by Angela Blake
Brandon was shaking his head. “I don’t know. Maybe. . .” Ashlyn hated the tears that built up and slid down her cheeks at the same time.
“Fine!” she shouted, louder than necessary. “I see it means nothing to you that I want to. . .” Ashlyn shook her head. It felt dirty saying it out loud, now that Brandon clearly didn’t care what she felt for him.
“Ashlyn,” Brandon said. He reached for her, but Ashlyn took a step back, wiping her own tears. “It is important to me. It means everything to me. That’s why I don’t know if I can just take you, even though everything inside me is telling me to do it. There’s still something inside me that says I shouldn’t.”
“Just do it!” Ashlyn said, trying to be defiant, even though she felt rejected.
Brandon tried to reach for her again, but Ashlyn crossed her arms and refused to melt into him. She stood like a statue as Brandon wrapped his arms around her. Ashlyn didn’t feel turned on anymore. She just wanted to go home and sleep. She wanted to go home to her mom, not her temporary home with these temporary crew mates.
Brandon kissed the side of Ashlyn’s head. He kissed it again, her hair pressing up against his lips. Ashlyn started crying. All of the rejection from previous men assaulted her. She remembered Javon’s interest, purely physical. Now here was Brandon, interested in her for some other reason, and she wasn’t allowing him to treat her like a lady. Ashlyn was broken.
Brandon gently stroked Ashlyn’s hair. Her tears eventually stopped, and she stopped shuddering. Brandon still held her. Then Ashlyn realized. Maybe Brandon didn’t really want her. Maybe he just saw her as a friend. But now, that couldn’t be. He had kissed her. He had held her hand. He was interested in her, even after most of his time working as an extra had ended.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Ashlyn murmured, still buried in Brandon’s shoulder. By this time, her arms were wrapped around him, and her eyes were closed. She felt at peace.
“Don’t apologize for being you,” Brandon gently reprimanded. “Remember, that’s one of the things I like about you. You are always so honest.”
“I don’t think you would like it about me if you were with me for a long time,” Ashlyn replied. “My mother always said that I was too emotional.”
Brandon laughed. He gave a real, from the belly laugh. “Yeah, people have said that about me too.”
Ashlyn pulled back and had to look Brandon full in the face. “What? No way.”
“Yes way! People say that I’m a guy. I’m not supposed to feel anything, but I do.” Brandon shrugged. “You just haven’t seen me get to that point yet.”
Ashlyn sighed. She no longer felt overwhelmed by the need to be needed. She felt overwhelmed with gratitude that some guys didn’t just jump at the chance to have her body. Some guys wanted to know her for who she was first.
Ashlyn looked at the ground as she reached around and re-fastened her bra. Maybe she wouldn’t do it tonight, but someday, if Brandon kept showing her this side of him, Ashlyn felt determined that she wouldn’t have sex with him, a simply physical thing. She would make love to him, something that involved the heart too.
The moment suddenly seemed too tender to do something so bonding. Ashlyn realized that she shouldn’t be so eager to give herself away. “I guess we should go back to the house now,” Ashlyn said as she took his hand. Brandon started pulling her in the other direction.
“Why? We’re already halfway there. We might as well take another trip to look at the hole in the sand.”
Ashlyn smiled. “Okay, I like the sound of that.” She wasn’t quite ready to leave Brandon yet anyway. She wanted to hold on to a little of the magic of the night. Ashlyn held Brandon’s hand tightly, and as they came up to the turtle nest, they saw that the crowd of people was more than double.
Brandon broke into a jog. “Come on! They’ve got to be hatching!”
Ashlyn and Brandon found their way along the edge of the passage so that they could see the little creatures moving.
“I’ve never seen turtles move so fast,” Ashlyn commented, in wonder of the baby turtles that were no bigger than the palm of her hand. There were hundreds of baby sea turtles, all following the passage down to the edge of the ocean. The turtles didn’t take notice of the large humans watching them. They had one goal only.
“How do they know to go toward the water?”
“The moon reflects off the water. They actually want to reach the moon, but the reflection throws them off.” Ashlyn smiled, not taking her eyes off the baby sea turtles. She couldn’t believe that she had finally gotten to see the turtles. The ranger was advising people not to take photos, so Ashlyn just watched. When the last baby turtle had found its way into the ocean, Ashlyn turned and smiled at Brandon.
“I guess we finally found what we are looking for,” Ashlyn replied. “We saw the turtles at last.”
“I wasn’t looking for the turtles,” Brandon said. “I was just looking for a way to spend more time with you.”
Ashlyn giggled, and the two kissed, once again igniting the fire in Ashlyn’s stomach. She knew that she felt something strong for Brandon that wasn’t just based on physical features. She had a friendship with him, just like the friendship she had had with Mark, before he had broken her trust.
The feelings of fear and distrust tumbled back into her thoughts. Could Brandon have a hidden side? How would she know if she knew him completely? Ashlyn sighed. She knew that she would just have to give him more time, more time before she would be able to completely get rid of the distrust she had for men.
