Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (13 page)

“Are you ready to batter up?”

“I better not until everything stops twirling around.” She stood up and swayed a little, which made her laugh and sway more. Then his arms were around her and he was helping her step out of the tub. “Kiss me while everything’s still spinning,” she said.

He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his body. Their hip bones notched together, and his chest and arms felt hard—he didn’t have even a little extra on him. She wondered if she felt bony to him, the Burnside skinniness was kind of a curse, but when he slid one hand down to her butt, she guessed he was fine with seeking out the place where extra softness was never a problem.

She looked up at him and was still spinning a little. He smiled and she felt a little dizzier.

Not all of this thrill was from the Tub o’ Fun.

“Hold still,” she said.

He laughed over her mouth and this kiss was slow and kind of sloppy—her fine motor skills were wonked, still. But he just took over, touched his tongue to hers and brought it away, sucked in her bottom lip, licked the corners of her mouth.

It was lovely, warm, and he held her so tight that all she had to do was sort of drift into it, her brain slowly settling to a stop.

“I want to watch you hit balls first.”

“Certainly.”

She laughed. “Have I told you how much I like your accent?”

“No. I like yours, too.”

“I don’t think there is an Ohio accent. Don’t we all just sound like newsreaders?”

“You have an accent to my ears, and I like it. I like the sound of your voice.”

“I was looking on the Internet about Wales, and did you know that you have your very own language?”

He smiled. “Yes, I think I remember hearing about that.”

“Do you speak it?”

“Most everyone in my village does. I learned in school and from my mum and dad.”

“Say something to me.”

Hefin kept ahold of her and kind of danced her around in a circle, looking up as if for inspiration.
“Braf cwrdd â chi.”

The words belonged to his accent, burred and soft, impossible to parse out where one started and the next began.

“Slower.”

“Braf cwrdd â chi,”
he repeated. She watched his mouth.

“
Brahv-corth-ah-kee,”
she tried.

He squeezed her. “Yes, that’s it, actually. Just right.”

She squeezed him back. Smooshed her nose against his chin until his bristles made her eyes water. “What does it mean?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t translate until I miss a ball.”

“Pffft.”
She blew the raspberry against his neck and he jumped very satisfyingly.

“Tell me.”

He stood back and held on to both of her hands. “Say it again.”

“Brahv-corth-ah-kee,”
she tried to fit the burrs and dips in the best she could.

“Braf i gyfarfod â chi, yn rhy,”
he answered. “You told me, ‘nice to meet you.’ ”

“And what did you say back to me?”

“I said that it was ‘nice to meet you, too.’ ”

“So we’re official now, properly introduced.”

“Yes, one language is never enough for a proper introduction.”

She decided she would ask him what was Welsh for
good-bye
later. They might need more than one language for that, too.

“Hit some balls for me, Hefin of Aberaeron.” She moved to sit on the bench and handed him his bat.

He swung it over his shoulder and picked up the big bucket of balls. He walked the bucket back to a big green machine at the back of their cage and put everything down to dig in his pockets, his waistband dipping below some tight little hip-dips, the sight of which made Des determined to bite them.

He pulled out the handful of tokens he had bought from the counter and flipped a lever on the machine. “I’m going to keep it in slow for us since you’ve never done this before.”

“Terrific.” She didn’t think there was any way she was going to hit a ball anyway.

He dumped the balls into a big hopper and put the tokens into the machine. It made a bunch of loud machine noises, and Hefin jogged up to the batter’s box. He watched the first pitch lop out of the machine, then stood ready for the next.

He looked so hot standing in the box, ready to swing, that she didn’t realize the next pitch had whooshed out until she watched him swing and heard the crack of his bat all at the same time. He looked over and winked at her.

She laughed, and she watched him smack one ball after another into the back net, easy and loose. At this rate, he would never tell her anything.

Unless she totally cheated.

