by Kata Čuić
If he can afford a fat rock for Bethany’s finger while he’s getting his master’s degree, then I can surely afford dinner for two on my internship salary. Besides, coming here means he’s on my turf. Apparently, he needs proof that I’m doing well.
“Hey, Julian!”
My favorite server eyes the man sitting across from me with suspicion. “Miss Russo. How are you this evening?”
I’m starting to feel like no one is on my side tonight. Gone is the friendly banter I’ve shared with Julian in the past. Maybe I was wrong about him not treating Mike differently.
“I’m well, thank you for asking. Can I get a vodka martini with extra olives to start?”
He nods then waits on Ben’s order.
“A sparkling water, please and thank you.”
Julian barely raises an eyebrow at our decidedly different choices before turning toward the bar.
“So.” Ben sighs then closes his menu. “Tell me what’s been going on with you.”
“Nothing much.” I relax into the cushy leather chair. “Working.”
He nods then takes a prim sip of his flat water. “Owen told me. I thought your internship was only for a year? What happened to getting your master’s?”
I wasn’t going to brag, but if he insists… “I did so well the first season that the team offered me a second year and a scholarship if I agreed to their terms.”
He doesn’t look impressed. “Owen told me about that, too. Your brothers are concerned about the team’s, um, terms.”
I snort, much in the same way I did when my brothers threatened to take Mike out to the parking lot to teach him a lesson on gentlemanly behavior. As if all of them combined could even land a single punch on a guy packing that much muscle. “Their concerns have been noted and duly dismissed. You’re all caught up on what’s going on with me. Tell me about you now. How’s grad school? How’s Bethany?”
His shoulders fall, and he at least has the decency to appear contrite. “I figured you’d met when I saw you on the sidewalk outside our apartment building.”
I nod and smile at Julian as he delivers our drinks. Perfect timing, as usual.
“May we have a few more moments?” Ben returns his full attention to me, his dismissal of our server assumed. He reaches across the table to grasp my hand in his own.
Any spark that was between us has well and truly been snuffed out. I don’t feel anything except discomfort when he swipes his thumb along my skin.
“I’m sorry you found out that way. I should have at least called and told you about Bethany, but…I didn’t want to hurt you unnecessarily. Surely, you’ve moved on as well. And not in the way the media would have everyone believe.”
I squeeze his hand then pull free of his grasp. “Apology accepted. I’m truly happy for you both. She’s a lovely woman.”
Ben sighs and fiddles with the napkin in his lap, not quite meeting my gaze. “She is. Unfortunately, she broke off our engagement. Said she thought we were moving too fast.”
“I’m so sorry.” Not entirely surprised though. She blatantly asked me if she should doubt the speed at which their relationship had progressed. I guess my reassurances weren’t enough. “I hope me showing up at your door didn’t cause her to question things between you two.”
“It did exactly that.” He raises his deep blue gaze to mine. “She accused me of using her to get over you.” He takes a deep breath. “She’s not wrong.”
A shameful laugh threatens to spill from my lips, but luckily for me, Julian reappears to take our orders.
Long after he’s left for the kitchen, we stare at each other across the table in strained silence.
Ben clears his throat. “It’s true that Owen called and asked me to check up on you, but that’s not why I’m really here.”
I swirl the martini in my glass, chew on an olive, and wait for him to get on with it.
Sensing I’m not waiting with bated breath, he continues with an outstretched open palm in the middle of the table. “Could you find it in your heart to give me another chance, Vittoria? I was stupid to throw away what we spent years building together. I shouldn’t have jumped ship at the first sign of hardship.”
I chew another olive and consider my options.
Before I can even form a coherent response, Mike practically jogs up to our table.
He’s still wearing the required suit for team travel, and he smells like stale, recycled plane air when he bends down to place a tender kiss at the corner of my mouth. He murmurs, “Hey, babe. Missed you.”
“Ben Sharp.” I point my sadly empty toothpick across the table then at Mike, who pulls over a chair from a nearby table. “Mike Mitchell.”
Ben rises from his seat and extends a hand to Mike. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise.” Mike accepts the handshake gracefully then sits down beside me.
I stare at him in silence.
He finally gestures for me to glance under the table, where he’s holding his cell phone up for me to see the screen. A picture of Ben holding my hand singes my eyeballs, followed by several texts.
Julian: WTF? Who’s the bro making a move on your woman?
Julian: I’m delaying their dinners, but there’s only so much I can do.
Julian: You better get here! He’s going in for the kill!
The laugh I’ve been keeping locked away in the innermost recesses of my chest breaks free.
“Something you want to share with everyone?” Ben looks like a justifiable combination of fury, embarrassment, and regret.
“No, no.” I force myself to calm down. “Just a funny meme. It’s kind of our thing.”
The only emotion left on Ben’s face is disappointment. “It’s true, then? You’re really together?”
Mike’s eyebrows pop into the shock of hair falling over his forehead before he whips his gaze to me, silently asking, Is this guy for real?
I nod.
“Please, let me punch him,” Mike begs on a muttered whisper.
