by Tracey Ward
“How long until kickoff?”
I check my watch. “Another twenty minutes.”
“Ugh, I’m gonna miss it.”
“Do you want me to DVR it?”
“I don’t care that much,” she laughs. She settles back against the seat, eyeing me cautiously. “So what’s the deal? It’s Sunday. Why aren’t you watching your boyfriend play from your parent’s house?”
My heart hammers at the word; boyfriend. It makes me excited and so insanely uncomfortable.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I protest weakly.
“Oh, come on. He’s there opening the bakery with you almost every day. He’s not seeing anyone else. You’re his girlfriend.”
“Or he likes scoring free scones in the morning.”
“Or he likes the way you dry hump.”
I close my eyes on a sigh. “Why do I tell you anything?”
“I wonder that every single day. When are you going to give it up to that boy for real?”
I open my eyes to glare at her. “We’re taking it slow. Leave me alone.”
“You’re taking it really slow.”
“Compared to you and Matthews, yeah.”
She rolls her eyes. “That’s not even comparable. Kurtis was a onetime thing.”
“That’s happened three times!”
“Okay, yes, that’s true, but I mean the essence of the encounters has a very singular feel to it. Like every time feels like it’s the only time.”
“That sounds so insane, you know that, right?”
“No. It’s solid. It’s science.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“How is it, though? The singularities?”
Rona grins mischievously. “Fucking awesome. That man can… oh my God, that man can everything. Literally everything and so damn well. I can almost get past the fact that he doesn’t talk.”
“Like during sex?”
“Like during life,” she says emphatically. “I have spent hours with him and I know next to nothing about him. I feel like we talk so much, but then at the end of it I think back and I can’t nail down more than a few things that he said.”
“So he’s a good listener? That’s good, right?”
She curls her lip back distastefully. “I don’t know. I think it’s less about listening to me and more about not having to talk. If I’m flapping my gums I’m not asking him to say anything, and I think that’s how he wants it. He’s not big on letting people in.”
I nod in agreement. “Colt said no one knows jack about him. Sloane’s agency represents him and his agent, Hollis, is the only one who knows anything. Even his address. It’s not stored anywhere. Hollis just knows it and he keeps it quiet.”
Rona laughs in amazement. “I don’t know where he lives either. The man has been inside me and I don’t know his zip code.”
“Damn, son. That’s a hard truth.”
“Sure as shit is.” She rolls her head toward me impatiently. “So, you didn’t answer me. Why aren’t you watching this with your dad?”
I pluck absently at the edge of the pillow on my lap. “My mom called this morning. She said they had a rough week. They’re both exhausted. She asked Michael and me for a raincheck.”
“Sorry, Lil,” Rona says softly.
I shrug, the movement jerky. “It’s cool. If it’s not good to be over there then we shouldn’t be.”
“I know but… it’s happening more often, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I whisper, not meaning to. I clear my throat, digging for strength. “It is.”
Rona reaches across the couch to put her hand over mine. She squeezes it gently.
“Life is a motherfucker.”
I chuckle despite myself, grateful for the brevity. “It is indeed a motherfucker.”
“—Avery is going to show us some of that super speed of his today?”
“You know he will. In fact, Becky was down on the sidelines with him earlier and he said he’s got a surprise today, even for him. Now, normally we see him down there devouring a Snickers bar, but today he says he’s trying something different.”
“I can’t wait to see this. He’s always an entertainer, Dean. Always on. He’s got great charisma and the fans love him.”
“Well it looks like we’re getting close to kick off so let’s go down to Becky and see if we can’t get him to show us what he’s got to fuel his Sugar Rush today. Becky?”
“Oh shit,” I mutter, my stomach turning.
“What’s wrong?”
“I made what he’s about to eat.”
Rona’s eyes go big. “You did? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I forgot to. I gave it to him last night. I made him promise not to open the bag until he was ready to eat them at the stadium.”
