by Madison Faye
“And I’m not, actually. I’ve been offered a job, and I’ve been sitting on it wondering if it’s a move I really want to make, but I think it is. This thing with you and Waverly tips the scales, perhaps, but it’s my decision independent of that.”
“What’s the job?”
“Dean of Admissions at NYU.”
My brow shoots up, and I whistle lowly.
“Shit. Congrats, Natasha.”
“Thank you. If I went, it would probably mean Waverly moving into the dorms to finish at Winchester, since I’d be moving to New York. I’m not going to say I’d be happy with her dating a man ten years older than her, but you won’t be her coach. And…” She frowns. “Well, it might be better than her dating some shithead high school guy.”
I grin. “That I can promise you.”
She smiles thinly, nodding.
“Look, Camden, I don’t think you’re a bad guy, I just…”
“It’s not what you imagined.”
She nods. “Yeah.”
“Natasha, I’m in it for the long haul. I’m here, and I’m going to be with Waverly for as long as she’ll have me. What I mean is, I don’t want us to… you know. I don’t want this to be a wall.”
“No promises,” she says quietly before she smiles a little more. “But, I’m willing to meet you halfway and at least try. Beyond anything else, I think we both want the same thing, which is to make my daughter happy and to keep her safe.”
“It’s the most important thing in my world,” I growl.
“More than swimming.”
“Hands down.”
She smiles. “Well, if you’re dedicated enough to that to be trying out for the goddamn Olympics, and it’s only your second priority…”
I grin. “I’d give it all up for her. In a heartbeat.”
She nods. “I believe you.”
“I’m not gonna hurt her, Natasha. Not ever. And I’m not going to stop her from doing anything she sets her mind to do. I want her to go to Cornell. I want her to stick with swimming and go as far as she can. I mean, shit, Natasha, she’s not just good, she’s at the top. Did she tell you about her time the other night?”
She frowns. “No?”
“She literally almost broke a world record in the Winchester pool for the four-hundred freestyle.”
Her brow shoots up. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, seriously. Three seconds shy of it. That’s not just talent, that’s a fucking gift, and I’d never let her waste that, or dwell in my shadow or any of that bullshit.”
We look at each other, and slowly, Natasha nods.
“And my rules? About your contact with Waverly before regionals and before you leave to go to training?”
“Hands off, and you have my absolute word on that.”
Fuck it. It’s going to suck, but I mean what I say. When it comes to Waverly, I’m in it for the long haul. I’m in it for forever. And really, what’s two months in the scheme of forever?
Natasha sighs, half-smiling as she looks away.
“I can’t believe I’m about to fucking say this, but…”
She looks back at me, and our eyes lock.
“Then you have my blessing.”
I start to smile, but she holds up a finger.
“But so help me God, if you hurt that girl—”
“Natasha, I’m never—”
“If you do, don’t think for a second I won’t exchange that fake gun for a real one and put you in the ground. Do we understand each other?”
I grin. “Crystal. Heard loud and clear, mama bear.”
She smiles.
“Waverly’s outside in the car. You’ve got ten minutes and then I’m taking her home, and then our deal goes into effect until after regionals. Yes?”
My grin widens. “Absolutely.”
Because again, what’s two months against forever?
Natasha nods towards the front door. “I’ll be out in ten.”
“Hey, Natasha?”
She raises a brow.
“Thank you.”
I whirl, and I’m out the door like thunder, and as I go barreling out, Waverly comes flying out of the car.
“She wouldn’t tell me anything! I—Camden, I don’t know what’s—”
I crash into her, and she gasps as I spin her around, holding her tight before my lips sear to hers. She moans, melting into me, clutching me feverishly as I kiss her with every single thing I have.
“What’s going on?” She pants, pulling away, her eyes wild.
I tell her, and there are tears, and she starts to say how unfair it is, before she actually stops herself.
“Two months?”
“Two months. Until regionals, and then I’m leaving Winchester to start training.”
She frowns. “Leaving Winchester as in your job or leaving Southworth entirely.”
I grin. “What do you think?”
Slowly, a smile spreads over her face. “You’d train here?”
“As it happens, I know of this private school with facilities that would make most colleges and training centers jealous.”
She giggles. “And they’ll let you use the pool here?”
I shrug. “I mean, I’ve got a copy of the keys.” I wink. “I’ll make sure it’s cool with Principle Kane, but I can’t imagine he’ll have a problem, provided we, uh…”
She grins. “Maintain a certain level of discretion?”
“Bingo.”
She sinks into me again, hugging me tightly as she buries her face in my chest.
“Two months without touching you sucks.”
“Tell me about it,” I growl.
“But, after that?”
I smile as I look down into her eyes. “After that, we’ve got as long as you want, beautiful.”
“How long do you want?” she says quietly.
“Well,” I wince dramatically. “I wasn’t really sure how to bring this up, but…”
She arches a brow at me, and I grin.
“How does forever sound?”
Her lips pull into a grin, and she starts to nod as her eyes shine up at me.
