Free Agent

by Catherine Gayle

  “No! I’m not embarrassed about you. That’s not— I just—”

  “I get it,” I said. “I’m not the kind of guy you want to bring home to meet the folks.”

  “More like I’m not sure how you’ll respond to them.”

  “Well, try me. Seems like a good way of finding out. At least to me.”

  “But what if…”

  “What if what?” I prodded.

  Bea sighed. “You don’t understand. They’re not like your grandmother.”

  “No one’s like Grandma.”

  “But she’s the only family you’re used to.”

  “Are you trying to tell me they embarrass you? It’s not me, but it’s them?”

  “Maybe a bit of both?” she squeaked, almost apologetically. “They’ll be glad I’m finally bringing a man around, I suppose.”

  “But not a man like me?”

  “You’re not what they’d expect for me.”

  “Not what they’d ex—”

  “You’re not Hispanic,” she interrupted before I could get the question out, raising a brow pointedly. “Which doesn’t matter to me, and it shouldn’t matter to them, but it does. And you’re younger than me, which again shouldn’t be a problem, but it will be. And to be honest, I think they’re convinced that I’m never going to get married or have kids, so I can be the one to take care of my parents in their old age or something. I’m the perpetually single one.”

  “So maybe it’s time you show them who you really are. Or who you want to be.”

  “I’ve tried. I mean, they didn’t like it at all when I had weight-loss surgery.”

  “Why the hell would they be upset about you making a choice about your own body, something for your health?” I ground out. All of a sudden, I was starting to hate her family, and I’d never even met them. This wouldn’t bode well for whenever I did get to know them.

  And if I was going to this quinceañera thing, that would apparently be very soon.

  She turned apologetic eyes on me. “It’s something they talk about before you can have the surgery. I had to see a counselor about it. People treat you differently afterward.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning my family lost control over me in some ways, because when I was fat they knew they could force me into certain things because I didn’t have any other options, so now they’re trying to regain that control in other ways.”

  “Well, maybe you just need to convince them they can’t control you at all,” I said.

  “It’s not that easy. Not in a family like mine.”

  All the more reason I supposed I needed to meet them.

  “So when’s this keen señora thing again?”

  “The eighteenth,” Bea said, almost hopefully.

  I dug out my phone and glanced at the calendar. The eighteenth was coming up soon. “Looks like I’m all yours the whole day.” And I tapped in a reminder, just to be sure I didn’t forget and plan on anything else that day. There wasn’t a chance in hell I’d be letting her go to that thing alone. Not if her family was half as bad as she made it sound.

  She groaned.

  I winked.

  “Aren’t you going to open that package?” she asked in a clear bid to change the subject.

  I shrugged. “They’re probably just some adult coloring books I ordered. They can wait.”

  “You ordered more?”

  “Different kinds of them. It would’ve been nice to have them while we were gone, actually. Would’ve given me something to do while Grandma slept and you were working. Something other than playing games on my phone.”

  “You had some stuff with you.”

  “But these are better.”

  “Better?” She arched a brow but didn’t press me. “Too bad they took so long arriving.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, grinning. “Now…how about we take a look at these proofs Mia sent me?”

  “Can’t I look by myself first?”

  “Nope. We took them together, so we’re going to see them together.” Because I didn’t know how much longer I could go without her letting me see her.

  “TAKE OUT YOUR laptop,” Blake said. “I’ve got it open on my phone but we’ll be able to see them better on your monitor. They’ll be bigger.”

  “I don’t know if bigger necessarily means better,” I muttered, unzipping the laptop sleeve and slipping the machine out.

  “Sure it does. Just ask any Texan. Rachel Campbell will tell you. She’s always telling me and anyone who’ll listen how everything’s bigger and better in Texas.”

  “Rachel is the tiniest woman I’ve ever come across.”

  “Cadence Babcock is probably smaller.”

