by Devney Perry
“Nope. Just giving you exactly what you want.” The catharsis is real and frightening and feels like a thousand-pound boulder is being lifted from my chest with each word. “Like how my dad is sick. He’s dying, Easton. Is that what you wanted to know? Or how it’s taking everything I have to get this goddamn contract with the Aces that I don’t give a fucking rat’s ass about, but have to get because that was his one request? And once I do, he’s going to leave me, too? Is that what you want to know?” I scream the last words at him, tears sliding down my cheeks, anger burrowed in my heart, and all of me laid on the line. “Is that enough for you? You now know that every single person I’ve ever loved, who I’ve ever let in to know the real me, has left me. How I’m cursed, and petrified that if I let you in, I’m just dooming myself because you’ll leave me, too?”
My voice is hoarse. My heart bared. My fears exposed.
My shoulders shudder with the sobs I won’t allow to come. My mind reels with my confession as the dust settles, and I realize everything I just said.
Oh. Shit.
Those two words are the only thing running through my head like the tears running down my cheeks as Easton just stares at me, his face a picture of shock, his eyes a sea of compassion.
“Scout.” His voice is broken when he says my name, much like how I feel.
“Don’t. Please don’t,” I beg of him.
I can’t do this right now. I don’t want to hear the sympathy in his voice. I don’t want any pity. But more than anything, I just can’t take the hurt anymore. There’s a reason I’ve locked all this emotion up and not touched it for years. This is the explanation for my hard heart.
So, I shut it out to shut him up and step into him. With my hands in his shirt, I yank him down to me and bruise my lips on his, needing to feel him. Needing to feel wanted. Needing to know that, even though he knows my fears, he still wants me.
He kisses me back, but I can feel his hesitation, sense his discomfort, his wondering what in the hell I’m doing. My heart falls, and his hands lift to frame my cheeks. He holds my face still as he leans back. “Scout.” Our eyes meet, and I see honesty so raw I can’t handle it. I also see the pity. The sadness.
And I can’t see any more of that.
I shake my head back and forth, and he leans forward and brushes his lips tenderly against mine, almost as if he thinks I need nice and sweet right now, to go along with my sadness.
“No.” I need the exact opposite from him. “No,” I reiterate, gripping the back of his neck, not allowing him to back off, adding some urgency to our kiss. And he lets me take the reins again. Allows me to pour my unsettled emotions into the kiss until I’m breathless and the tears have started to dry on my cheeks. “Make me feel, Easton. I don’t need sweet. I need real. I need to know you’re here. I need to know you want me. I need to forget. But more than anything, I need you.”
He leans back again. I watch his Adam’s apple bob, see the clenching and unclenching of his jaw, and watch the realization sink in.
“I need you,” I mouth the words to him, and it’s like I’ve just thrown kerosene on a lighted match.
We meet each other in the middle, a mass of hands and tongues and commands and haste. We move to our own music: shirts over heads and bra unclasped and jeans unbuttoned and shoved down while he pulls my skirt up and his fingers find their way beneath the lace of my panties.
“God, yes.” His fingers part me, play with me, enter me. There’s no niceties. There’s no seduction. There’s just him doing exactly what I asked him to do—make me feel. Push my mind into the free fall of orgasmic oblivion so I can’t think.
He’s everywhere at once, hands and teeth and lips and skin, and it’s nowhere near enough. We shift backward somehow, our feet moving as our hearts race, until I bump into the net of the batting cage behind me. My feet tangle in it until I fall against it, leaving my body supported by the net itself. My laughter at the predicament shifts into a moan as his teeth nip at my jawline and his thumb slides over my clit.
“Mmmm, hold tight, Kitty,” he orders as he pulls his fingers from within me and moves my hands to hold onto the woven rope above my head. “You holding on?”
My eyes flash up to meet the salacious look in his, and I nod and try to comprehend why he’s asking; he shakes his head in warning and slides his fingers into my mouth. I taste my own arousal, suck on them, as he slides them back and forth between my lips.
