Frenzy Read online

  I took a hit. “You don’t even smoke weed? Seriously?”

  “Just makes you stupid,” he said. “See, like weed’s not really dangerous or anything, but it’s a really great way to do absolutely nothing, you know? If you sit around smoking pot with people, you all talk about the really cool shit you’re going to do, but you never actually do it. You only talk about it. Anyway, sometimes smoking it makes me kind of paranoid.”

  I handed the joint back to him. “Are you going to get paranoid now?”

  He chuckled. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll see. I doubt it, because it’s usually social awkwardness and I feel really comfortable around you right now.”

  He hadn’t kissed me in hours. I wished he would, but he was adamant about not doing it. Whatever. I couldn’t figure out the mystery that was Levi Reed. Not at all.

  I smiled down at him. “I feel comfortable around you too.”

  He handed the joint back. “But not comfortable enough to tell me who your dad is?”

  I sucked in marijuana smoke. “Whatever, I don’t see you spilling all your secrets.”

  “Who says I have secrets?”

  “Well, why don’t you want to kiss me, for instance? Why are you a drug dealer who never does drugs?”

  He pushed himself up to a seated position. “I thought I explained the drug stuff.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess you did.”

  He looked down at his hands.

  “Oh my god,” I giggled. “You aren’t really an undercover cop like Chase said, are you?”

  “No.” He laughed. “I’m not a cop.” He fiddled with the joint. “Look, if I tell you stuff, Molly, you have to promise to keep it yourself.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He stubbed the joint out in a bowl that we were using as a makeshift ashtray. “Okay, see, the thing is, I’m not actually trying to get to Professor X because I want to deal drugs from him. I mean, I’d probably start out doing that, but I’m trying to…” He fidgeted. “Maybe I should start at the beginning.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was confused. He didn’t want to deal drugs?

  “I had a brother,” he said. “He was older than me, and I looked up to him. His name was Dwayne. When he was in college, he started doing a lot of drugs. And he got pretty heavily into them. He got sort of desperate for drugs, and he would do anything to get more. Anything at all. But he started running out of money. And, at first, I guess the dealers let him slide or whatever. But, then, after a while, they wanted to collect. They roughed him up a few times, but he couldn’t get the money for them. So, then, they decided to make an example out of him, so that other people would know what happened if they didn’t pay up. They killed him.”

  “Jesus.” I reached for Levi’s hand. “I’m so sorry.”

  He looked up at me. “I’m doing this for my brother. I’m not really here at this school because I’m trying to get an education. It’s taken me a long time to track down the people who are responsible for his death. But getting close to Professor X is the next step. I have to get into that operation. For Dwayne.”

  Oh. Everything was starting to make a lot of sense. “So, you’re only posing as a drug dealer? That’s why you don’t do drugs?”

  “That’s why,” he said. “I can’t be stupid enough to go down the same way he did.”

  So, that explained why Levi always acted like he was stoned out of his mind when he actually wasn’t. And it explained why he was so intent on finding Professor X.

  I was floored. “What are you going to do when you find these people who killed your brother?”

  “I’m going to stop them,” he said. “I’m going to make it so that they can never do that again.”

  I nodded. “I get it.”

  “Look, I’ve been doing this for a long time, Molly. It’s the only thing I care about. I’m not… I’m older than you think I am.”

  “How old are you?”

  He picked up the pack of menthols, but he didn’t take a cigarette out of it. Instead he just opened and closed the lid. “I’m twenty-five.”

  “That’s not that old,” I said. But inside, I gulped a little bit. Twenty-five? He was six years older than I was. That meant that when I was ten years old, he was sixteen. And when I was sixteen, he was twenty-two. Which sounded kind of gross, actually.

  He looked at me. “And I’m devoted to this, okay? This is what I do. I don’t have time or energy to… be with anyone. Not that I should be with someone like you, anyway.”

  So, that was why he didn’t want us to kiss. He was trying to spare my feelings, because he knew that the most important thing to him was getting justice for his brother. He knew that he couldn’t concentrate on a relationship.

  “You’re, you know, young and sweet and innocent, and I don’t want any of this to be a part of your life.”

  “I’m not sweet and innocent,” I said.

  “You are, though,” he said. “I know that might sound sort of patronizing or something, but you’re a college freshman. You need to be thinking about your classes and about having fun, not about ecstasy cooks and the O’Shaunessy family.”

  I got up. I walked across the room to the entertainment center and began to run my fingers over the rows of DVDs lined up on the shelves. “I’m not sweet, and I’m not innocent. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “So tell me,” he said.

  He’d told me his secret, hadn’t he? Maybe I owed it to him to tell him mine. I slid out one of the DVDs. It was a Tarantino movie. Reservoir Dogs. I peered down at the cover. “I partied a lot at my last school. I got drunk a lot.”

  “Sounds pretty typical for your first year in college.”

  “Really drunk,” I said. “Black out drunk. Like every time. It was like I started, and I couldn’t stop or something. No, that’s not it. I could stop. I just didn’t want to. Anyway, the last time I drank that much, I was at my parents’ house on a weekend home. They were out of town, and I brought a bunch of friends back from school to hang out. My boyfriend at the time, Duncan, was there. And so was his sister, Heidi, who was my best friend.”