  I furrowed my brow, thinking of the tiny blonde figure skater married to the younger of the two Babcock brothers on the team and comparing her to the redheaded pixie. “Not by much.”

  “Okay, so maybe the people aren’t all bigger and better, but everything else is.”

  I snorted. “I think they’re talking about the size of their state.”

  “Whatever.” He rattled off his Wi-Fi password so I could log on, and then he forwarded Mia’s email to me so I could open the image gallery for us to see.

  It seemed to take forever for the first image to load. Or maybe I was just impatient because I was sure these photos would prove my point, and Blake would realize his mistake, and this would all come crashing to an end.

  But as soon as the first photo popped up on my screen, my breath caught in my throat. That couldn’t be me. Or if it was, Mia had to have Photoshopped the heck out of every tiny detail in the picture.

  Because that woman in the picture was kind of hot.

  The whole thing looked sexy as all get-out, especially the heat in Blake’s eyes in every single shot.

  In a handful of them, I appeared shy—not a surprise. The whole experience had been uncomfortable for me because it had dragged me kicking and screaming out of my comfort zone. But as we scrolled through the gallery, my confidence during the shoot had visibly grown. By a third of the way through, I was laughing and leaning in toward Blake. By the midpoint, a definite sense of lust was visible in my eyes.

  The thing that came as a true shock to my system, though, was the pure desire staring back at me in Blake’s expression—in all of them. Unless it was a trick of the camera, he was completely into me and what we’d been doing.

  My tongue lodged itself in my throat, and I couldn’t swallow.

  “You like them?” he asked, his voice thick and deep.

  I nodded. “I think I do.” To my complete and utter shock.

  But now I really had to wonder just how much editing Mia had already done, even though she’d said she wouldn’t be doing much until after we’d picked out the ones we wanted. Did I actually look like that?

  “Good. Because they’re hot as hell. You’re hot as hell.” Blake leaned in and captured my lips in a determined kiss that made me forget my insecurities, at least for a bit. “So which ones should we have her finalize for us?” he asked, giving me another quick peck.

  We spent the next twenty minutes poring over every image Mia had sent us. With each photo, Blake inched closer to me. Not that I minded in the slightest. His heat was intoxicating; his scent was addictive.

  Finally, we finished going through the shots and sent Mia a message to let her know they were ready for her to finalize.

  With his arm draped around my shoulders, hugging me to his side, Blake buried his nose in my hair. He took a deep whiff, then sighed. “After this, you think maybe you’ll be ready to let me see you soon?”

  “Maybe?”

  “So we can try it?”

  “Dim lighting, at first?”

  “I can compromise like that. I’m good at compromise. Grandma made sure of it.”

  But could I follow through? I wanted to, but I just wasn’t sure what would happen once my clothes came off but the lights stayed on. Even just thinking about it had my pulse galloping at lightnin
g speed.

  “You going to stay with me tonight?” he murmured.

  I nodded, tentativeness warring with desire.

  He pressed a quick kiss to my temple and got up. “Give me ten minutes to get ready for you.”

  “Get ready?” I stifled a nervous chuckle. Shouldn’t I be the one who might need a bit of time to prepare? I tried to remember when I’d last shaved my legs. Was it two days ago or three? I was probably stubbly.

  “I just want to change the sheets. I’m not sure when I did it last…”

  “Oh.” That was a bit of thoughtfulness I hadn’t expected from him. I nodded him on his way. But then I realized I should do something so I wasn’t sitting here getting more and more anxious by the moment, but I wasn’t sure what. Settling in for a bit of work didn’t seem like the brightest idea, so I shut down my laptop and set it aside.

  The padded mailer was still sitting on the coffee table in front of me, though—the coloring books Blake had ordered. Surely that had to be what it was. I could open his package for him, get rid of the trash, and maybe have a look through the images just to get a better sense of what had struck his fancy now that he’d been doing these crafty things for a while. It might come in handy for me later—in case I wanted to get him a gift at some point down the line.

