Hate Me Like You Do Read online

  Hate Me Like You Do

  Copyright 2019 A.K. Koonce & Rebecca Grey

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover design by Everly Yours Cover Design

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without express written permission from the author. Any unauthorized use of this material is prohibited.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  I. Hate Me Like You Do

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  II. Love Me Like You Can’t

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Also by A.K. Koonce

  About A.K. Koonce

  About Rebecca Grey

  Part One

  Hate Me Like You Do

  One

  Dee

  There was a time when we were four best friends. And then they were my crushes and then… well, then we were nothing at all.

  But at first, we were friends.

  The porn star moan cannot be blocked out. It’s a breathless whisper that builds into a scream.

  It wakes me Every. Single. Night.

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Her rasping voice cuts out when Reed rails her temple into his headboard.

  Sharing a room with Reed is supposed to help me finish my senior year locally. Not get me an up close degree in sex education.

  Her moans just get louder and louder and I swear she’s been fake climaxing for twenty minutes now.

  “Would you just come already and put all three of us out of our misery?” I glare up at the shadowy ceiling and through the open door I hear a deep rumbling laugh from somewhere in the living room follow my words.

  At least Landon agrees.

  I can hear the sneer in Reed’s voice when he talks and I make the mistake of glancing over at my roommate, his arms flexed, his palm holding her bare thigh in place while he thrusts deep and hard into her. “If you want to be next on my misery list, just say the word, Dee.” Our eyes lock and he groans, keeping his attention fixed on me while he fucks the unnamed girl harder.

  He loves to talk to me while screwing them. It’s a dirty but delicious feeling that twirls through me when he does that.

  And he does it too much.

  “Yeah, I’m going to pass. I can’t fake one orgasm, let alone multiple.” Not that I’ve ever tried. With anyone...

  Darkness shadows his perfect features, his gray eyes seeming darker in the moonlight. I can barely make out the way his full lips tilt with a cocky smile and I know he just can’t help himself but have the last word. “I’d give my right nut to hear you fake it. Just once.” He growls out the last words, thrusting in time with his statement.

  “You’re so fucked up,” I whisper.

  His lips part to speak but his…date cuts him off. “Are you going to gossip with your girlfriend or are you going to screw me?”

  He halts on top of her, his hips stopping instantly and his hand dropping her leg with a dramatic bounce off the mattress.

  My pale brows lift and I pretend to give them privacy that doesn’t exist in this house.

  “I think I’d rather gossip with my girlfriend. Don’t trip on your way out, sweetheart.” He rolls off of her and pulls his boxers up as he stands, his cock straining against the thin material.

  He’s the oldest. Almost nineteen and still a senior at Mournmount Academy.

  Sometimes he still doesn’t get all the hints.

  Like right now.

  My mattress dips so hard I nearly flop out of it as he takes a seat at the edge despite the way I’m glaring at him and the sweat that’s clinging to his muscular back.

  Post sex cuddles should be limited to those who were involved in said sex.

  The rules are simple.

  The redhead pulls her dark dress down but the wrinkled material doesn’t stay in place as she hightails it out of the bedroom door, an angry scowl on her face that I’ve seen a time or two from girls leaving this house.

  You’d think the girls would be smarter.

  But...I guess I can’t say I’m any better.

  When my mother landed in prison last month, her friend offered me a place to stay for my final year in the little city of Paducah, Kentucky.

  Even if I do have to transfer to Mournmount Academy to do it.

  So I live here now.

  With Mr. Reyes’s gorgeous son and his gorgeous son’s ridiculously gorgeous friends... While he’s away on business. And we have the house all to ourselves. It’s like the beginning of a bad porn video.

  Reed’s daily sex life only adds to it.

  But none of that matters.

  There are no druggie friends of my mother’s around. No shady people randomly sleeping on the couch. Landon even set up a nightlight in the hall outside my room just for me and he didn’t even give me shit about a seventeen-year-old girl being afraid of the dark. It’s all just...freedom in a way I've never had before.

  It’s fun. And I have friends. For the first time in my life actually.

  It’s been an amazing month.

  Even if I keep up this torture that I keep putting myself through just to be around them all, lingering on the outside but never feeling the way they make all these girls feel everyday.

  They’re my friends but that’s it. Totally, entirely, annoyingly platonic.

  I’m locked in this beautiful fairytale of a mansion with three perfect boys and I’m just their friend.

  It’s complete self-inflicted torture.

