by LJ Evans
Ever since I’d seen her my freshman year, there hadn’t been anyone else. I hadn’t dicked around on her no matter how many panties had come flying my way. Just like my dad had never dicked around on my mom, even though he had wild fans stalking him at every concert and leaving PlayBabe-style notes at our front gate because of Dad’s past, growing up in the PlayBabe mansion.
I stared back at Maleena, languidly sliding my eyes over her tight sweater and skinny jeans accentuating every curve. She had plenty of them. Curves I liked to hold on to. The thought of them made my morning wood solidify, and I didn’t try to hide it.
“You’ve been ignoring me,” I told her.
She nodded, arms across her full chest. Like her father. Like me. Blocking the world. Putting a barrier between them and the us that could be broken if we let the world see the cracks.
“I needed a break from…well…you,” she tossed back.
“But not anymore?” I tried not to get my expectations up too high. She’d told me we were done, so I wasn’t exactly sure why she was here.
“I’m not here for us.”
I looked down at the notebook on my chest. The loss Aunt Cam had felt at losing Jake, it had rippled off the pages and into my heart. It had been a waste. His life cut short because he hadn’t taken care of himself. Because they’d both been blind to what the short term did to the long term.
Looking at Maleena, her golden curls twirling about her face, the red lipstick that I wanted to wash off with my tongue and my lips, and I wondered if there was anything worth giving her up for. When my football career was over—because let’s face it, it would be over in a flash, bursting like a finale at a fireworks show—what would I have left? If Dad never made another album again, if his fans were to drop him like a hot potato for something newer and better, it would stab him in the gut, but not the heart, because his heart was protected. His heart belonged to Mom.
I tossed the notebook aside and moved to the edge of the bed. I’d fallen asleep in sweats when I normally slept in just my underwear, but I was still shirtless, and I watched as Maleena took me in as I moved. There was both determination and uncertainty mixed in her eyes, which gave me a shred of hope.
I stood, stretched, and tried to shake off the hard-on before it got in the way of the words I needed to say. She licked her lips, and it made it impossible. I took two steps, placed both my hands on the arms of the chair, and bent so my face was inches from hers. Her eyes went to my lips and then back up. A bottled up mix of energy always seemed to overflow from the two of us when we were together, like a Coke that had been shaken.
“Why are you here, Maleena?” My voice was thick with emotions and lust.
Her eyes met mine defiantly. “For Dad.”
This surprised me and pissed me off. I wanted her to be here for me and only me. I wanted her to say, like Aunt Cam had said about Jake, that she’d never wished anything else for herself. That I’d been her only wish come true. Except, I knew that wasn’t the case for Maleena. It wasn’t the case for me, either. We both had dreams beyond one person.
But I also knew Maleena. I knew how to get her body to react to mine, so I slid my hand in the neck of her thin, button-up sweater, pulled aside her bra, and ran my thumb over her nipple. I was rewarded with a gasp and a moan.
“Your dad, huh?” I smirked before taking her lips into mine. And she let me. She let me kiss her with a force I’d been too afraid to use on any other person before. Too afraid I’d be accused of something I hadn’t done. But I needed force. I needed passion. I bit at her lip and thumbed her nipple again, and she moaned.
Then she pushed me hard against my chest, and the wheels on the desk chair moved her in the opposite direction from me. She fixed her bra and her sweater and glared at me.
“I’m not here to have sex with you, Tiras.”
She knew my full name pissed me off. I crossed my arms over my chest, no longer caring that my dick was all but poking a hole through my sweats. She needed to know exactly what she’d done to me.
“Your body doesn’t agree with that statement,” I said, because I could still see her nipples through her clothes. Her body very much wanted me.
She stood, crossing her arms over her chest once more in a mirror image of me. Then, she was moving toward the door. “I should have known this was futile.”
She was leaving. Panic filled me, and I moved so fast it startled her. I slammed the door shut with my hand and caged her. We’d been in this position many times. Our passion getting to both of us. “Shit. Don’t leave.”
She turned, leaning on the door, and looking up at me. “Why should I stay?”
I wanted to say it was because I loved her. Because goddamn it, I did. I wanted this woman, who knew more about football than I did, to be by my side for every fucking step of my career. I wanted her guidance and her kicking my ass into shape, but more than that, I wanted her love.
But I wasn’t good at showing emotion or saying what I felt. I was good at grunts and throws and snark. That was it.
“Tell me why you’re here,” I demanded.
She was breathing heavily, fighting the desire I knew she had for me. It was shooting sparks at me from her honeyed eyes.
“My dad needs you,” she forced herself to say. She didn’t want to, you could tell. It was so not in her to cave, to succumb. She hated it. She didn’t want to have to ask for anything. She wanted to demand it and have it given to her.
“Your dad,” I said, trying with every fiber in my body not to touch her. My hands were on either side of her head, my wide stance surrounding her body, and that was as close as I could get while we talked.
“There’s a good chance the board will let him go if he loses you,” she said, and I heard the wobble in her voice. The emotion. The sadness for her dad.
