“Wait, Mark . . .”
But he’d already hung up.
Dylan shook her head.
Was this what all competitive athletes were like? There was no denying any longer that he was interested in her as more than a phone pal—his attention, when he had time to give it, was so overwhelming, like he didn’t want to permit her a moment to consider and possibly develop doubt. Yet when they were together, he was a little quiet, almost shy. But despite that, he was clearly a man who went after what he wanted and for reasons she still didn’t get, he seemed to want her. For now.
She returned Ava’s calls but got voicemail so decided to jump back into the shower to freshen up for whatever Mark’s “thing” was this time. And no matter what he said, she wasn’t taking any chances by wearing a freaking t-shirt.
Once again he was exactly on time, and Dylan was waiting for him wearing a pretty white off-theshoulder blouse, her favorite jeans and black high-heeled sandals. Mark had on well-worn jeans and an orange shirt that looked amazing against his complexion. He took one look at her footwear and laughed.
“Dylan, I’m serious,” he said. “Wear something comfortable.”
“Are you sure you’re not taking me to George Steinbrenner’s house or something?”
“First of all, Steinbrenner is Yankees, not Mets. And second, I told you, it’s not that big a deal. Where’s your closet?”
He walked past her and back into her apartment, finding the bedroom and looking around. After a moment, he returned carrying her Nikes and a sweater.
“Okay, now let’s go.”
Dylan locked the apartment door behind them and followed him to the elevator. When she was with him, and even talking on the phone, it was easy to forget that they had met just weeks ago. Apart from the fact that she felt like wrestling him to the ground and having her way with him when he was anywhere within ten feet, it felt like they had history. In the elevator, Mark tied the laces of her sneakers together and draped them across his shoulders.
“Are you planning to tell me where we’re headed?”
“Some people just don’t like surprises,” he said shaking his head. “My parents’ house. Happy now?”
“You sure aren’t a believer in working up to things,” she said.
“My parents loved you,” he said looking puzzled. “And Miri most especially. So why should I ‘work up to’ bringing you over?”
Dylan couldn’t help but be pleased at that news. She’d been curious about whether his family would be suspicious of this new woman who had shown up just as Mark was being made into a very wealthy man.
“So my brothers have been telling everyone in the neighborhood,” he warned. “So it’ll be crowded.”
“Oh, so now the truth comes out,” Dylan laughed. “Will there be like a thousand people there?”
“I’ll always tell you the truth,” Mark said, serious for a moment, his brows furrowed.
The party at his parents’ house in Washington Heights, five blocks south of 115th Street was the real celebration of Mark’s contract with the Mets. The house was a three-story white clapboard, one of the few in the neighborhood with its own backyard. When they pulled up, Dylan saw that the Acostas had decorated the front and back of the house with strings of white lights and opened the entire ground floor to people from the block who had closed off the street to traffic, pulled out lawn chairs and set up enormous speakers to make a party. Mark parked a block away and held Dylan’s hand as he led her down toward and then into the house.
In the Acostas’ kitchen a feast was being prepared—gargantuan pots with rice and beans, fried plantains, bacalao, pollo guisado and countless other dishes Dylan could not identify. Mark’s mother and two of his aunts were cooking, their dark hair pulled back and away from their faces. His mother, a stout woman with satiny dark skin and the heavy eyebrows that Mark had inherited, smiled at her and kissed her on the cheek calling her “azúcar” which Dylan recognized from her rudimentary knowledge of the language as Spanish for “sugar.”
The Acostas’ niceness and ease with her was something she almost didn’t know if she should trust. She had never been welcomed so easily by a boyfriend’s family before, and Mark wasn’t even her boyfriend. Mark’s aunts also beamed at her from over the pots of food they were preparing, and then gently shoved them both out of the kitchen.