“Don’t talk, Scout,” he murmurs. “Don’t question. Don’t move your hands. Just do. Just let me. Just feel.”
I nod as my breath grows shallow. His teeth are biting into his bottom lip as he watches, his free hand working back and forth over his cock. But it’s the look in his eyes, desire personified, that makes my back bow and beg for more.
“You want me to touch you?” He leans in and murmurs against my ear, his body close enough that I feel the crest of his cock bump against my lower belly as he strokes it in his hand. Talk about the sweetest torture, knowing the havoc that cock can wreak on my system, having it just within sight, and being told not to touch it.
I moan when he rubs it against my clit, and push my hips forward to get the feeling again. He half laughs, half groans as I take his dick between the tops of my thighs and show him what I want.
“Mmm, that feels good,” he says as he pushes between my thighs and adds to the friction on my clit.
But it’s not enough.
Nowhere near enough.
And he must agree because, unexpectedly, he lifts my hips and sets my ass back in a framed alcove of the netting. The moment my butt is settled on the shallow shelf, Easton drops to his knees, spreads my thighs, and looks up at me.
“You want to feel? Well, I want to taste you. Hold tight, Kitty.”
Without another word, and with his eyes fastened to mine, he uses one hand to part me and then licks a line from my clit all the way down to my opening and then back up. And with the perfect amount of pressure and frequency, he begins to flick his tongue over the hub of nerves there. Soft and slow at first, and then faster and a bit harder.
I writhe beneath his touch. I sink into the pleasure and soar in its haze. Every sensation works my nerves—the warmth of his tongue, the tickle of his breath, the pressure as he slides his fingers inside me to give me the one-two punch of tongue on my clit and fingers rubbing my G-spot.
I moan and buck and pull on the netted ropes, all to ease the mounting pressure inside of me. To hold off my orgasm so that the pressure can build even stronger. I’m a mess of contradictions, and yet every one of them feels so damn good that the moan from my mouth can’t even express how incredible they are.
I’m aroused. Needy. Greedy. Desperate for more. Selfish. Eager. And every single one of those feelings is amplified by the hunger in his eyes as he looks up at me with his tongue buried between my thighs, my arousal glistening on his skin, and his fingers buried deep within me.
A lick of his tongue. A rub of his fingers. The groan from his lips. The carnality in his eyes. The rope biting into my skin.
My breath grows faint. My body pulls tight. My head grows dizzy.
And then lightning strikes—from my center, out to my toes and fingers, and then all the way back in until the reverb slams back for a second, more powerful wave.
My cry fills the room as he laps at the wetness between my thighs, his groan of pleasure sounding as good as the orgasm feels. He milks it out for me, the licks of his tongue grow softer, and his palms slide up my belly to cup my breasts, gently tug on my nipples, and sustain the ecstasy pulsing through my body.
And when he stands, when he brings his mouth to mine and takes my lips with as violent a desire as when his tongue brought me to climax, I’m immediately desperate for the feel of his dick sliding into me.
I can’t speak, even if I wanted to, and so, with my taste on his tongue, I suck on it. His groan, broken and begging, is all I need to hear to know I’m going to get my wish.
“Fuck me, Easton.”
I broke the rules. I spoke. But I don’t give a damn because when he lines his cock up and dips the tip inside of me, my head is already rolling back against the net, and my lips are already falling open into a garbled sound of yes, please, now, and thank you.
He fists his hands in the net beside my hips and pulls it to him so that he stands still but I slide slowly onto his rock-hard shaft. When he’s sheathed root to tip, our mutual groan is the only sound in the room, as he lets me enjoy the feel of him filling me before he pushes the net back so he slides out.
And then, without warning, he yanks the net back toward him, and I slam against him, and him into me. The action sends shockwaves through my already hypersensitive nerves.
