Under Parr

by Blair Babylon

  God, she was going to die, though.

  His hand moved down her back, and with his other hand still pulsing between her legs, he popped the hooks on her strapless bra.

  Yeah, that was the difference between having sex with a college guy and a grown-ass man. Jericho knew what he was doing. He hadn’t fumbled with her bra at all.

  Or her body. His measured, careful movements were driving her crazy.

  And then he leaned over her again, kissing the backs of her shoulders and the back of her neck over her spine. His warm breath feathered over her neck and flowed over her throat. “Tell me you want this.”

  If she would’ve tried to speak, her voice might have cracked, so she nodded.

  His thumb slid from her clit and rested at her entrance between her legs.

  Her attention condensed to that tender opening his thumb rested against as he slowly pressed inside. His fingers held the front of her, and he pulsed his hand that way, gently squeezing her clit inside of her.

  Every press sent her farther into a spiral, but he was moving so slowly and gently that she wasn’t going over the edge. Sweat rolled beside her squeezed-shut eye and over her cheekbone because her body was burning from the inside.

  And Jesus, Lord, that was just his thumb.

  She whimpered a helpless sound with his every move.

  “Good,” Jericho whispered near her ear.

  Tiffany pried her eyes open and glanced to the side, her head swimming from the way he was keeping her just on the edge of orgasm.

  Jericho had braced himself on one forearm and was watching her, hunger evident in his sharp glance as he looked from her eyes to her lips.

  His hand gently pulsed within her again, squeezing another wave of tension up her body.

  He asked her, “Do you want more?”

  “Yes,” Tiffany gasped, and yes, she did. She didn’t even know what he was offering. She just knew she wanted more. Her hands gathered handfuls of the sheet under her palms because she wanted to fly higher, hit it longer, more.

  Jericho pulled his hand away.

  Dammit, dammit, dammit!

  He growled, “Roll over,” and she writhed on the bed, her knee slipping on the yellow silk of her dress as she flipped herself.

  As she flopped on the sheets, Jericho bounced off the bed, shoved his trousers down his legs, and kicked them off. He yanked the drawer out of the nightstand where it crashed to the floor, scrambled after the packets spilling across the floor, and scooted across the sheets to lie beside her like he was sliding into home plate while he ripped a condom packet open with his teeth and slapped it on.

  Tiffany reached toward him as he rolled on top of her, his weight pinning her to the soft mattress as he wrestled her thighs apart with his knees.

  Not that Jericho had to wrestle her. They were on the same team and hell-bent on achieving the same goal. She flipped her legs up and grabbed him around his hips.

  “You’re amazing,” Jericho whispered, his voice catching in his throat. He grinned and twitched his head, flipping his messy hair off his forehead as he pressed the thick, pale plum head of his erection against her center, slipping slickly on her skin.

  Damn, no wonder that man went for the oversized shafts and clubheads when he was buying golf clubs if he was swinging wood like that every day. His clubs had a lot to live up to.

  But she was acutely aware that she was lying on her back with her hair squashed under her skull.

  Jericho was a big guy, and every golfer knows that the force of hitting a golf ball is mass multiplied by the acceleration of the golf club. Jericho was a lot of mass lying on top of her. Church started at eight-thirty the next morning, and Tiffany had a full day of family obligations and then a packed-solid week ahead of her. “Let me get on top, ‘kay?”

  Jericho ducked his shoulder, rolling over and bringing her with him so that she ended up above him, straddling his body. “Anything you want.”

  “Really?” she asked, eyeing him. He seemed more like a take-charge kind of guy.

  His hands clamped around her hips, and his smile turned mischievous as he eased her backward, still entirely in control even though he was on his back. “Sure.”

  Yeah, that’s what she’d thought.

  He moved slowly, settling her back on his erection, the pressure both delicious and unbearable. As the length of him squeezed inside her, she ducked her head, and her forehead pressed against his burly shoulder.

  He asked, “You okay?”