THE END
A Secret Baby Sports Romance
Chapter 1
Keith Roger smiled as he watched his parents interact over dinner.
At twenty-five, Keith Roger, NBA star knew that he didn’t have the most typical upbringing what with all the back forth between two continents. His mother was a typical English woman, pale, blonde and very proper. His dad was an American with coffee black skin, an easy going smile and a very loud and rambunctious personality.
It’s not like they still lived in a time where it was illegal for interracial marriages to happen, but it still shocked both sets of parents when Bridget and Roger fell in love and got married.
Keith had always admired his parents and the way their relationship just seemed so effortless, but he often wondered why he was nothing like them.
He had inherited his father’s dark skin and his mother’s hazel eyes, but beyond that he got nothing else. Not their old fashioned romantic notions on love, nor their love for the ordinary. Keith knew from a young age then he didn’t want a quiet life raising a family. He wanted to be front and center, he wanted the glory and the fame that came with being in the spotlight. He wanted girls to scream his name, and he didn’t want to stick to just one woman.
While his father tried to teach him about romance, Keith was too busy trying to figure out how to make it big. He knew that he had a tough time ahead of him because of his skin color, because although black people had come a long way in the States, he knew they still had a long way to go.
White privilege was still very much alive.
Growing up with two different cultures as his environment meant that Keith had a talent that very few people possessed. He had the charm of the English, and the tenacity of the Americans, paired with his winning smile, and his confidence, he knew that if he played his cards just right, he’d make it big.
And he was right.
He managed to graduate top of his class with a degree in the media arts, but he soon began pursuing a different passion, something he had a knack for since he got his first basketball at the age of five.
The second he opened the present and held the ball in his hand, he understood why Michael Jordan wanted to get where he was, and from that point on, he did everything he could to make sure he got there too.
When he graduated from college, he moved to the States full time to pursue a career in basketball. At first, he worked odd jobs he
re and there. Three days a week he did some free-lance work for a marketing firm, and the rest of the week, he trained with a coach who let him play in a small scale basketball team. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
Two years later, a talent scout happened to be walking by when he spotted Keith play, and the rest fell into place. His parents had just flown out to celebrate, and they took him out to dinner at a nice restaurant. They began prepping him with questions about the sport, his team mates, particularly Blake Hamilton and Mark Hummel. They were legends in the NBA, and even though he played alongside them in some of the games, they only knew him from afar, so he hardly ever interacted with them.
But he knew all about their lifestyles, they were considered royalty on and off the court. Women flocked to their side; or at least they used to until they both discovered that they were fathers.
Keith inwardly snorted at their bad luck, knowing that he’d never make that mistake. He knew that he wanted to be at the top of the food chain in the team, and once he got there, no one would take that away from him.
Not a woman nor a child.
He knew that having one or the other or both would be distracting and would make him unable to stay ahead of the game, so he avoided it as much as he could.
He half listened to his parents chatter on about how proud they were, and how they were thinking about moving to the states, so they could be close to him.
“Wait, what?” Keith had only been half listening, so he wasn’t sure he’d heard them right.
“Move back here?” He repeatedly looked from his father’s shy smile to his mother’s beaming face.
“Well, honey, why not? Your father and I have lived in Britain for quite some time now, and I know your father misses America, so I figured we could move back here for a while.”
Keith loved his parents, he did, but he was twenty-five, and just getting started on his big plans to live large, so he didn’t want to have to worry about disappointing his parents.
“Don’t worry, son. We’re still talking about it, we wouldn’t want to ‘cramp your style’ or whatever the kids call it these days.”
Keith was surprised to find himself chuckling. “Okay, Dad.”
Cramp my style he thought to himself with an amused grin, he shook his head as his parents continued to tell him a story about his grandparents.
He absent-mindedly scratched his back, wondering how long the tattoo would itch. The tattoo artist had said that it was normal for it to feel itchy and uncomfortable for the first few days, but that after a week of using cream, he wouldn’t be able to feel a thing.
He had gotten two tattoos, one on his shoulder of a Game of Thrones quote ‘Valar Morghulis’, and the other on his back that was a picture of Rocky Balboa.
He hadn’t been quite sure of the second one, but his team mates had assured him that women not only loved tattoos, but that they loved manly tattoos, what could be more manly than a boxer?
He took a bite out of his dessert, and absent mindedly watched a petite waitress with short black hair and a nose piercing clear the table next to them.
She was bent over the table as she cleared away the dishes, and Keith found himself fantasizing about a different kind of bending.
He shifted uncomfortably as he felt himself begin to grow aroused. He hated that his parents were sitting right across the table from him because he didn’t feel comfortable doing his own thing with them around, but he’d figure out a way around that.
He continued to watch the waitress out of the corner of his eye, and once she caught him staring, she smirked at him and gave her hips an extra shake.
