Loud: The Complete Series (A Bad Boy Alpha Male Romance) Read Free Page B

unemotional as I could muster, “Yeah, sure, whatever. Go ahead, if you
wanna waste your time on a bore like her.”
    “Maybe I will,” he grinned, apparently completely
oblivious to the rage bubbling just beneath my skin.
    “Hey, check it out,” he said, changing the topic and
pointing across the gym. “Melissa.”
    I looked up and my heart sank. It was definitely
Melissa — and she had seen us.
    “Here she comes, bro,” Chris whispered as Melissa
stepped off of her exercise bike and headed over to where we stood in the free
weights section.
    Melissa has had a crush on me for, well, I don't know
how long. As long as I could remember. We'd had one or two moments together, but they'd always been when I was drunk. It wasn't that I wasn't
physically attracted to her. I mean, any guy would be. She had a killer body
and was a beautiful girl, but something about the kind of person she was not
only put me off, it kind of repulsed me.
    Chris, though, was super into her. It was pretty
obvious to everyone but him that those feelings weren’t reciprocal. For
whatever reason, it was me she was into. And the more I tried to push
her away, the harder she tried to get into the zone. To make it worse, Chris
would encourage it because whenever Melissa would want to hang out with us,
she'd bring along a bevy of hot friends, most of whom were airheads who fell
head over heels for his ripped body and lame jokes. It was easy pickings for
him.
    I admit, they were fun to be around for a while, fun
to drink with, but I didn't care for the pressure Melissa always put on me. And,
it would always end up like that when we had parties at our place. Chris and
the other guys would be chatting merrily away with Melissa's friends, while she
would manage to maneuver me away from the crowd and get alone.
    Time to put my powers of resistance to the test again
— not that it would be an issue since I hadn’t been drinking.
    “Well, hey there, guys,” she said as she walked toward
us, exaggerating the swaying of her hips as she did. It looked like she'd just
had a session in the spray tan booth. Her entire body was an even, honey-toned
hue. It was hard to not to notice since most of her tanned skin was
revealed in her skimpy gym outfit. It also looked like she'd just been to the
cosmetic dentist; her teeth seemed impossibly white against her skin. I
suddenly found myself wondering if anything on her was real. I knew her chest
was fake — I won’t go into details about how I knew — and as she turned around
(on purpose, I'm sure) I had to wonder if there were implants in the back, too.
Such a perfectly round, firm rear just didn't seem like it was, well, real.
    “Hi, Mel,” Chris said. “Working hard over there?”
    “You bet. I'm a certified personal trainer now. Did
you know that?”
    She was speaking to Chris, but her eyes were on me.
    “No way! Nice, girl, nice! So you're gonna be in the
gym all day, every day now, huh?” he asked.
    “That's right.”
    “Damn, girl, I wish I could spend that much time in
here.”
    She turned to me. “And what about you, Emerson? Do you
wish you could spend all day every day in here, too? With me?”
    “Um, well, I like the gym,” I replied uneasily,
avoiding eye contact, “but uh, I'm way too busy with other stuff to even think
of doing something like that.”
    Melissa rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips.
    “You're still persisting with that boring-ass
science shit? You could be out making good cash right now, Emerson. You could
model, for one thing. I told you, I've got connections to get you good-paying
jobs. Or you could get serious about the gym and get your personal training
certification like I have.”
    “I'd have to drop out of college to take those jobs,
Mel. They're all-day shoots, and often in different cities. And besides, I
mean, thanks for the compliment and everything, but I just don't want to be a
model. Science is my passion. Physics-”
    “Is so lame and boring.” She