Bad Boy's Treat: The Possessed MC Page 32

  “How do we tell who wins?” Gryff asked as they started smashing their hammers down on animatronic moles popping up out of the holes. She scoffed, hitting one extra hard for effect.

  “There are no winners in whack-a-mole,” she told him, unable to tear her eyes away from the game. “You just have to hit as many moles as you can.”

  “Right.”

  Nibbling her lip, she resisted the urge to look his way, worried she’d see him having a bland time in a place she’d once adored. Although she hadn’t told him the importance of the arcade, Beth had hoped he’d just pick up that she was excited to be there.

  When they finished the first round, Beth paid again so they could play another, and Gryff picked up the hammer with a sigh.

  “Everything okay?” she asked, hoping to keep her tone light—non-confrontational. Any other girlfriend would have laid into a guy like Gryff by now for skipping out on so many of their dates, but Beth hadn’t said a word. They both knew he wasn’t upholding his end of things. It wasn’t a secret. He’d said dinner tonight was his way of making up for not being as present as he could have been, for goodness sake. While she was steadily finding her backbone, all the while settling into the position of submissive in the bedroom, Beth didn’t quite have the stones to call him out face-to-face yet.

  Besides, what good would that do? It was too early in the relationship to get in a fight over something like that. She vowed to talk to him a little more seriously if the behavior kept up, but Beth was optimistic things would get better.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Are you okay?” was his answer, and she swallowed hard. Why didn’t he sound… happier?

  “Totally,” she said, head bobbing up and down as the lights and corny music started up again. “I just… I know this probably isn’t somewhere you’re used to going. I came to the arcade all the time in high school. I thought we might have some fun.”

  “I see you were one of the cool kids in high school then,” Gryff teased, nudging her arm as they started whacking moles. There it was. Some playfulness had seeped back into his words, and she felt the familiar prickle his attention usually brought to her cheeks.

  “I was totally the coolest.”

  “Were you a part of a knitting club then too?”

  “I was,” she replied as she slammed the hammer down over a mole close to his hand. “Taught me how to handle sharp and pointy things with grace and precision.”

  He laughed. “That’s terrifying.” A brief pause. “But kind of hot, I guess.”

  Beth brightened at the compliment. “Really?”

  With a swing of his hammer, Gryff managed to get two moles at once, effectively ending the round. He set his hammer down with a smirk, then pressed a kiss to her forehead. When he pulled back, he held her gaze and crouched down a little so that they were at eye-level.

  “Hot in a scary kind of way, sure,” he told her, then winked. Beth rolled her eyes and carefully set her hammer back on the game, handling it with more care than necessary. Gryff could say whatever he wanted; Beth knew he liked that she was a knitter. He was even wearing the scarf she’d made him a week earlier, which was a much-appreciated touch.

  Working her hand into his, Beth led him toward one of the hardest games of them all: The Claw. Inside the glass rectangle was a mountain of stuffed toys, most very dated, especially toward the bottom, and the objective was to fish out a stuffed animal with the claw-like grabber hanging overhead. A deceptive game, if anything, with a very low success rate.

  When Gryff declined the first attempt, Beth paid her required tokens—which she seemed to be doing a lot of since they arrived—and grabbed the joystick. Her tongue poked out the side of her mouth as she readied herself, and the joystick rumbled once the claw was active.

  “I’ve never been very good at this game—”

  “How’s Professor Holstein?” Gryff asked, speaking over her when they both started at the same time. Beth steered the claw down, aiming to a fat pink seal that was sure to be an easy mark.

  “He’s good,” she said when he ignored her comment about the game. “I was helping him finalize study aids for one of his first year courses.”

  “Why?”

  She glanced up and caught Gryff’s reflection in the glass, noting the way his features had contorted into a frown.

  “Well, his TA had some big family emergency over the holidays and the school hasn’t issued him another one yet,” she explained. Professor Holstein was one of her favorite professors. In fact, he’d been one of the few who had noticed her grades slipping after she and Gryff started spending more time together. Young and relatable, the professor seemed to genuinely care about her bringing her grades back up, and he even helped her prep for other classes in his own time.

  “You’re bright, Elizabeth,” Professor Holstein had said when she asked him why he bothered at the time. “I just hate to see people burn out in their final year. You can do this. Don’t give up.”

  Of course, Beth also knew he was probably hoping to score brownie points with her dad, but she couldn’t blame him. Young, new professor hoping to make tenure early in his career? Who wouldn’t spend a little personal time with the dean’s daughter to bolster his reputation?

  Still, once he was done helping her, Beth actually liked the guy enough to volunteer a few hours a week assisting with the tasks his old TA normally did. It was the least she could do; his tutoring had made her grades even better than before they took a horrible nosedive.

  “So why do you have to do his work for him? Is he even paying you?”

  “I don’t have to do anything for him,” she remarked stiffly, matching the tone he’d suddenly taken with her. The claw swung a little too far to the right, and Beth steered it back over the seal since she only had one shot at landing her prize. “He helped me when my grades weren’t doing so hot, and I thought it’d be nice to return the favor.”