“What is it?”
“Candies,” I answer weakly. “Chocolate candies.”
“Then what are you so worried about?”
“Colt, we’re dying to know,” Becky, a white-toothed blond is saying.
Colt is standing tall over her, his cheeks smeared with black, his body huge inside his pads. He smiles at her and the camera. It’s the model smile. The one he always gives to the lens. To the masses.
“What do you have with you today?” Becky asks.
He lifts the bag so the camera can see. The Mad Batter logo is brightly displayed in green and purple writing on the white paper.
“Holy shit!” Rona squeals excitedly. “Lilly, this is amazing. Do you know how many people are watching this?!”
I frown. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Colt answers with a charming, helpless shrug. “I asked the beautiful women down at Mad Batter to surprise me. They made me promise not to open it until game time.”
“Well, we’re almost there. Can we get a sneak peek? If they’re as good as you say I might have to steal a piece.”
“You don’t want to do that,” I whisper.
Colt nods agreeably. “Sure, let’s crack it open.”
I raise the pillow slowly to my mouth. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck.”
Colt opens the bag, thrusting his hand inside. He gets ahold of a handful of candies and pulls them out. They’re hidden in his palm. The camera angles to get a look at them but he holds them back slightly, his face unreadable.
His smile is slow. It comes on him by degrees, starting at his eyes and trickling down to his mouth, to his chest until it rumbles like thunder that bursts out of him in a boisterous laugh. This is not his model smile. This is the smile I’ve come to love, the one that gets inside me and grows on my lips as well, even now as I’m dreading what’s about to happen.
“We’re dying to know,” Becky reminds him. “What are they?”
He chuckles, picking one out of his palm. He holds it up for the camera to zoom in on. The dark of the chocolate is reluctant to come into focus but when it finally does, its shape is undeniable.
It’s a dick.
The shape suddenly blurs into a pixelated mess thanks to the beauty of modern television. Colt pops it in his mouth, along with the handful of white, milk, and dark chocolate dicks that he pulled out of the bag. He chews them happily, smiling at the camera.
“Thanks, Lilly!”
Rona lifts the remote, pausing the feed on Colt’s happy, dick eating face. She turns to me slowly.
“He wanted something from the bakery to eat on national television and you chose to send him penises?” she asks slowly, softly.
“I didn’t know he’d eat them on live TV!” I protest defensively. “I figured with his Snickers endorsement he wouldn’t be able to endorse anything else.”
“Like cocks? Chocolate cocks? From our bakery?”
“I thought—“
“No, no. Not done,” she interrupts calmly. “Where did you get the molds for those? I know I’m not in the kitchen as often as you, but I’m pretty sure we don�
�t have cock molds laying around.”
I hide behind my pillow again. “I ordered them off Amazon.”
“Of course you did.”
“Free shipping.”
Rona sighs, tossing the remote to me. “How fucking frugal of you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
COLT
November 23rd
Mad Batter Bakery
Los Angeles, CA
Lilly’s hand feels impossibly small in mine. Delicate and warm, even in the cold morning air. She’s taking a rare break from work to walk with me. It’s only fifteen minutes, but I’m grateful for it. I needed to see her. It’s why I came down to the bakery at six in the morning on my day off. I could be sleeping in. I could be in my sweats in front of the TV, shamelessly catching up on The New Girl, but instead I got up at dawn and came down here just to hold her hand for fifteen minutes. Well, that and to taste her tongue for seven minutes of heaven on the sidewalk in front of a sex shop. My morning wood has had a revival since then. I was hoping the walking and the cold would help lay him down, but that sugary scent that lingers in Lilly’s hair after a morning of baking is working overtime on my libido. He will not go quietly. He wants loud, hot, and sweat soaked. He wants hands in hair and teeth grazing skin.