Ben looks horrified that it might actually happen. He scoots his chair back from the table. Just a little. “I apologize. I didn’t know. Her brother told me it was all for show, so I thought I could ask for a second chance. She’s clearly all yours. I didn’t mean any harm.”
“You didn’t mean any harm?” Mike narrows his eyes at the suddenly pale-faced man on the opposite side of the table.
I gesture with my empty glass to Julian, who’s watching the circus from a safe distance at the bar. If he’s going to cause shit shows, the least he can do is refill my drink. He’d also better delete those photos before they end up on the internet to ruin everything Mike and I have been working to build.
“No bad publicity, Mitchell,” I remind him.
He’s already leaning over the table, but the expression on his face isn’t menacing at all. His gaze on Ben is full of pity. “Even if she wasn’t mine, you sure as hell don’t deserve her.”
For some reason, those words are enough to make Ben regrow his spine. He scoffs. “And you do?”
Mike shakes his head slowly. “You are missing the point entirely, my man. Tori isn’t a toy to be put on a shelf when you get tired of her, only to play with her again when you’re feeling it. If you really wanted her back, you sure as shit didn’t prove it just now by caving to the competition.”
“You’re not really competition,” Ben hedges.
Mike straightens in his seat before turning his attention to me. “What do you want to do, Peaches?”
“Can we get out of here?” I’m beyond done with this entire situation. This feels more and more like a pissing contest for bragging rights instead of any kind of prize.
“Julian!” Mike calls. “We’ll take our dinners to go, please.”
Ben rises when we do and has the actual nerve to grab my elbow. “What are you doing, Tori? You’re too smart to sleep your way to the top. This is a bad idea, and you know it.”
I do know it, but at least I’m making
my own decisions for a change.
Mike crosses his considerably large arms over his chest. “I know if you don’t take your hand off her, I’m not going to ask permission a second time to punch you.”
I shake off Ben’s grip and address Mike. “Let’s go home.”
I walk away with my head held high, my arm through Mike’s elbow. Ben is my past. My future is just beginning.
By the time we’re lying face to face on our respective sides of his bed, Mike’s eyes are half-lidded. “Did I overstep instead of supporting again?”
That gets a smile out of me. “You didn’t. Thank you. Even though I didn’t need rescuing, it means a lot that you came straight from the airport to support me. And after such a close game, too.”
The moment I place my hand on his shoulder to show my earnest gratitude, he winces. I pull away.
He catches my hand in his own and kisses my palm before flattening it against a spot on his chest that must not be as sore.
“I’m a little sad that we’re just going to sleep tonight,” I confess, hoping to make him laugh after the disappointment of a loss. “Seems a shame to bring me here and not use me for your pleasure.”
“Who says that’s not what I’m doing?”
I give him a skeptical raised eyebrow, but his eyes are already closed, his breathing evening out.
“Good night, babe,” he mumbles.
I gently rub my fingertips against his warm, bare skin.
He hums in response, a small smile etched on his face even as sleep pulls him under.
“Good night, teddy bear,” I whisper.
The more I think about it, the more it’s a perfect nickname. He’ll never be my unicorn, not when our goals are so different. That doesn’t mean he’s not warm, comforting, and all softie under his big muscles. I’d never tell him that out loud when he’s awake though.
The sensation of her hand caressing my face wakes me. My body is sore but warm beneath the blankets. She’s learned not to touch me much after a rough game, but her feet are entangled with mine. Even if I’m not up to giving her more proof that multiple orgasms aren’t a myth, I still like some part of me to be touching some part of her while we sleep.
Maybe to prove to myself she’s not a dream.
“Good morning,” I rasp.
She smiles in return. It looks like she just woke up, too.
Her red hair is a mess of tangles, but the sunlight coming in through a crack in the curtains catches on the strands, making them seem to glow. Her eyes aren’t quite alert yet—not like when she’s pecking away at her phone, coming up with the latest and greatest content for my social media feeds. There are pillow lines on her chest, running down her arm. That milky white skin can’t hide a thing. Especially not the red patches I leave behind on her neck, breasts, and between her legs if I haven’t just shaved. But it’s her fingertips—light as a feather as they dance across my face—that are really distracting me this morning.
“What are you doing?”
I know what I’d like to be doing. My dick is already hard. If she keeps it up, I might be late getting to the team facilities for our traditional post-loss ass chewing from the coaches later this morning.
“Thinking,” she admits on a murmur.
That single word brings my dick down a few notches. Being stuck in your own head never leads to anything good. I would know.
“About last night? Your dinner with Ben?”
She shakes her head against the pillow. “Wondering why you still have all your teeth.”
Just to make sure I’m not hallucinating this conversation, I run my tongue across my teeth. Yep. Still all there.
“Ahhh, you’re thinking of hockey players. They lose teeth a lot. Football players, not so much.”
“Hmm.” Her fingers slide over my lips. “Why is that?”
“Mouthguards and different types of helmets, mostly.”
“Interesting. What are the most common injuries for football players, then?”
Wow. Now I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of distraction techniques. Or maybe I just haven’t been this invested about what’s really going through someone else’s mind in a long time.
That makes me feel even shittier.
“We can talk about it, you know. We might be in bed together, but we’re friends, too.”
