by Natalie Wrye
I take a step closer, facing him full-on for the first time all night. “What is it you want me to do?”
He blinks. “I want you to make a deal with me.” He takes a step closer, his blue eyes flashing. “An arrangement of sorts. Like you said before… A pact.” He doesn’t stop. “I need you to help me be a better man…with women.” He finally slows, his feet planting to the floor—grinding to a halt. “For my image, of course. I need to get back on the team. And I’ve got about two weeks to do it before the trade cut-off deadline. So, not a lot of time.”
I can’t breathe as Sawyer inches nearer. I bite my lip. “And in return?”
His blue eyes burn. “Do you want something in return?”
“I did.”
It’s an admission of sorts. And my voice nearly cracks when I say it. “I need you to teach me how to be you.”
He snorts. “Which ‘me’?”
“The you before tonight that actually had sex.”
His bottom lip falls by the smallest fraction. “Seriously?” His body, tall and broad, crowds all the space around me, squeezing out the air. Our chests are almost touching. And I wish they would.
I’m suddenly dying to feel him.
He freezes. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“You want to have sex?”
“Yes.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ill?”
“Sawyer,” I hesitate, my hand flying to my hairline. “This is not a joke. I need someone to show me how to date. I need a dating guru. Someone who has been through the ringer and knows how things are supposed to work.”
His full head of hair tilts, his eyes thinning to slits. “You do realize that I just asked you to help me not to have sex, right?”
“Yes, and I respect that,” I pause over the words, attempting to figure out how best to say this. So I just do. “We don’t actually have to have sex for this to work. I just need someone to run through the motions with me.”
“The motions?”
“Yes. Someone to show me the ropes…or at least how to navigate them. And we wouldn’t have to touch. Or kiss. Or do anything that would constitute us being more than friends. I just need a teacher, that’s all.” I exhale, letting the break shake me. “And I think you would be the perfect one.”
“Let me get this straight,” Sawyer says, shaking his head, seeming to need the space to clear it. “You want me to teach you how to be me?”
I take a deep breath, blowing it out just as hard. “Yes.”
“The me that, as you put, ‘winds up with a different woman every night’?”
I exhale. “Yes.”
“The me that you think is more ‘ape than man’?”
“Yes.”
“The me that’s led a ‘string-less’ sex life?”
“Yes.” I nod, finally noticing the mark of a bruise forming near his shoulder. Absentmindedly, I reach out, brushing my fingertips over the red skin, wincing when I make contact, an electric current running between us that is hot enough to fry neurons. I drop my hand. “I need a guide, for lack of a better word, to help me find that part of me. The part that moves forward. The part that takes chances in the bedroom and out of it. And the part that knows enough to distinguish the difference. Do you think that’s something you can handle?”
“Let me get this straight. You need me to be your sex coach?”
“Correction: Dating coach.”
“And this involves showing you how to have sex?”
“Without actually having it, of course. Think guide, not willing participant.”
“With you?”
“I’m starting to sound like a broken record here. But the gist of what I’m saying points to ‘yes.’ So, what do you think?”
The penthouse’s sturdy walls seem to stretch around him. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, if I tried.
His chest is even more mammoth at this angle, looming over me from where I stand. The dark caramel strands of his hair fall down his face, but they do nothing to soften the hard look in his blue eyes as he stands there, one hand in his jeans pocket, the other on his hip.
But before I can comment on it, Sawyer pivots on his bare feet, walking farther into the living room. The moonlit expanse looks different in this light—serene. It makes the man in front of me look the same way, and through the blue-white light shining on his shoulders, his golden brown hair across his collarbone, I have to repeat the same mantra again to keep myself in check.
It’s just sex (or non-sex) between us.
And nothing more.
Maybe it isn’t anything at all. For several seconds, Sawyer is utterly quiet. That is, until he finally turns, a grin starting to make its way to his full lips.
He smiles and says, “Where do I sign up?”
And I smile back, feeling more victorious than ever.
Chapter 10
SAWYER
Thursday afternoon
Forgetting about Naomi and our agreement the next day at the gym is impossible.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
The steam isn’t just coming out of the showers when I hit the locker room. It’s coming out of my ears.
And even though the Cougars’ afternoon game is done, even though the team closed out the last inning with a win over one of the league’s toughest teams, Sevin’s old squad—the New York Fever, I can’t help but to be angry as hell that, for once, I wasn’t a part of it.
Suspension sucks.
And I start feeling it. That familiar need to fight or fuck when I get into one of these moods.
I tell myself that I can handle keeping my libido in check, that I can handle two weeks without sex. No problem.
But every time I close my eyes, I hear Naomi’s voice in my living room last night. Every time I take a breath, I imagine her honey-tipped moans as I lavished long, swirling bouts of attention between her thighs.
And then I imagine the anvil that sat inside my chest the moment I realized I couldn’t touch her.
Not like that. Not anymore.
Stripping the last of my sweaty workout gear off my skin, I toss it into my locker, along with all my frustration with Naomi Silva, cinching a towel around my waist just as a hand lands on my shoulder.
I turn.
“Still simmering about the suspension?”