I don’t blame him. I’m looking at Lilly in her tight jeans and oversized coat, and I’m thinking about that night on the couch. The wet, slick feel of her against me in the shower. It’s been over a week since that night and kissing is all we’ve done since. Maybe I’ve had roaming hands, yeah, but it’s the most innocent groping I’ve ever conducted, I swear. I’m taking it slow like she wants and it’s good because she’s worth the wait. For once sex isn’t the endgame for me.
Added bonus, my right hand is getting one hell of a workout.
“Are you hungry?” Lilly asks innocently. “I put apple fritters out just before you got to the store. They’re probably still warm.”
I smile, squeezing her hand gently. “You remembered my favorite.”
She laughs, her voice simultaneously rough and soft. “You eat like five of them every time you ‘help’ in the mornings. You’re a little transparent.”
“What’s your favorite?”
“My favorite donut?” She thinks about it for a second, her shoulder bumping mine as she walks. “Raspberry filled. Glazed.”
“Sexy.”
“How is that sexy?”
“Raspberries are always sexy.”
“I thought that was strawberries.”
“It’s both.”
She smiles to herself, shaking her head.
“What?” I prod.
“You have a fruit fetish. I don’t know why that surprises me.”
“I don’t have a fetish.”
“You have a small fetish.”
“I don’t think you know what ‘fetish’ means.” I stop, tugging on her hand to pull her back the other way. “Come on. We’ll go back to the sex shop and I’ll teach you.”
She laughs, letting herself be pulled easily into my arms. “I’m never going in a sex shop with you. I can see the headlines now. My mom would cry.”
“Do you see any paparazzi around here?”
Lilly searches the street, the sidewalk across from us, finally bringing her eyes back to mine. “Nope. Not today. But they’ve started circling. John said there were six outside the shop during your game yesterday.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Yours.”
“Yours!” I laugh. “You gave me chocolate dicks to eat!”
She blushes furiously. “I didn’t think you’d eat them on television! I thought it would be a private joke.”
“I don’t have private jokes.”
Her eyes cloud with the sky, darkening. It’s getting colder instead of warmer as the morning moves on. Thin, gray clouds are rolling over the weak yellow sun. It feels like rain is in the air.
It also feels like she’s pulling away, even though she hasn’t moved. She does this whenever my fame comes up. She gets wiggy. Nervous. She says it’s because of what happened to her brother with Cassie Carlyle, and I wish I knew how to explain to her that I would never do that. I won’t ghost her. Not in a million years. She doesn’t understand that I’m just as vulnerable as she is right now. That this is new territory for me.
She has no idea she could hurt me far worse than I could ever hurt her.
“Lilly.”
“Hmm?” she replies distractedly.
I reach out to run my fingers through her hair, smoothing it away from her face as the wind tries to hide her from me. “Tell me a secret and I’ll keep it.”
She chuckles faintly. “What are you talking about?”
“I want you to trust me. I want you to feel like there’s some part of this that’s not on the table for the public, but you’ve gotta give me a chance. You’ve gotta give me something private to let me prove that I can keep it private.”
She looks away, her eyes falling to the sidewalk where litter dances by in the wind, tumbling and spinning. She’s focused somewhere else, following that blue scrap of paper, but she leans her head into my hand. It’s a strange set a gestures, like she’s pulling away and burrowing in at the same time. Like she’s torn in so many ways that I wish I could understand.
“Is there anything that’s yours that you don’t share?” she asks quietly.
“My dad,” I answer immediately. “I never talk to the press or the team about him. No one knows his name or where he is.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. I found him when I was in college. I went to meet him.”
Lilly’s brow creases, her eyes returning to mine. I lower my hand from her head to her shoulder, wrapping my arms around her loosely. “I thought you said you never met him.”
“No, I said I never got to know him, and I didn’t.” I take a deep breath, filling my chest with air to ease the tightness growing inside it. “On spring break my sophomore year at North Carolina I told my mom I was going to Mexico with guys from the team. I didn’t, though. I lied to her and she still doesn’t know about it. No one knows but me and my dad.”