  Random bumping sounds filtered into the living room from the direction of his bedroom. It shouldn’t take him too much longer to finish changing his sheets.

  I tore open the mailer and took out the coloring books. The first one made me laugh out loud. It was called Swearing Words for Dirty Mouths and Dirtier Hands. That fit him to a T. I flipped through a few pages to get a sense for what was in the book—the images were frilly, flowery letters with cute animals surrounding them like bunnies, kittens, and puppies, and they spelled out words like cumbucket, dipshit, twatwaffle, douchecanoe, and thundercunt.

  After almost snorting in laughter and turning another page, I closed that first book and set it aside, making a mental note to remind him not to bring anything like that to my classroom. I could already imagine the angry emails and phone calls I’d be getting from parents if their children went home saying things like fucktrumpet.

  I switched that book to the back of the stack and brought the next one forward, and my tongue suddenly felt really thick.

  Dirty Girls Doing Dirty Work was the title, and it had an image of an almost nude pinup type girl, wearing nothing but a tiny apron that barely covered her overly enhanced assets. Her impossibly long and curvy legs were spread shoulder-width apart, and she had a feather duster in one hand.

  I opened the cover and found more of the same. The next one had an almost-nude sanitation worker riding on the back of a trash truck, her ridiculously large and buoyant breasts practically spilling out of her tiny uniform.

  Every page I flipped to was more of the same.

  I wanted to vomit.

  Because this was what Blake was really attracted to. Not me. Maybe he could pretend he was into me, but I could never be what he was truly attracted to. He wanted a Barbie doll in human form, and that was something I wouldn’t want to be even if I had any control over it.

  I’d only been fooling myself to think he could want me—no matter how hard he had tried to convince me otherwise. The photo shoot we’d done? That was probably nothing more than his attempt to get me as close to what he’d find in the pages of this book as he possibly could.

  If that was his goal, it’d been an utter and complete failure. Maybe I looked better in reality than I could have believed about myself, but I would never look like this. Not even if I could afford plastic surgery to tighten things up a bit, and that wasn’t ever going to happen.

  I dropped the coloring books on his coffee table and started gathering up my things, debating how long it would take to get an Uber to come and pick me up at this hour. That would be easier than trying to take my suitcases with me on the Max. And now that I’d thought through my options, I took out my phone and opened the Uber app so I could start the process of arranging a ride.

  “What are you doing?” Blake asked, his impossibly perfect body filling the doorway and making me want to be with him again even as I wanted to punch him in the nose. He must have stripped down to his briefs while he was changing his sheets. Perfect, glorious muscle filled my eyes, making me want to lick him to see if he tasted as good as he looked.

  Bad line of thinking. This wouldn’t help.

  Well, good. If he was in his underwear, he wouldn’t come chasing after me when I left.

  “I’m going home,” I bit off, but my voice wobbled. I silently cursed myself for allowing him to see just how upset I was. He didn’t need to have that kind of power over me.

  “But I thought we—”

  “But nothing, Blake.” I slammed my laptop back into the outer pocket of my suitcase—probably harder than I should have—and zipped all the pockets.

  The hurt in his eyes nearly killed my resolve.

  Nearly. But not quite.

  “What did I do wrong this time?” he demanded.

  “Nothing. This is all me.”

  “If you’re not ready—”

  “I’m not,” I cut in. “That’s it. And the truth is, I’ll probably never be ready.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I shouldn’t say probably. I’ll never be ready. Okay? This can’t happen. I need to get home to Neville and Luna.”

  “But—"

  My Uber app dinged. I glanced down at the screen of my phone. A driver had accepted the fare and was pulling in, ready to pick me up. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  Then I grabbed the handle of my suitcase, tossed the strap of my purse over my shoulder, and headed out his front door.

  Only once my hand was on the door to the Uber driver’s car did I allow the first tear to fall.