  “Trashing your parents’ house is not that big a deal.”

  “That’s not what I did.” I put the DVD back. I turned back to face him. “My dad has guns. Some of them are really old, like from the Civil War and stuff. He collects them, and I decided I would show them off to my friends.

  “So, we all went into the room where he keeps them.” I took a deep breath. “And we looked at them, and it was no big deal. There was one from World War II. It was a Nazi gun that my dad had. Anyway, I left it out when we went back to the party. I remember that much.

  “We drank more,” I continued. “We all did. We were all drunk. And then… I don’t know, things get fuzzy after that. I remember that I wanted to see the gun again, that I wanted to pose with it. I wanted Heidi to take pictures of me with the gun, because I thought it would be sexy. And I knew it wasn’t loaded. It was never loaded.”

  Levi got up and walked across the room, shaking his head. “Molly. I know what you’re going to say.”

  I held up my hand to stop him. “Let me finish.”

  He halted.

  “I didn’t check, though. See, my dad taught me all about guns when I was younger. And we had to learn how to load them and how to check to see if they had bullets in them. So, I knew how to tell if there were bullets in the gun. But I didn’t check.”

  “Molly—”

  “Let me get this out. I was totally plastered, and… I don’t remember all of it. It’s like there are these pieces of the evening that are missing. I remember Heidi and I going back to the study, where my dad kept the guns. And then…”

  Levi grabbed me. He pulled me into his arms. “You don’t have to—”

  “The gun went off. It was so loud. I remember how loud the gun was. And I remember looking down at my hand, and the gun was in my hand. And Heidi was… Her skull. The back of her skull just exploded. It went ev
erywhere. It was all over me and all over the wall, and she was just… she was…”

  “Shh…” He held me tighter. “Shh, it wasn’t your fault. It was an accident.”

  “No, I should have known better,” I said. “I should have checked the gun to see… to see if it was loaded.” I wanted to cry right then, but my eyes were dry. I didn’t know if I’d ever talked about it before and not cried. Maybe it was because I was still rolling. It reminded me of the time that Jill had been so upset about Cori’s death that she couldn’t cry. “It was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

  “She’s dead,” I said. “I did that. Me.” I struggled against his arms. “Let me go.”

  He released me.

  I stalked over to the other side of the room and swept the cigarettes up off the ground. I lit one. My hands were shaking.

  I sucked hard on the cigarette.

  I blew out the smoke.

  The fucked-up thing was that I could still feel the edges of the drug in my system, unraveling my emotions, smoothing everything over, making me feel calm and happy.

  “This is the thing you feel like you need to do penance for?”

  “I killed my best friend.”

  “But you didn’t mean to.”

  “But she’s still dead.”

  “Molly, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  I looked at him. I shook my head. “That’s not true.”

  He crossed the room to me. He touched my face, his fingers feather-light against my skin. “You can’t torture yourself about this.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “But if I do this for Cori, if I find who killed her, maybe that will make it just a little bit better.”

  He tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Levi—”

  “No,” he said. “You didn’t.” He kissed my forehead.

  I backed away from him, still taking drags on the cigarette, fierce and fast.

  In the background, a new song started, something bass heavy with a fast drum beat.

  I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to think about this anymore. I could still see the image of Heidi’s shattered face burned on my memory. I wanted to erase it.

  I put the cigarette out. I turned to Levi. “I want to think about something else.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  I moved closer to him. I put my hands on his face.

  He closed his eyes.

  I kissed him.

  He didn’t resist me.

  * * *

  I pushed Levi back on the couch and crawled over him, straddling him again. Suddenly, I felt like I was in a frenzy. The music was pulsing in the background, and the last vestiges of the ecstasy in my system were coming alive, glowing brightly with each thrum of the bass.

  My mouth met his hungrily. He was what I wanted. His lips. His tongue. His skin. It would erase all the ugliness of my past, all the mistakes I’d made, all the pain I’d caused.

  He gasped, throwing his head back, his eyes closed. “Molly…” he managed.

  “No,” I said. I put my hands inside his shirt, touched the sweet warmth of his skin. I was mesmerized by the feel of him, his softness. His firmness. How alive he felt under my fingers.

  He caught me by the back of my neck, holding my head in place. “We shouldn’t. You shouldn’t let me.”

  “I want you,” I said. “Do you want me?”

  He groaned.

  And then his lips met mine, and the entire world burst out in a rainbow of gushing delirium.

  I moaned against his mouth. I pushed his shirt up, baring his stomach, tracing designs over his flat, hard body.

  “Shit,” he breathed. “That feels so good.”

  I grasped the edges of his shirt, and I yanked it over his head.

  He swallowed, and I stared at him. In the dim light, his skin glowed golden. He moved his shoulders, and his muscles rippled.

  My breath caught in my throat. I felt like I’d never seen something quite so beautiful. I reached out with one finger and drew a line down his chest, down over his belly, and then lower… lower…

  He grabbed my wrist. “Wait.”

