“Weight should be in this leg,” I hear the instructor say.
“Yeah, thanks, she’s got it,” Doc says sharply, putting himself between the instructor and me, who gets the hint and walks to the next student. Doc shoos him off anyway, grumbling “Putting his hands on—”
“What?” I interrupt quietly. “Your woman?”
“I was going to say ‘my woman’s ass’, if you must know, but basically,” he admits, sheepish. “I’m not trying to be a caveman, but that was your ass. His fingers were almost in your crack.”
A loud hoot escapes me, and I cover my mouth with my fingerless leather glove. “It wasn’t, but fine. I know you’d rather be correcting my form.”
He moves close to my ear, tickling its shell when he quietly says, “Oh no, love.”
He molds his body to my back, one hand on my stomach to hold me against him. The other skims the side of my breast and brushes down my side to land on my ass, where he grips the cheek.
“There is nothing wrong with your form.”
I laugh and push my ass into his hand, my body into his.
“Mmmm, nothing at all. Shoulders back now.” He speaks low and controlled, a whiskey-flavored gravel sound hitting all the right notes in my ears. His hands tug lightly on my biceps, one sliding purposefully down to my hip, the other smoothing over my skin down my arm and extending his along mine. His fingers close over my knuckles and press gently. “Now let go.”
I do, and I feel flushed. It skims the edge of the target. “Shit.”
“Maybe you weren’t focusing,” he suggests.
I turn quickly and scowl at him. “Seriously?”
I can feel his laugh rumble in his chest, but I don’t hear it.
Doc spends the rest of the course very close to me under the guise of adjusting my posture or holding my arm at the right angle. From there, we’re all hands. Touching unnecessarily, we’re chastised several times by the instructor.
“Come on, guys,” he keeps saying.
Doc whispers that he’s jealous, and I giggle at the pot-meet-kettle of the situation.
I think we toned it down, but eventually, he just stops trying to teach us anything. Instead, I learn things from Doc—such as how my shoulder blades are one of my new favorite erogenous zones.
***
Since Doc got to plan the first “date,” I take command of date two. It’s nearly two weeks after the first, but with my job and his, most of our time together since has been spent in his bed. Or out of it, but… yeah.
This time we agree to do something more public to avoid being the horny-teenagers-without-supervision we were at archery. Naturally, I use the opportunity to torture him. I take him to my favorite salon for pedicures.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he says just loud enough that I can hear it. “Now I know why you insisted on surprising me.”
“I offered to tell you,” I remind him, holding back my delight. Yes, it was purely for my own entertainment. “But you insisted on being surprised.”
“Because you said you wanted to surprise me,” he says, clearly aware of how pleased I am. “Joke’s on you, though.”
He walks in, leaving me behind and confused—well, more worried that my “make Doc uncomfortable” plan is moot.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, running inside, only to find him already sitting in a pedicure chair and chatting up the woman at his station. “What the—”
“Hey, baby,” he says, as though we didn’t come here together. “This is Katherine. She and I have been seeing each other for… almost a year now, is it?” He shifts his attention to her to punctuate the question.
Katherine looks at me and nods, but she has a strange look on her face. “Yes. Almost a year.”
I smell bullshit and narrow my eyes at Doc. “Dude, lest ye forget, I’ve seen your feet. No way in hell you’ve had a pedicure this decade.”
I’m exaggerating. His feet aren’t really bad, but there’s no way anyone has been paying attention to those cuticles. His eyes widen just a tad, and I know I’ve busted him.
“Katherine,” I say sweetly as Doc slumps ever so slightly. “Has he ever been in here?”
“Yes,” she says, too quickly.
The owner comes walking out of the back, so I switch targets. “Sandy, you ever see this guy in here before?”
Sandy is a friend of Cameron’s. They used to do drag together until Cam came out as transgender and decided to focus on comedy. Sandy, however, takes his love of all things drag to his day job.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Doc shaking his head. He knows he’s done for.