  Tiffany nodded. She was better than okay—she was almost jumping out of her skin because she wanted to take him in faster—but there was a reason he was easing into her like that. Her skin inside was stretching to its limit as he filled her. Each time he pulled her up a little before stroking farther inside her, she inhaled hard like he’d been cramming it up against her lungs.

  Jericho smiled, his lips parted as if in wonder, and he looked in her eyes as he pressed her hips down and she took the last part of himself into her.

  Tiffany gasped as her hips nestled onto his, the accelerating pressure finally over. He stayed still for a few minutes, watching her as she opened and relaxed around his hard length. He was still tight against all the best nerve endings inside her body and where his hips pressed against her clit, but she could breathe.

  Jericho sighed and squeezed his eyes closed, his muscled chest pumping as he breathed, and then he began to move her hips on him.

  He rocked his hips under hers, grinding against her clit and opening, and his muscular back arched with each deep stroke.

  Earlier, when he’d pulled away to take his pants off, Tiffany’s body had unwound, and then his slow invasion had given her time to recoup her senses.

  But the way he moved—those slow undulations that ended with a hard grind against her body, the way his hips rocked into hers—spiraled her into a coil of need within seconds.

  And then he slowed, holding her still on him so she was suspended, not finishing, until she drifted downward and away from her climax.

  But then just as Tiffany sighed, her body relaxing, he clutched her hips and powered up into her again, his hard body rubbing her inside and on her clit until the friction was going to drive her insane.

  By the third time, she was squirming above him, begging him to keep going, begging him to let her come. She was bracing herself with her arms on his broad shoulders, pushing herself backward for every stroke he allowed her to have.

  When she thought she would die and her pleading reached a high pitch, Jericho curled up to sitting and grabbed her around her waist and shoulders. He pinned her against his chest, holding her arms to her sides with his muscular arms, and pumped up into her.

  He moved slower, deeper, his body digging into Tiffany’s as she tightened, clamping down on him which increased the friction, her body concentrating as his erection rubbed her within and the rough hair on his chest abraded her stomach and nipples. After a few wild strokes, a wave of ecstasy blasted through her.

  The rush billowed from her sex to her scalp, roiling her soul inside her body and tossing her into a storm, and she drowned.

  And then she breathed.

  Light suffused through the depths to Tiffany’s eyes, and the room drifted back into focus.

  Jericho clutched her in his arms, and he was gasping as hard as she was. His still-smooth cheek pressed hers, and he was holding the other side of her face with his other hand.

  She was thoroughly captured, and she didn’t want to move.

  Jericho turned his head, and he kissed her jaw and then her lips, his breath a whisper on hers.

  “Stay,” he said.

  Tiffany nodded, letting her forehead fall to his shoulder. Calling a rideshare was possible if she wanted to go home, but she didn’t want to.

  He carried her to the bathroom, waited while she wrapped her hair in a towel, and then washed her body in the small, glassed-in shower stall. “This would be easier in my bathroom at home. I had an XL-sized shower installed a
few years ago because I kept bruising my elbows on the tile when I turned around,” he chuckled as he soaped her arms and legs.

  Yeah, she bet that wasn’t the only thing that had been slapping the sides of his shower stall when he turned around. Holy cow, not looking at it was difficult because every time he swiveled to grab the soap, it swung and thwacked his thigh. He must be used to that, but the constant bonking looked like it should hurt.

  Then again, it was probably pretty tough after a few years of monthly new girlfriends.

  Afterward, Jericho carried her back to the bed, even though she was giggling at how much he was carrying her around by this point. She grabbed a nightshirt and a silk scarf for her hair out of her backpack to sleep in, and he practically tucked her into bed and then tossed his arm over her before he turned out the light.

  Was that it? Didn’t they have to talk about boundaries or how this was or wasn’t going to be a repeat thing? Didn’t they need to have some kind of a postmortem?

  Had he just assumed that Tiffany was Miss May, and that was the end of it?

