by Liz Crowe
“Evet,” he whispered, as he nuzzled, sucked, and nipped. “Sí, mi amore.”
“And I brought protection, not that it matters that much since we… oh….” He threaded his fingers in her hair, then licked and kissed his way up her neck to her lips. “Seriously, Metin, you’ve fucked every Eurotrash skank possible. How do I know….”
He stopped, tilted her face down to his. “You and Alicia are the only women I have ever not worn a condom with. Ever. I swear it.”
She recalled the sight of all the used ones she’d seen lying around the pigsty of a flat where she’d found him. But the sound of her sister’s name threw her. She backed away, rubbing her freezing arms, suddenly embarrassed by her nudity. He sat, gazing at her, his body at full attention. She tried not to stare at his erection.
“What’s wrong? I get it. It’s just sex. Come here. Let’s have some,” he insisted, but his eyes betrayed he flippant words. The actual emotion in them terrified her but drew her in at the same time. Mainly because it mirrored her own—which meant she had to reject it. She refused to be in love with this man.
She stepped away shaking her head. “Metin. I know you. You’re… you get attached and I can’t. I mean, we can’t. It’s too… oh, hell.” She took the three steps between them and shoved him down, her hand and lips on his shaft, loving the pure maleness of him, the way his hips moved and how he fisted his hands in her hair.
A blow job wasn’t sex. It meant nothing. She’d suck him off and be on her way. And the “getting attached” thing was clearly not one-sided. Mel shuddered at that realization. And that she simply had to do this thing, dispel the base urge in herself and exit his life.
“Ah, god…” He groaned, yanking her up to face him. “I must be inside you, Melanie. I must….”
He caressed her face, giving the most gentle, erotic kisses she’d ever had. No rushing, no urgency but merely his lips and tongue, soft, probing and seeming to question her which she answered by throwing her arms around him again. He turned them, eased her down, keeping his mouth on hers, his hands on her breasts, waist, and hips. He stopped, poised between her legs, his eyes so dark and full of meaning she wanted to cry. She ran her fingers through his hair.
“I won’t do this if you don’t want it. God knows I love a good blow job.” His smile was wickedly familiar.
“If you don’t get this inside me in the next few seconds, I will flip us over and take care of it myself,” she whispered, running her hand up and down his warm, solid shaft.
“I’ll consider that a yes,” he said, moving slowly, easing into her, never taking his eyes from hers. “Is it? Melanie?” His voice was low, his gaze hypnotizing. She cradled his face between her hands and lifted her hips to meet him. He sank deep, his lips on hers again.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes!” she cried out.
Metin cradled Melanie’s warm body against his. She stirred, mumbling in her sleep. He kissed her shoulder. “Shh… it’s fine. Rest.”
“No.” She sighed, rolling away from him. “I gotta get home.”
He ran a finger down her face and neck, to the round perfection of her breast. “I’m going to take the job.” Leaning in, he kissed the line of flesh he’d just touched, unable to stop.
She jerked away from him. “I hope it’s not because I came here.” Leaving the bed, she clutched the sheet to her body, her face flushed red, her thick, dark hair a mess. “Because we… you know… did this again… that we should not have. Shit.” Her voice broke.
Metin tried to keep his own voice even and calm. It wasn’t easy. Melanie brought out a lot in him—lust, satisfaction, and no small amount of frustration. “Well, I was on the fence. You could be accused of shoving me over.”
“Well, get back up on the damn fence, Metin. I… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come here.” She scrambled around for her clothes.
“No, I’m kidding. Relax. I had already decided. But you did seal the deal nicely for me.”
“Oh god, oh Jesus, oh fucking hell.” She sat again, a tear rolling down her face.
He got up, slipped into his shorts, and crouched down in front of her, desperate not to ruin this moment because it suddenly felt very crucial to him.
“Stop it. Melanie. It’s okay. I’m not going to ask you to marry me or anything.”