This time, when we’re as close as can be, his lips find mine and devour them, murmuring, “Hang on, baby.”
“Please.”
And before the plea is even finished, he already has me pushed back and then pulled back into him again. He sets a bruising pace by manipulating the net around me to control the depth and the angle of his thrust. All I can do is hold on and watch how damn sexy he looks as he works himself up to his own release.
Those biceps of his flex and release with each pull and push. The tendons in his neck grow tight. His teeth bite into his bottom lip, and his nose scrunches up as he concentrates. But his eyes stay steadfast on mine. All the way up until the very end, when his head bucks back as his hips thrust forward, his hand holding me as close as I can be to him as he grinds his hips against mine and loses himself.
Completely.
And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything sexier than Easton Wylder come undone. I can’t take my eyes off him. I can’t stop thinking how I did that to him.
With my words.
With my confession.
With my body.
And when he lowers his chin and meets my eyes, everything I was fighting against the past few months dissipates.
I surrender.
Heart.
Body.
Mind.
Fear.
Scout
“We can go upstairs, you know.” Easton’s voice is murmured satisfaction as he speaks a full sentence for the first time since we moved from the nets to lay naked atop our discarded clothes on the turf baseball field.
“I kind of think this is fitting,” I muse, grateful to hear his laugh. His silence has been eating at me, because I know I unloaded a ton on him, and now that our tempers have cleared, I must explain more, but need a few more minutes before I do.
I appreciate his patience. I am grateful for his silence. But with both of those also comes the unsettled quiet in my head that riots around on how to begin, since this sharing thing is all new to me.
“It would be more fitting if we were lying on home plate,” he chuckles as his finger trails lazily up and down the length of my spine, pausing to smooth over the curve of my ass before starting the whole process all over again.
“So, why did you bring me down here, anyway?” I ask to buy more time. His hand pauses, then continues.
“Because, if you were going to walk away, I didn’t want you in my place. Memories are a bitch, and the last thing I needed was to make more of them there on the kitchen counter.”
“The kitchen counter?”
“I figured that was as far as I’d get you in the door before I had to have you, and the kitchen counter is the closest horizontal surface so . . .”
“Do you always want to sleep with someone when they make you that angry?”
“Only you, Kitty. Only you.” Silence descends again. He plays with a strand of my hair while my fingertips draw aimless circles on his chest.
I feel at peace. It’s such an odd feeling for me. New. Foreign. And yet the panic I’ve lived with for so very long is nonexistent. It’s unsettling but also so very welcome.
“My mom is an alcoholic.”
His confession into the peaceful silence has me shifting so that I can see his face, but his eyes are staring at the ceiling above us.
“Easton, you don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do. You shared your secrets with me, and so you deserve mine,” he says with a nod. I watch his Adam’s apple bob. I hear his unsteady exhale. And he continues, “She’s not a mean drunk, but she’s a drunk nonetheless. There’s no gentle way to pretend she isn’t. She’s stuck back in time, not wanting to let go of the past, so much so that most days she doesn’t know what day it is.”
“Does she live close?”
“Mm-hmm.” He falls silent, but I know there is more, so I give him time. “She lives about an hour outside of town. Seventy-eight minutes to be exact. I know because I often get late night calls when she won’t leave the bar in the trailer park that she lives in and refuses to let me move her out of.”
“That has to be frustrating for you.”
“So many things about it are,” he sighs. “It would be different if she were a mean drunk. It would be easier to hate her for it then. But she’s not. She’s sweet and lonely and just wants me around more. And I feel guilty that I don’t spend more time with her . . . but at least sleeping on her couch a night or two during the week is enough for her. She deserves the world, but her world is her double-wide trailer, cluttered with her things and my games on replay on the TV, and so that’s what I give her.”
My heart swells at the audible love transparent in his voice. The measure of a man is often unquantifiable, and yet, with Easton, it’s everywhere. In his love for his mother. In unpublicized visits to Children’s Hospital. In his charitable organization for literacy. In his patience with a spooked woman.