It took me more seconds than it should have to process all her words and what they meant. Doubt, first, because Coach Crandall was known for his dogged approach and eeking out the best from players who shouldn’t have any talent. Then, anger came next, because it meant she’d told him I was declaring.
“You told him?” It was the anger that curled from my lips instead of the love I’d wanted to state just minutes before.
She looked down in guilt. Then her eyes met mine, defiant again. “He was taunting me about you. About us.”
“No way he knew about us,” I all but snarled.
“He did. I guess your pals Kelly and Murray told him.”
“Hell no, they didn’t.”
“You calling me a liar?”
“Maleena, I can guarantee whatever they told him, it was still all guesswork until you confirmed it for him.”
She had the graciousness to blush, because she realized it was probably true. Her dad had tricked her into confirming something he might have suspected.
“So, you just threw back at him that I was leaving as a way of, what…getting even for him knowing about us?”
My anger was burning out, being replaced with sadness. It had to have hurt him. Disappointed him. He’d been the best coach I’d ever had. Matching my talent with his drive for perfection.
I stepped back. Conflicted. The range of emotions that had run through me in the course of a couple of minutes were more than I was equipped to handle.
“He wanted me to come talk to you. To ask you to stay one more year,” she said.
My eyes flew to her face, shock filling me. “He wanted you to have sex with me so I’d stay?”
For three years, we’d kept our relationship a secret because she’d insisted if he knew, he’d pretty much kill me on the field. Now, she was saying he’d basically sent her here to win me back. I shook my head. No. No fucking way. He wouldn’t pimp out his daughter. That wasn’t Coach.
“No. God. He’s not an asshole like—” She stopped herself before she could complete the sentence. Not an asshole like me.
My heart twisted and turned in my chest. Gripped so
tight it felt like it was turned to ash. I backed away farther. Her words icier than any cold shower I could have taken. Her words burning like frostbite at all my extremities and slowly tearing their way into my chest until nothing was left but a frozen muscle.
Maleena
MERRY CHRISTMAS, BABY
“Well I, I wanna kiss you baby
While we're standin' underneath the mistletoe.”
Performed by Christina Aguilera w/ Dr. John
Written by Moore / Baxter
Ty backed away from me with a look on his face that was equal parts disgust and hurt. I’d hurt him. In a way I didn’t think Ty was capable of being hurt. And yet, I should have known. He’d told me once, when we’d been tucked up in his bed after a night of passion, after a day of no clothes and Froot Loops because it was all he’d had in his apartment. He’d told me his biggest fear about being a successful football player was someone using him for his fame and fortune. That someone would have sex with him just to achieve something. Their own fame. Maybe someone crying rape. Or somehow forcing a paternity test for a baby he hadn’t fathered. Ruining his career with charges he’d never shake even if they were false.
At the time, I’d brought him out of the serious moment by telling him he wasn’t going to make it to the pros. It had worked.He’d smiled and tackled me, but we’d both known the truth. He would make it, and his fear was a legitimate one. There were a million and one people out there who would love to have a piece of his pie. Who would stop at nothing to have a piece of it.
Now, I was here, basically saying I was supposed to have sex with him to get him back. To get him to go back to my dad and UTK.
“That isn’t what I meant, and you know it,” I told him instead of apologizing. We both did it a lot, deflecting instead of saying I’m sorry. Assuming the other person knew what we really meant.
He just stared, his emotions having been shuttered behind his game face. The look he had when fighting the enemy. That look wormed its way beneath the barricade I’d tried to put up because I knew the truth about Ty. I knew, behind the bravado and the snarky attitude and the ego, there was a little boy who had always been compared to an uncle he hadn’t known. To someone he couldn’t possibly have ever lived up to because that man had died.
I took a step toward him.
“I just meant Dad needs you, and I wanted you to know that before you made a decision you couldn’t take back.”
“So, you’re only here for him.”
Was that the case? Was I truly only there for my father? God. Probably not. I missed Ty. I missed his crappy attitude and his ego. I missed his hands and his lips. I missed the passion I felt when I was with him. I missed how much he understood me. How he didn’t look at me and see a girl pretending to know football, but, instead, saw a woman who breathed football.
I took a shaky breath and took a leap I didn’t even know I’d come to make until I was there, looking at him. The knowledge winged its way from my brain to my heart to my toes and back. I loved him. More than I should have. More than I thought I was capable of loving someone.
“I came for him,” I said quietly. “But I’d like to stay for us.”
“What?”
We stared at each other, and I finally said, “Don’t make me say it again. You know it’s too painful.”
He smiled that goddamn lazy smile. The smile a million other people, along with me, thought was sexy. He closed the distance he’d put between us, wrapping his arms around my waist so I was tight up against his body. His body with too few clothes. The body that always caused mine to burst into flames.
