Getting Played

by Mia Storm

  My breath gets shaky and my heart races when I recognize that what I’m hoping for is that he’ll open his eyes and see me here.

  But then what?

  He’s obviously struggling with something, and my guess is it’s the same thing I’m struggling with. If that’s true, the last person he’d want to see right now would be me.

  Still, there’s a second I can’t make myself turn around. I know exactly how deeply I’m in this mess when my legs finally begin to move, but totally against my will carry me in the wrong direction. The closer to Marcus I get, the more I feel the pull. His eyes are still covered, and there’s something exhilarating about being this close without him knowing I’m here, like I’m seeing the real Marcus, open and vulnerable, his guard totally down.

  But just as I reach out to touch him with a trembling hand, his face crumbles into a pained grimace with whatever internal battle he’s waging.

  “Fuck!” he hisses.

  I jerk my hand away and back toward the path. When reach it, I spin and run toward home, where I drop into a heap on the porch steps. I’m shaking and I can’t catch my breath.

  I lower my head into my hands. “What am I doing?”

  The answer is, I’m going crazy.

  I close my eyes and imagine what would have happened if I’d touched him: his eyes snap open as he grabs my wrist, yanks me to him, kisses me. My heart pounds not only from exertion but from the image of him crushing my body to his, devouring me.

  “God,” I whisper into my hands.

  “You rang?”

  My head jerks up at his voice, and he’s standing at the end of my walk, a little winded.

  “I knew you were fast in the pool, but you should think about running track too.”

  I stand but all I can do is stare. He just ran after me. The thought sends an electric thrill coursing under my skin.

  He glances around, then moves slowly toward me. Where I stand frozen on the stairs, we’re almost the same height, and I feel like I’ve got an entirely new perspective on Marcus. I can see straight into those incredible cinnamon eyes and there’s something in them that hasn’t been there before. Something deep and vulnerable, dark and wanting, but also a little frightened. With every step closer he comes, the air around us becomes more charged, until all the hair on my body is standing on end. He stops in front of me, close enough to reach out and touch me if he wanted.

  And God, I want him to.

  For several beats of my racing heart, we stand here staring at each other. There are a hundred things I want to ask, to say, but his gaze holds my free will captive. All I can do is wait for him to release me.

  “Can we…?” He trails off with a tip of his head at the house.

  I finally breathe as I turn and unlock the door, then step inside.

  “You weren’t at school today,” he says, following me in. “I was worried.”

  I close the door and work to get myself together before turning to face him. “I had a doctor’s appointment this morning, then I took Dad to rehab.”

  His eyes widen. “He really went? That’s awesome, Addie.”

  “It looks like a decent place, so…” I trail off, my nerves too fried by this entire day to figure out what’s okay to say and what I need to keep to myself.

  He glances around as if it’s just occurring to him he’s alone with me in my house, but instead of reaching for the door handle and letting himself out, he stalks closer. He reaches up and brushes his fingertips over the scar above my ear. His touch is so gentle, but it feels like a wrecking ball to my stomach, knocking the wind out of me.

  I stand, trembling, as his fingers thread deeper into my hair and I feel his hand fist there. For a moment, my heart sputters with the certainty he’s going to kiss me.

  But then he seems to remember himself and lowers his hand. “What did the doctor say about this?” he says as his fingers brush past my wound. “Will I be getting my right wing back anytime soon?”

  His words break the spell and I can finally breathe. “The doctor says I can start swimming. No contact.”

  Something dark and hungry flashes in Marcus’s eyes, but it’s gone so fast I’m sure I imagined it. “It will be good to have you back in the pool.”

  “Yeah,” I say absently, because all I can think about is that I want him to touch me again.

  He just stares at me for several beats of my racing heart. “Why did you run?”

  “What?” I ask, my brain still not with the program enough to follow his shift in gears.

  “Just now, in the park?”

  “Oh…” Because I was just about to climb right into you. “You looked like you were…busy.”

  “Busy,” he says with a bitter laugh. “Yeah, I guess I was.”

  “Is…is everything okay?”

  That same dark need passes over his face again. “Nothing I can’t work out.”

  “Okay,” I say with a nod. “Good.”