I snort as Sevin grins in my face. “You have no idea. By the way, you almost blew it with the last throw.”
Sevin elbows me. “But I didn’t. O’Connell caught it, giving us our last out. You should be proud.”
I grin.
I am proud.
There’s a reason Sevin had been MVP of the league for the last two years. It’s just that…proud isn’t exactly the word I’d use for myself right now.
Proud was for men who weren’t grounded from dating women. Proud was for men who didn’t fall apart, melt into messes, at the prospect of not putting their dick in someone for two weeks.
But I guess because that’s what my life was these days: A mess.
I wrestle my towel tighter, still mad at the Cougars for doing this to me. Needing to take my anger out on someone.
I shake my head. “Working on it, Sterling.” I use my nickname for the MVP. “Just got a lot on mind.”
“Of course you do. You’re going through a lot. Hey, man, thanks again for watching out for Naomi. She’s not the world’s most prolific drinker. And I’m just happy someone was there to have her back.”
“Have her back? Trust me. If your bartender Chris and I weren’t there, I’m sure she could have stretched those guys out herself. If her fists are anywhere as lethal as her tongue, I’d take a bet on her beating a full-grown man’s ass any day.”
Sevin crosses his arms, still fully clothed in his gym gear. One dark eyebrow stretches sky-high, and I can tell that my longtime friend is looking through me. I rotate back to my locker, shutting him out, hoping he can’t see my thoughts.
It’s not like I’m bre
aking our long-time “Never cross the line with our women” pact. Or am I?
What’s happening (or not happening) with Naomi is nothing like what happened with Finley and Kimmy.
I’m not Sevin’s roommate and Naomi is not Sevin’s girlfriend. And by the time these two weeks are over, we’ll be back to hating each other, or at least back to pretending the other doesn’t exist.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Sevin questions, still staring at me.
I don’t want to ask him if he’s talking about the suspension or why the thought of going back to “normal” with Naomi makes me feel ill. So I do what I’m best at: Pretending I don’t have a clue.
It’s worked with Danica and Dad. Hopefully, it’ll work for my best friend.
I don’t turn. “What on earth do you think I need to talk about, Sevin? I’m not a seventeen-year old girl who needs a milkshake session with a best friend at the local Burger-and-Fries. I’m a grown-ass man.”
“A grown ass man who just got suspended from his baseball team. I know that’s gotta sting more than just a little bit.”
“I’ll have a whiskey and play some Cry Cry Cry on the record player later.”
Sevin frowns. And I realize he has no idea what I’m talking about. After all these years…
I playfully punch his shoulder. “It’s a Johnny Cash song, man. And the next time you make a face like that when I mention his music, I’m sending over his entire catalogue for you to listen to.”
“Excuse me if I don’t want listen to some country-fried, sappy Southern song about some asshole shooting my dog.”
I rotate back. “Johnny Cash is more than just sappy songs and put-down pups, Sterl.”
“I forgot. He’s also the patron saint of funeral clothing, drug addiction and divorce.”
I shove him, laughing. Maybe the first time today. It feels good. “No, the man was a rebel. A guy who walked to the beat of his own drummer, no matter how somber the sound.”
My best friend tilts his head. “Sounds like someone else, I know, these days.”
I run my tongue along my teeth, suppressing a frown. I close my locker, turning. “I know. I need to pull the stick out of my ass and stop being such a wet mop. I’m depressing even me.”
“Seriously, Saw…” My best friend presses. “You could use the break. Once you moved out of my guest bedroom after the renovations were done, I wasn’t sure I trusted you alone in that new penthouse of yours.”
My eyes narrow at his face as I walk towards the showers with him following. “Christ, Sterl. I wasn’t planning on running a brothel out of my damned bedroom.”
“You sure about that?” he jokes over my shoulder. “And to be honest with you: You hadn’t exactly been careful with your, uh, liaisons lately. You’d been more on edge lately. More sloppy. More out-of-sorts.”
My mind goes to Naomi. About how I’d have to learn to control myself around the pushy virgin. Again.
I take Sevin’s words in. “Okay, yes. I’ll admit it: A few things got out of hand. That little romp I had in the locker room after the Bobcats loss could have waited. Not to mention the one after the next night’s win.” I round another corner in the steamy locker room, my eyes scanning over the tiled walls. I run a hand through my hair. “Just never thought the organization would literally suspend me for Sexual Misconduct. Didn’t even know that was a rule. And when they told me, I literally read the entire book on them from cover to cover. Took me all damn night. But they were right. And I wanted to bawl like a baby when I found out.”
Sevin shakes his head as he quickens his pace beside me. “Saw… You’re capable of a hell of a lot more. I’m sure you know that. It’s just your history of ‘playing the field’ with women is coming around to bite you in the ass. It’s happened to all of us. How do you think I found Emily?” He grins. “Trust me: If you would just commit yourself to a little monogamy, you’d find out how goddamned amazing it could be.”
“I’m allergic,” I throw at him, slapping the towel around my waist on a hook on the wall. I dip my head under the shower’s steady stream, letting it beat the circling thoughts in my head back into submission.
Circling thoughts about Naomi. Circling thoughts about what monogamy might look like with a woman like that.