She looked around at the other cages through the net, and no one had rented any of the ones around them. She snuck her hands behind her back and unhooked her bra strap through her T-shirt. As soon as he cracked the next ball, she moved to catch his eye, and he smiled at her—she held his gaze. She waited until that moment right after the clunk of the ball entering the shoot and before he turned back to the pitch.

That was the sweet spot, and she flashed him, the hem of her T-shirt right to her chin, her nipples bunching as soon as they hit the breeze.

Swing and a miss.

It was just as awesome as she imagined it would be.

Hefin closed his eyes, and when he opened them, Destiny was laughing and had started tugging her shirt down.

He threw down the bat, because that was unacceptable.

When he reached her, she squealed, and laughed some more, and what he managed to catch hold of in the middle of their squirming half struggle were her belt loops. She let him tow her in, and he rucked her tee back up, swirled his thumb around the whole of her small breast.

Then he found the other, and the pleasure of just looking at her breasts, deciding which one had more freckles and which nipple was a little bigger was like sitting in a comfortable part of the surf when the sun was high and there was nothing else to do.

Mesmerizing. Without purpose except what the skin could feel.

“Hey.” She laughed, and wiggled down the tee. “Give a girl some …”

He kissed her. Actually, he sort of licked her, starting with the curved corner of her mouth right to the fullest part of her lower lip. While he did that, he found her belt loops again and tugged her in close. She groaned in such a perfectly agonizing way that he tugged again, and she pressed herself against his cock.

She licked him back. “Pull up like that on my jeans again,” she whispered. “Feels so good.”

Oh
God
.

Her request triggered some deep mental pornography of a schoolmate he’d had, a girl who told him she’d meet him in the school lavatory between classes and let him kiss her. And she had, and had also lifted her uniform skirt and tugged rhythmically and purposefully on the gusset of her panties when he’d tentatively tried tongue kissing for the first time.

Gripping Destiny’s loose waistband in both of his hands and pulling, so she could ride the taut denim seam between her legs as he sucked on her tongue, he was very afraid that this encounter would end similarly to the one in that overwarm lavatory.

With his come sliding around, hot, inside his briefs and a rap on the door
signaling they’d been discovered.

But he recklessly rubbed his lips over hers, unable to relax into a good kiss because they were both breathing too hard. He kept up the pulling with one hand, but let another travel over her fly and lower, to push a knuckle where she might like the pressure. He could feel her lips there separate with a slick give that made him squeeze his arse in counterpressure to the hot and sudden heartbeat in his dick.

“I need to sit.”

He almost didn’t understand her, but her panting combined with her sudden weight against him made him understand. He backed them up against the bench. Her hands were under his tee, grasping at his skin.

“Dig your nails in,” he breathed as he got her straddled around his waist on the bench. When she complied, a soft scratch first, and then a stinging pressure along his spine, he pushed on her lower back, hard, so they could fuck against the other, clothes bunching and damp.

“Crazy, crazy, crazy,” she whispered, between kisses at his neck.

“Yes,” he said. It was. Weeks of pining after the other, just looking, his dreams about her, her possible dreams about him—it meant this. It meant
this
was between them.

A live thing.

He rubbed a hand over her shoulders, trying to soothe them a little, but then he encountered the ends of her unhooked bra under her shirt, and that was what made him pull up on both of their shirts, so that their naked skin could rub together.

Why the feel of just their trunks sliding against each other’s was what sent his hand down his own trousers, to squeeze and to rub, and why his self-abuse was what sent Destiny’s hand between her own legs was all some mystery equal to why the tides waned so shallow in the summer a boy could wade leagues out into the sea and still catch glimpses of the bottom swirling over his feet.

“Let’s go back to the limo,” Destiny breathed into his ear.

Yes
, he thought back.
Let me lay you out underneath me and come all over you while you come all over me
. He realized he would come, if he said those words, or anything like them. When the tip of her wet tongue curled into his ear, her breath fast and hot and loud, he almost did, just for the selfish rush of letting go like he did in the school lavatory, the radiator burning his back as he came with the entire wildness of girlhood displayed before him.