  “He’s manipulating you into giving him free labor,” Gryff snapped. Beth pressed down hard on the red button on the top of the joystick, her cheeks hot at the accusation, then forced out a groan when the claw missed—as if she was too into the game to catch his insinuation.

  “He is not,” she said as the game reset itself, no prize won. Unable to look at Gryff when he scoffed, she fished out another token, ready to try again and hope the conversation went away. “I like helping him. He’s a nice guy.”

  “Nice guys are always the worst kind of guys,” he growled as the joystick rumbled in her hand. Beth gripped it tight, glaring at the immense pile of stuffed toys in the glass case. “At least assholes are up front about what they want.”

  “And you’re the king of being up front, aren’t you?” She bit the insides of her cheeks. Apparently her backbone was getting bigger. She steered the claw around on the hunt for her next target. Behind her, Gryff had started to pace.

  “Look,” he started, “I’m just trying to watch out for you.”

  “Well, you don’t need to.”

  “Clearly, I do,” he bit back, and a flood of angry tears made her eyes burn. “You can’t even see that this guy is just using you. I’d stop doing him any favors. Maybe tell your dad that he’s trying to—”

  “He’s not trying to do anything,” Beth snapped, her voice taking on a weirdly hysterical high-pitched quality that made her face even redder. Turning, she fixed him with a narrowed look. “I think it’s ridiculous that you’re lecturing me about him… You barely know him. And, honestly, I wouldn’t be spending so much time doing him favors, as you call them, if you bothered to show up when we have plans.”

  Backbone engaged.

  Gryff bit down on his back teeth, making his jaw flare, and for a moment she saw real anger in his eyes. Not the kind of anger he used when they were behind closed doors, the Anger Lite he sometimes used when she’d been “bad.” No, this was real anger, and for a moment, it made her want to shrink down and hide behind the game until the storm had passed. But she didn’t. Beth stood tall, knowing that s
he was in the right here, and as difficult as it was, she refused to look away.

  “Beth, I really just think you should stay away from him,” he said, each word laced with forced softness—and it made her sick. “He’s being so obvious about—”

  “You know what? Stop.” The joystick vibrated in her hand, as if telling her she’d been stagnant for too long, but she ignored it, planting her hands on her hips. “I seem to recall you telling me very tactfully to stay out of your business when you were getting random, secretive phone calls from your landlord.” She added air quotes around it, telling him right then and there that she’d never completely believed the story. “Maybe you should take a page from your own book and butt out of my business. It’s none of your concern… at all.”

  All around them, the noise of the arcade grew to a thunderous volume. Suddenly, it was all too loud, the lights too bright, the venue too crowded. Her words hung between them like stale air, Beth wearing a mask of defiance and Gryff staring at her as if she had six heads. Her blood pounded through her tingling body, each beat of her rapid pulse whumping in her ear.

  It was the first time she’d actively stuck up for herself.

  And it felt good.

  Terrifying, but good.

  Unfortunately, what Gryff said next was far from good.

  “Fine.” He zipped up his coat, handling her homemade scarf a little too roughly as he stuffed it under the leather. “You want me to butt out? Happy to oblige.”

  He then gave her a too-hard kiss on the forehead, nothing like the one he’d given only minutes earlier, and then took off without so much as a word of goodbye. Beth stood there for a long moment, cheeks burning and eyes still prickling with tears, then turned back to The Claw.

  How had the night gone in this direction? If Gryff hadn’t mentioned Holstein, would they have moved on to a different game by now?

  Glaring through a teary field of vision, somehow Beth managed to pick up that damn pink seal. The game shrieked her victory after depositing her prize in the pick-up compartment, but Beth left it there, arms wrapped around herself as she made a beeline for the exit Gryff had just stormed off toward in a fury. If he wanted to be a childish prick, she wouldn’t stop him. Beth thought Doms were better mannered than that, but apparently Gryff wasn’t just the king of being up front, but also the king of proving her wrong.

  Chapter 23

  If anyone had asked Beth how she saw her day going when she woke up that morning, her answer would have been simple. Classes. Assist Professor Holstein. Dinner and arcade date with Gryff. Amazing sex into the night. Falling asleep in her boyfriend’s arms.

  She never would have said that she’d be at a trendy club downtown, surrounded by fellow law students with many, many drinks buzzing in her system. Music pumped through the huge former-warehouse-turned-nightclub, a heavy bass rattling her bones and coaxing her to jump and dance and laugh. Someone had spilled his or her drink, ice and all, down her back earlier and she didn’t even care. Drunk on the moment, Beth found herself wondering why the hell she hadn’t done this before.

  On her way out of the arcade, disappointed that she now had yet another horrible memory to cling to while walking through the side exit, Beth received a text from one of the law girls in her new study group. Harriet had been desperate to get her out ever since they clicked a few weeks ago, but Beth had been tactfully dodging the invitation, preferring to spend her time with Gryff instead. However, it seemed that tonight Harriet had texted at the right moment—because Beth was desperate to think of anything but Gryff.