“Yeah, I think I could work with forever.” She shrugs. “Plus, her words were no touching during the two months, right?”
I nod.
“As in, each other?”
My brow furrows. “Yes?”
“Sooooo, if we were to, say, call each other? Maybe video chat?”
I grin.
“Have I mentioned that I love the way you think?”
She beams. “Hey, desperate times call for desperate measures. And again, it’s just two months.”
“It’s just two months,” I murmur, pulling her tight. “By the way, we’ve got like five minutes left before that starts, so—”
She jumps into my arms, her lips crush to mine, and we melt together.
“I love you,” she whispers into the kiss.
“I love you, too,” I growl.
And then I kiss her, and I keep on kissing her until our time is up. And after that?
Well, who the fuck cares about eight weeks when we’ve got the rest of our lives after that?
Epilogue
Waverly
Two months can go by very, very slowly. Or at least, I imagine it would have if we’d spent them sulking and being all sad that we couldn’t really see each other. Okay, we were sad, but then, neither Camden or I are the type to just lay down and take it.
So we didn’t.
Yes, two months without being able to touch the man you love or really show him any public affection whatsoever is pretty sucky. But, plenty of people in the world have it way worse, and at the end of it, we knew what we had to look forward to. So, we knuckled down and did our time.
…By which I mean, we had video chat sex literally every night.
Winchester killed it at the regionals. Well, the girls’ team did, at least. Despite Camden’s best efforts to whip the guys into shape, or even to go out and try and recruit new talent l
ike Winchester’s resident bad boy Jamison Scott, they just never got there. It didn’t help that Ian—who, despite being an absolute creep, was actually maybe the strongest swimmer on the team—was caught spiking a girl’s drink at a club with a fake ID three weeks before regionals. Being eighteen, he wasn’t just kicked out of school, he was tried as an adult. Yeah, his dad and his dad’s money kept him out of jail, but it was a serious publicity nightmare for his dad’s company.
If you’re looking for real closure there, though, in an awesome twist of karmic payback, Ian tried to spike someone’s drink again, but managed to drink the that drink himself. He subsequently drove his car into the back of a police car, and even daddy’s money didn’t save his pampered ass from some jail time after that one.
Douchebag.
So, the guys dropped the ball, but the girls’ team slayed it. I took home a few medals, including a new state record for the four-hundred meter freestyle. Sasha got first place for the fifteen-hundred meter, and Brynn took home a first place for the four-by-one-hundred relay. And the day after regionals, right on schedule, Camden put in his notice, and regretfully told Principle Kane and the school board that he’d be leaving to train for Team USA. Of course, being such an amazing coach and having taken Winchester to regionals and all, they practically begged him to stay in Southworth and have full use of the facilities for training.
Needless to say, he accepted.
Mom did take the position at NYU, which was actually pretty bittersweet. It’s a fantastic job, and really much more of what she wanted to be doing anyways, so I was happy for her, but also sad. After all, it’d been just the two of us for so long.
“Think of it as practice,” she’d said as I helped her pack. “For you going to college.”
Then she’d laughed and made a joke about this being all backwards, me helping her pack for college and not the other way around before making a really awkward comment about me making sure I used protection.
Ew.
I moved into the dorms—a single room, thank you very much—but it didn’t take me long to basically be living at Camden’s. See, I ended up living right down the hall from Zara Bateman, Winchester’s resident bad-ass musician chick who happened to be in this actually signed band with a couple of the guys on the football team. We ended up becoming pretty close friends, and she soon clued me in to this whole secret staircase thing hidden behind the wall of a maintenance closet on our floor that would basically let you sneak out any time.
That was basically giving me the keys to the kingdom, and after that, I slept in my own dorm room maybe once a month. And the rest of the time, I was with Camden.
And after everything, we managed to leave Winchester without a scandal. Okay, eventually, Sasha and and Brynn found out. By which I mean, there’s a small chance I eventually told them. But, besides Sasha squealing a lot, they both played it totally cool. Besides, Brynn eventually had her own little—or not so little—scandal to deal with. I mean, I may have been sleeping with my coach, but she was…
Well, I’ll leave that particularly juicy little bit for another time.
But that was all a year ago. Now?
Well, now we’re in Miami, training.
Spoiler alert, Camden made it onto Team USA. Yeah, most of the other guys trying out were basically my age, but he blew them out of the water. And in a year, he’ll be swimming for the gold.
Actually, let me rephrase that: we’ll be swimming for the gold.
…Yeah, I, uh, made the team too. Surprise.
It was Camden who got me to sign up for a tryout. I mean, I knew I was a really good swimmer, but he was the one who saw it as more than that.
“Remember that time you almost broke a world record at a high school pool in a bikini?”
“Yeah, but I had pretty good motivation.”
He’d chuckled and pulled me close, and told me if I made the team, he’d make sure to motivate me in the same way, every night.
…He’s a very good motivator.
