Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (12 page)

“Let me, Hefin.”

He slowly removed his hand, but trailed his middle finger just inside the crease of her bottom, and it made her grunt against his shoulder. There was sweat in those twin depressions at the bottom of her spine and he teased those last before he backed away and pulled off his tee for her.

Her eyes had bled out from gray to deep charcoal, her cheeks bright red, hectic. Her hair was dark and wet along her hairline. There was a spotty dark triangle on the breastbone of her tee where she’d sweat through it. She was breathing so hard that her throat hollowed out with every sharp inhale.

He was right fucked.

“You’re beautiful,” she said, and leaned over to steal a fast kiss over his top lip.

He grabbed her again and made her take it slower.

He needed the time—even if they didn’t have any at all to spend.

Des sank into his arms again, kissing the cords of his neck, biting them, tasting the tang of wood resin as it steamed out of his skin.

Hefin was all wires and ropes and tight, efficient muscles. His skin was a flawless pale gold with sleek brunette hair in the dips and furrows of his chest. He moved against her like he couldn’t ever get enough of her, but it was graceful too, like they were dancing, like he was leading her to music in his head.

It reminded her of his hard, nearly choreographed movements carving: every stroke had power but a kind of ultrafine grace and precision. She wrapped her arms around him and stuck her ass out, licked the little scoop his collarbone made in his shoulder, bit the soft skin at the top of his arm.

He felt amazing. Better than she had imagined, all those weeks, looking at him, fantasizing about him. In his arms, she sank into dozens of moments where they had held eye contact and looked away. She touched him and her touch made him real, finally.

He licked her, bit her, in return, got his hand over her ass again, and she curled her hands into the trough of his spine to keep from shoving her own hand down the front of her jeans and pushing over her clit. She was hanging in a wet, warm wave right next to orgasm and all it would take was a few taps with her ring finger.

She huffed out a breath against the overwhelming, slippery, inevitable pulses, tried a tiny buck of her hips for relief. Even that little movement made her cross her eyes when Hefin’s response was to squeeze, superslow. Just a little hard, and a lot low. She breathed in some kind of squeak when two long, rough fingertips kind of skidded and dipped for a frustrating second into her softness.

“Easy,” he breathed.

She skated her hand down his chest, and when she brushed over his belly it scooped in with his gasp. She rested a single finger against the first button of his jeans. They both stilled.

“This is getting so crazy,” she whispered against his jaw, pushing her nose along his temple.

“Completely mad.”

“I mean”—she reached to hold tight to her senses to make sentences and to
think
—“I guess it’s kind of appropriate that we’re rounding the bases at the ballpark.”

He exhaled a laughlike noise. “You know, I didn’t even know what that meant until my wife explained it to me.”

Des settled her ass down a bit and eased back.
Okay
. Ex-wife mention was definitely a way to slow things down. He seemed to realize it and pulled his hand from her jeans again. Brought both his hands to settle at her hips, his head bowed, breathing hard. “Uh, oops,” she said.

“I am a right pig.”

She tangled her fingers through his crimpy, wavy hair. “No. Don’t do that.”

He looked at her, his eyelashes tangled at the corners in a squint. His neck was red, and the color blended over the topography of his chest, highlighting his lean musculature as if the sun had touched all the jutting places. He was beautiful like this. Softened way up. His expression was so chagrined it managed to break up the scruff and angles into boyishness. “But you were—I think you were right there, Destiny, in my arms, I—”

“I’ll survive it.”

“You’ve had a shitty day.”

She teased him by working her face into an angry pout. “That’s very true.”

He winced. “Maybe I might’ve had you talk about it instead of mauling you.”

She almost automatically denied that and tripped over what he was offering. To listen.

To listen to her problems.

Listening to problems seemed like something more than a fling, but listening to problems in combination with even near orgasms could be another kind of problem.

For all her jokes about a kissing friend, the couple of kissing friends she’d had just ended up as regular boyfriends. Hefin couldn’t be her boyfriend. He lived in Wales, a place as unimaginable as the moon. Maybe even as far.

