Second Chance: A Military Football Romance

by Claire Adams

  In response, I nodded and planted a soft kiss on his lips. He lowered me onto the bed and then stood back as he slowly removed his T-shirt and undid his jeans, letting them fall to the floor. I sat up and started tugging on my shirt, but he pushed my hands away and said, “No, let me do it.” His hands were gentle as he pushed my shirt up my torso and then pulled it over my head, and I saw him wince as his eyes scanned the bruises that Dominic had left.

  “Do they hurt?” he asked as he ran his fingers over the marks that mottled my skin.

  “Not yet. That’ll come tomorrow,” I replied, knowing that the worst would be the next morning, when I would feel the full impact of the blows.

  He leaned forward and lightly brushed his lips across the worst of the bruises as he gently pulled my skirt down and dropped it on the floor. He quickly added my panties to the growing pile of discarded clothing as he lay down next to me.

  His hands roamed my naked body as we slowly kissed, and I could feel his hardness pressed against my thigh. My body responded to his touch as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and before long, I felt him spreading my thighs and slipping his fingers into my wetness. I gasped as he slowly slid them up and down, lightly stroking my clit, and then dragging them down to tease me a little before sliding back up again.

  In retaliation, I reached out and ran my hand across the tip of his cock, coating it in the pre-cum that covered it. Then I wrapped my hand around his girth and began stroking it slowly. Now it was his turn to gasp. I smiled as I whispered, “Two can play that game, Mr. SEAL.”

  “Can they, now?” Brian laughed as he pushed two fingers up into my tight, wet pussy and heard me inhale sharply. We lay there watching each other as our hands got lost in the playground of our bodies.

  Suddenly, Brian withdrew his fingers, wrapped his arms around me, and rolled over on his back, pulling me on top of him so that I was forced to let go of my hold on his cock. He quickly positioned me so that the tip of it was pressing up against my wet opening, and then kissed me deeply as he slowly slid inside me. I felt like I was melting as his cock filled my pussy, and I moaned softly into his lips as he pushed the entire length inside. He stopped and waited, letting me feel the fullness before he began slowly pulling back out and leaving just the tip of his swollen member inside me.

  I kissed him harder as I tried to make him push back up, but he held his ground and waited.

  “Oh Brian, please?” I begged. “Please! Please!”

  “Please what,” he said through gritted teeth as he kept me from slamming myself down onto him.

  “Please! I need it!” I cried as I wriggled in his grasp.

  “What do you need, Ava? Tell me,” he urged.

  “I need it! I need your cock! Please!” I begged more desperately. “God, take me! Now!”

  Hearing those words spurred him to action, and Brian slammed his hips up against mine as he buried his cock inside me. I cried out as I felt him enter me fast and hard, and then began pushing against him as we tried to find a rhythm that would match the desire we felt. He thrust up again and again and I met him more than halfway as I tried to drive him deeper and deeper inside of me. I wrapped my arms around him, and as I slammed down, I heard him groan. We’d found our rhythm, and frantically rode it until both of us were on the edge of an intense orgasm.

  Brian had somehow worked his hand between our two bodies, and was firmly stroking my clit in a way that made my pussy pulse around his cock. I’d never felt anything like it, and I briefly wondered if I would pass out when I came. The thought left my mind as quickly as it had arrived, and suddenly, I was hurtling over the edge of a cliff as I moaned his name. The orgasm shook my body, and I felt him join me as we both flew into the abyss together.

  Many minutes later I heard Brian whisper something in my ear, but my pulse was still pounding in my brain and I couldn’t hear him. I lifted my head and lightly kissed his lips before I gave him a questioning look.

  “I’m so sorry, Ava,” he whispered as he bent forward and pressed his forehead to my chest. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I reassured him. “This isn’t your fault.”

  “It is my fault,” he said. “I was supposed to protect you and keep you safe and I failed.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I objected. “There was no way for you to have known what Dominic was doing!”

  “I tried to keep tabs on him at all times,” Brian admitted. “All those texts were from a couple of the frat brothers I’d had following him and Cheese. I tried to keep him under surveillance, but we lost him.”

  “So that explains the obsessive texting all the time!” I laughed. “I thought it was a new girlfriend.”

  “A new girlfriend?” he said with a smile as he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me tightly against him. “Why would I want a new girlfriend when I’ve got all I ever wanted right here in my arms?”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

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  SEXY TATTOOIST

  By Claire Adams

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 Claire Adams

  Chapter One

  Graham

  “A rose.” The girl gestured vaguely to her tanned, freckled cleavage, of which there was plenty. “Right here.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes, which was generally a frowned upon reaction when a customer was telling you what they wanted you to tattoo on their body.

  “Okay,” I nodded, and tried to arrange my features into an expression that suggested I thought getting a rose tattooed on her cleavage wasn’t a completely overdone and tired idea. Not that someone like her would care—I could tell her mind was made up about it, regardless of what anyone said.