Her husky chuckle brings my dick back to full mast. “I suppose I have myself to thank for that.”
“That’s true,” I admit. “If you hadn’t said you wanted more, I never would have made the first move.”
The lips I haven’t kissed yet today pull down in a frown. “I meant the part about teaching you that friends talk to each other and trust each other.”
“So, trust me. Talk to me.” I have never wanted to have an honest conversation so much in my goddamn life. If she’s considering her second chance with the guy she always imagined marrying, then I sure as shit want to know about it.
“Like you talk to me?” She raises an eyebrow. “How did Evie’s surgery go? I overhear your conversations with her and Rob, but you never say a word about them to me. I learn more about their lives from SportsCenter clips than I do from you—the guy who’s supposedly a very close friend of theirs. You never talk about or to Alex when I’m around. For all I know, you two still haven’t buried the hatchet about your fight last season.”
My defenses go on red alert, and my dick goes into lockdown mode. “I wasn’t aware you broke your golden rule to be in my bed just to get closer to my friends.”
She doesn’t try to hide the obvious hurt in her expression as she pulls her hand away, curling it into her chest like a barrier between us. “I wasn’t aware you had suspicions about the reasons why I’m in your bed.”
“I didn’t until just now.”
She rolls away from me then sits up at the edge of the bed, her bare back a crisscross of angry looking lines from my sheets. “If knowing my ulterior motives will make you trust me again, I’m only asking because I don’t have any friends left. They all faded away because I spent so much of my time with Ben. I understand why it’s going to take you a long time to trust your Wolves teammates, but I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you with people you already consider friends because you spend your precious free time with me.”
That doesn’t make me feel better at all. “What about your co-workers in the marketing department?”
She laughs, but it’s not the kind that goes straight to my dick. “They view me as the enemy. I’m the lowly intern who stole the kind of experimental assignment they’d be all too willing to bet their much higher salaries on. Not to mention, I’m a good decade younger than most of them. We have nothing in common outside of work.”
That sounds…lonely.
“So, you really are considering Ben’s offer.”
“No.” The word lands like a grenade between us.
She rises from the mattress then immediately pulls the first shirt she finds on the floor over her head. She’s obviously trying to make a point, so it’s one of her shirts instead of one of mine. The fitted kind that doesn’t nearly cover her bare ass even though I know damn well she’s trying to hide herself from me. Again, to make a point.
This morning is starting off on the wrong foot, riding on the wave of a shitty last night, clinging to the coattails of an even shittier loss on Sunday. I dig in to the misery because…old habits die hard, I guess. “I get it. It makes sense. He’s familiar, easy. You could have a life outside of work again. You flat-out told me at Jeremy and Alyssa’s wedding that you always imagined marrying him, popping out two-point-five kids, adopting a puppy, and living out the American dream. Go for it.”
She rounds on me, her face red, her eyebrows practically up to her hairline. “Oh, since you’re giving me your blessing, I’ll just get right on that.”
She storms out of the bedroom, still naked from the waist down.
Since this is my house, and I have nothing to hide—fuck, I’m a shitty
liar even to myself—I follow. Completely naked.
I find her in the kitchen, popping a K-cup into the coffee maker she brought from her apartment when she basically moved in here without either of us ever having a conversation about it.
“You’re forgetting one very important thing. You can’t go back to him. You wouldn’t do anything to create bad press for me or to jeopardize your scholarship.”
Her shoulders shake with silent laughter, but she doesn’t turn around. “Oh, Mr. Mitchell. I can promise you that if I dumped you and went back to Ben, you would gain so much sympathy from your followers. I’d be the villain, and there would be women lining up to comfort you. That might actually be one of the most brilliant marketing ploys I’ve ever heard. We absolutely should go for it.”
Fuck that. “You can’t call me Mr. Mitchell when you’re standing in my kitchen without any panties on!”
She glances at me over her shoulder, a single eyebrow raised. Then, she slaps her own bare ass hard enough to leave a handprint behind.
It’s red, and I’m already mad as a bull. I rush her, spinning her to face me before I hoist her up onto the edge of the countertop to get us at eye-level. Cock to pussy level, but whatever. “Call me Mr. Mitchell one more time. I dare you.”
“Do it, Mr. Mitchell,” she fires back, her eyes sharp, her cheeks flaming. “I dare you.”
“Not trying to trap me into anything, huh?” I practically spit the words into her mouth. “I don’t have a condom on.”
“I’m still on the pill.” Tori digs her nails into my shoulders, not trying in the least to be careful where she can see obvious bruises from Sunday’s game. She wraps her legs around my waist, pulling me closer. “So, no. Your move, big boy.”
If she thinks she’s going to call my bluff, then I’ve got news for her. I shove into her in one hard push. Her pussy is tighter than it’s ever been, strangling my dick past the point of reason.
I fuck her. Hard. Right on the kitchen counter.
She pierces my skin. Her grunts echo off the cabinets in time with my pounding thrusts. Somewhere in the back of my mind—cutting through the pure bliss slicing down my spine—I’m aware I’m bareback in a woman for the first time in my twenty-four years, but that’s not enough to make me slow down and savor the moment.