoring me.

Noah shook her head, wrapped her arms around my neck, and stood on her tiptoes to address me.

“Are you sure you don’t mind being here?” she asked, tickling my neck with her long fingers.

“Go have fun, Freckles. Don’t worry about me,” I answered, bending down to press my lips into hers. They were so full, so soft that I thought I’d lose my mind. “I’m going to go find Lion. When you miss me, you can come looking for me.”

“I miss you already,” she responded. Just then, Jenna pulled her away from me and dragged her off to do God knows what kind of stupid shit.

I scowled at her and let her leave with Noah to where their friends were getting ready to burn their uniforms. It was a tradition… I could still remember the day I had burned my own.

I walked over to a smaller fire with just a few people standing around it and looked at the flames, my hands tucked into my pockets, thinking, fantasizing about all the things I wanted to do with Noah that summer, all the possibilities that would open up for us in the months to come.

Then I saw Lion standing beside another fire as far as possible from the crowd. He had a beer in his hands and was staring into the flames just like me, but he didn’t look like he was dreaming or making plans. He looked worried, even depressed. I walked over to talk to him.

“What’s up, man?” I asked, clapping him on the back and bending over to retrieve a bottle from the six-pack at his feet.

“Just trying to make this dumbass party pass as quickly as possible,” he replied, then took a long drink of his beer.

“By getting drunk? Jenna’s already tanked, and one of you will need to drive, so if I were you, I’d slow down,” I warned him, but he ignored me and brought the bottle straight back to his lips.

“I didn’t even want to come here, but Jenna wouldn’t shut up about it,” he told me, looking straight ahead.

“She just graduated, dude. You can’t blame her for not knowing what the fuck’s going on with you. I don’t even know myself.”

He exhaled for a long time and tossed the bottle into the fire, where it shattered into tiny pieces.

“Things at the garage aren’t going well, and the last thing I want is for my brother to get out of prison and see me unable to keep the family business afloat…”

“If you need cash…”

“No, Nicholas, I don’t want your money. We’ve already had this talk a million times. I can work it out. It’s just, things aren’t going the way I’d like, that’s all.”

By his expression, I could see he wasn’t telling me the whole story.

“Lion, before you get into some kind of trouble…”

He turned to me, and I shut my mouth.

“You used to have no problem with getting into trouble. What the fuck’s happened to you, Nicholas?”

I stared at him without blinking. “Someone kidnapped my girlfriend, that’s what happened.”

Seeming to regret his remark, Lion looked past me and took a cigarette from the back pocket of his jeans.

“Speak of the devil…here she comes now,” he said. I turned around to see Noah approaching with a huge smile on her lips and her hair blowing in the breeze.

I forced a smile and opened my arms to hug her as she reached me. She kissed me on the chest and then turned to Lion.

“Jenna’s looking for you,” she informed him.

“Great,” he replied curtly. Noah’s expression changed, and I suddenly wanted to beat that shitty mood out of him.

Noah glanced over at me as he walked off toward the mass of people. “Is something up with him?”

I shook my head. “He’s having a bad day. Ignore him,” I told her, kissing her cheek, which was warm from the fire, and then her neck. For days now, my lips had been longing for her flesh, and the last thing I wanted now was to see something as stupid as Lion’s mood sour her evening. “I love you,” I said, moving down to her throat, tasting her skin, enjoying the effect my caresses had on her.

“Nick,” she said a minute later, when I’d reached the curve between her breasts.

I separated from her for a second, bewitched but also aware that more than a few people were looking at us, anticipating a show. I cursed, grabbing her hand and leading her away.

“Let’s take a walk,” I said, steering her away from the bonfires and toward the dark night and the harmonious breaking of the waves. There was no better place in the world, and I liked experiencing it calmly, without all the racket from that stupid party.

Noah was strangely quiet, lost in thought, and I didn’t want to bother her. Eventually, she turned toward me.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said, with a trace of anxiousness in her voice.