Cornell was happy to defer my enrollment—after all, having an Olympian at their school and swimming on the team, medal or not, is huge. And honestly, I know there are a lot of pro athletes out there who say “oh it’s not about winning, it’s about playing” but then in secret it really is all about winning. But for me, I’m just here for the ride. After all, I already won with Camden.
And anyways, tonight isn’t about swimming. Tonight, we’ve actually got the night off, which is why we planned this weekend for my mom to come down and visit. Camden’s taking us all out to this awesome new Cuban spot, and I’m honestly dying to catch up with my mom.
Oh, and show her the ring in person, of course.
…I guess you could say I really did already get a gold.
In the end—win or lose—it’s all about fighting for what you want. When you jump in, you either sink, or you decide you’re going to try, and you swim. And if you really want it, you swim your ass off, and you don’t stop until you get there. And somehow in the water, I found him, and he found me.
And that’s all we need.
* * *
The End.
Sneak Peek - Barely
Looking for more Winchester Academy? I’ve got you covered! Scroll on for a sneak peek of Barely, book seven in this series.
Off limits, forbidden, twenty years my junior…
And in way over her head.
She needs saving. I need to keep away.
But one taste of those sweet, innocent, barely legal lips, and I’ll fight like hell to keep her safe.
There are those that want to take her from me. Those that want to hurt her.
…They’re going to have to come through me first.
* * *
Chapter 1
Camden
* * *
She looks like heaven and moves like sin. Soft, sultry music pulses like a lover’s touch over the club’s sound system, and under the sensual blue and pink lights, and through a fog of fake smoke, her hips sway as her hands slide up to grip the pole tightly.
And there’s something about her that has all of my attention.
Yes, you could assume it’s that she’s wearing next to nothing—just this sky-blue, lacy, basically see-through bra and thong panties that hug every single part of her perfectly sculpted body like they were painted on. You could say it’s that she’s grinding her hips, and sliding her hands over her body in a way that’s designed to get a guy like me hard.
But it’s…it’s hard to explain, but it’s more than that.
For one, she’s no pro, that’s pretty easy to see. In fact, I’d almost say she looks nervous, even though there’s not really a ton of people in here tonight, and even though she’s wearing a black masquerade mask that totally obscures who she is. Her moves aren’t practiced, either. It’s like she just got done watching a how-to video of “dancing sexy”, and this is her first time trying to remember how to do it.
Secondly, strip clubs are not my scene. Not by a fucking mile. Maybe it’s that I just see through the bullshit that they are? There are guys who walk into a strip club and swallow that fantasy pill whole. The girl is “totally into them”, and she “totally just gave them her real name. No, really, bro.”
You know the type. But me? Nah, I’m not that type. I see through the illusion. Or maybe it’s just that a woman hasn’t turned my head—stripper or otherwise—in years.
Several, several years.
But in any case, with both of the reasons there, here I am just fucking staring at her. Mesmerized, hooked. Like the animal inside of me that I’ve kept chained up finally has the scent of prey hitting its nostrils for the first time in far too long. And now it’s fucking starving.
There’s the taste of overpriced mid-level whiskey on my tongue, the faint scent of cigar smoke wafting through the air. And around me, Dan and the rest of my “buddies” are cavorting around, knocking back shots, cat-calling girls, and generally doing exactly what you’d expect of bachelor pa
rty of thirty-to-forty-year-old guys to doing in a strip club.
But not me. I just watch, my pulse thumping in my neck and my muscles clenching and unclenching as my eyes follow her every move.
“Bro!”
I’m startled from my thoughts by two sweaty palms slapping my shoulders from behind. And that’s saying something, because I never startle. I glance over my shoulder at the man of the hour, Dan, my old college roommate from what feels like a lifetime ago. A life before war. Before I met death and chaos. A life before the Special Forces.
My old life.
“Hey, man,” I force a smile. “Having a good time?”
“I’m having a fucking awesome time, man!”
Hey, it’s not my jam, but to each his own, I suppose.
“Great, buddy. Listen, thanks for the invite. I know it’s been a wh—”
“Bro, have you checked out the tits on that Asian chick over there?”
I’ve changed a lot in twenty years. Dan, has not.
“Must have missed that,” I growl, rolling my eyes as I look away and take another sip of the twenty-dollar pour of Maker’s Mark in my glass.
Dan chuckles. “Guess you were distracted.”
“Hmm?”
He grins and nods at the stage I’ve been staring at, and there she is, still dancing. Still utterly captivating me.
“Dude, she is so fuckable.”
My jaw clenches tight. Very, very tight. About as tight as my fist on the glass of whiskey, which feels like it might shatter in a second. I understand the place I’m in. And I understand what her job is. But the idea of anyone—of any man at all—looking at her like that, or thinking of her like that, has my blood boiling.
“Take it easy,” I growl. Instead. Instead of smashing my glass over his head or throwing him across the room.
Dan just laughs. “Hey, it’s cool man, it’s cool. You saw her first, huh?”
He grins, and in the spirit of where I am, and allowing that Dan is wasted, and further allowing that in all likelihood, the wedding next month will be the last time I ever see Dan, I force a smile back.