Hardball (17 page)

“It’s a funny story.” Dad shrugged, and I rolled my eyes.

It was only funny the way Dad told it. We’d bought tickets on eBay, which was completely against the rules unless you bought a four-hundred-dollar hat that happened to come with two nosebleed tickets. When eBay had taken the listing down, we’d done a reverse search on the ticketholder’s email, hunting her back to Lancaster. Then we drove up there in my Nissan, up the mountains while my car choked and hitched, almost got eaten by her four angry pit bulls, paid her cash, and made it to Dodger Stadium with not a second to spare.

“It was crazy,” I said. “We almost missed the national anthem because of traffic on the 5.”

“I struck out that night, I think?” Dash said.

“Stand-up double, two Ks, and a walk, actually,” I replied.

“I only remember the strikeouts.” He looked at the flowers as if he’d forgotten he had them, and he handed them to me.

“Thank you, they’re perfect.” I didn’t know what else to say. They were.

Dad took them from me. “I’ll put them in water. Get out of here. The two of you. I want to go to bed already.”

Dash shook his hand and led me outside, where a black Volvo sedan waited for us in the driveway. I paused, trying to remember if he’d had a Volvo the other night.

“Like it?” he asked as he opened the passenger door.

“You had something different yesterday.”

“That one got in a little fender bender.”

“Are you okay?”

“I went to the doc this morning. My arm’s bruised, but that’s it. It was nothing.”

“Nothing? You got a new car.”

“This one’s safer. Get in before I put you in.” His lips tightened as if holding back a smile.

He’d have loved to pick me up and put me in. I might not have minded it either, but Dad was watching. He’d have denied it, but he was watching.

“Where are we going?” I asked when he got behind the wheel.

“Someplace fun.”

I felt the scratch of lace on my skin as he drove. It wasn’t uncomfortable. It reminded me of what I was wearing under the simple dress. I crossed my legs and folded my hands in my lap.

“Did you eat?” he asked.

“A little.”

“Can you wait a few hours? I have someplace I want to go first.”

“Sure.”

Traffic was nonexistent as he brought me into downtown.

“Dash, I don’t want to bring this up…”

“But you kind of are.”

“The pin.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

“I can’t tell you how bad I feel.”

“Then don’t.”

“I feel like it’s my fault.”

He took my hand out of my lap and squeezed it. “If that glove hadn’t been taken, we wouldn’t have met.”

“I know but—”

“You were worth it. If I’d been given the choice to trade that good luck charm for you, I would have done it in a second.”

Was this the same guy who’d wanted to pre-dump me? I was confused, but I wasn’t ready to replace… what? Important artifacts? His sister?

I shook it off. He was just talking.

“Well, when I wish, I wish big. You should have me and the pin.”

“I went to that library ready to pound on your desk and demand you find it or I was going to call the cops. But I saw you coming down the hall, and it all went out the window.”

“Thank you. I would have broken down crying.”

He squeezed my hand. “Glad I didn’t.”

After the red light, his hand stayed in mine, even when he turned onto Pershing Square and stopped in a red zone. A man in a tuxedo rushed toward the car and opened his door.

“Hang on,” Dash said before getting out. After chatting with the tuxedo guy and handing him the keys, Dash crossed in front of the car. Then he opened my door. “He’s going to park it downstairs in the lot.”

I took his hand and stepped onto the sidewalk. “You could have taken me down there. I’ve been to the Pershing Square lot before.”

“Not looking like you do. It’s filthy down there. You’re too good for it.”

“Silly,” I said even though I loved every word.

We held hands and walked into the square. It was empty and mostly dark. The playgrounds were locked, and the temporary outdoor skating rink was bathed in white light. The booths were locked. The skate rental had been dismantled until next Christmas season.

“I hope you’re a size seven,” Dash said.

“In what?”

“Skates.”

I gasped. “Are you taking me skating?”

“You’re taking
me
skating.”

“It’s closed.”

“Not tonight it’s not. Not for us,” he said, opening the gate to the skating area.

“Oh, Dash, I love this!”

His smile was so wide it could have just about broken his face.

Once we were on the turf-covered platform that surrounded the rink, another man in a tux handed us two pairs of skates.

