Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4

When it comes to love, there’s no such thing as smooth sailing.

Bend or Break
, Book 4

Rafael Castro is so far out of his element he can’t even see it anymore. Carlisle College in Massachusetts is a long way from his Chicago home, even farther from his Dominican Republic roots.

The only thing keeping him attached to his last nerve is the prospect of seeing Denny Winslow again. The first time they met, Denny taught Rafi to fly across the water, rowing hard in a knife-like boat. Now, two years later, on the wings of a rowing scholarship, Rafi is attending Denny’s elite college.

Even before the excitement wears off, Rafi is struggling with classes and fending off rumors that Denny’s family, not Rafi’s talent, won him his spot. To quash the gossip, Rafi tries to steer clear of the man he wants. A plan that evaporates in the fire of renewed attraction.

But Carlisle’s academic pressure cooker has Rafi barely treading water. And when a family crisis hits, both Rafi and Denny must pull hard to keep their relationship from capsizing in rough waters.

Warning: Contains a surly Dominican-American guy determined to show no weakness, a golden boy who knows his soft spots, some seriously dirty bachata dancing, and an excellent excuse for voyeurism in the locker room.

Level Hands

Amy Jo Cousins

Dedication

For F., who puts up with a distracted mom with more grace and kindness than any kid should possess. May you grow up to live your dreams supported by the love of your family, just like your mom. Love you always, kiddo.

Prologue

Two Years Earlier…

Denny Winslow was temptation incarnate.

Rafi was a year older than Denny on the calendar, and about a century older when it came to life experience. He’d been out and messing around with boys since early in high school. Denny hadn’t come out to anyone except his parents, and not even them until after he graduated. When they didn’t taken him seriously, he ran away to stay with his cousin Cash in Chicago, which had thrown him into Rafi’s path.

Like a boulder the size of a Cadillac, Denny lodged himself in Rafi’s way.

No way should a boy like that have been able to push Rafael Castro off balance.

But somehow, Denny had.

Ever since the night Rafi promised to kiss Denny on his eighteenth birthday, Rafi felt those blue eyes on him like he was pinned under a microscope. He blamed the late hour and too much talk about sex—which Denny knew fuck-all about—for the fact that he’d given in to Denny’s pleading.

On the day itself, Rafi managed to keep multiple adults in the room with them for the entire length of Denny’s celebration. After that, Denny seemed to hesitate to approach him, as if he’d lost his self-assurance. Rafi meant to keep up the distance between them until the very minute Denny headed for the airport to go back home to his rich parents and his big house and his gap-year internship, something Rafi had never heard of before meeting Denny.

He really, really meant to keep that distance.

“I never took you on that bike tour of the city,” he found himself saying on the last day Denny volunteered with the elementary school soccer team Rafi helped coach with Denny’s cousin.

The smile that lit up Denny’s face was everything Rafi wanted.

It’s a bike tour. A last chance for him to see the magic of this city before he’s gone for good. Nothing more.

Rafi repeated those words until he almost believed them. Until he could show up at Cash’s apartment with a grin and pretend Denny was a friend like any other boy Rafi knew.

After eight hours of biking around downtown, to the bird sanctuary on the south shore and the Baha’i temple up north in Evanston, his legs and his ass were sore, and his brain wouldn’t stop counting down the hours that were left until Denny’s plane took off the next morning. Time was slipping through his fingers.

They’d stopped at one of the boat harbors halfway back to downtown. The sun was setting in the late afternoon, and the sky was a deep lake blue streaked with hot pink and neon orange. Rafi leaned next to Denny against the railing at the edge of the cement pad overlooking the harbor, while Denny tried to get a good shot of the glittering skyline spread out against the darkening night. After he got his shot, he slipped his phone back in his zippered jacket pocket.

Denny’s hands were red from the wind, because it was practically winter and only crazy people biked around Chicago in November. Rafi wanted to take them in his own and warm them up, but he wrapped his hands around the cold metal railing and held on tight.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Denny said, his eyes on the skyline.

“I know.”

“And it was my birthday on Saturday.”