  WHAT THE FUCK had just happened? It took about ten or fifteen panicked seconds for my brain to kick in. I scanned the room in a desperate attempt to figure out what I could have possibly done wrong this time, what I was missing. Nothing came close to cluing me in until my eyes landed on the adult coloring books I’d ordered sitting on the coffee table—the one with pinup girls at the very top of the stack—with the ripped-open mailer haphazardly discarded next to them.

  Just like that, everything clicked.

  Not bothering to put on clothes or even shoes or a coat, I took off after Bea. Even though she could power-walk like nobody’s business, my legs were still longer than hers, my stride far more powerful. I caught up to her just as she was loading her bags into the trunk of her waiting getaway car.

  “Bea!” I shouted and reached for her hand to stop her.

  She whirled around on me, her cheeks wet with tears, her arm raised as if to slap me, her fingers curling like she wanted to punch me in the nose.

  Maybe I deserved it.

  Actually, I was almost positive deserved it. I usually did. That was the way most things in my life always went, wasn’t it?

  Only, now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure I did this time. She’d misinterpreted something, a huge mix-up, but that wasn’t my fault. I’d still let her hit me, though, if it meant getting her to come back into my condo so we could talk through the misunderstanding, because I hadn’t explained things in advance.

  “Let go of me,” she bit off, jerking her arm with more force than I’d realized she could produce. She was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked, which turned me on in a twisted sort of way.

  I stifled the lust coursing through my veins. “No, I won’t let go of you. Not yet. I’m not letting you leave like this. We need to talk.”

  Willing to take whatever she could dish out, I stood my ground, refusing to release the hand I’d grabbed because I couldn’t let her leave. Not like this, at least. I was already losing Grandma, and there wasn’t a single motherfucking thing I could do to prevent that; I couldn’t lose Bea, too, especially not over something we could talk through like adults.

 
She didn’t strike me, but it seemed like a near miss. “Let me go,” she ground out, her voice laced with a devastating combination of anger and pain.

  “You agreed to explain shit to me. Now’s a good time to do that.”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Well, I have things I need to say to you, and you’re going to listen.”

  “You okay, lady?” the scrawny, pimpled Uber driver asked. He had his cell phone in his hand, and it was already halfway to his ear. “Need me to call for help?”

  “I’m fine,” she bit off and turned back to me. “What the hell could you possibly say that I would want to hear? And just why do you think I’ll be willing to listen?”

  The fact that she’d used a curse word, however mild, only further proved how upset she was. I’d never heard her say so much as darn it before. I wasn’t even positive words like that were in her vocabulary prior to spending time around me. Probably weren’t, because of her students. She’d never curse in front of them, which was just one more thing I adored about her.

  And that was what she had to understand. I loved her. I loved her more than I could bear, and she loved me, too.

  Didn’t she?

  “You’re going to listen because you love me,” I said, and she froze, glaring at me.

  I hoped like hell I was right.

  No one had ever loved me before other than Grandma, though, so I could only cross my fingers that I wasn’t reading too much into the ways Bea had been responding to me lately.

  “You love me,” I continued, “and I love you, and we need to find a way to make this work.”

  “You don’t love me.”

  I noticed she didn’t deny that she loved me, latching on to her admission by omission as a lifeline. “Bullshit. I do. And so do you. And it isn’t just physical, either.” It had to be more than physical. She would never have allowed the physical side of our relationship to get as far as it had if she didn’t love me, or so I had to believe.

  “It’s definitely not physical on your side.”

  “And whose fault is that? Who won’t allow me to see her?”

  “Whatever, Blake. You just think you can control me, the same as my family’s always done. But you don’t love me; you just want to use me. You want me to fill certain needs you’ve got, but that’s all it would be—using me. And then you’ll meet your other needs by going behind my back to do it. You can probably have any woman you want while you’re on the road with the team.”