  “A red one with thorns,” she said after a moment. “You know, so it’s like symbolic of who I am … I have a hard exterior, but inside I’m like—”

  “I know exactly what you mean.” It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, but still way too early in the day for this kind of talk. “Give me a minute and let me sketch something up for you.”

  “Great. I’m so excited to see how this will turn out.” She grinned, lines creasing the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t so much a girl as a woman who was still trying to be a girl, with her tight tank top and short shorts. She probably dedicated a considerable amount of time to working out, and it wouldn’t be long before she delved into the world of plastic surgery, if she hadn’t yet already. “You come highly recommended, you know,” she said, widening her eyes at me.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. You tattooed my best friend, Stephanie. She got a ... like a flower or something, half a flower, really. No, it was a lotus. I don’t totally remember, but it was here,” she gestured to her inner forearm, right below the wrist, “and you did it this special way, I forget what it’s called? Jab? Stab? No, not stab—”

  “Stick and poke,” I said. “Or hand poked.” That nasal, high-pitched voice of hers was starting to shred my eardrums.

  “That’s it! It was so beautiful. I might get something like that next time, but I’ve always wanted a rose, so I’m going with that first. But I really do like the idea of the stick and poke tattoos. It’s like, going back to the basics or something. That’s why Stephanie said she wanted one.”

  My thighs were covered with the rudimentary stick and poke tattoos I’d been giving myself since I was a preteen, sitting in my small, shitty bedroom, my stepfather, Wade, taking up all the space in our small, shitty living room, watching TV in a haze of cigarette smoke, surround
ed by crushed PBR cans. I used a sewing needle, a chopstick, and some Bic ink and decorated my legs with all the things I wanted to say to Wade but couldn’t: Fuck off & die, Eat a dick, You are a cunt. Oh, I’d said a few things to him before, but that had always resulted in black eyes, broken ribs, a few concussions. The worst of it was when I was 10 and he hit me in the face with a two-by-four. It didn’t knock me out, but it left a spectacularly jagged scar right along my jawline, which I’ve since erased by growing a beard. The last fucking thing I wanted was a daily reminder of Wade’s existence every time I looked in the mirror.

  It only took me a few minutes to sketch the rose exactly to this particular customer’s liking—so she said—and then she sat in the chair and I got to work. She kept up a steady stream of chatter that was easy enough to nod mindlessly to while tuning out at the same time. I felt a building sense of discontent, some sort of strange malaise, even though I knew how little sense that made. On Point Tattoo—my very own shop—was doing better than I ever could have imagined, and showing no signs of plateauing any time soon. I’d been doing so well, in fact, that eight months ago, I’d hired a second artist, an art school dropout named Helena with an uncanny ability to recreate, from memory, pretty much anything she saw in exacting, photographic detail. She was better than I was, though that wasn’t something I was willing to admit out loud. At least not yet. She probably knew it, but she hadn’t brought it up, and she didn’t seem like she was one of those people that needed to prove something about themselves. Besides, it would be good for business, which was what I told my buddy Todd when he started giving me shit about it.

  “When I think of On Point, I think of you, Graham,” he’d said. “Not Helena. Which, by the way, is way too an exotic of a name for someone with as plain a face as she has.”

  It was true: Helena was a plain Jane with spaghetti legs and no tits to speak of. She had brown hair she wore in a no-nonsense braid and had a penchant for wearing baggy skater shorts and white tank tops that only accentuated the fact that she was flat-chested. I guessed she was a lesbian, but we didn’t talk about our sex lives.

  But this discontentedness, I’d say that started not long after Helena started working for me, though I didn’t think the two were related. No, it had more to do with the fact that I’d broken things off with Danielle, and that Danielle also happened to be a bit mentally unbalanced. That’s putting it nicely. She turned out to be a complete psycho. Not a dangerous one, but I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that her pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage were actually figments of her imagination. There was also the fact that we’d both discussed, at length, the fact that neither of us was really interested in being in a relationship and would prefer to keep things casual. At some point, she’d changed her mind, though she hadn’t bothered to let me know it.

  Other than that, though, there was absolutely no reason for me to be feeling anything but satisfaction with the way things were working out in my life so far—successful business, fulfilling work, as much sex as I wanted. Women like tattoo artists, and women like beards. Even the women that you might peg as too straight-laced to get an actual tattoo themselves. There were a couple weeks this past winter—before Danielle—when I slept with a different woman every night for two weeks straight, culminating in a face slap when I accidentally called Hattie (Night 14) “Katie” (Night 2).

  “Oh, wow, that looks great.” I’d finished with the rose and my customer was beaming down appreciatively at her cleavage. The skin was red and puffy around the outline of the rose, but it’d come out as good as you could expect something like that to look. As I taped a gauze pad to her, I gave her the spiel about the “dos” and “don’ts” of caring for her new tattoo.

  “I’m going to tell all my friends about you,” she said. “I hope you’re ready for an onslaught of business.”

  She reached out and touched my arm, letting her fingers linger there just a few seconds too long. Long enough for me to know I could suggest we take a detour to the back room and she’d be on her back in two seconds flat.