“I noticed.” Rafi damn near growled the words, staring out over the water.

Denny was eighteen. That knowledge hung between them like smoke in still air.

“So was what you said about kissing me when I was eighteen just bullshit or what?”

Rafi turned a look on him that was so hot Denny backed up.

Time’s up.

“Or. What.” And Rafi stepped into him, hard.

Remembering to breathe was impossible when Denny’s slim hips pressed against his, the length of his dick firming up against the push of Rafi’s crotch. Rafi lowered his face, oh so ready for this kiss he hadn’t even been able to admit he’d wanted since the first afternoon he’d met this blond-haired, blue-eyed white boy.

The beginnings of a giggle slipped out of Denny’s mouth.

Denny jerked back, horror written on his face.

Rafi frowned, which must have been intimidating? Or amusing? Because another giggle squeaked past Denny’s lips. Denny tried to pull his hands up, but they got stuck on Rafi’s chest somehow, palms spread flat against the front of Rafi’s coat.

“What’s wrong?” Rafi pulled his head back, hesitating. This wasn’t how he’d expected this to go.

“Nothing!” Denny’s voice squeaked.

Rafi didn’t lean in close. Not yet. “Then why are you acting all weird?”

“I’m nervous,” Denny wailed, and it was maybe the cutest thing Rafi had ever seen, how quickly he got himself worked up as he babbled. “You’re killing me with the pressing me up against the railing and the glowering and can we please fucking kiss now before I say anything else embarrassing? Please?”

Rafi smiled like someone had plugged him in and Denny was the wire connecting him to the source. That much power zinged.

And thank God they didn’t have to talk anymore, because the only words in Rafi’s brain as he leaned in to kiss Denny were
pay attention…don’t miss a thing…this is your only chance
.

He wouldn’t have admitted the idea made his heart ache if there’d been a gun pressed to his head.

Soft. Denny’s mouth was soft. Rafi hadn’t thought it would be, because Denny’s lips were so much thinner than his own. After a moment, they pulled away far enough for Rafi to speak.

“Okay?” he whispered against Denny’s mouth.

“If you stop now, I’ll push you right in the lake, I swear to God,” Denny muttered, and threaded his fingers together behind Rafi’s neck, pulling him back down.

They kissed again, and this time it wasn’t gentle. Wasn’t simply the press of lips together. Denny opened his mouth and nudged at Rafi’s lips until he parted them. This might have been Denny’s first time kissing a guy, but it obviously wasn’t his first time kissing, and Denny clearly knew exactly what he wanted. Rafi was happy to give it to him, his tongue in Denny’s mouth, the hot exchange of panting breaths, the feeling that their lips were bruised from kissing.

By the time they stopped, breathing hard and shivering now from the cold, the sun was all the way down and the lampposts along the bike path were lit.

Denny’s blue eyes were dark like midnight in the shadows of the evening. The younger boy licked his lips, and Rafi dipped his gaze to follow the movement of that tongue.

There were all kinds of things he wanted to watch that tongue lick.

Rafi struggled to control his breathing. This wasn’t about sex, even if his dick wanted to fuck its way out of his pants and against any available surface on Denny’s body. It was about one boy getting kissed by another for the first time. “Happy birthday, Denny.”

Then Rafi tugged a knit cap out of a pocket and pulled it down over Denny’s head until his ears were covered. “The ride back home is gonna be a cold one with the sun down.”

Back at Cash’s apartment in Pilsen, Rafi stayed straddling his bike as he watched Denny carry Cash’s bicycle into the building. They had hugged so hard Rafi’s ribs ached. He wanted to invite himself up. Wanted to crawl on top of Denny on the sofa bed where Denny slept in Cash’s living room and rub against him until they both came, breathing hard and sticky with sex as they tried to keep quiet.

Saying goodbye was more awful than he’d ever imagined it could be, but the memory of that tight hug, the press of his mouth against the bare skin of Denny’s neck, would stay with him for a long time. As would the lesson he’d learned from Denny Winslow.

Magic always happened at the last minute.

Chapter One

“It’s okay to be nervous.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“Dude.”