Mark kept his hold on her hand, leading her toward the rear of the house and out the back door where for a moment they stood on the steps, surveying the already crowded backyard. Someone spotted him and a cheer went up, then he was surrounded by well-wishers, patting him on the back, shaking his hand and kissing him on both cheeks. Dylan tried to keep up with what was being said to him, most of it in rapid-fire Spanish or “Spanglish” but could not understand most of it.
Mark responded in kind, often shaking his head modestly and even blushing at times. Gracias, por favor, he said over and over. Then he was putting an arm about her shoulder and steering Dylan down into the yard and towards a huge barrel filled with ice and beer. It was a little chilly out, so someone had lit fires in three steel drums in the center of the yard. They radiated a comfortable heat and people stood nearby, nursing their drinks and soaking in the warmth.
Mark grabbed them both a beer and led her to the rear of the yard where they leaned on a chain link fence overlooking an empty lot next door.
“I hope you won’t get sick of all this and give up on me,” he said, handing her one of the bottles of beer.
“What d’you mean?”
“I keep bringing you to these things where it’s loud and crazy and crowded.”
“Well,” Dylan shrugged. “This is your life right now.”
“But it won’t always be,” he said, looking at her. “This’ll die down and then I can do what I really want to do.”
“Which is what?”
“Play ball. Spend some time alone with you,” he said simply.
He smiled at her and Dylan could swear her heart literally skipped a beat. When she met him, he had been shaved almost bald but now she could see his jet black hair growing in. It looked both velvety soft and prickly at the same time. Before she could stop herself, she reached out and smoothed a hand over the crown of his head. Mark looked surprised, but his lips turned up at the corners in a slight smile and he bowed slightly to allow her easier access. It was as soft as a baby’s brush. When she removed her hand, he was looking at her with such unmasked wanting that Dylan’s breath caught in her throat. Mark leaned in closer and she exhaled softly, preparing herself for his kiss.
“¡El novato!” someone said from close behind them.
Mark turned toward the voice, and their connection was broken. It was an older man, tall and with a shock of gray hair and a beard to match. He hugged Mark tightly and kissed him on both cheeks. The two men exchanged a few words in Spanish then Mark turned to Dylan.
“This is Wilfredo,” he told her. “My first coach. My first coach after my father, anyway. Wilfredo, esta es mi . . . es Dylan.”
“¿Como estas?”
“She doesn’t speak Spanish,” Mark said.
“¿Dominicana?”
“No.”
“Ah. How are you?” Wilfredo addressed Dylan directly. “I apologize. I thought you were Dominican also.”
“No problem,” Dylan said. “Nice to meet you.”
“And you as well,” Wilfredo said. “I just came to congratulate my friend here, my student. We are all very proud of him.”
“With good reason,” Dylan said.
“Well, I will leave you. I smell plátanos fritos, so I must follow my nose. And my stomach.” Wilfredo kissed Mark again and was gone.
“C’mon,” Mark said taking her hand.
Dylan followed him to the far corner of the fence where he pulled back a section that had been separated from the frame and helped her through so they were in the empty lot next door. He led her into the dark and Dylan followed him willingly and without question. Soon they were
standing next to a shed and it was so dark she could barely make out his features. Mark took her beer bottle and put it on the ground with his. Her back was pressed against a corrugated metal door and Dylan looked up. She couldn’t remember ever wanting to be kissed as badly as she wanted Mark to kiss her right now. Her breathing was shallow and fast as Mark braced himself with his elbows on either side of her and lowered his face to hers.
At first, he kissed her just on her cheek, then at the corner of her mouth, his lips soft and so light, that goose bumps tickled her arms, and a delicate tingling traveled down her throat, and directly down between her legs. When he moved to her jaw and her neck, his breath warmed her. Dylan turned her head so he would kiss her on the mouth, but still he teased her, touching his lips to hers only briefly then pulling away.