“Thank you,” I said.

I threw myself onto a bench and kicked off my heels. Inside the boots were a new pair of good, thick socks. Excellent, because the stockings were a hundred fifty dollars and would have gotten ruined in the skates, never mind my feet.

Dash held a pair of hockey skates as he said a few quiet words to Tux Man, who nodded and disappeared.

“This is so great!” I said. “How many guys in black suits are helping with this illegal trespass?”

“It’s totally legal and paid for.” He laced his boots up quickly. “They’re just parking the car, keeping people with cameras away, that sort of thing. Here, let me help you.” He kneeled in front of me and methodically tightened my laces.

“The cameras,” I said. “That’s why you don’t do interviews. You don’t like cameras.”

He stopped lacing and put his hand on my calf, brushing his thumb on the smooth stocking. “I like these.”

“Stay below the knee, sir.”

He looked up at me, all mischief, and tied the laces without breaking our gaze. “Really?”

“Really.”

He leaned down and put his lips on the inside of my calf. I gasped. Having him so close to home when we were outdoors made me wild. Even if no one was around, the presence of the sky above felt as if Los Angeles was looking.

“I can respect that,” he whispered. “For now.”

He worked his mouth up along the inside of my leg. Pressed my legs open. Kissed inside my knee. I gripped the edge of the bench.

“Are you wet, Apples?”

Wet? Wet was an understatement. I was soaking a pair of panties I couldn’t afford. “I’m not telling.”

He stood and held his hand out for me. “You don’t need to. Come on. Show me what you got.”

I took his hand, and we went onto the empty rink.

My muscles remembered what to do, pushing side to side, balanced in movement. I couldn’t have worn a more perfect dress to allow my legs proper movement, though keeping the underwear under wraps would be difficult. I pressed down the flared skirt.

He skated to me, pants fluttering against his legs, grace and power in male form.

“You skate?” I said.

“Everyone in Ithaca plays hockey.” He circled me twice, and I spun to keep my eyes on him. “I was a traitor when I went to baseball.”

“Why did you change?”

“Love. I just loved it.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me along.

The wind blew my hair all over my face, and I sped up to catch then pass him. “What did you love?” I said as I passed him.

“The downtime. You can process every play, then there’s this burst of activity, and all the processing just clicks. Like dominoes. All the calculations you made in the past two minutes, it fills in like an equation.”

“And you catch the ball.”

“Sometimes.”

“Always.”

He put his arm around me, and we circled the rink. I turned my face to the sky. The speed, the scratch of blades on ice, the crisp January air, this man’s ridiculous body next to mine. My heart felt lighter than it had in a long time.

He twirled me under his arm then pulled me with his arm around my waist. We synchronized our steps, laughed when we missed, turned, and did it again.

I didn’t know how long we were circling before he got ambitious and sent me spinning to the center of the rink. It could have been an hour, but when he did that, I forgot what I was wearing and went into a scratch spin. It was slower than I did when I was more practiced but fast enough to pick up my skirt.

When I slowed down, he was standing still on his skates, mouth open, hands slow-clapping.

“What are you gaping at?” I asked, still thinking it was the spin that had impressed him. I skated over to him, and he pulled me into his embrace.

“We’re going now,” he growled.

“So soon?”

Before the words had left my mouth, his hand was up my skirt, tugging on the top of my stockings. He’d seen what I was wearing under the dress. In the exhilaration of skating, I’d forgotten I’d expose myself in the spin, and now I had his arms around my waist, his lips finding mine, the thrust of his body pushing me back against the wall.

“You wore those for me?”

“I’m wearing it for me.” I didn’t believe myself, but I said it anyway.

“I’m going to eat you alive.” His mouth coursed the length of my throat, and his hands gripped my ass.

He’d been attracted to me before. I knew that. But I didn’t know what a garter belt did. I’d hoped it would make me a little hotter. I hadn’t known it would make him crazy.

The sudden increase in heat sent my alarm bells screaming. It was too soon. He wasn’t committed to me or my feelings. My sexual arousal had always been tightly tethered to love, romance, the promise of something more. A future. We had none, and I was clear about that. It was the weight that spun me in his centrifuge. We were just bodies, and I couldn’t drag him down. I couldn’t weigh on him.

