by Aja Cole
“I’m always listening to you.” I murmur, running a hand over the back of my neck. “Do you want to? We don’t have to, I just thought…”
She turns around and grabs my hand, pulling me towards the couch. She scoots back on it, hair bigger and wilder than it started out this morning.
“Casablanca, please.” She grins. “Then get your ass over here and cuddle with me.”
I close my eyes and breathe out hard. Thank god. Guess I’m not total shit at this after all.
I last an impressive forty minutes or so before I start getting restless.
She’s all warm skin and her hair smells like honeysuckles, body pressed against my dick under the blankets, and I’m only a man.
The movie is good though. Just not good enough to completely distract me from her.
I’m propped up on some fluffy pillows and she’s sitting in between my legs, leaning back against my shoulder.
I trail my nose up the column of her neck, just breathing in her warm smell. She’s put her hair up in a bun and I’m finding her neck is a favorite spot for me.
“I wondered how long you’d be able to behave.” She shifts and it causes her to rub against my hard cock and I groan. “Your friend gave you away twenty minutes ago.”
“And you let me sit here in torture?”
“I love Casablanca. Humphrey Bogart has some funny as hell one-liners, and he has the whole internal conflict thing going on.”
“So this man is more important than me? Wow, I’m glad I know where we stand.” I scoop her and toss her to a different area to the couch and she shrieks, turning to me with her mouth open.
“That was so rude.”
“Was it?” I reach my arm behind me subtly and pinch the edge of one of the pillows. When she turns to settle into the couch again, I grab it fully and whack her with it.
Medium force though, since she wasn’t paying attention.
Somehow, the band she used to put her hair in a bun snaps and her hair halos around her head so quickly that it makes me crack up.
I’m still laughing until she smacks me in the face with a pillow.
“Oh, it’s war now.”
She ducks to the side as I swing another pillow at her and swings back, diving for my torso. It’s ridiculous how big this couch is.
We’re laughing and breathing hard and Casablanca is still playing.
After she gets me full on in the face for the fourth time, I decide it’s time to take her down. I toss my pillow aside and hook an arm around her legs, pulling them out from under her and putting her under me.
She looks up at me, still laughing, hair spread out haphazardly around her and in her face. We’d been laughing so hard that her mascara is smeared so she’s got these small dark streaks around her eyes.
My heart gets caught in my chest.
“What?” She giggles, green eyes sparkling. So different from that first night when she was crying over Hawk.
“Don’t leave me.” The words fly out before I have time to think about them and I close my eyes, cursing my own insecurities.
Good going self, an insecure man is so attractive.
She stops laughing. “What made you say that?”
I shrug, wishing I could disappear. Now isn’t really the time I want to get into the mental hell I was in last year. I’m better now, but when thoughts like that cross my mind, it’s a vivid reminder of how powerless and worthless I felt.
“Liam.” She strokes my face gently, making me look at her. “How am I supposed to get to know you if you don’t tell me the uncomfortable stuff too?”
“Let’s go with a surface level relationship, I like those.” I lean back on my knees, rubbing my chest. She raises up on her elbows and shakes her hair out of her face, giving me an unimpressed look.
“Why’d you leave football?”
Damn, she had to ask the one question that’s connected. Too damn perceptive.
“Can I choose a new category, Alex?”
“Nope.” She pops the p, rising up on her knees and pushing my chest hard so that I tip backward. I hit the tangled pillows and blankets, a little shocked.
“What the hell was—,” I decide to stop talking as she climbs over me, straddling my stomach. “Well shit, all you had to do was ask…”
“I’ve been thinking about what it’d be like when I finally feel you inside of me. What those first few inches will feel like, how much I can’t wait to feel your tongue on my clit, I mean - I’ve been wanting to just say scrap the waiting and it’s only been a week.”
I think my eyes are bugging out of my head.
“So, I would appreciate it if you’d drop the guard so we can get there quicker.” She shifts on top of me and I scowl.
“Me? What about you? I don’t hear you sharing any deep dark shit.”
“So it’s a serious reason then?” She narrows her eyes, and I roll mine, putting my hands underneath my head and staring at the lights on the ceiling.
“Alright. If this is what you want to spend our time on today.”
“We don’t have to. I obviously don’t want to force you to share if you’re not comfortable…but it would mean a lot to me if you wanted to tell me.” She smiles guiltily.
I’m learning I don’t want to say no to this woman, and that’s scary too.
21
Mickey
Liam’s body feels amazing under me, but I won’t tell him that just yet.
I can’t believe I put a restriction like no sex and no oral on us. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.
Since we can’t, it’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s been great just talking and being with each other and not feeling like it really is just about lust…but damn. It’s hard.
And I know he’s hard too. The man is always hard. It’s as maddening as it is flattering.
“I feel like this is emotional blackmail.”
“You’re free to tell me no. It’s not like I’m going to walk away.” I say, because it’s true. I want to know his past, but I want it to be because he wants to open that part of himself to me.