“Honey, I’d remember if I saw this hunk of man meat up in my shop,” Sandy says, flinging the long hair from his wig over his shoulder. He inspects Doc head to toe. “Mmm. Hell, yes, I would.”
Katherine looks at me silently, guilty. “He gave me a twenty to lie for him.”
Doc grabs at his chest, cheesily acting heartbroken. “Katherine, I thought we had something.”
I snort. “Really? Well, don’t let me stop you.”
“I’m married,” Katherine says, and I daresay she looks bummed about it.
“Well, I’m not.” Sandy intently scopes Doc up and down. “You wouldn’t happen to be interested in one of the best amateur queens in Hollywood, would you? And in case you’re not hearin’ what I’m sayin’, I’m saying me, baby. I’d rock your world.”
Above the partial mask of his beard, Doc is blushing. “No, thank you,” he says. He turns to me with a crooked smile and juts his chin in my direction. “That’s my rock star over there.”
“Sonofabitch, and he’s an Aussie, too,” Sandy mumbles to the room. He starts fanning herself and walks past me. “Tell Cammy I said ‘Hey, bitch’, okay?”
“I will,” I say with a laugh before moseying over to the chair next to Doc’s. We take off our shoes and get our feet a-soaking. “So, what color are you getting?” I ask.
“Sparkly purple. You?”
“You should know better than to try to trick me,” I say, my voice low. I realize as I lean on my armrest and focus on him that this ridiculous shit has become foreplay. “I might have to withhold for that.”
“Wow,” he says, a little growly but not in the angry way—he’s exactly where I am right now. “Doling out punishments. You know that’s a two-way street, yeah?”
“Interesting. Should we see who caves first?” I did not mean to make this a denial competition, but fuck if I’m not competitive enough to see it through.
His wheels churn while his warm eyes stay locked on me. “What are the terms?”
“Terms?”
“Rules,” he replies, drawing the word out into the most aggravatingly sexy sound I’ve heard this week. “Is this like the Seinfeld bet? No ‘taking things in hand’, so to speak?”
“No orgasms at all, you mean?” I ask, my voice cracking pretty loudly. A few people turn to stare. “Um, no, I don’t think we have to go that far.” I mean, Christ, I’m not a masochist.
He pushes out his lower lip and shrugs. “Okay then. Stakes?”
“Oh, like what does the winner get? Hmm,” I run my gaze along the ceiling as I rummage through ideas. “Winner gets… whatever position or sex act she wants, with the exception of anything past your hard limits.”
“I do believe you mean whatever he wants. In which case, I accept. Good luck, Beauty.”
With that, he turns and settles into his chair, turning on the massage feature and tilting it back.
As we drop the conversation and relax into our pedicures—and I’m now wondering if he has had one before, because he’s really chill with the whole thing—I get a knot in my stomach that tells me I’m either going to go crazy and lose this bet, or die of withdrawal symptoms before I have a chance to win.
Then Katherine gets to the foot-scrubbing part of the service, and Doc nearly shoots out of his chair. Well, holy shit. My man is ticklish.
13
AFTER THE P
URGATORY
DOC
AS SOON AS WE leave the salon and try to decide on where to eat, the games are on.
Nora “accidentally” brushes her hips against my crotch I don’t know how many times while we stand outside discussing lunch options. She also manages to make biting her fingernail hot. Probably has something to do with her pink tongue darting out once and again.
At first, I’m at a loss as to how to retaliate. Then I smirk at one of her suggestions and continue to hold her eyes. She loses her train of thought, and I laugh.
“You know what?” she says, obviously irritated. “We’re going to Fresh Catch.”
“That new place on the beach? But that’s in Bodhi Canyon.”
“So?”
“Wasn’t the road leading in closed from a rock slide?”
“Just for a week,” she says with a triumphant expression. “So we’re fine. Unless you’re afraid?”
“Get off,” I say. “Or don’t, as the case may be.”