I was burning up from the inside out, melting flesh and bone against him. I couldn’t put together a thought, only a series of images. All were affected by gravity. Falling. Sucked down. My consciousness, thought processes, ability to keep my body from molding itself to his got swept into the black hole of our shared need.

“Wait,” I gasped.

“What?” he answered in my ear, breath hot, hands settling on my waist.

What did I want to say? Did it have words? I just needed to stop breaking apart into a million hot shards, or I was going to lose my mind.

“I mean it. I didn’t wear this for you. I just didn’t expect to be doing scratch spins.”

He nodded once. Slowly.

“And I don’t even know you. It’s too soon for you to take me home. I’m scared of getting attached to you. Really scared.”

“The feeling’s mutual.”

Mentally, I stopped dead in my tracks. Whatever train my thoughts had been on screeched to a halt between stations. I looked in his eyes, searching for a bit of guardedness, a little double meaning, but there was none. He wasn’t lying.

“I tell you what,” he said, drawing his finger along the ridge of my jaw. “Come home with me, and let’s get to know each other. But we can reserve sex for later.”

“Define sex. Penetration? Coitus?”

He laughed. “You sure you don’t teach sex ed?”

“I’m trying to make it less appealing.”

“Didn’t work. But I’ll use your words. I’ll get my mouth on you, my hands all over you. We can enjoy each other tonight, and I’ll fuck you later.”

“Those weren’t my words.”

“I meant the words you were thinking.”

“You’re a little crazy. Do you know that?”

He dropped his hands, smoothing down my skirt. His cheek against mine, I felt him smile. “Any man would get a little crazy around you.”

I put my hands flat on his chest. He was so solid, so real, yet he’d mistaken me for a woman who drove men wild. He saw some mirror image and not the real Vivian. What would the anti-me do right there, with her hands on him and his body so close she could feel the heat coming off it?

“Take me home, Dash.”

Vivian

He drove up to the hills, hand on the stick shift, mine on top of it, but he didn’t say much. I’d never wanted anything as badly as I wanted his body and his time, but he wasn’t talking.

Neither was I. I had nothing interesting to say besides
fuck me
, which I couldn’t bring myself to utter, and as he clicked the box that opened his garage door, I wondered if I was doing a good job of being the anti-me.

“Vivian.”

“It’s all right. You don’t have to.”

The garage yawned before us, and I wondered if I had my Ryde app ready.

“I want to.” He squeezed my hand and looked into my eyes in the darkness. “But I’m sticking by my word. I’m not fucking you. Not tonight.”

I wanted to reassure him that I could easily be talked into all kinds of things, but cautious Vivian and reckless Vivian agreed it was time to shut up.

I shifted in my seat, and my skirt slipped over the tops of my stockings. I pulled it down. He laid his finger on my thigh and drew it over the stocking, pushing my skirt back up. He looked out the windshield as if he needed a moment, then he turned back to me, leaned forward, and spoke softly yet with force.

“Open your legs.”

He put a hint of pressure inside my knee to part it from the other one. I went liquid and squeaked, so intense was the pleasure that gushed out from my center.

“Go on,” he whispered.

I parted my knees, and he watched. My hands were at my sides, braced against the seat, the only clue to my heightened nerves.

“That’s so good.” He brushed his hand inside my thigh. “Sweetapple, I’m going to make this a night you never forget. Everything I ask you to do is for your pleasure and mine. Communicate with me if I ask. Tell me what you like.”

“You’re a bag of tricks, Dash Wallace.” I barely got the words out around the dryness in my mouth and the chest-inflating heaves of my breath.

“You are too.” He pulled the garter strap and sat up straight to pull the car in.

He got out of his side and opened my door. If I’d asked for it, I could have gotten out of it regardless. Right? But I didn’t want out. I’d had sex for intimacy and love, but I’d never had sex strictly for pleasure.

All I had to do was ask him to stop if I wanted him to stop. Stop holding my hand up the stairs. Stop guiding me into his house. Stop turning on the soft lights.