She scooted off his lap and swung her legs into the driver’s footwell. He picked up his T-shirt and shrugged into it. The close front cabin of the limo was redolent with the saline tang of overheated bodies mixed with Hefin’s perfumey tea.

Kind of wonderful, actually, but something between them, invisible and palpable.

“Do you still have those doughnuts?”

Hefin looked around and pulled the bag up where it had fallen into his footwell. “Affirmative.”

“Hand them over.”

He passed over the bag and she handed one to him and pulled out one for herself. They ate a few bites in silence, looking out the windshield at the beautiful pale blue sky over the fields, or at least, that’s what she was looking at, so she wouldn’t have to look at Hefin’s puffy top lip, burned from kissing, sinking into chocolate icing.

Her doughnut was too sweet, the decadence a disappointing echo of actual pleasure. She chewed the heavy dough just enough to swallow it without choking.

“Ball for your thoughts,” he said.

“What?”

“We’ll hit balls for thoughts. Do you play baseball?”

“Not at all. I once broke my arm playing foursquare.”

“So we’ll buy our bucket of balls. And given your history of injury, rent a couple of helmets, as well. Then we’ll go into the cages. I don’t mind saying that I’m a fair hand at hitting balls, so when I miss a ball, I’ll tell you something about myself. When you hit a ball, you tell me something about you.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer and so she finally looked at him. He was already looking at her, with that open gaze of his. “I think it’s probably a bad idea,” he said. “But I find I want to do it anyway.”

“Okay. Why is it a bad idea?”

“Because everything we do together is just another way to say good-bye, and we haven’t properly met in the first place. If you want to know more than that, you have to hit balls with me.”

“We have to tell each other real stuff, though? Not like what our favorite ice cream or color is?”

“Right. Only real stuff.”

“And you’re not going to go all cheesy and
Bull Durham
on this activity?”

He laughed, that cute, polite huff into his chest. “You can swing however you like. No copping a feel disguised thinly as coaching the batter.”

“Do they have nachos here?”

“God, yes.”

“I require a trencher of them, with extra of the orange cheese and jalapenos.”

He wrinkled his nose and the expression looked ridiculous on him, but of course, also hot. It was a little unfair. “Can we put jalapenos on half, perhaps?”

“You can buy your own baby nachos, perhaps.” She tried a little imitation of his accent on
perhaps
. The burr felt silly in her mouth, but she liked doing it. Loved his singsongy accent that made even the serious things he said sound like a ballad.

He grinned, and she let herself just look. She studied the horizontal crease his smile made in the space between his top lip and his nose. How his scruff darkened the brackets in his cheeks. His big dark eyes. His grin softened into an equally considering look when he realized she was staring.

So they both just looked. She relaxed in his regard and focused on all the details she’d never been able to steal in her scurries by his workstation in the library. She found a tiny, healed dimple in his earlobe where it might have been pierced once. He had a scar at the very edge of his right eyebrow, white with age. The bridge of his nose was pink, a little shiny, and she wondered if it had burned at the park. She tried to guess his age, just from looking at him, and didn’t think she’d guess he was any older than herself, even though she knew he was ten years older. There was history in his face, but not such a rough kind. An artistic earring, a childhood fall, a face unused to smiling.

Their eyes met, then they both leaned toward the other at the same time. She reached up to play with his earlobe, and he dove his hand into her hair, which made her shiver a little. Their kiss was just kisses, layered one over the other.

He kissed with his eyes closed. His lashes looked mascaraed, they were so dark against his skin. She noticed he kept his eyes closed when they had their hands all over each other, like he needed to take in everything a different way.

“Good-bye,” she whispered.

He leaned back, but kept his hand in her hair, sifting it, shaking out goose bumps.

“Where’re you goin’?”

“That’s another good-bye, right? Because
you’re
going. I’ve decided to make it easier. I’ll tell you ‘good-bye’ all the time, then it will be easy when you leave.”