My Beauty grumbles and hisses a retort that she thinks is under her breath. “Such a fucking asshole.”
Just before we get to the restaurant, I notice the new Danger: rocks falling signs they’ve put up post cleanup. Nora tells me she saw pictures of one of the boulders that fell.
“It was huge, but cracked in half when it landed. There was a bunch of debris on the roof of the restaurant, but luckily no real damage,” she says.
As she talks, her hand “absentmindedly” runs up my thigh, where she leaves it to drum lightly, inches from the perfect spot to wrap those fingers around.
“Let’s go in.”
I take a deep breath and realize how long a meal this will probably be.
I’m not far off, as Nora spends half the meal playing footsies or whatever the fuck you call it when she slides her newly painted toes up my leg, stopping just shy of my dick. I can barely eat at first, what with the wood I’m sporting.
“I think that’s crossing over the initiation line,” I say, citing the main rule.
“Me?”
“Uh, yeah.”
She shrugs, amused.
The rest of our time there I eat my food in the dirtiest possible way—lots of tongue, slow-sucking and the like.
As a braised octopus’s tentacle hangs out of my mouth, she hisses at me, calling me a cheater.
“Cheater?” I laugh at that, but bite it off. “I’m just eating. You actually touched me with your foot, all enticing-like. If anyone’s cheating here, it’s you.”
“You’re playing with your food.”
I chuckle and nearly choke, so I swallow before I continue. “I’m enjoying my food. The only other thing I’d play with right now isn’t an option.”
“Of course it is,” she says, pausing between mouthfuls of spicy coconut scallops. “You’d just lose.”
I grin. “No, I wouldn’t. Though I might be arrested.” I make a jerk-off motion with my hand. “But you’d bail me out, wouldn’t you?”
“If you become a sex offender? No,” she says with a straight face. “No, I absolutely would not. I would claim I’d never met you before.”
“You forget I have evidence that you have.” I pick up my phone and wave it around a little. “You’ve sent me a few pieces of that evidence.
“Not of my face,” she says, her cheeks reddening. “Was there?”
She’s unsure, and that makes this even more enjoyable—not as enjoyable as calling off this bet and having sex, but the teasing is going to make the next time we do have sex feel nuclear.
I have to keep reminding myself of that. Constantly.
In the end, I consider letting her off the hook, but then she grabs for my phone. I snatch it away and shove it in the back pocket of my pants.
“Ah-ah-ah,” I tell her, shaking my head. “No deleting shit. You sent them; I have every right to keep them.”
She eyeballs me. “If I sent them, they’ll still be on my phone.”
“You already deleted them,” I remind her. That’s a lie because I have no idea if she deleted them or not. And actually, there weren’t any that included her face. Only her lips, though those are pretty identifiable. At least in my mind. “And anyway, I’d never use those against you.”
Nora’s eyes narrow. “Damn you.”
“Not ‘fuck you,’ though?”
She picks up a piece of sautéed habanero pepper and flings it at me. I bat it away with the back of my hand, laughing as it lands on the table.
“Maybe never again,” she says. “Keep playing the way you do.”
“I’m kidding, love.” I grin, trying not to laugh too much. “You get evil when you’re not winning.”
Scoffing, she pretends to ignore me. Her eyes flick to the window, watching the surf and the people outside. Then they move inside the restaurant and back to her food. It goes like this for a few minutes before I break the silence.
“Honestly, Nora? Ignoring me?”
She continues like this as she eats. I begin to think she’s truly mad at me, until I catch her pulling at her blouse to fan herself. This reveals the lacy edge of her black bra. I look up to her eyes as they flicker over me. When she meets my gaze, she looks away. She’s trying to use my plays now. I go back to my pornographic eating techniques. Twenty minutes later, we’re asked to leave the restaurant after a family with small children complained about the noises we were making in tandem with the gestures and licking.
