by Cassie Cole
It was a beer I recognized and loved—as did every good Texan—but I frowned at it. “Blood and Honey. Is it any good?”
“It’s real good. Lots of flavor.”
The can was still sealed, I realized. It was a small gesture, and probably wasn’t even intentional, but I appreciated it nonetheless.
“My name’s Roberta.”
He stuck out his hand formally. “Danny.”
We shook hands, opened our beers, and then Danny raised it in a toast. “To non-shitty beer,” he said with a beautiful smile. How could someone look so good when they smiled?
I took a sip of the beer to hide my own silly grin.
The music changed, and that thumping bass returned. Danny leaned in close to ask, “Are you a student?”
He smelled like fresh leather and cloves. “Would I be at this party if I wasn’t?”
“Honestly? You look like you don’t want to be here.”
“Oh,” I sputtered, embarrassed that he’d recognized exactly how I felt. “Yeah, I’m just tired I guess.”
I winced inwardly. I’m just tired. I bet I sounded like his grandma. I tried to think of a joke about Matlock, but before I could, he chuckled.
“Honestly? I am too. I only came out tonight because my roommate made me.” Danny gestured over in the next room, where the music and dancing was craziest. “He’s over there somewhere trying to get laid.”
“You’re not going to believe this, but that is literally my exact situation.” I put my palm up. “Swear to God. Bored roommate looking to get laid, and she’s somewhere over there too.”
One side of his lips twitched. Goodness gracious, even his half-smile was gorgeous. “Is she rejecting the dress code as flagrantly as you?”
“I assure you that Aly is perfectly in compliance. She’s wearing sparkly silver fuck-me pumps, and she’s pretty much poured into her dress. If she tries to dance I’m afraid the button at the top of her cleavage will shoot off like a bullet and kill someone.”
“She should meet my buddy Lance. He was the idiot doing the keg-stand and Cossack dance.”
“Actually,” I said with a smirk, “she mentioned wanting to bite off a piece of him. She’s probably in there somewhere shaking her tits and hoping he notices.”
“Oh, he’ll notice alright.” Danny shook his head in amusement. The music rose in volume, so he leaned in and asked, “So what are you studying?”
“Ancient Mesopotamian marital aids,” I said with a straight face. “With a focus in Persian butt plugs.”
My timing was absolutely horrific: the music cut off halfway through my sentence, which resulted in me shouting, “Butt plugs!” into the ensuing silence. A few guys laughed. One shouted, “Hell yeah, now it’s a party!” from the other room. All the primped girls stared daggers at me. If this kind of social miscue had happened five years earlier, I would have been mortified. But at 22 years old, I was only mildly embarrassed.
Danny cleared his throat and loudly said, “I’ll buy the two-inch diameter! Do you accept Venmo?”
The music returned. I sighed with relief as everyone stopped staring at me and resumed dancing.
“Thanks for that,” I muttered.
“I’d hate to see a good joke ruined by embarrassment.” Danny gestured with his beer. “All joking aside, ancient Mesopotamian dildos sound really interesting. I’m picturing a Flintstones-style vibrator powered by a woodpecker.”
When I stopped laughing, I said, “Kinesiology is my actual degree. Five year master’s program.”
I expected him to not know what that was, or to not care, but he bobbed his head enthusiastically. “Hell yeah. The human body is fascinating. What do you want to do with that?”
He was so engaged in the conversation. Leaning forward, holding eye contact in a way that seemed totally genuine. Like he really wanted to hear my career aspirations rather than making conversation as a means to get into my pants.
“I want to be a personal trainer,” I explained. “The biomechanics involved with sports medicine, in particular. I love working with the human body. The intricate relationship between muscles, tendons, and ligaments fascinates me. Especially on athletes whose bodies have trained for one specific goal. The quadriceps muscle group on sprinters compared to long-distance runners, fast-twitch versus slow-twitch. The entire rotator cuff system for professional baseball pitchers, and the inverse health relationship with their ulnar collateral ligament. It’s just like engineering, but with flesh instead of metal! That makes it so much more fascinating. Not to mention all the maintenance required, repair after injuries, specific macro-nutritional requirements for different muscle group longevity…”
I made myself chuckle. “Sorry. I tend to ramble when talking about kinesiology. This is all probably boring to you.”
But Danny only grinned. “Hold this,” he said, handing me his beer. I accepted it and then he bent down to the left cuff of his jeans, rolling it up his calf.
“Just because I’m interested in muscles doesn’t mean I want to admire your calves,” I said. “Though they look very nice.”
“Not that,” he said, struggling to pull the tight jeans over his knee. Finally he slid it the final way over, bunching up the entire jeans leg on his thigh. “I wanted to show you this.”
He stuck out his kneecap, which was kind of knobby. But that’s not what he was showing me. Surrounding the knee, like the corners of an imaginary square, were four scars. Each was only an inch long.
I leaned over to get a closer look. “You’ve had ACL surgery!” I said excitedly.
“Uh huh,” he said.
I touched one of the scars. “About, hmm… three years ago?”
“Closer to four,” he said, looking at me funny. “Good eye.”