  But ... no. I didn’t find her that attractive, and there was some part of me that had begun to suspect my feelings of ill ease were stemming from all the sleeping around I’d been doing. I hadn’t really investigated these feelings any further, mostly because I wasn’t the sort to sit around analyzing my moods and shit, but it was getting a bit harder to ignore. It was like an annoying, yappy dog, or a mosquito that kept buzzing by your ear: you’d try to ignore it, tune it out, but it was right there, demanding that you pay attention.

  I didn’t want to have to think about any of that, though, and I’d put it off for as long as I could, the hope being that eventually the feeling would just disappear. Things were good right now—as good as I could really expect them to be—and I planned to do whatever I could to make sure it stayed that way.

  *****

  I was just adding some black power lines to one of my regular customer’s latest—an elongated koi fish devouring its own tail—when Todd showed up. He gave me a mock salute when he saw I was with a customer and sat down in one of the lounge chairs up front to wait for me to finish.

  “You up for a ride tomorrow?” he asked once we were alone in the shop. “I’m thinking 20, 25 miles.”

  “Sure,” I said, though it hadn’t been on my agenda. Todd and I were somewhat unlikely pals, at least looks-wise: he was your typical, clean-cut jock, a category 1 mountain bike racer. Maybe more surprisingly, I was also a cat 1 mountain bike racer, though I wasn’t affiliated with any club and I sure as shit didn’t wear a spandex kit. I ran flat pedals and a rode an all-mountain, full-suspension bike, which pissed off a lot of the cross-country racers who actually took the racing circuit seriously. Todd, though, found it more amusing than anything else, and for that reason, we hung out and went riding together fairly often.

  “Cool. Oh, and if you’re not working tomorrow night, Amanda said she wanted to hang out. I’m supposed to forward her number to you.” Todd gave me an expectant look when I didn’t reply. “Amanda? Remember? Tall, blonde chick? Legs for days? Those tits that look fake but aren’t?”

  I stifled a laugh. “Wait—you’re trying to hook me up with a girl you’ve already been with?”

  “Who says I’ve been with her?”

  “Uh ... you just did, if you’re telling me her tits look fake but aren’t.”

  “We’ve never hooked up, though not because I haven’t tried. I just know I’m not her type. She likes the bearded tattooed guys. Know anyone who fits that description?”

  “So, how do you know her tits are real?”

  “I can just tell. But if you want ... you can verify it for me.” He pulled his phone out of pocket. “Here, let me send you her number.”

  I didn’t say anything as he started tapping on the screen. I’d let him send me the number, but I probably wouldn’t call her, amazing tits or not.

  “She’ll be expecting a call from you,” he said.

  “You told her this? You want to be my personal assistant or something?”

  He grinned. “I’m far too busy to be anyone’s personal assistant. But I’m always happy to help a bro get laid.”

  “I don’t actually need any help in that area.”

  “I know. But I figured after all the shit with Danielle, you at least deserved to sleep with someone who wasn’t a total head case.”

  The thing was, I’d already slept with a few girls since Danielle. The sex itself had been great, but the other stuff ... not so much. One of them had a boyfriend, who somehow found out and had come down to the shop ready to fight, but once he got sight of me, he’d quickly changed his mind. The other girl had a 4-year-old son, and while I certainly didn’t have anything against kids, I sure as hell didn’t want to be the stepfather she was so obviously looking for. And the third girl had just been whiny and clingy and completely insecure, in spite of having supermodel looks.

  I wouldn’t be able to properly explain it to Todd—and we didn’t
talk about that shit really, anyway—but I wasn’t going to call Amanda, because I wanted a breather from all the bullshit. This was why, I suspected, that people got divorced after 35 years of marriage: at some point, you just got fed up with all the shit that some people brought to the table. I’d never been in a long-term relationship, but even the most casual of relationships could still come with strings attached.

  So, what if, just for this summer, I took a break from all that? It’s not like I wouldn’t have plenty to do, with it being the shop’s busy season and the height of the mountain bike racing season. It would be like one of those 30-day challenges that people are always posting about on Facebook—except instead of having firmer abs or being able to do a plank for two minutes, by the end of the summer, I might have some sort of peace of mind, which, after all the shit I’d been through, didn’t sound too bad at all.

  Chapter Two

  Chloe

  I swear, Tara had some sort of psychic abilities or something.

  She had texted me a few days ago about when I planned to get to my parents’ summer house, and I’d written back something sort of noncommittal: Not sure, still have some packing to do and other stuff to take care of. I’ll text you when I get there.

  This wasn’t a lie; I had to clean out my studio and then go back to my apartment and tidy up a little bit there, too. Freshman year of college, I thought that I could do the Airbnb thing—rent out my little Back Bay apartment to travelers, maybe to people on a budget or something, with Boston prices being so expensive—but my dad vetoed the idea the second he caught wind of it.

  “You have no idea the sorts of people that might be living there,” he’d said, giving me one of his stern looks that still had the ability to make my throat go dry. “We’re not a charity, Chloe.”