“Now,” is what he said.

She moved away from his ear, and he grabbed her around the waist to help her off his lap. He felt broken up and lame, limping with sludgy fever in every joint and limb. She stood, and he grabbed her hip bones and used them as handles to raise himself from the bench.

There were baseballs littered all over the ground, and the machine whirred, empty and loud.

How had they even heard each other? But it was as if his ears still rang with their breath, the strained and wet gasps they’d made.

“Come on,” Destiny said, and pulled him out of the cages. They walked with their hands interlaced, palm to palm. He could see the twisted outline of her bra resting against her breastbone, under her tee, her nipples so hard her shirt did nothing to disguise the discrete texture of them. His cock looked obscene poking out against the back of his fly. He’d appear less ready for sex if he were completely naked.

Somehow, they met no one along the way. Hefin refused to analyze why this disappointed him.

When Destiny put her key in the back door of the limousine, she looked over at him and grinned.

“We shouldn’t.” She started to turn the lock.

“Certainly not.”

She abandoned her key ring in the door and put her arms around him, her cheek against his chest. He could feel her nipples poking him. “I’ve already had a long day, you know.”

“You have.”

“I might not be thinking straight.”

“I’m certainly not.” He held her and looked at the blue Ohio sky, a blue the sky never was over Wales. “Are you tellin’ me that if I join you in the backseat of this limousine and take advantage of the privacy windows and acres of horizontal surfaces that I’d be taking advantage of your less-than-straight thinking?”

“No. Well, yes. But only because I wanted you to.”

“But we shouldn’t?” He jumped because suddenly her hand was over his poking dick, pressing, as if she was testing its resistance against her palm, which, he could tell her, was significant.

“It’s our first date. You’re going back to Wales. Then you’re going to go work in
China
, which is about as far away as I can imagine. My sister received emergency medical attention today.” She looked up at him, her forehead wrinkled, her eyebrows trying to kiss. “But for some reason, the more I think about all of that, the hornier I get for you.”

He closed his eyes.
The things she says
. “Tell me what to do. I trust you’ll know.”

She reached back and turned the key and the lock tumbled open with a muted clunk. She looked at him, and there was something in her face that was the same as when he helped her out of the Tub o’ Fun.

Something that made him feel like she knew what she was doing, that he would be glad if he did what she asked, even if what they did was all he could think about for the rest of his life away from her, staring at a sky over the sea that would never turn the same color as the sky over her head in Ohio.

He reached around her, opened the door, climbed into the limousine, and looked back at her. She was right behind him.

* * *

As soon as she pulled the door shut, the hinges screaming, she was reaching for Hefin’s shirt. Even if all they did was squish against each other, feeling their skin warm against the other’s, she would be happy. She would break her right hand masturbating later, but she would be happy.

She directed them to sit on the floor of the passenger bay, the seats facing forward in a U bracketing them and a leather bench facing backward under the privacy window. There was just enough room on the carpeted floor to lie down if they should need to.

As soon as his was off, he reached for her T-shirt, but hesitated, looking at her. Then she died of cute because he grinned and looked down, coughing out one of his laughs. “What I wouldn’t give,” he said, “for the kind of suave I imagine makes limousine lovemaking appear natural.”

She laughed because he couldn’t be more adorable, sitting crisscross-applesauce on the floor of the limo, his beautiful chest gleaming, color high over his cheeks. “Let me
tell you something, as long as you promise not to get all skeeved out and run out of the limo screaming.”

He gave her a toe-curling look from under those curly lashes.
Okay then
. He was not going anywhere.

“I am pretty certain that every single one of the Burnside boys and girls left their virginity and/or various pieces of their dignity behind in this very passenger bay.”

He laughed and forgot to hide it from her into his chest. It made him look about seventeen years old. “Is that right?”