And when he finally kissed her, really kissed her, it was better than she remembered. Mark’s kisses were teasing, seductive promises of greater pleasures to come. He drove her crazy by taking her tongue between his lips, then pulled back; or he nipped her lower lip with his teeth almost hard enough to be painful then exhaled a cool breath to soothe it. It was possible she could altogether lose her head just kissing him but she wanted more. She wanted so much more. It seemed unfair that she was the one left desperate and yearning, so the next time Mark’s tongue slipped between her lips, Dylan pulled away. It was her turn to tease.
“I’m not sure why we’re back here in the dark when you’ve gotten more than your share of kisses already tonight,” she breathed against his jaw, referring to the exuberant greetings he’d gotten from just about everyone since they arrived.
“But yours are the only ones I want,” he said, aggressively taking her mouth once again.
Almost against her will, Dylan’s hips pressed against him and Mark pressed himself against her in response, but just as she felt his excitement, he pulled back, his pelvis no longer in contact with her stomach.
Just twenty feet away was a crowd of people, all there for him. And yet he wanted to be alone with her. The excitement of it reminded her of high school and being kissed under the bleachers by a boy you liked—it was the same heady, dizzy, giddy feeling like falling and falling and falling; the same and yet so much better.
“I thought it best we get this out of the way right now,” he said, lifting his head for a moment. “Because we’re going to get interrupted all night. And Dominican parties do go all night.”
The party did go all night. They ate and danced and Dylan enjoyed watching Mark with his friends and family, and got a little annoyed when other women approached him and even more so when he seemed to like it.
But still, they couldn’t seem to get the kissing part “out of the way.” Every chance he got, Mark cornered her somewhere, tilting her chin upward and leaning in toward her. Finally, frustrated at constant crush of well-wishers, he held her hand and walked with her, he said to get her running shoes from his car when her feet started to hurt, but they were gone almost an hour because they were all over each other in the back seat and only stopped when the windows began to fog and Mark said he wasn’t sure he could be trusted to keep his hands to himself. Dylan didn’t bother telling him that she wished he wouldn’t.
Sometime after three-thirty when the party was still in full swing and her eyelids began to grow heavy, Mark told his mother he would be right back and drove her home. It took him fifteen minutes to find a parking spot but he insisted on walking her directly to her door and they kissed even more, standing in her entryway, and his hands, pressing into her hips made her want to beg him to stay, so she could feel those large, warm hands against her skin, rather than through the fabric of her sweater and blouse.
When he pulled away he exhaled audibly, looking every bit as unsteady as she felt.
“Call you tomorrow?” he said.
“Yes.”
Mark glanced at his watch. “I mean, today. Later. I’ll call you later.”
Dylan nodded.
When she shut the door behind him and locked it she stood there for a moment, wanting to go after him and ask him to stay. And she knew somehow that on the other side of the door, he was standing there and hadn’t moved because he was hoping she would. Her hand was poised on the doorknob but she pulled it away. It was delicious, this waiting.
3
“So what are you two, exactly?” Ava asked. “I mean, what does he call this . . .” she waved her hand vaguely, “. . . this thing you two are doing. Going to his signing dinner, his family’s house. I’m confused.”
“You’re confused?” Dylan said. “Think how I feel.”
They were stretched out on Ava’s futon, watching her TiVo’ed episodes of some show on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Ava was obsessed with Oprah, though for very different reasons than most. Her dream was to move to Chicago and work there. She’d once met some guy in a bar who turned out to be one of the network’s associate producers who was in New York on vacation. After a few drinks the guy had complained about his paltry salary which was, to Ava’s dismay almost fifty grand more than she made as a senior staffer at Channel Seven. She decided that as a matter of principle, she needed to make at least as much as a junior production staff on OWN and asked her boss for a raise. She got one—her five percent cost of living increase was accelerated so that she got it six months early. Of course, this was not nearly what Ava had in mind and her obsession with the Oprah show began.
“These are not particularly incisive comments,” she said under her breath as she listened to an expert talking about earlier initiation of sexual intercourse among teens. “I would have found her someone a lot more interesting than this guy.”
“Of course you would have,” Dylan said loyally.