Rafi stared out the SUV window, bouncing his knee so rapidly he was annoying himself, much less the man sitting next to him. He was not nervous. He wasn’t.

Man, that’s some so-lame-you-don’t-even-believe-it-yourself bullshit.

“Denny’s gonna be so excited to see you, he’ll probably piss himself. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not.” He wasn’t trying to be short with Coach.
Cash. Call him Cash. He’s your friend now, not your boss.
It was weird, though, changing that up after three years of working for Cash as his junior coach.

Those days were over anyway, one way or another.

Cash and his girlfriend had moved back to Massachusetts over the summer, one of those goodbyes that had felt to Rafi like getting his legs cut out from under him. When Cash had hugged him next to the U-Haul he and Steph were driving back east, promising to fly back to Chicago to drive him out to college, Rafi had shrugged as if he didn’t care one way or the other. Which was a total lie. For once, he hadn’t even worried about pissing off his sisters, because none of them had ever gone away to school. Rafi and his sisters had all taken classes at the city colleges, but that didn’t count when it came down to figuring out how to navigate a foreign land like Carlisle College. Having Cash with him for his arrival on campus—knowing he could count on his ex-boss not to steer him wrong, while not embarrassing Rafi either for being ignorant—was keeping him from puking on the floor mats.

The one thing Rafi was not open to was leaning like a man who needed a crutch on the only other person he knew at Carlisle.

Not knowing what he was doing sucked monkey balls. Back in Chicago, he’d been the one who knew his shit. For the first year Coach Carmichael had been assigned to Asher Elementary, Rafi had known more about how the program operated than the rich white boy from Boston, having transitioned into the junior coach role as soon as he’d aged out of the program as a player. He’d been comfortable there, a hard worker and star graduate, now employee, of the program.

Heading off to Carlisle was taking him so far out of his comfort zone he couldn’t even see it anymore.

“Oh, I love this song!” Coach—Cash thumbed the steering wheel volume button up until a Taylor Swift hit blasted out of the speakers at max volume. “Haters gonna hate… Sing it, dude.” He was singing and bouncing in the driver’s seat, rolling his shoulders and trying to circle his hips, because Coach could get down pretty damn good on the dance floor for a white boy.

“No way.” But he was smiling as Cash yodeled along with the chorus in a surprisingly rich voice, because that was what his boss did—threw himself with enthusiasm into the moment, bleeding off some of people’s stress by giving them the chance to laugh at him. It was a gift, and Rafi tried to accept it, but couldn’t stop the tap-tap-tapping of his foot against the floor mat.

Even the landscape outside the car windows pulled his gaze and tightened his stomach. Everything had been Midwest prairie normal for the first interminable hours of the drive from Chicago to western Massachusetts, but now that they were almost at the school, he couldn’t get over how different things looked from the city.

“Mountains. Shit.” He’d thought his mutter was quiet enough, but a playful shove to his shoulder made it clear Cash could hear him.

“You call these mountains? These are barely hills, my friend. We’ll get you up to Vermont to my aunt and uncle’s place and you’ll see some…well, sort of mountains.”

“Sort of mountains?” He ignored the part about visiting relatives. Jesus Christ. Like he wasn’t sick to his stomach already with nerves. Visiting some rich white people, even if they were related to Cash, was not on his list of shit he was dying to do.

Cash shrugged and eased off the gas as he merged smoothly into the traffic whirling around one of those insane circle things, the rotaries. Rafi had no idea how everyone didn’t end up in one giant wreck. But Cash swiveled his head right and left like it was on ball bearings and slid through the traffic without flinching.

Rafi flinched for him.

“Well, yeah, it’s no Colorado or Washington,” Cash said, and Rafi struggled to remember what they were talking about, fingers wrapped so tight around the door handle his knuckles hurt.

Mountains. Right.

Worrying about burning up in a fiery crash before he ever got to what he was calling “sleepaway camp” in his mind, because that sounded less intimidating than Carlisle College, made it hard to think about anything else.

Of course, he’d never gone to sleepaway camp either. Who knew? Maybe it was as scary as these fucking rotaries.