  Things have always been so easy between us, and I hate that we’re suddenly so awkward.

  “So…I’ll just…” He reaches for the doorknob.

  “Have a good weekend,” I say as he pulls it open.

  He hesitates without turning around. “Yeah,” he finally says. “You too.”

  The door closes and I sink to the floor right here on this spot, because my legs are too weak to even get me to the couch. I lie back on the hardwood and stare at the ceiling, all the possible scenarios playing out in my mind.

  Up until today, I never really believed Marcus could want me that way, but now…the quiet desperation in his eyes mirrored everything he makes me feel. What if I wasn’t imagining it? What if he really wants me as much as I want him? If that’s true, and we follow through…so many different paths to the same end.

  And it’s not a good one for Marcus.

  Chapter 13

  Marcus

  I take my paycheck straight from the gym to the bank on Monday morning and cash it, then swing by the hospital on my way to school for practice.

  I find the billing department and when I reach the front of the short line, I step up to the counter.

  “Can I help you?” the woman says.

  “I need to make a payment.”

  “That part I guessed,” she says, glancing at the wad of cash in my hand. “Do you have a bill?”

  I shake my head.

  “I need an invoice number to apply your payment to the right account,” she says, giving me a look that screams “what kind of an idiot are you?”

  “All I have is a name and the dates she was hospitalized,” I tell her.

  She looks at the cash again, then turns to her computer. “I’ve never done it this way before, but let’s give it a try.”

  “Addaline Grace is the name,” I say, “and she was here from September twenty-ninth to October first.”

  She pounds at the keys for a minute. “Okay, I’ve got it.” She looks back at me. “I can’t release any information, including the amount of the charges,” she says with a squint, obviously still questioning whether I’m in my right mind.

  I hand her the cash. “Well, I know it’s a lot more than this, so can you just apply it to her balance?”

  She takes it and counts it out, then looks up at the computer and plugs in an amount.

  “Your name?” she asks.

  “Um…can I just make it anonymous?”

  Her face screws tighter in frustration. “I don’t know how to do that.”

  She calls over a co-worker and the two of them figure out how to enter an anonymous cash payment and print out a receipt that has no info on it except the amount paid.

  I walk out feeling a little better about myself.

  Until I get to school and my body reacts when I see Addie in her Speedo. She’s at the pool’s edge talking to some of her younger teammates about reading the shooter.

  It’s been two weeks since her fall and her shiner has faded, just a hint of yellow in the crescent below her eye. The bandages are
gone and when her hair’s down, like on Friday, she’s able to hide the wisps of hair growing back around her ear and the damage underneath.

  I shudder, remembering the sensation of those curls twisted into my fingers—how soft they were…all the raw need shining out of her eyes as she stared into mine. I feel like, even though I managed to find some deep reservoir of control inside myself and nothing happened, we’ve reached a point of no return. There’s no way she didn’t feel how desperately I wanted to kiss her. And I know, if I had, she would have let me. So, with that line crossed, the only question now is how far over it I’m willing to go.

  She turns to me as her teammates jump into the pool and I try to read her expression. Her face is flushed and though I can tell she’s trying to rein it back, there’s a mix of anticipation and need swirling the gray of her eyes into a summer storm.

  “You ready to get back in the pool?” I ask.

  She nods. “I was going to take some laps after practice if the cage will be open.”

  “I had something to do earlier, so I’m swimming after practice.” A grin I can’t control spreads over my face. “I’ll go easy on you. Don’t want a matching set,” I say, touching the skin under my eye.

  She turns for the pool. “I’m all for symmetry.”

  It’s been nearly a week since I announced Addie as captain and the truth is, she’s a better assistant coach than I ever would have guessed. I’ve basically given her the reins and let her run with them.

  Corinne seems to have come around, and instead of fighting Addie, she’s actually helpful. Which makes me uneasy. After all the time she’s spent trying to get my attention and coming onto me, I can’t help but think she’s got an agenda. But all the underclassmen are starting to look to Addie for direction, and she’s totally stepped up. Once she’s back in the water, this team will be unstoppable.