  And was he this possessive with the other monthly misses, washing them like that and then wanting to cuddle while they slept?

  Because if this was par for the course for Jericho, Tiffany needed to know that. If she thought how snuggly and possessive he was acting meant something, she might be in for a rude awakening on May thirty-first if he was just going to move on and hold try-out rounds for Miss June.

  “It seemed like you were looking at me a lot while we were in bed,” she said to him. “Like you were looking at weirdo faces I was making or something.”

  “It was our first time,” Jericho whispered in the dark. “I didn’t want to miss a thing.”

  “Oh, you mean you were watching to see if you were too much for me. Well, you weren’t. I was fine. I’m always fine.”

  He chuckled in the dark and cuddled her closer to him in the sheets. “I meant I wanted to remember.”

  Tiffany could not figure out what she was missing, but there must be some reason that his girlfriends didn’t last more than a month.

  She was kind of nervous about what it was.

  Worth Repairing

  Jericho

  Jericho ordered breakfast from room service the next morning.

  Tiffany hid in his bedroom while breakfast was delivered even though a different girl than the one from the previous night pushed the cart into his hotel suite. Tiff said that somebody would tell Asia they’d seen Tiffany in his room, and she seemed confident that everybody in Newcastle would know her on sight. It was a small town.

  They continued putting up a false front at the club, acting excruciatingly professional when anyone else was around, their demeanor even a little cool toward each other.

  Luckily, because Tiffany was the assistant golf pro, she had ample reason to visit the office that Jericho had commandeered on the second floor of the clubhouse. Every time she walked into his office holding a sheaf of papers or announcing that a file had been uploaded into his cloud storage, he insisted she come inside his office to take a look at it, and she needed to shut the door behind her.

  Sometimes, it was long, languorous kisses while she straddled him in his office chair.

  Other times, he shoved her up against the wall and took her with her legs around his waist and his hand over her mouth, lest the Lady Captain hear them from her office just a few yards down the hall.

  One time, he bent her over his desk and took her from behind, and then he couldn’t concentrate while he was sitting at his desk the rest of the day, believing that the green desk blotter was still warm from her soft tits and stomach where she’d lain.

  Between Tiffany’s tight schedule and her tight body, Jericho forgot to ask how her appointment with his orthopedic specialist had gone. He’d called and booked the appointment for her because it was easier when a former patient paved the way.

  They were standing in the back of the bag room with the door locked one evening, their clothes scattered on the floor around them. The fecund smell of grass clippings turning to humus filled the dim space between the bags.

  Jericho was tucking his shirt back into his pants while Tiffany was hooking her bra. He asked, “What did my orthopedic surgeon say about your knee?”

  Tiffany turned her head away from him and looked at something on the far wall, a subtle movement he was associating with her not wanting to talk about something. “He said there’s nothing he can do.”

  “Nothing he can do? When he was fixing my shoulder, he said that orthopedics is like carpentry more than medicine. It’s just sawing bones and nailing ligaments back together. Knees can’t be that different than shoulders.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess he’s not up to doing my knee.”

  Jericho buckled his belt. “He’s one of the best surgeons in Connecticut. There’s really nothing beyond him, but maybe he’s better at shoulders than legs. I’ll find you somebody else.”

  “You don’t need to—”

  “I’ll just ask around. My friends always seem to be having some sort of work done, and some of it’s not even plastic surgery.”

  Querying various group chats and private spaces on the internet took Jericho a week, but he found a guy who seemed to be more in line with what Tiffany needed.

  They were back at the Newcastle Inn and Spa, hiding from Tiffany’s cousin again while they ordered room service for breakfast, when Jericho told Tiffany that she had an appointment the next afternoon at Yale Medical Center, and he would drive her over.

  She frowned at him from where she was sitting up in bed and eating oatmeal with five different kinds of berries on top. “I can drive myself to New Haven. It’s less than two hours away.”

