Keeping Her

place to be alone. My bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, I don’t care where. The only thing I care about is fucking you so hard you can’t see straight.”

tongue. I eased back and his tongue assault ended, only for his teeth to clamp down on my bottom lip.
I was all for a little biting, but he pulled my lip out until I had one half of a fish mouth. And he stood there, sucking on my bottom lip for so long that I actually started counting to see how long it would last.
When I got to fifteen (fifteen!) seconds, my eyes settled on a guy across the bar, watching my dilemma with a huge grin. Was shit-­eating grin in the dictionary? If not, I should snap a picture for Merriam-­Webster.

love we have is because of theatre. I associate all of our greatest moments with a play. If we’d thought about what was safe or smart when we met, we wouldn’t be together today. And you’ll always be the man that encouraged me to follow through on my dreams, the man that taught me how to make the bold choices and go after what I wanted. You said you weren’t like your father. He’s supposed to be the one whose primary concern is money.”
“The money is just a means to an end. You and the baby are my priority.”

My heart flip-­flopped, li

now openly laughing at me.
And he was fucking gorgeous, which made it so much worse.
Sometimes . . . the now sucked.

I braced myself and pulled my poor, abused lip from Tamás’s teeth. My mouth felt like it had been stuck in a vacuum cleaner. While I pressed my fingers to my numb lip, Tamás started placing sloppy kisses from the corner of my lips across my cheek to my jaw.
His tongue slithered over my skin like a snail, and all the blissful, alcohol-­induced haze that I’d worked so hard for disappeared.
I was painfully aware that I was standing in an abandoned-­building-­turned-­bar with a trail of drool across my cheek, and the guy across the room was

abs.
New life motto, right there.
I gave István a ­couple notes and sent him to get more drinks. In the meantime, I turned to face Tamás. He’d been pressed against my back for God knows how long, and I’d forgotten how tall he was. I leaned back to meet his gaze, and his hands smoothed down my back to my ass.
I smirked and said, “Someone is happy to have me all to himself.”
He pulled my hips into his and said, “Beautiful American.”
Right. No point expending

energy on cheeky banter that he couldn’t even understand. I had a pretty good idea how to better use my energy. I slipped my arms around his neck and tilted my head in the universal sign of kiss me.
Tamás didn’t waste any time. Like really . . . no time. The dude went zero to sixty in seconds. His tongue was so far down my throat it was like being kissed by the lovechild of a lizard and Gene Simmons.
We were both pretty drunk. Maybe he didn’t realize that he was in danger of engaging my gag reflex with his Guinness-­record-­worthy

of the world bearable. I downed it like it was lemonade on a blistering Texas day. His eyes went wide, and I licked my lips. István bought me another, and the acidity and sweetness rolled across my tongue.
Tamás gestured for me to down it again, so I did, to a round of applause.
God, I love when ­people love me.
I took hold of Tamás’s and István’s arms and pulled them away from the bar. There was a room that had one wall knocked out in lieu of a door, and it overflowed with dancing

swept an arm underneath my legs, and pulled me up to his chest. It was a good thing I wore skinny jeans instead of a skirt.
“Köszönöm,” I said, even though he probably should have been thanking me, based on the way he was openly ogling my chest.
Ah, well. I didn’t mind ogling. I was still pleasantly warm from the alcohol, and the music drowned out the world. And my shitty parents and uncertain future were thousands of miles away across an ocean. My problems might as well have been drowning at the bot