Hardball (21 page)

I was caught off guard. Did that happen? Did I want it to? Now I felt like the one putting the brakes on the relationship because the thought of leaving Dad and my life for months to chase around a pro ballplayer overwhelmed me.

The screen door scraped open before I could answer. Thank God, it was Dash in his polo and jeans, a demigod slipping half in, half out of the human-sized house.

“You need help making coffee?”

“Coming right up!” Dora’s smile was meant to lighten up the room, but knowing what was behind it made it look sad.

Vivian

I’d never gotten the entire twenty-five-man roster from any winning year on a single baseball. It was a fan’s wet dream, yet as the shape of the ball in my tote pressed against my thigh, it had an uncomfortable memory attached.

“She blames herself for what happened,” I said in the car on the way home. It was dark, and the traffic was at that in-between place where it was open enough to go fast but too close to do it safely.

“Yeah, that’s pretty normal.”

“I think it’s crazy.”

“It’s baseball. Normal is crazy.”

“‘He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a man’s love, or a whore’s oath.’ Or baseball.”

He chuckled. “Yeah. If Shakespeare played ball.” He got off the freeway. “And it’s a boy’s love. Not a man’s love.”

“No, it’s man. I’m sure of it.”

He shook his finger at me. “Boys don’t know how to love. Men do. See
Romeo and Juliet
. The entire thing.”

I turned in my seat. “Are you for real? Romeo didn’t know how to love?”

“They both ended up dead. So no.” He headed up into the hills. We were obviously going to his place, and I was all right with that.

“You really need to stick to the sonnets, buddy. This is
King Lear
. It’s ‘man.’ And Romeo Montague is the greatest romantic hero ever in the world.”

He didn’t do more than
tsk
, shaking his head like a disappointed parent. “First you get the quote completely wrong, then—”

“You are out of your league on that, mister.”

He just nodded, but there was plenty going on in his head. I wanted to open it like a book and savor every line before using it to convince him of my personal Shakespearean truth.

His garage slid open, and he pulled in. The lights went on.

“You’re not getting any tonight until you see it my way,” I said, not meaning a word of it.

“I have all night, sweetapple.”

He got out, crossed in front of the car, and opened my door. He closed it behind me with a
whup,
and he led me up the stairs and to the front patio that overlooked the city. Before I could breathe, his lips were on mine, his hands were on my hips, and his tongue could taste my next sentence.

In the basin below, traffic hummed and bushes rustled. In this space, his kiss was the dark night and the full moon, the spin of the earth, and the slow, purposeful drift of the clouds against the charcoal sky.

He pulled back long enough to breathe. “It was boy.”

“Man.”

He kissed me again, softly, with the entirety of his lips, and even as I leaned forward to extend the touch, he pulled away.

“Boy. And, Miss Foster, this is your last chance.”

“Man. A man’s love is not to be trusted. And Romeo’s love was real. Are you going to kiss me again or not?”

“Turn around and look at the view.”

I paused before doing it. The view seemed harmless enough. From behind me, he took my bag off my shoulder and dropped it on the glass-topped table. He ran his lips along the curve of my neck, found a space, and bit down just hard enough to make my eyes flutter closed and my knees bend.

He pushed me to bend at the waist until my elbows were on the table and I felt his erection on my ass.

“I think we can look it up,” he said, drawing his hands down my back, “but first, you need to see it my way.”

“I do not.”

The first breath wasn’t out of me before he’d pulled my skirt up, exposing my white cotton underwear to the night air. He kept one hand between my shoulders, and the other stroked my ass over my underpants.

“You do,” was all he said before I felt his palm meet my bottom.

I gasped.

I groaned.

Something.

Both.

He did it again, and my groan mixed with a cry in a new kind of sound. He stroked and hit me again. The sting wasn’t half as powerful as the feeling that my pussy had exploded just to get closer to him so his hand would reach me a split second sooner.

His finger slipped under my panties and slid along the wet skin.

A long groan escaped me.

“You’re wet. So wet.”

He hooked his finger in the crotch of my underwear and pulled the panties down to mid-thigh, then he spanked my bare ass. The sting was sharper, more concentrated, and the pleasure stirring between my legs was fuller.

“Boy,” he said then smacked me again.

“Man,” I gasped. “Trust not a…” I couldn’t finish the sentence as he put two fingers in my soaking wet pussy.

“Romeo was a dopamine addict with no common sense,” he said.

“Well, of course not! He was ‘
a boy
’ in love. A man’s love.”

“You’re asking for it, sweetapple.”

“‘Trust not a man’s love or—’”

He got each cheek, spanking quickly on one side then the other then the backs of my thighs, which weren’t ready. I never thought I’d find such a thing pleasurable, but it was more than good, more than a turn-on. He was waking up every nerve ending between my legs as if they’d been sleeping.

He stopped long enough to stroke my pussy, my clit, to enter me with two fingers and stroke a hard nub inside me.

“What were you saying, beautiful?”

“Nothing. I wasn’t saying…” The words dropped into sucked breaths when another finger flicked across my clit over and over. “I’m going to come.”

“Yes, you are.”

I hadn’t thought he’d say that. I’d thought he’d stop and wait until I was on my back or until we were inside. But he kept going. Flicking and rubbing, holding me down between my shoulder blades as the view of the city blinked in the darkness.

My body stiffened and clenched around him, and I exploded in a cry I was sure the neighbors heard, hips pumping against his hand.