  Wait wasn’t no.

  I bit my lip, still staring at how gorgeous he was. My whole body felt like it was lit up and yearning for him.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “I’m breaking all the rules anyway.” He lifted my wrist to his mouth and kissed it on the inside, just below my palm.

  My eyes fluttered shut.

  I was encased in darkness, warm and comforting. I felt his hands on my hips. I felt his fingers ease under the hem of my shirt.

  I gasped when he touched my bare skin.

  His hands traveled up higher, over the dip in my waist, sliding around to hold my rib cage. His hands spanned my body. I felt so small. He moved higher, caressing my back. He found the clasp of my bra. He undid it.

  My eyes snapped open.

  He was gazing at me. He stared right into my eyes as his hands glided over my skin to cup my breasts.

  I let out a little noise at the sensation.

  His touch was gentle, but I felt it all through me, almost violently. A luscious sensation of pure enjoyment.

  I moaned.

  He was grinning a stupidly happy grin. “That’s awesome,” he whispered.

  I pulled my shirt over my head.

  He sucked in breath, taking me in. “Molly. You are…” He tugged me against him, his lips finding mine.

  Our bare chests touched. I felt his warm, soft skin everywhere. It was wonderful.

  He pushed me down on the couch under him, and we lay like that, his body pressed into mine, our mouths entwined. He kept kissing me, but he eased a hand between us, seeking out one of my breasts again. He squeezed it gently, then began to tease my nipple hard.

  And it seemed to go on forever, our half-naked bodies so close, kissing and kissing so intensely, his hand on my nipple, sending tremors through me. Jubilant tremors. I felt like we were part of each other, like his skin and my skin were the same skin, like all I’d been waiting for my entire life was to be this close to him, and now I was made whole and perfect.

  I didn’t want to come up for air. I had this idea that I’d keep my mouth on his, and somehow manage to take off both our jeans without breaking contact.

  And I did manage to get my pants off somehow. It took a lot of wriggling. And I guess they weren’t really off. They were more just scrunched down around my ankles.

  I started on him, unbuttoning him, unzipping him.

  And then he stopped kissing me. “Hey.”

  “Hey?”

  He kissed my jaw. “You, um, you sure about this?”

  “I…” I wasn’t thinking thoughts like that at the moment. I was feeling sensations and seeing colors, and all I knew was that when my body was mashed up against Levi’s body, the sensations were nice and the colors were pretty. And so I basically wanted to keep mashing up against each other. I didn’t want there to be anything between us. “It feels good.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. Really good.” He kissed me again.

  It swept over me, brilliance and beauty and bombardment. I clung to him.

  He broke the kiss. “It’s probably a bad idea.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  He pushed himself up so that he was propped up over me, so that we weren’t touching. I didn’t like the not touching part.

  He looked down at my body, which was completely uncovered now. His lips parted. “Yeah, okay, I don’t care either.” He lowered his mouth to my nipple. He kissed it. “Don’t move. Stay here.” He kissed my other nipple. And then he vaulted off the couch.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “Condoms.” His pants were unzipped, they fell down to his knees.

  I giggled.

  He laughed too, kicking them off, so that he was standing there in his boxers. I could now see that he had an erection. It was poking out agains
t the fabric.

  I sat up. There was something about a hard-on that always fascinated me. The minute I saw it, I needed to touch it. I reached out to wrap my hand around him.

  He made a strangled noise. “Jesus.”

  “You okay?”

  “Uh, it’s fine. It’s great. Distracting.” He closed his eyes.

  I fondled him. “I have condoms in my bag.”

  “Yeah?” He definitely sounded distracted.

  I giggled again. “Over there by the door. If I let go of you, will you go get it?”

  “Um…”

  I stopped touching him.

  He bent down and kissed me again. Hard.

  “My bag,” I said. “Go get it.”

  He got the bag. He brought it back to me.

  I started to hunt through it.

  He kissed the inside of my thigh.

  I gasped.

  “Your turn to be distracted.” And his mouth was between my legs.

  “No fair,” I murmured, my eyes rolling back in my head. I arched my back, writhing against him.

  He lifted his head. “Better find those condoms.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, trying to search through the bag with one hand and my eyes closed.

  His tongue teased me, assailing me, sending shock waves through me, making me cry out.

  Then my fingers closed around the cardboard box of condoms. I pulled it out and held it up, triumphant. “Got it.”

  He snatched it from me. Within minutes, he was over me again, his body settled between my legs, his hardness pressing against me.

  I gazed up into his eyes. I was aware of the music again. It was glorious, a melody that meandered through the drum beats and bass, urging me on, promising higher pleasures, better joys.

  He kissed me. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a woman this badly.”

  He called me a woman? Was I a woman?

  I reached down between us to find him. I positioned him in the right spot. I nudged him into me.

  I felt him pushing inside, felt myself parting for him, letting him in.

  Each inch was a new layer of pleasure, until he was snug and deep in my body.

  And then…

  It was as if the sky shattered.

  And rained nothing but pure bliss over the both of us.