“Sure, Freckles,” I responded, stopping by a tree that had sunk its roots in the sand and spread out powerfully above us. I sat down and pulled Noah between my legs so I could look her more easily in the eyes. “What’s up?”

She shook her head. “Nothing, it was a stupid question,” she replied evasively. She was blushing, and that piqued my curiosity in ways I hadn’t thought possible.

“There’s no such thing. What is it?” I pressed her.

“Seriously, don’t worry about it. It’s dumb.”

“You’re red as a tomato, and that’s just making me that much more interested. Spit it out.”

I hated her doing this to me. I wanted to know everything she was thinking or feeling, I didn’t want her ever to feel ashamed of anything. Plus, I was so intrigued that I couldn’t let her off the hook without telling me what was going on in her mind.

Her eyes met mine briefly, and she started playing with a lock of her own hair.

“I was just thinking…you know, about what happened the other night, when you…” By now she was red as a beet.

I tried not to smile. We’d never done anything like that. I’d wanted to take it slow with Noah, introduce her to sex a little at a time, always being sure she was ready.

“When I went down on you for the first time and it blew your mind?” I asked, looking forward to her reaction.

“Nicholas!” she exclaimed, looking around, as if it were possible for anyone to hear us. “Jesus, forget about it. I can’t even imagine why I thought it was a good idea to talk about this.”

I pulled her in close and forced her to look at me.

“You’re my girlfriend. You can talk to me about anything you want…so the other day, what about it?” I tried to calm her down. These subjects always made her shrink with embarrassment; I knew that from the many times I’d made crude comments in her presence. “Didn’t you like it?”

Hell yes, she had liked it. I’d had to put my hand over her mouth so no one would hear her shouting with pleasure. But did we have to talk about this right now? The memory of it was getting me hot, and this was neither the time nor the place.

“Of course I liked it. That’s not what I wanted to talk about.” She looked away. “I was just wondering if…like…if you wanted me to do the same thing to you.”

I almost choked on my own saliva. There was timidity in her eyes but also desire—yes, desire in those honey-colored irises. Dammit! I would have to make a new rule: no more conversations with Noah about sex in public places. I already felt myself getting impatient…

“Christ, Noah, are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

She smirked. “So you have thought about it,” she replied.

“I don’t think any guy with a pair of eyes who’s had you in front of him could fail to think about that, my love. Of course, I’ve thought about it, but we don’t need to do it unless you want to.”

Noah bit her lip. “It’s not that. It’s more…like it’s not fair. I mean, you had to do it with me and I…”

I burst out laughing. “Had to do it? You say that like it was torture. Noah, I did that because I wanted to. I enjoyed it, a lot, and I plan on doing it again whenever I get the chance.”

She opened her eyes wide, surprised but also excited. Sometimes I forgot how innocent she was.

“Then I’m gonna do it, too,” she affirmed, with some hesitation in her voice.

“No,” I said. “That’s not how it works. The things I do to you and the things you do to me are independent. This isn’t tit for tat. When you feel like it, just do it, and if that moment never comes, don’t worry…I’ll find someone who’s more willing.”

Hearing my joke, she slapped me on the shoulder. “I’m being serious!”

“I know,” I said earnestly, “but I don’t want you doing things you don’t want to do, okay?” I kissed her on the nose. She blinked a few times, then continued:

“So you don’t mind? I’m not saying I don’t want to. It’s just maybe…I don’t know if I’m ready yet.”

And that was why I had fallen in love with her. Any other girl without a backbone would have just given in to keep me happy. Noah wasn’t like that; if she wasn’t sure of something, it didn’t matter what you did to try and convince her—she was going to go on being true to herself.

“Come here,” I said, pulling her close and kissing her as if I would never kiss her again. “Having you by my side is enough, babe.”

Noah smiled, and a few seconds later, we were in the middle of an epic make-out session.