He looked out the windshield, and she watched the little bunch of muscles in his jaw pull on the tendon in his neck. She reached up and traced it with a finger. “Good-bye, Destiny.”

She ignored the stab of that. It was her game after all. She started it. “See?” She bluffed. “A little rough at first, but by the time you get on that plane we’ll be sick of saying it. Are you going to buy me nachos and balls?”

He kissed her nose, a soft second of warm dampness and prickle from his whiskers. “You said balls.”

She laughed and got out of the limo finally. The air was so much cooler, she wished she had a sweater. They walked in and bought their piles of nachos, and he took her to the back where she tried on a couple of helmets until he was satisfied one fit, and she tried not to think about all the sweaty heads that had been inside of it. He hefted their balls out the back, down a dirt-packed path with walls of nylon netting on every side until they got to their own cage.

She sat on the bench against the net wall. The cage was much bigger than she had imagined. Next to the bench was what looked like a huge, round half barrel made of wood and painted with a red Cleveland insignia. Inside, it was set in with a narrow bench, and right in the middle was an old steering wheel from what looked like a truck, mounted on a metal stem. On the surface of the bench was painted
TUB O’ FUN
.

“What’s that?” She toed the tub.

Hefin came over and handed her the helmet, which she dutifully put on. He set a bat down next to her, which he had also picked out. “That’s a Tub o’ Fun.”

“What makes it fun?”

He held the side of the tub. “Get in and find out.”

When she stepped in to sit on the bench, she was glad he was holding it, because it moved, started to try to turn with her weight. She settled on the bench and said, “Now what?”

“Put your hands on the wheel, and turn hard and fast in one direction. You might want to put your feet up on the opposite bench.”

She hiked her feet up and grabbed the wheel. When she turned it, a metal grinding noise started up under the tub. “What’s that?”

“Big ball bearings in a track, you have to pull hard to get going, then the bearings will start pullin’ you along. Here, I’ll help start you up. Show me which way you’re turnin.”

She grabbed the wheel and started one way and suddenly she was spinning. She laughed out loud and kept turning the wheel, hand over hand, until she hardly had to turn
it at all to spin fast and smooth in the tub.

She couldn’t stop giggling, she couldn’t remember the last time she was moving purely for the sake of fun. It was like going years without dancing, then being out on the floor with the music bouncing your insides, jumping all over the place, getting sweaty, thinking
Why don’t I go out dancing all the time?

Like making out with a gorgeous Welshman in a limousine.

Like eating pancakes in the sunshine with a view of the water and the hope of a kiss.

She was going so fast, her palms were getting hot from the steering wheel’s friction. She spun, and her middle got light and dipping. She imagined the whole morning spinning away—that moment watching the paramedics shoulder into her sister’s apartment, PJ walking away, Sam and Sarah yelling at each other.

When she spun that all out, she spun out her empty bank account, then the shame of her weeks on unemployment, then her dozens of rejections, even the day her boss had walked in and told her they needed to talk.

She thought of the hours sitting in the hospital with her sister, washing blood out of her hair with a plastic hospital basin.

She remembered the look of her father’s ashes swirling away in the winter air, mixing with the snowflakes.

The air moving counter to the direction of her body grabbed it all away.

She held on to the weight of telling Hefin good-bye. She imagined it as a ball bearing, following its track in the opposite direction, pulling her, yet spinning her into giddiness.

She would lessen that weight in pieces, in a hundred different kinds of farewells. These days would be an advent, a little present every day and hour, until there were no more, but she would be different on the other side.

She tipped her head back to let her hair fly and her helmet bounced off into the dirt. Leaning back made her dizzy as she watched the net ceiling kaleidoscope above her.

Then she let go of the wheel and the revolutions got slower with every turn, until she felt the ball bearings under her feet roll past one more time, and the Tub o’ Fun stopped.

Hefin was leaning back in the bench, watching her.

“You made that look fun.”

“It was fun. It was a Tub o’ Fun.”

He made his little laugh into his chest, and she squeezed her eyes tight to get her brain to stop spinning.