She shot him a strange look then seemed to relax. He grabbed her feet, put them in his lap, and started rubbing, trying to force her to relax. “I get it, I mean. I can do a just sex thing with you. It’s fine. It’s more than fine. It’s good for us both, I think. But I do demand one thing of you.”
His skin burned. His heart pounded with fear that she would walk out, that he’d made the fatal error of jumping her yet again. When she’d just shown up to talk, most likely. He suppressed the urge to groan at what he’d done. And the stronger urge to do it again and again, to huddle there with her forever, skin to skin, emerging only to eat and shower for the next week or two.
She raised an eyebrow, groaning when he ground his knuckle into her instep. He grinned and his body hardened all over again.
“You have to consider me a friend. That is, someone you call on when you need something, or someone to talk to. Okay?”
“Whatever, as long as you never stop doing that, right there… ah….” He ran his hands up her leg to her thigh to her hot, moist center. “Not there.” She kicked at him so he retreated to her other foot. “Friends, eh? Pretty clichéd, this benefits thing, don’t you think? Can we be that? Fuck buddies?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Her scent made him crazy-horny all over again. “But if it means we don’t fight, and we get to fuck like this on a semi-regular basis, count me in.” He dropped to his knees and yanked the sheet aside.
“God damn it,” she exhaled. “Okay, deal.”
He grinned against her flesh and slid his fingers into the sweet glove of her body, drawing an operatic orgasm out of her before she stood up and shoved him down. “What was that about taking care of business yourself?” he asked, as she climbed on top of him.
Nausea rose in his gut at the sight of the Delta terminal of the Detroit Metro Airport. The last two times he’d been here, he’d been blind with agony, deaf from devastation, and running away from everything, hoping he could drink it gone. He took a long breath. When his phone dinged with a text, he jumped.
Don’t get freaked out at the airport, Metin. I know you are. So stop it. Things are different now. You’re fine. You’re going home to pack. Take a breath, get some coffee and a magazine with pictures of half-naked girls. You’ll be fine.
You are a real bossy bitch, you know it? he typed out, his pounding heart calming already. How do you know I don’t have an older woman fetish and am doing this to prove to you what a young man can do?
Huh, and how do you know I’m not a voracious cougar, looking to use you up and discard you? Now go on. See you in two weeks.
His smile dissolved into a frown. What are you telling your family, about us, I mean? He wasn’t sure what he meant and was sorry the second he hit send.
There was a longer than usual pause. He cursed himself for asking. There is nothing to tell them. We’re friends. What we do on our time is none of their business.
Fair, he typed. But his ears buzzed with a familiar something he identified later, as the plane rose into the Detroit sky to take him home to pack, as possessiveness and a very alarming sensation of wanting her family to know so that they didn’t have to sneak around. But he dismissed that as ridiculous romanticism.
They would not be anything more to each other than a great lay and hopefully remain good friends. He drifted off, the familiar lull of flight sending him to sleep, and dreamed of Melanie—her face, her laugh, her smart mouth and her body—waking when the plane bumped to a stop in Amsterdam.
Chapter Ten
By the time Metin had his hands around the team, his new life in Michigan, and the way he felt about Melanie everything seemed to slide into place. At the two-thirds mark o
f the season, he’d coaxed, cajoled, threatened, begged, and shoved his rag-tag team into first place in the expansion league, but more importantly, they had won every single “friendly,” soccer talk for “exhibition,” match, at least at that level.
They had beaten two top Major League Soccer teams, the Canadian national team and, ironically enough, the Istanbul team where he’d humiliated himself what felt like ages ago. Not a bad start at all. Their crack marketing and public relations departments were getting them all sorts of buzz, including a fair bit of annoying gossip, which meant they truly had arrived. Once people begin to give a shit about whom the players were fucking, marrying, and breaking up with, they’d done something right.
The whole thing had its share of headaches, of course. With a team comprised of “been there, done that,” men mixed with youngsters fresh out of college, the opportunities for trouble abounded.