“But we can still teach you to ski!”

“Shit, Co—Cash. I’m not going to frigging ski resorts.”

Cash snorted. “Yeah, Aunt Sue’s house isn’t a resort, trust me.” He said
aunt
in that funny way, where it sounded like
ahnt
instead of
ant
.

“They’re not gonna want some kid they don’t know staying in their house.” Although Coach’s friends hadn’t hesitated last year to pick him up at the airport, drive him hours outside of Boston for his campus visit, and put him up for the night before he flew home. And his own sisters would’ve smacked him upside the head for suggesting they wouldn’t open their homes to one of his friends, even if their homes were two-bedroom walk-ups in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, and not mountaintop ski-fucking-chalets or whatever these crazy-driving New England people called them.

“Oh, they don’t live there. Well, they spend most of the summer there, so everyone can bring their kids up. But in the winter, we let them know we’re coming and they have a guy who, I don’t know, turns on the furnace and chops wood, or something. They live in Boston.” They zipped around a semi that was lumbering up what Coach would probably call a hill. It felt like a mountain to Rafi, who hadn’t been out of Chicago since his mom brought him there from the Dominican Republic at five years old when she finally got her citizenship.
Never thought I’d miss the prairie so fast.
“Steph’s never skied either, which is a fricking crime for a girl who grew up in Portsmouth”—wherever that was—“so she’ll be a beginner too. I’m awesome, though. I can totally teach you guys.”

Holy shit. He knew Coach was rich. Or, at least, his family was. But he knew it like he knew some people went to Paris on vacation. It was a thing he’d heard about, but had a hard time imagining, because he’d never met anyone who’d done it.

Although, thinking about it now, he probably had met someone who’d been to Paris for fun.

“Hey, Coach—” he started to ask without thinking first. The idea was so fascinating he had to know, even if asking made him look stupid, his number one
don’t
for the next three years. Which was how long it was going to take him to graduate, since Carlisle had only accepted two semesters worth of his city college credits toward his transfer.

“And Denny! Man, that kid can fly down a slope like he was born on skis. He could teach you, better than me probably. We can get Tom and Reese and all go together. It’ll be awesome.” Cash was practically bouncing in his seat with enthusiasm, muttering under his breath about lift tickets and ski rental if there weren’t enough pairs in the garage, none of which Rafi knew dick about, but all of which cost money he’d bet, and would end up with him falling on his freezing ass in front of a kid who’d damn near worshipped him the last time they’d seen each other.

Oh hell no.

No way was he spending some kind of couples’ weekend making an idiot out of himself in front of Denny Winslow.

Even letting the syllables run silently through his head, the softness of that first name bumping into the elegant simplicity of his last name… Feeling the shape of that name in his mind made Rafi’s blood warm. Made his stomach dance and his breathing grow shallow.

Almost two years with Denny Winslow’s voice in the back of his head and texts blowing up his cell phone in the ebb and flow of Denny’s internships and studies and what Rafi was almost sure had been a pretty serious boyfriend at one point.

Imagining
that
had been a slick, delicious form of self-torture for Rafi. He’d been the first guy Denny had ever kissed, and had spent the next two years cursing himself out for being the dumbass whose “principles” kept him from being Denny’s first anything else. Rafi wasn’t stupid enough to think a newly out eighteen-year-old had gone too long without experiencing all kinds of things Rafi had refused to do with him.

He knew he’d made the right call. And he’d regretted being the kind of guy who made the right call every damn day since.

Now he was fifteen minutes from setting foot on the campus where Denny had spent the past year. Where the two of them would both spend the next three years, assuming Rafi didn’t do something to fuck up getting his scholarship renewed.

Excitement and nausea rode a teeter-totter in his stomach, and nausea was winning.

He’d tried doing the stuff he counted on to relax him before a big race. Aya had taught him about deep, slow breathing and clearing his mind, because his high school basketball and soccer games had never freaked him out like the first time he’d gone with the rowing club to a big regatta. He’d seen the hundreds of rowers—almost all of them older, white adults wearing workout gear that cost more than he gave his sisters for rent—hanging on to the sport they’d loved in their elite colleges, and had panicked.