  Phone in hand, tears in her eyes, Beth made the decision not to go home and sulk over a fight. Couples fight all the time, and she didn’t want to sink into a pit of despair. Gryff probably wasn’t in a pit of despair. Anger, maybe, over what…she had no clue, but she was sure that he wouldn’t be at home crying over the heated conversation they’d had. So Beth accepted Harriet’s invitation without putting much thought into it, then met up with the bubbly brunette at a mellow bar a few blocks away from the arcade. While she’d been a little down at first, not engaging in much conversation unless it was about what drink she wanted next, Beth slowly emerged, fluttering from her shy cocoon until she emerged the glorious drunk butterfly she currently was.

  Harriet’s friends, some of which were from Beth’s study group, others familiar because they were in a lot of Beth’s classes, swept her under their wing. Even as they moved from the low-key bar to the jumping nightclub, not one person let Beth lag behind, and soon enough she was laughing and dancing with the best of them. Gryff, funnily enough, was the last thing on her mind.

  A hand on some girl’s arm—Cordelia, was it?—Beth shouted in her ear that she would be right back, that she was off to get another drink. Before the woman had a chance to follow, Beth was off like a shot, shimmying and wiggling her way through the packed dance floor toward one of the four bars. The last round of shots had made her stomach feel a little off, so her drunk brain insisted on a vodka-cranberry—because cranberries were healthy. Duh.

  As she stood in the huge line, toe tapping to the beat and lower lip caught between her teeth, she fished out her phone to check the time. Given how long she’d been out and how buzzed she was feeling, Beth figured it had to be pushing two in the morning. Her jaw dropped, however, when she saw it was only a little after eleven. Clearly she wasn’t used to be out this late.

  A hand brushed against her lower back suddenly, and she jumped, stumbling around to see who had invaded her personal space. It was a man—a rather handsome man with a square jaw and a messy mop of light brown hair on his head. He offered her a handsome smile as he eased around her, and she grinned at the back of his head when she realized he’d only touched her to get around her. Even still, the brief moment of contact made her heart pound, and she remembered just how excited she had been to go home with Gryff tonight. Her stomach knotted uncomfortably for a moment, tightening enough to prompt a wave of nausea. Gryff. Beth frowned, her attention back on her phone.

  Gryff. He’d ruined everything tonight, from being too touchy-feely with her in front of Professor Holstein to bringing up the man and getting irrationally angry with her because she liked being helpful. Useful. Swaying slightly on the spot, she opened up her contacts list with a shaky finger and scrolled down to find Gryff’s name.

  There were no alerts. He hadn’t tried to contact her, nor had he been on any of the social media—all two of them—websites that she followed. Not that he was ever very active, but if he wasn’t sulking at home like she’d thought, Beth would have liked to know what he was doing. A nervous wave fluttered over her, toying with her, making her feel crazy. She wasn’t like this. She wasn’t this person. Even if she hadn’t dated many men in her life—at all—Beth knew she didn’t want to be some psycho possessive girlfriend.

  Still. He’d started the fight. He could have made the effort by now to finish it. But maybe, again, that would fall to Beth. For all his domineering energy, for all his outspokenness and sexy suaveness, maybe Gryff wasn’t the brave one. Maybe in the relationship, Beth had to be the one to make the first move, to step forward and initiate… something. She’d never considered herself to be all that brave, but for Gryff, she was willing to switch hats and try.

  After all, getting drunk was fun, but it wasn’t very productive—even through the cloud of shots and vodka and fruity mixed drinks cluttering her mind, Beth could see that. So, rather than advancing toward the bar where she could pay for another shot of forgetfulness, Beth turned and made her way for the smoker’s patio. Even though it was a chilly February night, she’d seen that the patio was busy on her way in. Pushing through the doorway, she stumbled out into the cold, her breath fogging in front of her. The alcohol did a good job at keeping her warm, and she was able to find an empty spot in one of the corners to make her phone call.

  Standing there overlooking the alley outside the club, Beth held the phone to her ear with her shoulder and crossed both arms over her, glad she
finally had something to lean on. Most of the women around her were in ridiculously tall heels, and she was also suddenly grateful she’d worn boots for her date night instead.

  Two rings.

  Three rings.

  Four rings.

  She swallowed hard, half-expecting to hear his usual answering machine again. If she did, was she ever going to give that damn machine an earful. However, just before the sixth ring could hum in her ear, it stopped midway and Gryff’s voice cut through the line.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello,” she managed, trying to keep the drunk tremor out of her words. Hearing him talk was enough to get her shaking, but she chalked it up to the cold instead. “What are you doing?”

  “Watching TV.”

  She waited for more, lips pressed together as irritation started to wriggle its way back into her system. While she hadn’t expected him to launch into an immediate apology, she wanted something more than two words.