He had a stack of personnel issues nearly a mile high most days, and the team’s recent jaunt out to the West Coast, stopping to play games in Portland, Denver, San Francisco, and Las Vegas, had not helped that much. He had players with DUIs, drunk-and-disorderlies, hotel staff complaints, a couple of paternity suits, a few quickie weddings and divorces, the usual bullshit considering the level of testosterone they were dealing with. Luckily, the powers that be had hired a crack legal staff, so Metin could mete out punishments on the field as he saw fit, and let them handle the rest.
He swiveled his leather chair around from the window overlooking the large, colorful pitch. The damn game was seventy-five percent show business, which bugged him. But as Jack Gordon liked to remind him, it paid his salary. So he did his job and did it well it seemed, at least so far.
His desk was tidy, with player files stacked to one side, recruiting info on another. But devoid of anything personal, of course. Whose photos would he display? His dead wife and son’s? Maybe one with his dead wife’s difficult sister, with whom he had maintained a steady stream of sex, sex, and more sex. Their official status, Friends with Favors, as they liked to call it, maintained through four solid months without seeming to let up.
But he had made a decision over the last few weeks. One his parents and brothers would no doubt chalk up to another “attachment issue,” but he didn’t care. The traditionalist in him kept rising up, choking him with a strange possessive feeling about Melanie that he didn’t have the energy to fight anymore. It was no longer in him to sustain the status quo. He wanted more and suspected she did, too.
He slid open the middle drawer and put his hand on the ring box, as if it could quell his nervousness. But this was what he wanted, what he required, and he believed this step could fix him, help him past the final stages of loss.
A tiny voice he’d been annoyed by in the last few days piped up, reminding him that rushing into marriage with his dead wife’s sister might not be such a hot idea. Especially considering how much fun they were having. Why mess with that? Cursing his inner traditionalist—the one who craved normalcy, a stable home life, like a starving man craved a steak—he pondered his next move and how it would either be the best or the worst possible one ever in the history of men doing stupid things.
“Metin.” He started, hearing his name from the hall outside his office. “Um, sorry.”
Surprised, but not unhappy to see Zach standing at his doorway looking sheepish, he smiled. “Hey, Zach. What’s up? What are you doing in downtown Detroit on a school day?”
“It’s a testing day for juniors so we don’t have to go.” The boy kept blinking, fiddling with his backpack strap.
“Well, okay, come on in, have a seat. I was about to watch some film, and see if I can figure out what the hell is wrong with my goalkeeper lately.”
The commonality of their mutual love for soccer seemed to put Zach at ease. He sat, and they watched for the better part of an hour, talking strategy and identifying that the tall, coal-black, completely bald man in the goal for the Black Jacks must have injured his left knee and wasn’t coming clean about it. They had lost their last match when the opposing team seemed to have figured that out before Metin did, continuously aiming soccer-ball-shaped bullets right to his weak side.
“Shit.” He pulled out his roster, frowning when he saw what he already knew. The goalkeeping position was one of their weakest in terms of subs. He needed another one, a good one, to fill in while he convinced the man in question to get his knee problem addressed.
“Uh, listen, I was wondering….” Zach interrupted his musings about stubborn players who play through injuries until it’s too late. “There’s a girl, and I… um… I want to ask her out. I think she’ll go, but I….” The boy glanced down, his thick brown lashes covering his eyes.
Floored that Zach would come to him for dating advice, treating him like a trusted older brother, if not a father figure, Metin swallowed hard, trying to summon anything that might sound useful. He tented his fingers together in front of his face and attempted to summon a wise expression. Zach stared at him, face red with embarrassment. The whole thing made a chuckle rise in Metin’s throat, but he choked it back. Zach needed help and had come to him to get it.
He stood. “Let’s go get something to eat. You should never try and figure out what to do about a member of the fairer sex on an empty stomach. That’s my first piece of advice.”
