Home Field Advantage

by Liz Lincoln

  So once again, against his better judgment, he reached for her. Slid his hand around the back of her head, into her soft blond hair, and drew her to him. The whole time, he watched her face for any sign of resistance. But her gaze didn’t waver and she didn’t hesitate in coming to him. So he did it.

  He kissed her.

  Chapter 10

  This time there was no soft, no gentle, no tender as their lips met. This was pure heat. His arm went around her and pulled her tight against his body, her soft curves pressing against his muscles in the best way. In a way that was, like everything between them, both old and new at the same time.

  “Quinn,” she gasped as she opened for him.

  Yes. Yes, he needed this. Needed her. He accepted her invitation, slicking his tongue into her mouth and tasting her for the first time in so long. She was hot and delicious and so good. So right.

  She pushed at his chest, and at first he thought she was pushing him away, but when she followed him, he realized she was pushing him inside. He followed her lead, walking backward until they were clear of the door and he could kick it shut behind her.

  They stumbled toward the couch, hands roaming over each other’s backs. Lips seeking and searching. Tongues sliding together.

  When his knees hit the cushion, he sank down, pulling her with him. He leaned back on the arm, half sitting, half lying, with an armful of sexy woman sprawled over his chest.

  Her hair fell around them like a curtain, shrouding their faces in an illusion of privacy. Kissing her was already a bad idea, Quinn knew that. Hiding behind her long blond waves made it all feel more illicit. More exciting. And one thing he’d never lacked with Natalie was sexual excitement.

  She started making soft little sounds in the back of her throat. He’d forgotten how she did that, and how much it turned him on. It was her own little pleasure barometer and he loved knowing he made her feel good.

  He dug through his memory to find other things she’d particularly enjoyed. He wanted to make her as out of her mind with desire as he was. And damn, if there were no other factors to consider, he’d have her naked and riding him inside of a minute.

  The mental picture drew a groan from deep in his chest, which Natalie matched with a hum. Yes, it was so good. They’d always been so good at this, from their first drunken kiss at a party junior year.

  He needed more of her. To touch and taste everywhere. He wrapped her long hair around his fist and drew her head to the side, his lips leaving a wet trail across her cheek, pausing to nip at her jawline, then running his tongue down the side of her neck. He feasted on the smooth skin there, kissing and licking and dragging his teeth over her until she shuddered in his arms.

  “Yes,” she sighed. Her fingers dug into his chest, nails making a scratching sound against his shirt.

  He wanted to rip off the filthy thing so she could mark him. He used to love the scratches she left on him even if his teammates gave him shit for it. He wanted to yank off her equally filthy shirt so they could be skin to skin. Maybe leave a few marks on her too.

  Who was he kidding? Certainly not himself. What he really wanted to do was flip her over and fuck her hard until they were both too satisfied to move.

  And what the hell was that about?

  This was Natalie. The woman who’d so thoroughly broken his heart he still wasn’t sure it would ever fully recover. The woman he’d loved so intensely it had been a physical presence inside him.

  But also the woman he’d had the best sex of his life with. Repeatedly. They’d obviously both changed, but if the way she was grinding against his throbbing cock was any indication, she hadn’t stopped enjoying sex any more than he had.

  She pulled the shell of his ear into her mouth, teeth tugging at the rim, and he lost the ability to think. Somehow his ear was connected to his cock, pleasure searing through him and making him dig his fingers into her firm ass and pull her tighter to him.

  “Fuck, Nat. That’s so good,” he moaned as he nibbled his way along her collarbone. She continued her own nipping and sucking and kissing and soon they were dry-humping furiously on his couch.

  What the hell were they doing? He hadn’t dry-humped a woman on a couch since high school. He had a perfectly good bedroom upstairs, and they were consenting adults free to have sex if they wanted.

  Weren’t they?

  Except were they really?

  Shit. If she were any other woman, of course he would take her upstairs so they could fuck. But it was Natalie.

  The woman who left him without a word in the middle of the night. The woman he’d loved with his entire soul, yet she hadn’t trusted him with all of her. He hadn’t known the extent of her dad’s alcoholism, or how bad things were with the rest of her family. She never told him.

  That night in college, she could have shared all that with him. Let him hold her and comfort her. Let him love and soothe her, take on some of her pain. Instead she’d vanished from his life.

  She hadn’t trusted him with all of her.

  And then she’d gone and taken everything she knew about him and used it against him. Used it to work out her issues with her dad and to further her career at the expense of his.

  “Oh god, don’t stop,” she gasped. She pressed down hard against his cock, white heat shooting up his spine. Desire and anger twined together.

  What the fuck was he doing?

  This was a mess. A mistake. He couldn’t fuck up his life over Natalie again.

  Quinn forced himself to sit up, his hands at her waist dislodging her from his lap. He avoided looking at her as he shoved to his feet and stalked to the door.

  “You need to go.”

  There was a long pause and he could hear her moving around but he refused to glance her way. If he saw her messy hair and kiss-swollen lips, he’d change his mind and ask her to stay. Which was a terrible idea.