A woman who could take as good as she gave. A woman whose quick tongue rivaled my own.
A woman like that was dangerous.
The spunky brunette was hiding more beneath those squared frame glasses than she cared to admit. Something else—someone else—lay behind those expressive brown eyes.
A glimpse of the “real” Naomi lived behind them. And I was dying for more than a peek.
I close the shower’s stall curtain. But that doesn’t stop Sevin from lecturing me, his deep voice bouncing off the walls.
“Look, I know how impossible the feat might sound now. Trust me: It seemed impossible after Kimmy cheated on me back in college. But everything changed when Emily came into my life…” His voice cracks over his girlfriend’s name. “And then Charlie.”
I hear the wistful joy in his tone as he finishes the sentence—ever the proud dad and boyfriend.
As a man, a friend, Sevin was the best. But as a father? There was no equal.
He’d fit into the role like a second skin when he found out the truth about his fatherhood.
It’s only two hours until he leaves for a quick trip over to New York for our next game against the Fever. And, of course, to see Charlene—aka Charlie, the most precocious nine-year old on the planet. But I can tell he misses her something terrible.
He clears his throat. “Goddammit, I’m turning into a sappy Johnny Cash song.”
“Just belt out a few bars about your dead dog, and you’re halfway there.”
He chuckles. “You joke now. But one of these days, you’re going to feel what’s it like.”
“What what’s like?”
“Love.” He states plainly—no Johnny Cash jokes involved. “Or something close to it.” He pauses, his voice barely audible over the shower stream. He speaks matter-of-factly. “You’re going to meet a woman who challenges you. Makes you a better version of yourself. A woman who matches you. A woman who sees through your bullshit, unsettles you. A woman who rattles you. In the best way, of course. And you won’t see it coming.” He chuckles. “None of us ever do. She’ll make every sacrifice worth it, I promise you.”
“And I can promise you, Sterling, that the only part of me I need rattled…might be my cock. But it’s just two weeks. Two weeks I can handle. But monogamy? And the headache that comes with it? Nah, man, I just don’t think it’s for me.
I hear Sevin slap the wall beside the stall. “Alright, bro. We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we? I’ll stop lecturing you.”
“At least wait until I get dressed before the next lesson, alright?”
He chuckles—a long, low sound. “Will do.” The sound of his footsteps starting to back away.
And my thoughts already start floating back to Naomi. Back to the concept of sacrificing sex. And a woman who might be worth it.
The stubborn, indescribably sexy brunette had me out of sorts last night.
I’m still thinking about her, about all the things I could do to her—would do to her if these two weeks weren’t in the way, when Sevin’s footsteps return.
“Hey, by the way,” he calls out over the shower curtain. “Have you heard from Naomi today?”
“What? Why?”
“Uh, because you were the one who took her to the hospital last night?”
Oh, yeah. That “why.”
“Uh, no,” I call out, ignoring the fact the we both arranged to meet today. In thirty minutes. Here. At the gym.
I don’t say that part.
“This is Naomi we’re talking about,” I continue. “When it comes to you, she’s never too far behind.”
I hear him snort. “You’re right. It’s just… I called her a few times before getting ready for my flight to New
York but she hasn’t answered. That’s not like her at all.”
“Well, maybe you don’t know her as well as you thought…”
As if I do. Or maybe I was beginning to.
Sevin accepts this, heading out of the locker room with me stewing in my own thoughts in his wake. His footfalls fade in the background, and when I’m alone, I start to rinse off the soap from the shower, stopping when I reach for my cock, the shaft thickening as I remember that I’m meeting Naomi in thirty minutes.
Thirty minutes. To discuss our “sex/no-sex” pact, a two-week commitment that seems harder and harder to come to terms with only a day later.
Fuck, would I make it?
Not only just avoiding sex…but avoiding it with Naomi.
A woman who more and more was starting to show herself to be my kryptonite.
I could keep rubbing my cock, get the frustration and lingering lust after watching her last night out of my system.
But what if I did it and she still wasn’t out of my system? What then?
Dammit, I don’t want to even think about it.
Turning off the shower stream, I comb shaking fingers through my thick head of hair, trying to get my thick dick head in order too. Heading to my locker, I’m halfway through getting dressed when I hear two voices outside of the locker room.
Problem is…one of them sounds suspiciously like Naomi.
Shit. She wasn’t supposed to be here, yet. And my whole friendship, nine years of it with Sevin—not to mention Naomi’s job—flashes before my eyes.
Chapter 11
NAOMI
Contrary to what my Cuban mother had tried to convince me of… I’d actually never wanted to fall in love.
In fact, I may be one of the few women I know who has hoped that she wouldn’t.
But life has a funny way of knocking you flat on your ass when you least expect it. And by life, I mean the “one hundred-ninety five pounds of baseball-bat swinging muscle” that slammed into me as I came around the corner, my eyes in search of Sawyer.
In his defense, Sevin actually hadn’t meant to hit me.
He’d only been trying to open the door out of one of the gym hallways he’d been exiting, and with one push, I fell flat on my Levi’s-covered ass and just happened to glance up into those familiar green eyes.