  “You gonna go to sleep now or you going to touch yourself to fantasies of me again?” His arm skims over my stomach, touching lightly before planting at my side. His other hand lifts and he toys lightly with the ends of my blonde hair.

  It probably wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t push me like this. They know my secrets: they know how poor I am, they know I’m a virgin, they know my mother got so high last month she’s awaiting trial for manslaughter.

  And yet, they still treat me like I’m one of their own.

  These boys know the good, the bad, and the very ugly about my past.

  Hell they even know the one thing I wanted to forget about my old life. They know about how all of junior year at my old school my ex-boyfriend called me Venereal Violet just to embarrass me for not sleeping with him.

  These three assholes are the first real friends I’ve ever had.

  So of course, I love them. Unless I hate them.

  Like now.

  “I do not touch myself to Reed fantasies. That’d be like watching golf and trying to get off. Swing and a miss. Sorry.”

/>   He nods, narrowing his steely eyes on me with a playful smile that I want to taste. Everything about him from his sandy blonde hair to his perfect athletic body screams boy next door.

  He’s anything but.

  “Well is it Pro Golf? Men’s or Women’s? Because, ya know, no one could get hard watching men’s college golf. Zero excitement.”

  He is such a weirdo.

  “Shut up.” My eyes roll in the dark and I hate that he can’t see my annoyance clearly.

  “So, you’re not going to touch yourself again?”

  “I don’t touch myself. What is your obsession?”

  There’s this little shine in his taunting gray gaze and it lingers there for several seconds, shifting across my face.

  “I hear you sometimes.” He shrugs but never looks away from me. “I hear you whimper under your breath when you sleep. It sounds,” a heavy breath slips from his lips, “really fucking hot.”

  And now I’m burning up. My cheeks sting they’re so hot.

  “I’m not going to touch myself. Sorry to disappoint.”

  That’s a lie. I’m going to touch my clit like the broken doorbell to the entrance to hell to Reed fucking Carrington fantasies like the liar that I am.

  What is wrong with me?

  I need to go out. To a Bible study group because I clearly need to be around better guys in my life.

  “Let her go to sleep. She has classes starting Monday.” Landon leans into the doorway, his bronze chest and arms flexing as he folds his arms, dark eyes gleaming behind shining black frames.

  Landon is the only person in this house who cares about grades. He’s also a bit—just the smallest miniscule—more discreet about his sex life.

  Except for that time I caught him alone in the shower.

  The wet image is permanently burned into my brain.

  Reed watches me in the darkness, moonlight shining in his gleaming gaze. For a moment, I think he’ll linger, taunt me some more just because he can never fall asleep before one a.m. Instead he pulls back, his big palm searing over my tank top, skimming along my lower stomach and over my hip before falling away.

  When Reed fully pulls back, Landon seems pleased with the work he’s done here. He’s my sweet protector in a way. He’s always on my side.

  And with a house filled with three arrogant men, I need someone on my side.

  “Night, Dee.” Landon lifts his hand to me in a weird half wave before walking out. I hear his bedroom door close and the walls between the two rooms are so thin, I hear his bed creak when he flops down.

  “I hope you don’t wake Landon up with your sex moans tonight. That’d be completely rude.” Reed smirks at me, falling back on his bed just across from mine.

  “You’re such an ass, you have no idea.”

  “Oh, I have an idea, I just like the idea, really.”

  I roll my eyes at him again in response. Minutes pass and I turn on my side, studying him in the darkness of our room. I’ve lived here, just five miles away from my old trailer for nearly a month.

  I think they broke me.

  These three assholes broke me.

  All because they showed me they cared too much. They took in this awkward girl who still misses her mom like a little kid and they treat me like I’m theirs.

  But they make it very clear that I’m not theirs.

  When I first moved in, I was worried they’d try to sleep with me or hurt my feelings or break my heart. It never occurred to me that they might ruin me by taking care of me.

  And now, I don’t know how to go back. I don’t know how to go back to not thinking of them in a wanting way. In a way that makes my heart pound with strength but break with weakness just to be near them.

  I’ll pretend for now. I’ll laugh and match their snark word for word but I’ll never tell them how much it hurts me not to be real for a single second with the few people I truly trust in this world.

  It’ll be easy. It’ll be so easy to pretend for just one year.

  Senior year will be over and then we’ll all go our separate ways. Me to college, Reed off to whatever football scholarship offers him the best future, Landon to the best ivy league in the country.

  And Knox...