Anxiety before a race was one thing. Packing up everything he owned (which wasn’t half the shit on the “recommended packing list”) to move halfway across the country to a school where he didn’t know anyone except one person (whom he’d kissed one time before never seeing him again), on a scholarship he could lose for what felt like a million reasons…was something else entirely.

Deep breathing was bullshit, it turned out.

Cash let him sit in silence for the last part of the drive, until they were stuck in a long line of cars packed with student belongings. Bikes and boxes and even a kayak were strapped to the roofs ahead of them.

“Home sweet home, buddy,” Cash said as they finally made it onto the campus itself. They hadn’t entered through the giant gates they’d passed a few blocks back, but on a side street Cash promised would take them right to Rafi’s assigned dormitory.

Rafi drummed his hand against the outside of the door, getting on his own nerves, but Cash never said a word as he rolled through campus, waving out his window at people he recognized. Professors, maybe. Rafi didn’t think Cash would still know any students on campus, but who waved to teachers like they were friends? He’d always been more of a get-his-work-done-and-get-out kind of student.

The street in front of Rafi’s dorm was busier than the elementary school drop-off lane at 7:45 a.m. back in Chicago. Students wearing Carlisle’s green-and-white school colors on their T-shirts and ball caps and loose athletic shorts or cutoffs crowded the area. Like they’d been dressed by the campus store for a TV commercial.

“What do you think? There’s a parking lot down the road, if you’re sick of the car. We can always hoof it.”

As if Rafi had an opinion. Shit. He didn’t know which way was north, and that was freaking him out a little. His interior compass pointed infallibly toward the lake in Chicago, but now he was in the middle of nowhere, on this campus where everything was so frigging green it looked like a fairy tale. The brick building, his dorm apparently, was four stories tall and half-covered in ivy. Students, parents and campus staff spilled in and out of the double doors like ants in a colony.

“Freshman move-in day is always insane,” Cash told him over his shoulder as he craned his neck to look for a place to pull over.

All of this waiting and going nowhere was making Rafi fucking crazy. He drummed his fingers against the side of the car door again until Cash turned and mock-glared at him.

“Would you like me to drive to the parking lot, Rafael?” Cash asked him in a voice that tried to steamroll him flat with exaggerated patience.

“Sure. Whatever.” He wasn’t going to say it out loud, but if he didn’t get out of this car soon, he might puke in it.

He couldn’t believe how quickly everything had fallen together, ever since the slim letter announcing he’d been selected for this new “diversity in sport” scholarship had arrived. The entire process had been like a secret peek into the world of rich people. A phone call here, an email there, and all of a sudden he was looking at the real possibility of being able to attend this elite East Coast college.

The first couple of months he’d been so excited he could hardly concentrate, but the closer he’d gotten to the day he actually had to pack up and leave home, the more his excitement had been stained by gray anxiety.

When they finally pulled into a space in the back corner of the large lot, Rafi burst out of the car and strode onto the grass. The urge to keep walking, to set one foot in front of the other all the way back to Chicago, expanded inside him until his skin felt tight.

“Holy shit, how good is it to get out of that fucking car, dude?” Cash hip-checked him on the fly as he bombed past Rafi and jogged around in circles on the grass until Rafi gave in and laughed at him. “I don’t know about you, but my ass done up and died during those last two hundred miles.”

“Mine too,” Rafi admitted, then yelped as Cash jogged by and gave his butt a smack. “Dude!”

Cash stuck his tongue down to his chin and crossed his eyes as he jogged backward away from Rafi, shooting finger guns at him. “Can’t touch this.”

His mentor in a goofy mood was impossible to resist. Giving in, Rafi held himself to faking an eye roll and strolling casually toward the car, before juking at the last second and chasing after Cash. They sprinted in zigzags like kids playing tag on a playground until Rafi had slapped Cash’s hip, his back, damn near his junk once, without ever once managing to get in his payback ass slap.

For a white boy, Cash was surprisingly agile with the hip thrust, twerking his ass out of the way at precisely the right moment.