“God, you are so sexy,” he said, tenderly pulling me up when I was no more than a puddle of broken breaths and gelatinous bones.

“I don’t think I can stand,” I said, half joking.

“That’s not what I had in mind.” He picked me up and carried me to his bedroom.

Vivian

Dash undressed me slowly, and I stood naked before him, then he pulled his shirt over his head, undid his belt. The buckle clacked, and then it whooshed out of the loops. We drew circles on each other’s bodies with our fingers and tongues twisted together and teasing.

“I can’t decide how to fuck you,” he said. “I want to take you in every position. I want to fuck you like an animal and a saint. I want to keep you on the brink for an hour and take four orgasms from you. I can’t do it all tonight. I’m kind of pissed about that.”

“We don’t have an expiration date. Remember?”

“We don’t.” He rolled on a condom. “But I’m impatient. I want it all right now.”

I watched him kneeling above me, a perfect body in the sum of its perfect parts.

I held my arms out for him. “Take what you can.”

He didn’t lean down, just kneeled where I could see him. “Open your legs.”

I loved it when he demanded my exposure. So I did it, letting him see me, all of me. He opened my knees wider, ran one hand up my inner thigh, and put three fingers inside, stretching me.

“You’re so tight. So wet and tight.”

He guided his dick to my opening and pushed forward, holding my legs open, fully in my view. I didn’t think I’d have enough room for him, but I did, and his length glided against every surface I had. He angled himself to press against my clit, stroke it with his cock, until the pain of him subsided and only the throb of an awakening orgasm remained. He leaned down and pushed his dick into me, owning me with his eyes and his attention.

His breath caught. He liked it. He liked what he was doing to me and how close we were. I reached for him and pulled him close, closer, as close as I’d been to another person, and still it wasn’t enough. I wanted his soul inside me, a melding of skin where we touched, an unbroken circle of pulsing attention and awareness.

“Vivian.”

He only said the one word. A prayer. A supplication. A breath from his heart to mine.

I put my hand on his cheek and said, “Yes.”

When he looked as if he was about to lose himself, I lost myself too. Physically, I came and came hard, arching and stretching under him, pinned to reality by the force of the way he fucked me. But emotionally, seeing him as lost in the moment as I was, unable to stop himself from closing his eyes and groaning… he gave me more than an orgasm. He gave me the sweetest release.

Afterward, when he was still on top of me and planting kisses all over my face and neck, he said, “You knew the Lear quote was ‘boy.’”

“I realized it on the patio.”

He pulled back a little until his nose was astride mine. “But you didn’t say?”

“You gonna spank me for lying?”

“Not tonight, sweetapple.”

“Are you getting hard again? I don’t think I can go another inning.”

He pinned my hands over my head and kissed me. “When you’re still sore two days from now, I want you to remember who fucked you so hard you can’t walk.”

I couldn’t. I really couldn’t come again. I certainly couldn’t let him inside me again.

Well, maybe one more time.

Dash

Terror. Absolute, all-consuming, skin-searing fear. Like a frog in a pot of water that got hotter and hotter until it was too late, early January became mid-February, and I was still fucking her. Compulsively. I had her on my kitchen floor. My shower. My car. I fucked her face with my cock and my fingers. I ate her pussy and sucked her nipples. I came on her tits, on her back, down her throat, inside her. I put my hands under her clothes as soon as I saw her, held her hands behind her back, spanked her, blindfolded her, and still there was shit I hadn’t done.

I hadn’t tied her down. I hadn’t gotten a finger in her ass.

There was
so much
.

And I was running out of time.

I hadn’t made a plan because a sensible plan meant either we cut the cord at spring training, no negotiations, or I told her what I told the other ones. It’s casual. It’s friendly. It’s non-exclusive.

But I couldn’t because if I said shit like that to her, she would walk.

So there I was, watching her drive away at the crack of dawn so she could get to work and wondering what the fuck I was going to do, when my phone buzzed.

Hey, bat boy. I’m getting the hotel.

A week.

She got the hotel a week before I landed in Arizona. She’d done it every year since my first winning season. Janice. Nice lady. Ass like a pear and God… what else? Nice hair, I guessed. Divorcee. Her ex got the kids for that week, or she got a sitter. She made sure of it. She met me at the field. I signed her shirt. Met her at the same hotel. She was waiting. Same every year. Every winning year, it was boom boom boom. The year I hit .225 between opening day and the All-Star break? When I couldn’t remove my glove from my ass before July fourth? That year we’d changed something critical, and there I was. Schmuck of the century.

So now what was I supposed to do?

Pace around. Not worry. Tonight was Joe Westlake’s Spring Training Dinner, and she was going. I wanted her there at the same time as I didn’t want to go.

I texted Vivian because I had to. The only thing that calmed me down was putting something sexy in her lap.

I can’t wait to get my mouth on your cunt tonight

Guilt for leading her on. Relief that I was being honest. One text could be both. I didn’t know how to exist inside my own contradictions.

Vivian

We didn’t have an expiration date.

But we did.

I spent weeks in a state of perpetual soreness. I’d never been sore like that, and if someone had told me it was the most pleasurable feeling in the world, I wouldn’t have believed them. But it was. I walked around school gingerly every day and went to his house every night to get sore all over again and started over the next morning.

I found myself in the hallways, carrying a stack of books and stopped dead, looking at some random corner, imagining the flick of his tongue on me, hearing his voice in my ear. Waiting for my phone to buzz.

I can’t wait to get my mouth on your cunt tonight

Is that from Hamlet?