  The mattress dips beneath me and a smooth, chiseled chest presses firmly against my back, his palm skimming down my arm before his fingers brush back and forth against my knuckles.

  “Reed wake you up again with his inability to stay hard, Vi?”

  Warmth sears through me from the way he uses my real name.

  Violet Demure. But Landon and Reed refuse to call me such an innocent name.

  As for Knox, I think he likes how innocent it sounds.

  I hated the name before I met him. Before his lightly rasping voice rolled across those letters, my name raked on my every nerve.

  And now it makes me tremble every time he breathes it along my ear.

  My lips pull up in a smile when a pillow is lunged our way from the bed across the room. I twist away from the attack, tucking myself into the strength of perfect solid muscle.

  “Fuck you. I’ll show you hard, Knox,” Reed says.

  “Do tell more about that in slow, descriptive detail, Reed,” I whisper against Knox’s chest. His breath fans along my cheek as he exhales a low rumbling laugh that I feel all over.

  His laughter is addicting, mostly because it’s rare but partly because I feel that rumbling sound low in my abdomen.

  “Stop making erection threats and go to sleep.” Knox snuggles into me until his head rests on mine, our breath mingling between us.

  This. Being held against him every night, my palms flat against the perfect lines of his chest, this is the closest thing to complete calm that I’ve ever felt in the chaotic life I used to live.

  To anyone else, this side of Knox Reyes doesn’t exist.

  People fear him. Girls love him but they still fear him. This boy is made up of idle destruction just waiting to release.

  Except when he’s with me.

  His friend. The roommate he’s shared a bed with for a month now. We’re nothing more. Even if my demented fluttering heart tries to tell me otherwise.

  He slept on the couch just like he said he would for the first week. Then he came home drunk one night and fell asleep. He fell asleep in my bed right after talking to me until four in the morning.

  And he hasn’t slept on that couch since.

  The long fingers of his tattooed hand brush over my collarbone slowly, so slowly I imagine the girl, Kylie, who I walked in on when I first moved in with them. She was blonde like me. Petite and pretty.

  Her neck was slender. I remember it in vivid detail. I remember it so perfectly, because Knox’s long tattooed fingers were wrapped firmly around her porcelain throat as he fucked her against the kitchen table.

  There’s a deadly flare in Knox’s gaze but I’ve never seen it like I saw it then.

  I think about that moment every morning when the four of us eat breakfast at the table.

  I think about the way he looked at me, burning his wild eyes across my skin but never pausing for a single second with her.

  “I saw that girl, Kylie, pulling out of the driveway this morning when I got back from the store.”

  Those steady fingers sweep back and forth along the column of my neck, sending waves of energy that shudder through me like a hurricane building just before a disaster.

  “Mmm,” is all he says, his dark eyes so hooded they seem nearly black.

  “I didn’t know you guys still hung out.” It’s the most subtle thing I can think of but the way the words turn my stomach into a sick pool of twisting feelings is hard to ignore.

  “Sometimes.”

  He’s a man of few words but there’s so many things that I know are off limits for discussion. Like his adoptive father. His real father in prison. The scars he has on his chest and upper back.

  His childhood: off limits.

  His sex life: off limits.

  Him and
me: Off. Fucking. Limits.

  So we don’t talk about it. Everyone has their secrets to hide. Knox just has an entire life he likes to hide.

  My fingers roam just like his. I touch him the way someone would touch an explosive just seconds before it goes off. What we have is fragile. Because he isn’t really mine, and even though we share these curious, chaste touches, there’s nothing more and I know it.

  But we bend the rules here, hidden beneath the blankets from our roommates.

  What are the house rules you ask?

  There’s one.

  Just one.

  Not super important. Just something they threw together the very moment I laid down on this bed and Knox realized how fucking quiet the room got as all three of them stared at me spread out on their fresh, clean blankets.

  House Rule Number One:

  DO NOT FUCK VIOLET DEMURE

  It’s a real tasteful list. Subtlety is their forte.

  And it’s that one little rule that holds our friendship together by fraying threads.

  With the lightest touch he trails lower and my lashes close, my breaths halting while my heartbeat works overtime. The faintest caress follows the curve of my breast, dipping beneath my tank top for the shortest moment before sliding down, meeting my lower stomach and stopping quickly when he feels the lace of my panties at my hips.

  “White?” his thumb brushes back and forth along the thin material.

  I choke on air when he asks that one word question that has fire burning up my chest and cheeks.

  “Black,” I whisper to him, my thighs shifting hard against the black lace.