My Fake Boyfriend Is the School Bad Boy novel Chapter 51

Chapter 51 A Crowd Watching a Kiss Turn Real

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I pulled my shaking hands out from under my legs. I didn’t push him away. I reached up, my fingers grabbing the thick leather lapels of his jacket. I twisted the heavy material in my fists, holding on to him as if he were the only solid thing left on a spinning planet.

He deepened the kiss even further. His tongue swept along the seam of my lips, coaxing them completely apart.

A massive, liquid heat poured straight down my spine, pooling heavy and thick in my stomach. The entire world outside the perimeter of his arms ceased to exist. Chase Montgomery was gone. Harper Vance was gone. The contract, the scholarship, the cheating rumor-all of it

burned away into white-hot ash.

I kissed him back.

I kissed him with every ounce of the terrified, suppressed devotion I had been hoarding since the moment he stood between me and Mr. Harrison in the parking lot. I opened my mouth to him, my fingers sliding up from his jacket lapels to grip the broad, corded muscles of

his shoulders.

Ryder groaned, the sound rough and completely unguarded. His grip on my waist tightened to the point of bruising, dragging me so close there wasn’t a single millimeter of space left between our bodies. He tasted like chaos and safety, completely contradicting everything I knew about him, yet making perfect, terrifying sense.

His thumb stroked a frantic, heavy rhythm against the skin of my jaw, while his mouth devoured mine. He kissed me like he was angry at me. He kissed me like he was entirely, hopelessly addicted to me. He kissed me like he had been waiting four years to do exactly this, and now that he finally had the chance, he was never going to stop.

The sensory overload was absolute. My heart was slamming against his chest, our pulses beating a synchronized, frantic war drum. I was entirely completely consumed. I couldn’t feel the floor beneath me. I couldn’t hear the music. I was floating in a dark, burning void made entirely of Ryder Steinmann.

A sharp, shrill whistle pierced the air.

“Alright, Steinmann, we get it. You win the game. Come up for air.”

Chase’s loud, mocking voice crashed through the bubble, a bucket of freezing water dumped directly over my head.

The room rushed back in. The smell of cheap vodka. The glaring lights from the kitchen. The dozen pairs of eyes burning into our skin.

I gasped, my eyes flying open, and ripped myself backward.

Ryder didn’t want to let me go. His hand remained tangled in my hair for a fraction of a second, his fingers dragging reluctantly through the strands before he finally dropped his arm.

1 scrambled backward on the plush rug, putting a foot of space between us. My chest was heaving, my lungs dragging in huge, desperate gulps of stale party air My lips felt swollen, sensitive, and completely branded by his mouth.

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12:50 Fri, Jul 10

Chapter 51 A Crowd Watching a Kiss Turn Real

I stared at him, my mind completely scrambled.

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Ryder wasn’t looking at the crowd. He was looking only at me.

His chest was rising and falling just as heavily as mine. The dark, indifferent mask was entirely shattered. His hazel eyes were blown wide, the pupils dilated so far there was barely a ring of gold left. His dark hair was messy where my fingers had brushed against it. The split

on his bottom lip was flushed dark red.

He looked completely wrecked. He looked exactly how I felt.

The silence in the sunken living room was different this time. It wasn’t expectant. It was stunned.

Chloe was staring at us with her mouth slightly open. A guy across the circle dropped his red plastic cup onto the carpet, the water soaking into the gray fibers, completely unnoticed.

That wasn’t a fake kiss.

You couldn’t fake the desperate, heavy way his hands had gripped me. You couldn’t fake the sheer, raw heat that had radiated between us. It was undeniably, terrifyingly real, and every single person sitting on that rug had just witnessed it.

“Damn, someone muttered from the back of the room.

Chase cleared his throat, the arrogant smirk wiped completely off his face. He looked slightly unnerved, shifting his weight away from the green bottle. “Right. Well. My turn.”

Chase grabbed the bottle and spun it, eager to shift the heavy, suffocating attention away from us.

I couldn’t look at the spinning glass. I pulled my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms tightly around my legs, trying to hold myself

together.

My brain felt like a skipped record, repeating the last sixty seconds in a continuous, panicked loop.

It has to look real, Petrova. That was his rule. That was the justification for the hand-holding, the shared jacket, the locker leaning. But

this?

He had kissed me like I was his entire world. He had taken a brief, required performance and turned it into an absolute, undeniable

confession.

I risked a glance at him through my eyelashes.

Ryder had turned his body back toward the center of the circle. He was leaning back on his palms, staring blankly at the spinning bottle. His jaw was clenched so hard a muscle twitched relentlessly beneath his bruised cheek. He was aggressively pulling the walls back up, rebuilding the bad boy armor layer by layer right in front of my eyes.

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12:51 Fri, Jul 10

Chapter 51 A Crowd Watching a Kiss Turn Real

But I could see the subtle, telltale tremor in the bruised knuckles of his left hand, resting against the carpet.

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