One eyebrow went up in surprise as she gave him a saucy wink before sauntering off, knowing full well that he was staring at her backside and wondering how to get her over.
Keith made a comment at something his parents said as he continued to think of the black haired mix who just walked off.
He noticed that she emerged a while later, and she made eye contact with him as she gave him a small seductive smile. He signaled her over, and as he watched her strut to the table, he wondered how he could make his move with his parents sitting across the table.
Just as she was approaching the table, she tripped and fell and landed directly at his feet. The water she was carrying spilled all over the front of his pants, and he gazed at his parents in dismay wondering what had just happened. He glanced down fully intending to help her up before he noticed that she was gesturing for him to be quiet.
“I’m so sorry, Sir,” she began as she picked up a napkin and began to rub his legs.
He opened his mouth to say something before he noticed that she had spilled some water on the front of her shirt as well, and now it stuck to her body in a way that accentuated her breasts. His parents both got up and mumbled about finding him a spare shirt from a shop nearby, and they exited the restaurant.
Aware that some of the staff was staring at them, Keith tried not to make it too obvious that he was turned on and staring at her.
She leaned over, so he could get a peek at her lacy black bra, and Keith gulped as he felt himself growing more and more turned on.
The waitress continued to tut and apologize as she attempted to make sure he was ‘dry’.
She knew exactly what she was doing and soon Keith was so aroused he was sure everyone in the restaurant would be able to see.
The waitress ran his fingers lightly over it as she smirked. “I think I’d better take you out back and find you a spare pair of pants, Sir. I wouldn’t want you to catch a cold on my account.”
“Yes,” his voice came out sounding hoarse. “Yes, quite right. I’ll also need to speak with your manager about your behavior.”
The waitress’s eyes widened in mock fear. “Please, Sir. Don’t get me fired. I’ll do anything.” She emphasized the last word by licking her lips.
Keith tried to look nonchalant as he stood up and glowered at her. She gestured for him to follow her, and she kept her head down as she led him to the back.
“We’re very sorry, Sir.” The rest of the staff hurried to apologize as he moved past them. He waved their apology away with a tight smile, feeling bad about the deception momentarily, before realizing that they had all probably done something similar.
The waitress led him to the back and through a set of double doors that led to what looked like the employee staff room.
There was another man there, so the waitress pretended to look for a spare pair of pants before she finally produced them and handed them to Keith.
The man left the staff room, and the waitress wasted no time in pushing Keith backwards and into the ladies bathroom. She looked the door and turned around to face him with a smile that made it clear what her intentions were.
“I’m Fiona, and I’ll be your waitress. Anything you need, anything at all, I’ll be happy to oblige.”
Keith pretended to think. “Well, Fiona, I believe you’ve gotten water all over my pants, and I’ll need you to find me a new pair and help me put them on.”
“Of course, Sir.” A small smile played on her lips as she reached for the button on his pants.
Keith grabbed her wrists and yanked her closer. “But first, we must talk about your very inappropriate behavior.”
Fiona gazed at him innocently. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Keith raised an eyebrow. “No?” He began to trail his hands over her body lightly, making sure not to touch her anywhere she wanted to be touched.
“Perhaps I can refresh your memory,” he whispered in her ear as he nibbled on her earlobe.
Fiona nodded eagerly. “Yes, I think you should.”
Keith chuckled as he began to pat her down much like she did with him earlier, only far more slowly, and he didn’t have to be subtle since no one could see them.
“Ringing any bells, yet?” he inquired casually as he let his hands rest on her breasts.
“Maybe a little.” Fiona’s voice came out sou
nding breathy.
She’s as turned on as I am Keith thought to himself. Good he thought as he moved his hands and began to massage her shoulders.
“Now, about those pants you were going to help me change out of…” He trailed off as he gave her a smirk.
Fiona leaned over and bit her lips suggestively. “As you wish.”
***
Keith emerged a while later and hastily ran his hands through his disheveled hair, he ran his hands down his pants and smoothed out the creases before he straightened up and made his way back towards their table.
“Oh, honey.” His mother stood up and handed him a button down blouse. “We went to the nearest store, but we couldn’t quite find your size, so it took a bit of searching. I do hope you won’t get sick.”
Keith shook his head as he took the shirt that was being shoved into his arms. “Don’t worry, mother.”
“Young Lady,” his mother gestured to the black haired waitress. The waitress froze before she put on a professional smile and walked over. Keith tried not to stand too close to her lest he smell himself all over here and become tempted to do it all over again, even if his parents were watching.
“Yes, ma’am?” The waitress smiled politely.
“ I do appreciate you helping our son find a spare pair of pants, it really is quite hard to manage that.” His mother patted her hand gratefully.
The waitress gave her a warm smile. “Of course, ma’am. Anytime, I’d be happy to help with anything I can.”
The waitress gave him a look that let him know what she meant, and Keith tried not to gulp as he felt himself begin to grow aroused again. He tore his gaze away from hers and stared at the china on the table on the far right until he felt he was in control again.