His eyes leave me to look at the ceiling again, and I swing my leg off, laying on my back beside him to look up at the lights too.
I’m a little disappointed when he doesn’t say anything, but I’ll get over it.
If we’re not there yet, we’re just not there yet. I find his hand with mine so he knows it’s okay, and we lay next to each other, Casablanca still playing but the last thing on our minds.
I’m actually a little sleepy. I pull up the covers over us and turn onto my side, putting my hands under my head.
Or try to. My hair is acting as a pillow.
My eyes keep drooping and I’m about to say goodnight when he starts talking, his voice low.
“I stopped playing the game because my depression got too bad to manage.”
I don’t say anything while he talks, but I put a hand on his chest, and he covers it with one of his.
“I’ve always had depression, for as long as I can remember really. I can remember my little brother, who’s a year younger than me, being so excited over Christmas and new things and just generally happy and it just never felt quite right to me. I didn’t feel it.” I rub my thumb gently where it’s resting on his chest, my chest tightening because I didn’t expect it to be anything like this.
I guess while part of me thought that he felt deeper, I didn’t fully think about what he might’ve gone through.
“My parents…my parents were happy. At first. Or maybe they weren’t really but I was too young to recognize it then.”
“There’s no way to know the reason why, but as I got older and it got more apparent that my mom was miserable, I kind of took her emotions on sometimes. When she was having a bad day, I was having a worse day. When she was happy, I was ecstatic. Eventually, around when I was in 8th grade, she was rarely happy anymore. And neither was I.”
“So what did you do?” I ask quietly, continuing to stro
ke his hand.
“I found football.” He turns on his side to face me, a little hair falling over his brow. “Football became what I woke up for every day. How I got away from my parents. I got to go throw myself into a game and practice every day instead of feeling like shit and being stuck in my own head. It wasn’t a cure, but it damn sure helped.”
“That’s how you got so good so quickly. It was all you were holding onto.” I’d done a little google searching of him when I got home, I’ll admit.
“Apparently I was a natural, even though I hadn’t played pee-wee or from a young age like some kids.”
“So what happened? What changed?”
I almost regret that I asked the question because his eyes fill with something that looks a lot like torture.
“I haven’t told anyone else this aside from my coach and my therapist.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“One of our trainers is a good friend of mine. One night she showed up at my place like you did that night, but for much different reasons.” His hand squeezes mine and I’m not even sure he realizes it, but I still just listen. “She told me that for 4 months, she’d been avoiding advances from the offensive line coach, but he kept getting bolder and bolder. The night she came to me, he’d tried to rape her.”
“I begged her to tell someone, but she needed the job. She was the only one left to take care of her brother and she didn’t want to lose her job or have her name connected to a scandal.”
“So what’d she do?” I whisper, fearing the worst.
“I tried to make sure she didn’t feel the need to do anything drastic, but I couldn’t let her have to see that man every day. I got her another trainer position, across the country.”
“Is she doing better?”
“She swears to me up and down that it was the best thing she could’ve done. She’s with a new guy, her brother’s doing well, and the pay is better.”
“So why do you sound so unhappy?” I lay a hand on his face and he closes his eyes.
“Because that man still has his job. His life is fine. He didn’t need to leave his friends and uproot his life to not feel like shit. Raquel begged me not to say anything, to shake anything up. So I kept playing because it wasn’t my right to drag her name out there. But knowing what’d happened, knowing I couldn’t do anything for my friend, seeing him constantly - the helplessness I felt before I found football came back. I stopped going out, I stopped doing interviews, and it took everything I had to even get out of bed in the morning.”
“I read the articles. Everyone just thought you were being eccentric. And you were still winning games.”
“Not a lot of people know I have depression. It’s not exactly a positive thing. Your quarterback is invincible, he’s larger than life. He doesn’t feel worthless. He doesn’t go between feeling nothing at all and feeling too much. I was playing, almost on autopilot. Going through the motions, but there was nothing in it for me anymore.”
“You don’t seem like that now.”
“Well, I’m better now.” He smiles wryly. “Not perfect. I won’t ever be perfect, but I’m better.”
“It couldn’t have been easy, deciding to leave?”
“It wasn’t. But I’d gone to an event and the coach was there, and just seeing his face…I had to get out of there. There was a big bridge and I walked to the edge of it and I thought…I wouldn’t even care if I fell over it. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t nervous. I was just…I just didn’t feel anything.”
I can’t help my eyes tearing up, thinking about how hopeless that must feel. I hate that he has to deal with that.
“But I guess I wasn’t ready.” He laughs a little. “I don’t know why I kept walking. Can’t really explain it. But I called a car, went to my head coach’s house at 2 am and told him everything. He made me stay there that night because he was worried about me, and he told me he’d take care of it. I took a leave of absence, moved in with my brother in Georgia, and took the SEC job temporarily since the timing worked.”