“Where is he now?” Ava asked, switching easily back to the topic of Mark.
“At the ballpark. They have some kind of charity event going on there.”
“See what I mean? You even know where he is at any given moment. I think he’s your boyfriend
whether you realize it or not. I don’t even know where Jake is.”
Ava and Jake had reconciled yet again, unsurprisingly. Dylan thought she secretly enjoyed the drama that went along with dating him. Jacob was only twenty, fours years younger chronologically, but everyone knew that in maturity, twenty-year old guys may as well be sixteen. Everyone that was, except for Ava.
“He’s probably out cheating on you again,” Dylan said before she could stop herself.
Ava looked at her. “You promised me you would stop saying stuff like that. He’s really trying this time.”
Dylan looked at her friend and touched her hand. “Sorry. I just . . . okay, I’ll stop saying stuff like that.”
Ever since they’d met in middle school, Dylan and Ava had been as thick as thieves, and even then, Ava had been a magnet for drama. Her household was noisy and chaotic while her mother went in and out of rehab and counseling, and her father improvised with his childrearing responsibilities, largely by passing his kids off to various and sundry neighbors, friends and family. Ava had a brother, Jon, two years older, who had been in and out of scrapes all through his teen years and now was only just beginning to get things on track and was working on finishing his degree in Pittsburgh.
Ava had been the kid who seemed okay on the outside, but beneath it all had exhibited a whole slew of troubling behaviors. Dylan had been her support through an eating disorder, an inappropriate relationship with a much older man while she was a junior in high school, a reckless few months of doing ecstasy every night with a dodgy new boyfriend; and assorted other break-ups, flare-ups and questionable relationships.
Even so, Ava had gone to and finished college cumma sum laude, scored an amazing job and maintained the appearance of having her act together. Dylan was sure she was just about the only person Ava allowed to see her messy underbelly. Jacob was the latest wart on that underbelly. He was just the type of good-looking scoundrel Ava always seemed to be drawn to. His ambitions had not progressed beyond being a
bike messenger and Ava seemed content to subsidize him for just about every single date they went on.
“I’m just happy you’ve moved on,” Ava said now, changing the subject. “You know. From the last guy.”
The last guy, was how they referred to Dylan’s ex-boyfriend. She’d dated Eric the last couple of years at Fordham, until he announced a couple weeks before graduation that he thought it was better to “keep things casual” since he would be all the way at U. Penn for business school. Until that moment, Dylan hadn’t been aware that it was casual. Needless to say, they hadn’t lasted after that.
Eric still occasionally breezed into town and called her up for dinner, but whenever she accepted, Dylan realized the odds were she would wind up in bed with him, so for the past year she’d declined the invitations. Since him there had been a couple short stints of dating, but no one who maintained her interest. Until now.
In the week since he’d taken her to his parents’ house, they’d talked on the phone as usual and he texted her, but hadn’t asked her out again. She knew he was busy, but Dylan still wondered why he hadn’t gone out of his way to see her. He knew where she lived now, and could ask to stop by. She would have said yes without a second thought no matter what time, day or night. All she could think about whenever she heard his voice was their marathon make-out sessions at the party. He was so patient and attentive just kissing her, she couldn’t help but eagerly anticipate the kind of lover he would be. Dylan had no intention of playing hard to get. At the first opportunity, she intended to find out.
In the papers, there were beginning to be pictures of him going to different Mets and MLB events. Most of the time he was pictured with one or both of his brothers and Corey; but once he was photographed talking to a young woman that the paper called an “unidentified companion.” The day the picture ran, Mark called her as usual and Dylan tried not to behave differently, but had anyway. Just the idea of some other woman being kissed by Mark the way she had been made her want to throw herself on the floor and have a tantrum like a three-year old. So she answered his questions with monosyllables, and didn’t volunteer any information about what she’d been up to, the way she might usually have done.
The Seduction of Dylan Acosta Page 4