When our server tells us this, Nora runs out of the restaurant, completely shame-faced. I grab some bills from my wallet and toss them on the table. After I get up to leave, I laugh my way out the door at the pair of go-to-hell stares the parents are aiming at me. When I get to the car, Nora is thankfully cracking up, her face now red from laughing so hard.
“We’re so bad,” she tells me.
I’ve never wanted to kiss her so much. I think she can tell.
“Do you work tonight?” I ask, and her amusement grows.
“I do. You want me to come over after?”
She’s just teasing me now. “You’re welcome to come over and crawl into bed with me,” I tell her. “I sleep naked whether or not you’re with me, so feel free to wake me up however you’d like.”
The quick downturn of her lips forces another laugh out of me.
“I’ll probably be too tired to come over. I’ll just go home.”
Liar.
“You’re right,” I say. “It is closer to come to my house.”
The conversation—or combat of words, rather—continues like this until I drop her off at her apartment. The rest of the afternoon I get random texts with various and often out-of-focus pictures of body parts. Some of them are just her mouth, pouty and perfect.
So. Not only do I have purple sparkles on my fucking toes, I’m also suddenly celibate. Tell me again why I thought egging her on into a bet where we aren’t having sex was a good idea? Because six hours after agreeing to it, I feel like I have indigo balls.
***
The next morning, I know Nora will be sleeping in late after a long night at the bar, so I call Fox to see if he wants to hit the water. He does.
“Hey, bitch,” he says when I walk into the open garage. “Lolls and Henry crashed after the early morning boobing, so this is the perfect time to get out there.”
“Boobing?” I look at him like he’s lost it.
He laughs. “Breastfeeding.”
“Oh, classy of you to change it up.” He ignores me. “Does she get on your case for surfing and not helping with the kid?” I ask.
“Naw.” He shakes his head. “I just like to be around if he’s awake.”
I blink my eyes hard. “Who the fuck are you, dude? What happened? I mean, I love Sophie an’ all—”
“Mine.”
“Fuckin’ hell, you’re not still sore about that flirting thing forever ago, are you?”
For a beat, I think he isn’t, but I can’t recall if we ever specifically talked about that. I know I apologized to Soph
ie, but not him.
Fox grins, knowing he had me concerned for a split-second. “No, I’m just ribbing ya.”
“All right, dickhead. Then answer my question.”
He stands up straight, chunk of board wax still in his hand. “What question?”
I roll my eyes and walk to the rack against the wall with our wetsuits. It’s a tiny bit chilly today, so we might as well suit up. “Who you are. I mean, when did you turn into such a responsible, doting, asshole father type, Mr. Monkhouse?”
The asshole laughs. “When I fell in love with my Lollipop,” he answers simply.
“Yeah, that sounds like a capable adult.”
Fox erupts into broad, open laughter. “No, man,” he says. The wax in his hand is good enough for one more use, so he tosses it to me. “I just… After we got together—legit, like not just the knock ’er up plan—something felt different. I wanted all the things she wanted. The relationship, the kid. I want to have another, but she won’t talk about it yet without threatening my junk. Too soon, I guess.”
I think I’m starting to understand what he means—about how the way you feel changes.
“So you’re saying the daddy shit suits you?” I revert to teasing.
“Fuckin’ nasty,” he grumbles. “Keep your kink to yourself.”
I make a noise of discomfort. “No, no way. Not my gig. To each their own, but for me? All adult, all the time, thanks.”
“Anyway, you sick fucker,” he says as he steps into his suit, “how about you and Nora? That was a surprise to see you two so into it at the baptism. Are you going to be in our presence again as a couple? Or are you too busy fucking constantly when she’s not working?”
“Close, but no,” I say.
“She doesn’t want to be seen with you in public?”
“Fuck you.”
“That is not one of the options.”
“You know what, ya cock? Let’s just surf, okay?” I pick up my board and walk out.
“Wow,” he says as he follows me around to the beach with his board. “She on her period or something? You know—”
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