  So he stared at her notebook where he must have dropped it when they first started kissing. That stupid fucking notebook.

  He should have just left it on the table.

  * * *

  —

  “I definitely want to be Leslie Knope when I grow up.” Natalie smoothed a label onto a slick ANNIE WILDER FOR COMMON COUNCIL postcard and tossed it on the pile on Annie’s coffee table.

  “You’re gonna give up football for a life in public service?” Annie asked, amusement dancing in her dark eyes.

  Natalie pretended to be horrified. “Never! Just funny and passionate and fierce and awesome like her.” Maybe “passion” was a bad choice of word. Now she was remembering how Quinn’s solid cock had felt between her legs as he sucked on her neck last night.

  She didn’t want to think about that. Then she’d go back to running her mind in circles trying to figure out what the hell had happened. She’d spent the better part of the afternoon on it instead of writing and she kind of hated him for it.

  Except she didn’t totally hate him. Some parts of her liked him. A lot. She wanted a nice simple relationship. Like Ben and Leslie on Parks and Recreation after they got together.

  If only her life were a sitcom.

  She paused in labeling postcards to take a drink of her wine. Pondered what the hell to do as she arranged five more crackers on her plate, topped them with cheese, and slowly ate them.

  “I’m willing to listen whenever you want to tell me what’s up.” Annie tossed another postcard on the pile, flipped her long dark hair behind her shoulders, and stared at Natalie. Stared a little more. And then a few moments after that.

  Dammit. Annie knew Natalie couldn’t hold out under that silent stare. She’d confessed all sorts of things because of that stare, from her ninth-grade crush on Chris Flemming to her recent worries that Ellen wasn’t the mentor Natalie had hoped for. Not once had she held out under the weight of that stare.

  No wonder Ann
ie was such a good teacher. Her seventh graders wouldn’t be able to get away with anything.

  Still, Natalie had to try. “Not sure what you’re talking about,” she lied.

  Annie just kept staring. Because of course she did. She knew as well as Natalie that she would crack.

  Annie leaned forward and got her wineglass. And stared. Took a sip. And stared over the rim. The episode of Parks and Recreation on the TV ended, Natalie finished her crackers, a new episode started.

  Annie stared.

  Natalie’s toes started dancing in her teal sequined slippers. But she concentrated as hard as she could on labeling a few more postcards. She had to focus on not bouncing her leg.

  Annie should have been a police interrogator. Hell, maybe even black ops. She’d get the world’s most hardened criminals to confess with that stare.

  “Ikissedquinn.” The sound rushed out of Natalie’s mouth before she knew she was going to break. Fortunately it was so slurred together, there was no way Annie could possibly have understood. She just had to think of a plausible alternative to what she’d said. I missed fin? No, that made no sense. I’m pissed at Lynn? She didn’t know anyone named Lynn. But maybe Annie would believe her if—

  “You kissed Quinn? When? Really? Is this good or bad? I feel like we haven’t talked in forever so I have no idea what the deal is with—”

  “Wait, you understood that?” Best friends could be real pains sometimes.

  Annie rolled her eyes, her dark lashes fluttering dramatically. “Of course I did.”

  “I hate the stare,” Natalie mumbled. She scooted back on the couch and curled her legs up under her. Maybe she was too old to pout, but sometimes she still needed to.

  “So tell me what happened.”

  There was no escaping it now. And if she tried to put it off or change the subject, Annie would simply redeploy the stare. It was a powerful weapon, that stare. It was the reason their suburb had approved a bike-share program by one vote rather than rejecting it by one.

  “I went over to his house last night to help him with a car he’s working on.”

  “Is that what you kids are calling it these days?”

  It was Natalie’s turn to level her own stare. But matched up against Annie’s grin, she just couldn’t pull it off. So she rolled her eyes at her friend. “Ha ha. You know I taught him to fix up cars. And he still does it. He was having trouble with it, so he asked if I could come take a look.”

  “Sure he did.”

  Despite Annie’s skeptical tone, Natalie did believe he’d invited her there with the sole intention of helping with his engine. Same as she’d accepted with that sole intention. After all, the engine really hadn’t worked.

  So she ignored her friend’s innuendo and explained how they’d spent two hours getting the car running. How he’d been so excited, he’d hugged her, and then they’d had that moment. How he’d seen her note in her journal and she’d told him why she broke up with him.

  Annie held up a hand. “Hang on. You mean to tell me, all this time, he had no idea why you left that night? That I know why you broke up with Quinn, but Quinn doesn’t know why you broke up with Quinn?”

  Natalie screwed up her face in a sheepish expression. “He does now.”

  “Natalie. Seriously. You never told him? What, you just ghosted the poor guy?”

  “I sent him an email the next day. Said it was over.” Her voice came out soft and small. She was a horrible person.

  Annie reached over and smacked her head.

  “Hey!”

  “You deserve it.”

  “Wh—what the hell?”

  “You do not break up with the love of your life in an email!”

  “Why are you taking this so personally? I didn’t break up with you.” OK, it was a pretty shitty thing to do. But she’d been twenty-one. She’d been young and stupid and heartbroken. And scared. She was older and wiser now and totally not hiding from what had happened between her and Quinn yesterday.