“Why are there four incisions?” I mused, touching the pair of scars above the knee. “The two incisions below the patella are standard for arthroscopic knee surgery, but the upper…” I snapped my fingers. “You had the entire ACL reconstructed. They had to use part of your hamstring.”
“Ding ding ding!”
He rolled his jeans back down, and I handed him his beer. “That must have been a pretty bad injury for them to do full reconstruction at your age. Typically, the younger a person is, the more original tissue they try to salvage.”
Danny shrugged sadly. “It was a bad injury. I was running, and planted my foot to change direction… And my knee didn’t bend the right way. I almost passed out when I tried to stand afterwards and saw my knee.” He shivered involuntarily.
“Knee injuries can be pretty gruesome. I’m not squeamish, but they still make me cringe.”
We both sipped our beer as the music pumped.
“So what’s your degree in?” I asked.
“Communications.”
“What do you want to do with that?”
“That’s a very good question.” He stared off for a moment and said, “I have no idea.”
“Well, you probably have a lot of time to think about it,” I said.
“Not a lot of time. Just until I graduate in May.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well then you have, uh, about nine months to figure it out. Good luck with that!”
Danny looked around the room. “I’m not too worried about it.”
“Why not? I’d be freaking out if my future was totally unknown.” I paused. “Well, I am kind of freaking out because my future is kind of unknown. But at least I know what I want to do.”
He gave me another funny look. Almost like he thought I was pulling a prank on him.
“I guess I’m just laid back,” he finally said, though from his tone he was leaving something out.
I finished my beer and waved the empty can. “You want to steal us two more of these bad-boys?”
“Well, those were the last two in the mini-fridge upstairs,” he said sadly.
“Ahh.”
We stood there awkwardly. I didn’t want to drink shitty beer from the keg, but I also didn’t want to st
op talking to him. I would’ve given anything to keep talking to him, because talking to him was distracting me from my own problems. That and the fact that he was gorgeous, charming, and had a presence about him. The kind of charismatic aura that politicians or movie stars had. It was almost magnetic, pulling me toward him.
“Maybe I just didn’t look hard enough,” he said awkwardly. Searching for something to say. “I’ll go check again in his bedroom.”
“Good idea,” I said. And then, seized by a flash of impulsiveness, I added, “I’ll come with you.”
4
Roberta
I followed Danny through the party and up the stairs, and all the while I wondered, what the hell am I doing?
I quashed the thought. I knew exactly what I was doing.
The sounds of the party dimmed to a background thumping as Danny went into one of the bedrooms. The walls were covered with NASCAR photos and paraphernalia, and the bed was made and clean like a hotel room.
“The mini-fridge is over by the—” Danny began.
I closed the door behind me and threw myself at him, my lips locking onto his as if by magnetic force. His arms wrapped around me and one of his large hands went to my ass, squeezing me, feeling me. We kissed our way over to the bed and fell to the sheets, not caring that it was someone else’s bedroom. The only thing that mattered was the muscular hunk in my arms.
This was the kind of unwinding I needed to do tonight.
Our tongues danced as Danny pushed on top of me. I spread my legs for him. He sank into me with his weight, a delicious pressure on my sex. He moved his hips while we kissed, his tongue rolling against mine in a way that made me wish it was my pussy he was tonguing.
He pulled back far enough to unbutton my jeans, and then his fingers slid underneath my panties and across my clit. I moaned into his mouth as his fingers surrounded my pussy, then invaded the wet slit itself, caressing up and down my opening. Not content with just this, I reached between us and stroked the front of his jeans until I found the hot, hard bulge of his cock. Danny sighed at my touch, exhaling sharply as his blond hair fell across his face.
“I want…” he began.
The volume of party noise increased as the bedroom door opened. A girl with a red solo cup staggered inside, then stopped when she saw us.
“Where’s Trevor?” she said in a thick Texas accent. She was quite drunk. “You’re not Trevor. Trevor?”
“Trevor’s downstairs,” Danny said.
The girl seemed to accept this, and wandered away. The door remained wide open.
Danny turned his beautiful gaze back to me. “You want to get out of here?”
“More than anything in the world.”
Danny held my hand as we left the bedroom and went back downstairs. “Let me check on my friend,” I said. “I’ll meet you outside.”
He gave me a skeptical look. “You’re not ditching me, are you?”
I put a hand on his muscular chest and leaned in until my face was close to his. Our lips were close enough that I could feel his breath on mine, and I stared in his eyes a moment longer.
“I promise I’m not ditching you,” I said. “Give me one minute.”
I found Aly in the living room, where the music—now techno—was loudest and everyone was dancing. “I’m heading home,” I told her.
“Fine,” she said.
“You okay by yourself?”
Still dancing, she rolled her head toward me. “I’m totally fine. If you want to leave, go ahead. I’m just happy you came out at all.”
If she showed any signs of being drunk, I would have hesitated. But she was totally sober, and was usually pretty responsible. I gave her a final wave and headed out the front door.
Danny was waiting down by the street. He dramatically raised his wrist to examine his watch. “That was one minute and nine seconds.”