“And you met him?” she asks, stepping deeper into my arms, raising her hands to my chest.
I clear my throat briskly. “Yeah, I met him. He’s a drunk in Chicago. He works maintenance for a hotel out there. Sits in a basement drinking Jack straight from a coffee mug and waits for shit to go wrong so he can swoop in and fix it, if he’s sober enough. When I found him he was drunk as hell. He didn’t understand who I was, so I got a room at the hotel and waited for the next day. In the morning when he came in to work he was coherent. He knew me right away.”
“Was he happy to see you?”
“Yeah,” I admit listlessly. “He was. He said he’d wanted to meet me for years but my mom made him swear to stay away until he sobered up. He never did so he never came back.”
“That’s really sad.”
“He’s a sad guy. He’s pathetic. He hates his job, hates his life. I felt bad for him. I told him we should keep in touch but he said we couldn’t. He told me meant that promise to my mom about getting sober before getting to know me and he said he was going to keep it. He said he was going to quit drinking that day.”
Lilly shakes her head. “He didn’t, did he?”
“No. I haven’t heard from him since I left Chicago that day. That was years ago.” I absently lean forward, pressing a slow kiss to her forehead. I breathe in the sweet scent of her hair, pushing out the memory of stale alcohol and sweat. “And that,” I whisper against her hair, “is a secret that nobody knows. One that no one else will ever know.”
Her arms go around my waist, hugging me tightly. It feels good. Solid. Comforting. It’s a scary thing, to tell her about my dad, but I think it’s a scary thing for her to trust me, and I want that more than anything. I know that to gain trust you have to give it, and I just gave her all of my aces. It’s a gamble I’m hoping will pay off.
She st
ands there with me for too long. Longer than her break. Longer than normal people should. She stays still in my arms like a statue on the street, a work of art, and I start to wonder if I’ve gambled and lost. I start to worry that I’ll never know what it takes to get closer to her.
That I lost her before I ever won her.
When Lilly finally speaks, her voice is smaller than a petal, “My dad has Alzheimer’s.”
But her words are larger than a mountain.
I open my mouth, struggling to find the right response.
Turns out there is none.
“How old is he?” I ask, completely thrown.
“Forty-seven,” she speaks quietly against my chest. “It started showing up a few years ago. It was little stuff at first. He’d forget where he put his keys. What he ate for breakfast. Then he couldn’t remember pictures we had around the house. There was one in the hall of us at Disneyland when I was in middle school. A couple years ago Mom found him standing in there staring at it and when she asked him what he was doing he started crying. He said he couldn’t remember the trip. He tried so hard but he couldn’t. After that it started happening faster. Bigger things, like how to get to work. Which car was his in the parking lot.” She pauses. I feel her take a bracing breath under my arms. “Last year he forgot my name. Two weeks later when I came into the house carrying groceries he started calling me by my mom’s name. Linda. He’s done it ever since.”
“Every time you see him?”
“No. Not every time. There are good days and bad days. The day you played the Panthers, that was a good day. We watched the game together as a family. I told him about you. That I’d met you and that you were funny. Sweet even. He was happy.” Her voice cracks. She sniffs roughly once. “He was my dad that day.”
I run my hand up and down her back slowly. “But there are bad days?”
“Yeah. Like last Sunday I couldn’t go over there. He had a bad week. He was freaked out because he knew he was forgetting things but he had no idea how much he’d forgotten. On days like those he doesn’t know me. He gets me confused with my mom. I look a lot like her when she was my age.” She shudders, her shoulders pitching forward like she’s going to be sick. “He came into the kitchen one day when I was in there. He thought I was Mom. He spun me around and he—he kissed me on the mouth. I was so freaked out I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there while he kissed me. While my dad licked my lips and groaned. When he let me go he told me I was as beautiful as the day he married me. He told me he loved me.”