“You love her.” It’s a stupid statement but so very true.
“Yeah.” I can hear the smile in his tone. “You know, my dad wasn’t around much when I was a kid. Sure, he was here in the offseason, or I got to spend time in the clubhouse with him, but she was the day-in, day-out parent. It would be easy for me to be mad at her for her drinking. It would be easy when the bar calls to let them get her home . . . but that’s my job as her son. She took care of me, now it’s my turn to take care of her.”
Emotion clogs his voice, and all I can think to do is to press a kiss to his chest to let him know what I think of him.
“Was that the reason she and your dad divorced?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember her drinking back then, but it’s easy for parents to hide things from their kids when they’re that young.”
It’s easy for them to hide things from their kids when they’re old, too. Like my dad has for the past year.
“My parents never discuss their divorce. I don’t remember them fighting. I don’t remember any ill will. I just remember coming home from practice one day and my dad sat me down and told me that things were going to be changing a little. That was it. Later, I learned from friends how weird it was that neither of my parents tried to pit me against the other . . . but they just didn’t.”
“Lucky for you . . . I guess,” I amend, realizing how wrong that sounds.
“No, you’re right. I understood what you meant.” His finger begins to trace over my back again.
“You’re a good son. A good man.”
“I’m all she has, Scout.”
I press another kiss to his chest. “She’s lucky.”
“My biggest fear is a trade. She’d have no one to take care of her.”
Easton shifts some and rolls onto his side, head propped onto his elbow, and looks at me for the first time since the conversation started. “Why didn’t you tell me about your dad, Scout?” The compassion is back in his eyes, and I can’t hide from it this time.
I sigh, shrug, and squirm under the intensity of his stare. “Because he made me promise not to tell anyone. Hell, he only told me a few months ago.” I shake my head and remember the defeat I felt when he’d told me. “His heart is failing him. Heart disease, which sounds so weird to me because he’s always been so healthy, but I guess he’s had it for a long time and never took the steps t
o slow it down. He’s on a donor list, but so are a million other people who have stronger bodies that can withstand a transplant, while doctors have determined that at this time his can’t. Why waste a precious heart on someone who might not make it through the surgery, when they have ten other matches who can?” The tears threaten and burn, but I keep them at bay. Hold them back like I do the acknowledgement that this is all happening and real and my dad really is sick.
“I’m so sorry.” Easton leans forward and presses a kiss to my forehead, the gesture so natural, so sweet, that one of the threatening tears slips out and slides down my cheek.
“When he first told me, I argued with him. Told him he was lying. And to this day, I still hope that’s true, but he’s living proof you can’t recover from a broken heart.” Easton’s eyes narrow as he links the fingers on his free hand with mine and waits for me to explain. “My mom leaving was hard on all of us, but especially him. He had to figure out how to travel for weeks at a time for his job while giving us as normal of a childhood as possible. And then when my brother Ford died, I don’t think his heart ever recovered.”
I can see his eyes jolt as everything starts to connect for him. “Wait. Ford? As in the Ford Marsden drafted from UCLA? The wonder boy who used to play with Cameron and Penski?” he asks, sounding more shocked with each word.
I nod, my smile bittersweet. “He didn’t want any show of favoritism because he was Doc’s son, so during college and the MLB draft, he decided to use my grandmother’s maiden name.”
“I remember when he collapsed on the mound.” The dreamlike quality reflects how I feel about it still today. Like I wish the whole thing were a dream instead of the nightmare it is.
“Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.” I murmur the term I’d never heard before I received the hysterical phone call that afternoon. “A massive heart attack from a condition he never even knew he had.”
“All of us players had always thought we were invincible. We ran every day, ate healthy, were in top physical form, and then that happened to him. It freaked a lot of us out for a while. Like, if it could happen to him, then . . .”