Then, he was kissing me with the ferocity he’d always used and matched my own. We weren’t tender, because we weren’t tender people. We were passion and heat and savagery. We were tearing-clothes, shoving-against-doorways, biting kind of people. Until I’d met Ty…until I’d had sex with Ty…I’d been afraid to let all of that out of me. I thought the guys I was with would have said I was a slut, or a whore, or that my passion would simply be misconstrued. But Ty had let me show every ounce of my strength and desire and met it with his own.
He tossed me onto his bed, and I was yanking at his sweats as he pulled my sweater until it tore from my body. When our clothes were flung away from us, and we were at the point where we normally would have licked and devoured each other, he suddenly stopped. My body was pounding out an incessant beat that was demanding he meet it, and yet, he didn’t. He looked into my eyes and pulled my hand to his chest where I could feel his own furious beat.
“Do you feel that?”
I nodded.
“It’s yours.”
We stared at each other, my gold eyes bouncing against his that were so many different colors it was like a box of puzzle pieces had been spread across them.
“I love you,” he said so low and so deep it was almost as if the words were pulsing through my blood instead of the air around us. “But I can’t make this decision about my career because of your dad. If that isn’t going to be okay with you, then I need us to stop right now. I need you to put your clothes back on, and I need you to walk out that door, because I can’t love you and wonder if you’re here for him or for me.”
This was why people thought he was an asshole. Why many times I called him one. Because he spoke his mind without a filter. He said what he meant. But he also meant what he said. And he was loyal to the people he loved. His words only hurt when he spoke a truth you didn’t want to hear about yourself.
“I’m not leaving. I’m not walking out the door no matter what decision you make about football,” I told him, pushing a curl of hair away from his eyes.
He smiled at me.
“Does that mean you love me too?”
I smiled back. “Leave it to you to demand that I love you.”
“I’m demanding you tell me how you feel, not that you actually love me.”
“I do love you. I’ve loved you since the moment you pushed Maddox against the locker for talking about me. I’ve loved you from the moment you asked me out, even though you knew it could screw your life up with my father. I’ve loved you from the moment you let me rant about the Titans when they fucked up getting their Super Bowl ring.”
He bent his head to kiss me, and I put my hand on his lips.
“I do have one favor to ask, and whether you grant it or not, I’m still not walking out. I’ll stand by you, whatever mistakes you make.”
He chortled. “Mistakes?”
“Okay, or successes.” I shrugged. He waited for me to continue. “I just ask that you talk to your family and my dad before you declare. That you listen to everyone who loves you and wants the best for you instead of trying, as you always do, to make the decisions on your own.”
He searched my face. “Deal.”
And then he was back to devouring me, and I devoured him right back. Our souls knocking together. Our bodies smashing together. Our hearts turning into some twined entity I’d never known they could be.
We made love with a new intensity.
Walls and barriers shattering.
♫ ♫ ♫
Ty was lying with his legs tangled in mine. We were spooned together. My body tucked up against his. His head was buried in my neck. He’d passed out as if he hadn’t slept for days. Next to the pillow was a notebook. It had been on his chest when I’d entered the room earlier. It was old. Paper yellowing. Spiral binding twisted and bent.
I picked it up. The handwriting was sloppy but feminine. As if the person writing it couldn’t bear to sit still long enough to put the words on the page. As if writing was too much effort. I scrunched my eyes and read the page. You and me and us filtered all over it. I wasn’t sure who had written it. It wasn’t Ty. His handwriting was all slanted capitals as if he couldn’t be bothered to know the lowercase letters.
I flipped to the front and read some. The words were bitter and sweet all at the same time. Filled with longing and regret that bled
from the sentences.
“It’s hard to put down, right?” Ty’s deep voice tickled at my ear.
“Whose is this?”
“My Aunt Cam’s.”
“She let you read this?”
He chuckled. “No. I stole it from her house.”
“What? You did not.”
He bit my earlobe. “I did.”
“Yet another reason everyone says you’re an asshole. You do things that normal people know are wrong.”
“I knew it was wrong. But I felt like I had to know. Why does everyone think he was the moon and the stars and everything in between?”
“Did you find out?” I asked.
“Yes and no. I realized he was pretty much a nice guy. But I also realized he was just a human who people had put on a pedestal because he wasn’t there to fall off of it. I’m never going to win that battle. He’ll always be better than me because he’s dead.”
“You realize how fucked-up you sound, right? He’s dead. How can he be better than you? He lost. He lost everything.”
Ty nodded. I could feel it against my hair.
“I just meant that I can’t let it get to me anymore. People will compare me to him, but I’m not dead. I’m me, and regardless of our similarities, my path isn’t his. It’s my own.”
I closed the notebook and tossed it to the ground next to the bed, turning in his arms. “You’re still going to catch hell if your aunt realizes you took it. That was some pretty private shit, and I only read a couple of pages.”
He grinned. “Yep. Hell and fire. Aunt Cam really isn’t someone you want to mess with. I’ll be lucky if I have a hand left if she finds out.”
His bedroom door burst open, and I yelped, trying and failing to pull the sheet that was under his body over me.
“Oh, holy hell,” his sister Ginny said. “You could have warned me you had company, Ty.”