Zach jumped to his feet, his face reflecting the sort of relief that he hoped he could live up to, because frankly, that was the only wisdom he had. A weird, guilty sensation coursed through him as they made their way toward one of the pub-style restaurants in the stadium. The place did a brisk downtown lunch business, and that day was no exception. Shoving aside all the images of himself with the boy’s mother and what they’d been doing “on their own time” nearly nonstop, he pointed to a table and ordered a beer.
Zach frowned at him at first then shrugged. Metin laughed outright at that. “Please, Zach, I’ve seen your fake ID and your mother says you hardly ever come home on the weekends not smelling of alcohol. It’s what young men do. However, as you have driven all the way down here, I can’t allow it.” He smiled up at the waitress. “He’ll have water.”
Holding up his glass of amber brew when they arrived, he clinked it to Zach’s water glass and they sipped. He scrabbled around in his brain for useful words about women, choking and spluttering when Zach spoke first.
“I know you and mom are… together.” The boy’s face held no malice, only a calm acceptance as he put his glass down. “I, uh… came home early last Friday… and….”
“Oh.” It was Metin’s turn to blush and squirm. He had received one of Mel’s sexier texts that day and blown off a meeting with his bosses to race to her house to “surprise her.” She loved doing that to him, fucking with his head via a few words typed out on her phone. Once she figured out he was a stone-cold sucker for dirty talk, she was relentless, many times insisting she talk him through an orgasm when he was on the road with the team.
They’d ended up fucking in the laundry room that day, within minutes of his bursting in and finding her calmly folding clothes. And Zach, apparently got to witness enough of it to realize Metin and his mom were “together.”
Metin’s ears burned. That had been one of their rougher hookups, loud, with her shouting at him to “fuck her harder,” to “show it to her when he came,” prompting him to pull out and cover both of their bellies at the last minute before dropping to his knees and bestowing her own little death at the end of his lips and fingers. God in heaven. He put a hand over his eyes.
“Yeah, so what I want you to know is… I’m okay with it.” Zach grinned up at the pretty waitress who brought them their burgers. “I mean, in general. Maybe not so much the loud sex in the middle of the day… in the laundry room.”
He honestly wished for the floor to open up and swallow him, right then and there. But a small smile played around Zach’s lips so he figured he’d stay at the table a bit longer. He cleared his throat, but when he spoke it came out squeak
y and lame. “Right. Okay, so sorry about that.”
“Listen, Metin, my mom has been through a lot. And believe it or not, I want her to be happy. I think she deserves it. And I hope you do, too.” His face grew serious, his eyes darkening. Metin’s admiration for the kid ramped up, truly loving how he protected his mother while encouraging her happiness at the same time.
“Yeah. Right. Okay.” He downed half his beer hoping it would settle his nerves. Since coming to the U.S., he’d stopped drinking nearly cold turkey, forcing that self-discipline on purpose. A wave of worry about how he could fit into Melanie’s reality washed over him, filling him with dread. He pictured the classy emerald and diamond ring he’d purchased a week ago, fully intending to give it to her that weekend.
“So, about my problem.” Zach devoured his food as only a healthy, young, athletic man can do. “Now that we’ve got you and my mom sorted out.”
Metin laughed again, a little bit hysterically to his ears. “I am probably the worst guy in the world to ask for advice in this area. But I will tell you this: don’t be an asshole, no matter how many people tell you that girls are drawn to them. They may be, once or twice, but at the end of the day you are better off with a girl who likes the real you.”
“Fair,” Zach said, dragging his fries through a puddle of ketchup. “So I have an idea for a first date….”
Metin listened, ate, drank his beer, and got to know the young man who’d been a mere boy when he’d entered his life, married to his Aunt Alicia and a mortal enemy of his mother, Melanie. Once they got the kid’s date plans straightened out, Metin stood, a strange, antsy feeling coming over him. They watched a bit more film, and he let Zach hang on the sidelines for the team’s afternoon practice. By the time Zach was back in his car and headed to Ann Arbor, Metin decided the ring box would stay put where it was a bit longer. He wasn’t even sure why, but knew that it had to be that way.