“And you started seeing a therapist?”
“Yeah.” This time, his smile is a little more real. “He didn’t let me wallow too long. Maybe the first session, then he pushed me to push myself more each time. The change of scenery helped, and being around my brother’s family. I started to find a reason to wake up again. And here I am.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” I tell myself to suck up my own emotions, because it doesn’t feel right to be the one that doesn’t have it together right now.
His eyes get that worried look in them again. “I can’t promise I’ll always be this way. I don’t think there’s really a cure for depression. I think you live with it and find the best way to handle it. For me, that’s therapy, Prozac, and staying aware. I still have days that are harder than others, but nowhere near what it was like when I was younger and before I changed things.”
“I don’t need you to promise that. Just…talk to me, if you can. Keep me in the loop, so I can support you when you need it.”
“You’re sweet.” He kisses me on the nose and I cross my eyes, making him laugh.
“Can I ask one more thing?”
“Shoot.” He gathers me into his arms and pulls me on top of him. I cross my arms over his chest and lean my chin atop them.
“The casual stuff, is that part of it too?”
“Hmm no, not all the way. But I think we’ve covered the past enough for today, we’ll save the rest of it for another time.”
The movie screen’s gone dark by now and there’s only the glow of the hanging lights. It’s just enough for me to see his face a bit, and I wiggle up his body some and press a kiss to his jawline.
“Okay. Thank you for sharing with me.”
“Thanks for not judging me.” He rubs a hand down my back and under my shirt, making me shudder at the first touch of skin on skin.
“When’s the last time you finished just from grinding?” I ask, enjoying the way his eyes darken and a flush of arousal hits his cheeks.
“It’s been a long time.”
I open my legs to my knees fall on either side of him and sit up, making him follow and put his back against the couch.
“Let’s see about changing that.” I lick his ear teasingly and he shudders, arms squeezing me and hips bucking up some. He strips his shirt off and I almost drool at the sight of his strong chest and abdomen.
“I at least want those nipples in my mouth.” He growls, pulling my shirt off and pulling my bra cups down.
That’s when I lose coherent thinking for a very long time.
22
Hawk
I did work the entire flight over to Switzerland, and I’ve got a few more things to handle before I can just relax.
It’s also been a pretty good mechanism for forgetting the fact that Michaela didn’t choose me.
She’s reached out twice over the past two weeks and I’ve just ignored her. I’m not quite ready to deal with it just yet.
Everyone else started the drinking early. I talked to a few people I didn’t know initially, but then I begged off and I said I needed to handle a few things before we landed.
The groomsmen are from different stages of Wes’s life, so I didn’t know all of them, but they seem cool enough. I know a couple people won’t be getting in until tonight, but I left to work when that conversation started.
I’ll just meet them when they get here.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were avoiding hanging out with us.” I look up from my laptop and Rachel, one of the bridesmaids is standing in the doorway holding two mugs. “Can I join you? I brought hot chocolate.”
“Sure, I’m just finishing up here.” I close my laptop and put it away.
Tara already told me she thinks Rachel would be a good match for me, and I’m sure she nudged her about it too.
Michaela’s made her decision. I’m not going to wait for her to change her mind. Clearly, she’s happier dating him than me
.
Rachel sits down on the other side of the table and pushes a mug towards me.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiles and puts her cup to her lips before holding it in her hands. “So, how do you know the happy couple?”
“Went to college with them. Got to see them duking it out with each other firsthand.”
“Oh yeah,” she laughs, “I hear those first few months, they basically hated each other.”
“Hate is an understatement. Tara thought Wesley was stuck-up and prissy, as she put it. And he thought she was disrespectful and not girly enough for his tastes.”
“Wow, really? You wouldn’t be able to tell at all now.”
“It’s crazy how things work out when it’s meant to be, I guess.” An image of Mickey laughing up at me when we all went to dinner after Jasmine’s track meet flashes in my mind.
I’d really started to believe she’d be in my life, that we were on the same page. I’ve never been into someone as quickly as I got into her.
“How do you know Tara?” I ask Rachel.
“We ran into each other at the cafe I go to, and she complimented my shoes actually. We just clicked and we’ve been friends since. I’ve been in Canada, but I’ll be back in New York next month.”
“Maybe we’ll run into each other.”
She smiles coyly, tucking a blonde strand of hair behind her ear. “Maybe we will.”
The doorbell rings, and she raises a manicured brow. “Should we go down with everyone else?”
“Sure.” I rise and follow her out of the room and down the massive stairs, chatting a little.
The chalet they booked for the week is humongous. There’s gotta be at least 10 bedrooms. I like that there’s enough space for us not to be on top of each other.
Everyone’s gathered in the foyer, talking and greeting whoever just got here.
“….Liam…” I overheard the name and I freeze.
There’s no way the world is this small. I look up and freeze at the bottom of the stairs because I see someone I wasn’t expecting at all.
