CHAPTER 1: THE PROBLEM WITH BOYS
WILLOW’S POV
“You’re just… frigid, Willow. Let’s be brutally honest here.”
The words hit me like a closed fist to the stomach. I froze, my hands still hovering awkwardly over the zipper of my jacket.
Jake, my boyfriend, let out a long exasperated breath and ran a hand through his perfectly tousled blond hair with evident irritation.
“Jake, I—” I choked on his name, my throat suddenly too tight. “I just need a little more time.”
“Time?” He scoffed, a cruel mocking sound that echoed in the cramped bedroom. “We’ve been dating for four months, Willow. I’ve been patient. I’ve played the nice guy. But I’m a man. I have needs. And you don’t know how to please a man.”
“I try,” I whispered after a flinch, and the defiance I normally carried was gone out of my voice entirely.
“Trying isn’t enough.” His dark eyes raked over my body, and the gaze wasn’t appreciative this time. He stared at my bouncy D-cups, at the petite curves completely hidden under my oversized sweater, then dropped to my wide hips. “That’s the most frustrating part. You walk around looking like that. A f*****g wet dream. Every guy on campus trips over his own feet watching you walk by.”
He stepped closer, and his voice dropped into a vicious sneer.
“But it’s all false advertising, isn’t it? Because under the clothes, you’re a total prude. A boring f*****g nun. Kissing you is like kissing a dead fish. You just lie there. You freeze up. You don’t know what you’re doing, and honestly? I’m exhausted trying to drag a reaction out of you.”
A dead fish. Tears pricked the backs of my eyes, but I refused to let them fall, not here, not in front of him.
I dug my perfectly manicured nails into the palms of my hands until the sharp pain grounded me back into my own body.
“So what?” I forced the words out, my voice trembling despite my best efforts. “You’re dumping me?”
“I’m putting us both out of our misery.” He turned his back on me to pick up his phone off the nightstand, already swiping right on his dating app. “You’re beautiful, Willow. Stunning, really. But you’re a broken toy no one will want to play with once they realise you don’t actually work. You need to figure your s**t out, and I’m not sticking around to be your training wheels.”
A broken toy. The insult sliced through flesh and bone, settling deep into the marrow of my worst insecurities.
Rather than argue or beg, I spun on my heel and walked out of his bedroom, down the shitty hall of his sweaty, weed-infested man cave.
I cried the whole twenty-minute Uber ride home.
For a long time, I thought my body was faulty.
Girls my age always bragged about their s*x-capades and hot boyfriends who made them see stars in under forty minutes, and that was the only reason I had ever dated Jake in the first place.
To prove to myself that I was normal. That I could be a regular nineteen-year-old girl with a stupid crush on a regular guy.
But even Jake proved the theory I had always feared correct. No boy could ever get me aroused. Or wet. Or excited. No matter how hard they tried.
So, no, Jake. I’m not frigid. I’m just wired differently. Or maybe you’re too stuck up in staring at Vanessa’s ass to know where the right hole is.
“Was this it? Is this the hole? No, babe, that’s — wait, hang on. Are we in? We’re not in. Sorry, babe, give me one second. I swear I had it. I had it—”
Fumbling i***t.
No, thank you. Please go away. Please take your roommate’s Axe cologne, your sticky comforter, and your Tumblr-quote approach to female anatomy and go.
I liked men. Not boys.
There, I said it.
I liked men with scarred hands. Men with stubble that would leave marks on my thighs the next morning.
Men with dark eyes who already knew where everything was and what to do when they got there, men who didn’t need a goddamn pop quiz at the starting line.
It was sinful, and I knew it. I had known it since I was seventeen, when my Pinterest boards had started slowly radicalising toward men in their forties with greying temples, forearm tattoos, and the specific luxury of a Silver-fox billionaire.
My best friend, Maya, had taken one look at my saved pins and told me, very seriously, that I was going to get myself in real trouble one day, and, as it turned out, she had not been exaggerating.
Because the problem was that there was only one man in my entire life who matched the specs my body secretly craved. And that man lived in the same house as me.
Nikolai Calloway.
My stepfather.
Forty-five and six foot three and built like an actual s*x god, with silver coming in at his temples and dark eyes under darker brows and the exact jaw my subconscious had apparently been shopping for since puberty.
The object of every single wet daydream I’d had in the last three years. The one thing in my life that absolutely no one could ever, ever find out about.
Too bad for me that he was too busy being a strict, unsmiling, honourable father figure to ever once look at me sideways. Too bad for me that all he’d ever wanted from me was to be a good dad, when all I had ever needed from him was a Daddy.
Too bad for me.
Or so I had thought — right up until that night at home, when the low groan started through the wall, followed by the slow, wet, unmistakable rhythm of a man stroking his c**k.
Slick.
Slick.
Slick.
