Come Out Swinging (Reach for the Moon Book 2) by Sam Hall (sight word readers TXT) 📕

his mates, isolating me, herding me into his house, then to his bedroom, before dropping to his knees and pushing my skirt up.

“I did some reading,” he said, kissing my thigh, but I only just heard his words. My hand went to his hair, messing up the long strands, feeling a strange prickling inside me. “I want to try something.”

He’d paused, looked up at me, and waited for my permission, not moving until I nodded shakily. He’d peeled my underwear down, separating my thighs, something we’d done plenty of times before, but rather than arrowing into the spot where he longed to go, he went higher.

I knew it was my clit. The internet and Bridge were better sex ed than health class, but I could never seem to get the amazing results from it everyone else seemed to gush about. The first gentle stroke of the hood had slick running down my legs, something that just made Dec groan, his fingers growing bolder and more insistent, then his tongue took their place.

“You do remember,” Declan here and now said, breathing in the scent of my arousal. He grinned, slow and cocky. “I want that now.”

“What, to make me come? Because I gotta say, this is not a good place for it,” I snarked back, but we both knew what he meant. He saw straight through my bluster.

“No, I want time, in that massive fucking bed or one of the small ones. I want to play with this Paige, see what makes her squeal, makes the slick run down her legs.”

“I do not squeal!”

He pulled me away from the wall, turned me around, and swatted me hard against my butt, and dammit, I bloody did squeal in surprise. He kept me in that position as he pushed his body against mine, and the newly sensitised skin of my arse, now throbbing and stinging from the blow, became all too aware of his hardness.

“You’ve given us this time to find each other, and I’m just saying I want you to get to know this Declan too.” He stretched my hands up above my head, keeping them pinned against the wall as he rained kisses down my neck and spine, my moans blending in with the fake ones on the soundtrack.

“So that’s where you got to.”

My eyes opened slowly, the sensual haze taking a little while to fade, but when it did, there they were, my pack.

“Bridget and Gavin have gone on the Ferris wheel,” Mason informed me, looking around the room before arrowing in on us. “Looks like it’s just us in here?”

“It’s why I picked it,” Dec said with a grin. “And why I didn’t wait for you fellas.”

“No?” Micah asked, padding over and then grabbing a handful of my arse, making me jolt as the skin began to sting again. That made him smile, his eyes glowing bright in the reddish light. “You told her.”

“We won’t have long,” Dec replied. “The universe, the Mother, whoever’s driving this thing with us and Nance, won’t give us downtime for long, so it’s time to put our cards on the table, show who we really are.”

“So that’s what this is?” Lorcan asked, eyeing the interior of the haunted house. “Then we better dive in.”

We walked past plastic skeletons and cartoonish bats, splashes of fake blood, and cages with corroded looking bars, low groans coming from within. It was all pretty cheeseball, but I admit, I jumped when a mannequin toting a toy chainsaw leapt out from the wall, the sound of a revving motor drowning out my squeak, but not their laughs. Declan looked down at me with a smirk, rubbing his thumb across my knuckles.

It was dumb, I got it, but maybe just to save face and stop being so skittish, I started paying a whole lot more attention to the crappy attractions, scanning the walls, looking for the next stupid thing to lurch out at me. I anticipated the mummy that was sent jerkily out for a few steps before being jerked back again, letting out a long sigh before I heard it.

A wolf howling, that was stock standard horror fare, I figured, yet all of us stilled at the sound of it. As we listened to it, it sounded clearer and crisper than the scratchy sound effects pumped into the place. My eyes narrowed. They used different speakers in the room to make it feel more 3D, but this was something else. The sound travelled around the room, like a wolf was padding across its territory, letting the others know to keep out. I frowned, and when I looked up, the others were doing the same.

“C’mon,” Declan said, moving in front of the pack, and we followed behind.

If this was an experience designed to reveal our true selves, we were sorely mistaken. We stepped into a fun house style environment, where the walls were all lined with mirrors created to distort our reflections. I walked up to one with Declan in tow, the two of us long and thin, like some kind of alien, smiling as I raised our hands, which became impossibly slender. He pulled me against him, kissing my neck until my eyes began to glow and so did his.

We were probably scarier than all the OTT kitsch in this place. Strange creatures with preternatural eyes, disguised in the bodies of beach goers, they should’ve hired us to give people a scare. But in the distorted surface, so much of the room reduced to a vague blur by the twisted glass, I saw something move. Large and dark, it passed like a shadow, both of us turning around to see where it came from.

“What the fuck?” Lorcan asked, all of us following its path. From mirror to mirror, we saw it jump, the first actually scary thing in this place. A loud bang had me jumping, but this time, the others did too. We turned around to see the door to this room had slammed shut.

“Shit,” Mason said,