  Except she’d let two calls from him go to voicemail.

  She propped her elbows on her knees and dropped her face in her hands. “I was young. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sorry. And he is not the love of my life.” Liar.

  “You wanted to marry him after college.” Annie’s hand spread over Natalie’s back and started rubbing. It felt nice. A reminder that she didn’t just miss the sexual intimacies of having a boyfriend, she missed the simpler ones, like casual touch.

  She and Annie were close, but it wasn’t like they gave each other frequent back rubs or snuggled while they watched their movies. Hell, between Natalie’s travel and Annie’s campaign, they’d barely seen each other over the past few months.

  “If I admit I fucked up, do I get to tell you the rest of the story?” Natalie’s voice was still muffled by her hands. But she didn’t want to sit up quite yet.

  “Go on.” Annie tapped a finger on Natalie’s spine, then went back to long strokes.

  So Natalie explained the rest of the story, trying to focus on the words coming out of her mouth and not the images pushing their way into her brain. She didn’t want to relive those memories. She’d already cycled through them several times in the past twenty-four hours.

  “And then he just stopped. Sat up, shoved me off his lap, and told me to leave,” Natalie finished. She dropped her hands from her face, letting them dangle between her legs. “He must have come to his senses.”

  And that’s what it had been. It wasn’t rejection so much as he’d been the first one to get past the lust and find a clue. He’d done the right thing. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t given herself a powerful orgasm last night, imagining where things might have led.

  “If he hadn’t stopped things, would you have done it?” Annie asked.

  “Done what?” It was a ridiculous question. Natalie knew what it was.

  “Fucked him.”

  Natalie heaved a huge sigh, then scooted back to the corner of the couch. She drew up her knees and settled her chin on top. “I don’t know. I really don’t.” Probably. She’d been so caught up in the moment, in the feel of his body, in the way he made her feel. The one thing she’d never doubted with him was their physical relationship. They had sexual compatibility to spare.

  But it was a terrible idea to get involved with him again. Even just a physical relationship would complicate things too much. Their tentative friendship already put her far too at risk of falling in love with him again. If they had sex, she’d be a goner.

  “Did you want to?”

  Her best friend probably should have been a therapist, not a social studies teacher. The stare combined with her knack for asking just the right question would have broken down even the most reluctant patient’s barriers. “I mean, we were always really good together.” Natalie braced against the flood of memories of just how good. Sometimes it seemed she remembered every single moment they’d spent together, every kiss and caress, every mind-bending orgasm.

  “You’re two consenting adults who make each other feel good. So why not? Go over there tonight, proposition him.” Annie’s expression was almost a challenge, daring Natalie to give her a reason why that couldn’t happen.

  Besides that the team stayed in a local hotel before home games to eliminate distractions for the players, there were a few million other reasons she couldn’t proposition him on, say, Sunday night after the game. She shook her head. “There are way too many unresolved things between us. It wouldn’t be just sex.”

  Sometimes she wondered if a small part of her already loved him. Would always love him. Not in a past nostalgia way, Past Natalie loving Past Quinn. But in the present day, the woman she was now loving the man he’d become. It was a ridiculous thought when they barely knew each other and there was so much hurt between them. But there were moments when her chest ached for
him, and she didn’t know how else to describe the feeling.

  “You think you’d fall in love with him again.” Annie wasn’t asking. She knew that was the crux of it.

  So no point denying it. “Yeah. I don’t think I’m capable of being a fuck buddy for him.” But god, it would be so good. To touch all that smooth skin again, to feel—

  “Plus, there’s that whole issue with Ellen wanting me to do a big article on him. An exposé-slash-profile like I did with Matt.” The article definitely complicated things, even if she had no other reason not to get involved with him. “I can’t do that if I’m sleeping with the guy. Hell, I really shouldn’t at all. But Ellen doesn’t seem to care.” And if she flat-out refused, it was very possible she’d lose her job. So she had to find a way to write something with no substance that would still please Ellen.

  Sure, no problem.

  “How many times must we go over this? It had been years. You didn’t use any information you got from being his girlfriend, only from outside sources. You did the right thing for that article. And it wasn’t the article that lost him his job.” Annie’s voice held a touch of annoyance.

  And Natalie got it. She should let the old article guilt go. Hell, Quinn had never actually said he blamed her or held a grudge. He seemed more bothered by how she’d ended their relationship.

  Which was totally fair.

  “I know.” Just because she knew didn’t mean she could get past the guilt. If she knew how to, she’d have done it a long time ago. “But I certainly couldn’t do another piece on him if we slept together.”

  Annie shook her head, her expression wryly amused but sympathetic. “You’ve got this so wound up.”

  Natalie dropped her forehead to her knees and closed her eyes. Memories of yesterday’s kiss, of his fingers digging into her hips as she ground against him, flooded her head so she tore her lids back open. “I made a total mess of things.” Again.

  Annie chuckled. Natalie could faintly see her moving around, returning to addressing postcards. “And I thought running for office was complicated.”