  “I’ve just never heard an orthopedist say that they can’t fix something. I’m not a medical doctor, but it seems like it’d be bad for business if the word got out that Jones-Becker wasn’t competent at doing knees.”

  At Dr. Jamal Cooper’s office the next day, Jericho was amusing himself wandering around looking at the poster-sized pictures of sports teams on the walls, most of which had Dr. Cooper squatting in the middle while several star players had their arms around him. Matching black and gold plaques announced that Dr. Jamal Cooper was an official team doctor of the Boston Celtics and the New York Knicks. Other pictures showed Dr. Cooper with baseball players, hockey players, and even a couple of professional golfers.

  Tiffany already had x-rays and MRIs of her leg, so they’d had those scans sent over ahead of time.

  Jericho walked into the exam room behind Tiffany without asking because it seemed like a good idea to have an assertive male there if she needed some backup.

  Dr. Cooper bent from where he sat in his office chair, crouching in front of Tiffany and manipulating her knee to examine her mobility and where movement started to hurt her. The orthopedic surgeon was a tall, half-bald man with the burly physique and wide skull of a former football player, which he confirmed when he and Tiffany got to talking about college sports at HBCUs. When Tiffany said that she’d received a golf scholarship to Tennessee State, Dr. Cooper had grinned and told them that he’d had a football scholarship to Howard University, where he’d been a linebacker.

  As Dr. Cooper rotated and bent her leg, he asked Tiffany if this or that movement hurt her dozens of times, and Jericho was about ready to slap the doctor away from her because it seemed like everything hurt her. Jericho didn’t like that.

  Finally, Dr. Cooper released her leg and scooted back in his wheeled chair to resume his place at the computer. “You have a partial but severe rupture of the patellar tendon directly below your kneecap. Your knee should have been repaired within a week of the injury, but I believe I can repair it to be, at a minimum, mostly functional, with the debriding technique I developed to reduce the scar tissue on the ruptured tendon. It’s a fairly straightforward case. You could make a complete recovery suitable to play professional sports, but much of the result depends on your commitment to phy
sical therapy afterward.”

  “Oh, I will,” Tiffany said, nodding. “I can do as much PT as you can throw at me.”

  He laughed. “I’ll hold you to that. Considering your job, you’ll probably need to take six weeks off for recovery. If you work hard on your PT, you might be able to shave it down to a month.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t take off that kind of time,” she said.

  Jericho butted in. “The blue-chip insurance program includes short-term disability and covers up to twelve weeks of salary. You can.” See? Jericho was good backup.

  Tiffany bit her lower lip and still looked worried.

  Dr. Cooper said, “I had a cancellation on my surgical schedule next week. If you want it, it’s yours.”

  Tiffany dithered, “That soon? Oh, I couldn’t. I have lessons scheduled—”

  “She’ll take it,” Jericho said.

  Tiffany glared at him. “But I have this asshole boss who won’t let me get a word in edgewise.”

  Jericho snarled, “I’ll crack his head open.”

  Dr. Cooper was watching both of them with wide, concerned eyes until Tiffany couldn’t keep a straight face and started laughing, which cracked Jericho up, too.

  As they were leaving, Jericho asked Dr. Cooper, “Is the surgery routine?”

  “Well, no surgery is routine,” he said. “But my scar-tissue reduction technique is certainly not experimental. I’ve done hundreds of them with excellent outcomes. If Tiger Woods had come to me, I could have had that leg of his back to a hundred percent within three months.”

  Jericho lowered his voice. “No, I mean, could her leg have been fixed without surgery?”

  Dr. Cooper frowned at him and tilted his head. “She already had a splint and immobilized it for six weeks right after it happened, according to what she told me. I don’t know why they even tried that. A tear of that magnitude will never heal with mere immobilization. Ruptures like that always require surgery. I’m surprised she’s able to walk on it at all, to tell you the truth. I consider a tear like that disabling. There was no medical reason not to schedule surgery to repair it immediately.”