“Darn,” I said, snapping my fingers. “I’m shocked you didn’t leave since I was so late.”
“I guess it was worth the wait,” he grinned.
We walked down the street, the sound from the party slowly diminishing behind us. This street of houses was adjacent to the campus, next to the baseball and soccer fields. Neither of us spoke, but it didn’t feel awkward. It was like we were both relaxing after the over-stimulation of the party’s sights and noises.
He led me up the walkway to an old craftsman house with a big front porch and brick pillars holding up the roof. “Nice digs,” I said. “Better than the senior dorm where I live.”
We went inside and he flicked on the lights. “Looks like neither of my roommates are home.”
I put a hand on his arm. “Good.”
Danny turned to me and grinned a wolfish grin.
I squealed as he bent down and lifted me off the ground as if I weighed nothing. He threw me over his shoulder and held me there with a hand on my ass, carrying me deeper into the house. I had a great view of his ass in his jeans from here, and reached down to give it a playful smack.
Through a doorway we went, and then the room spun as he dropped me on a bed. I bounced a few times and came to a stop on my back, elbows propped underneath me. The dresser to my right was covered with trophies and ribbons. Around the walls were photos of football stadiums, and framed football jerseys with autographs in fat black marker.
Danny knelt to the bed, drawing closer.
As much as I wanted him in that moment, there was a small prudish part of me that insisted I blurt out, “I usually don’t do this. I typically like to get to know a guy first.”
“Hey, no judgement here,” he said, smile deepening. “But if it’ll make you feel better, we can play a game.”
I perked up. “What kind of game?”
He sat on the edge of the bed and ran his fingertips up my thigh. “We take turns making guesses about each other. If we get it right, the other person takes an article of clothing off.”
I scooched over to the edge of the bed next to him. “Guess Who, but with stripping? Count me in.”
“You can go first.”
“Alright.” I gazed around the room at all the trophies and ribbons. “You played football in high school.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “You are correct.”
I squealed with excitement. “Do I get to choose the article of clothing?”
Danny reached down and pulled off both shoes and socks. “Nope. My turn.” He cocked his head while studying me. His blue eyes sparkled when he came up with his guess. “You get straight A’s.”
“What makes you think that? Do I look nerdy?”
“Most people on a five-year master’s program are overachievers,” he replied. “C students don’t cram six years of credits into five.”
“I am not a straight-A student,” I said victoriously. “I’ve gotten three B’s before.”
“Oh come on! That’s almost straight A’s!”
Taking pity on him, I took off one shoe and one sock. “That’s all you’ll get. Guess better next time.”
He grumbled, but didn’t argue further.
“Now, for you…” I looked at his pants. “You injured your knee playing football.”
He rolled his eyes. “You already knew that.”
“No,” I argued, “I knew that you injured your knee while running. You never told me you were playing football when it happened.”
Danny glared at me—he was gorgeous even while glaring!—and stood. He unbuckled his belt and then let his pants slide to the ground. His grey boxer-briefs were plastered to his muscular thighs, and the outline of a thick, semi-hard cock bulged across the front.
He sat back down before I could ogle him too much. “You’re not from Texas originally.”
“Arizona,” I admitted, pulling my T-shirt over my head. I was glad to be wearing one of my sexy bras underneath the shirt rather than a boring one. The pink fabric and white lace held my full breasts nicely, and Danny allowed himself a generous stare.
“Take a picture—it’ll last lo
nger,” I teased.
He immediately reached for his phone from his jeans on the floor and held it out to take a photo. I laughed and slapped it out of his hand. “I was joking!”
“Typical Arizona girl,” Danny said with fake disgust. “Alright. Your turn.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “I’m not the first girl you’ve brought home from a party.”
Danny smiled. It was a smile of embarrassment, and for a moment I regretted asking him. It shattered the illusion of our romantic hookup being unique and fun.
But he surprised me by saying, “I’ve… uh, never done this either.”
“Wait, seriously? Someone like you?”
He frowned. “What do you mean, someone like me?”
I waved at his body. “Uh, hello? Do you not know what you look like?”
“I would say the same thing to you.”
“I’m flattered, but seriously. Never?”
“Never,” he repeated, a serious look falling across his face. “I really don’t like hooking up with random girls. Especially not the girls that are usually at those parties. I’m just…” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I realized I was holding my breath. I let it out slowly and asked in a quiet voice, “If you don’t like hooking up with random girls, then why did you take me home?”
He took my hand in his, and all the while his gaze remained focus on me. “Because you’re not like the other girls.”
I was kissing him again before I knew what was happening, grabbing the bottom of his tight shirt and pulling it over his head.
“Woah, you didn’t make another guess,” he said when I paused to pull the shirt all the way over. “What about our game?”
“Games are dumb. Kiss me.”
He dove into me, pushing me back onto the bed and covering me with his chiseled body. It was more muscular than I could have imagined, totally defined in perfect contrast, hardly an ounce of fat on him. The veins bulged in his arms as he planted them on either side of my body and kissed me harder, and the world dimmed until there was only him, me, and our lips.