  After the team warms up, we separate them into scrimmage squads. I let Addie set up the situational drills as I settle onto the bleachers. When she determines they’re good to go, she comes over and sits next to me.

  “Learn to play guitar,” she says.

  I just look at her. “Um…I already know how.”

  Her eyebrows go up. “You do?”

  “Yeah. Blaire and I decided to learn together. She sort of blew it off when she started with the poetry thing in junior high.”

  “But you stuck with it?”

  I laugh, thankful that it seems like we’re back to ourselves after the awkwardness of Friday. “Thought I was going to be the next Stevie Ray Vaughn.”

  “And here you are,” she says with a loose gesture at the pool, “living your dream.”

  I lounge back and rest my elbows on the bleacher behind us, stretching my legs and crossing them at the ankles. “Doesn’t get any better.”

  “I really meant I wanted to add that to our bucket list,” she says, turning her attention back to the scrimmage.

  I fish my phone out of my pocket and type it in. “I can help you with that, and you can find me new foods.”

  “Deal,” she says, hooking her elbows on the bleacher and leaning back next to me. “So, what else do you have for the list?”

  “Sail around the world,” I say, typing it into my phone.

  “You think that’s realistic?” she asks. “I mean, are you ever really going to actually try to do that?”

  My eyes lift to hers. “The point of a bucket list is that it’s all your wildest dreams, right? Even the ones you know are probably never going to happen?”

  At my words, her gaze goes far away and unfocused. It’s as if her eyes open a window into her soul and I fall right into it. “Wildest dreams…” she repeats. But then she blinks and I feel my invitation into her soul revoked as she seems to find herself. She lowers her gaze and clears her throat. “Do you even sail?”

  “Learn to sail,” I say slowly as I type it into my phone.

  I look up at her when I’m done and she’s smiling down at her feet. Something stirs in my gut—a sudden, intense rush, like the first drop of a roller coaster.

  That’s why it’s called falling.

  Christ. I am falling for her.

  “That’s a double from me,” I say, trying to shake the thought from my head. But now that I’ve thought it, it’s stuck in my brain like a burr. “Your turn.”

  She chews her lip for a moment and her eyes go far away. “Finish Mom’s book.”

  I look a question at her.

  She leans her elbows onto her knees and looks out over the pool. “Did I tell you Mom was a writer?”

  “No.”

  Her fingers lace and unlace in front of her. “I’ve never read anything she wrote, but she was in the middle of a new manuscript when…”

  “You’ve read it?” I ask when she trails off.

  She pulls one knee up and hugs it to her chest. “I’m trying. It’s really hard, you know?”

  “Ah,” I say when it dawns on me what she means. “I thought you meant you wanted to finish writing it. You mean you want to read it.”

  She nods. “Part of it is set on a trip we took to Europe a few months before the accident. It was the most amazing two weeks of my life. But…” Her face clouds. “My parents already knew they were getting divorced then. They just waited to tell me until we were home.” There’s a quiver to her bottom lip as she adds, “She never really even finished telling me.”

  Oh shit. Is that what happened? “She told you that day…of the accident?”

  She nods against her knee. “Or, at least, she was working her way up to it.”

  I wait for more, but she’s done talking, apparently. After a minute, she gets up and goes back to the pool. I watch as she gives the team a new sub rotation and they go back to work.

  But I can’t help wondering what happened in that car.

  We wrap up practice and she jumps in the pool as all the others head to the locker room. I watch her float on her back and move her arms slowly through the water as if caressing it, reintroducing herself to an old lover.

  I wait until everyone else has cleared out before I jump into the lane next to hers.

  She stands in the waist-deep water and looks at me, a spark of excitement in her eyes. “This feels really good.”

  “It’s where you belong,” I tell her because it’s true. In all my years in the pool, I’ve never seen someone so free in the water, as if it’s not just moving around her, but through her.

  She moves to the end of the lane. “I was thinking about starting with maybe ten laps.”

  “Just take it slow and stop if you’re feeling anything,” I say, pointing at my head. “I’ll go at your pace.”

  She nods. “’Kay.”

  “Ready?” I ask with a sweep of my hand at her lane.

  In answer, she puts her head down and pushes off the wall with her legs. I watch as she cuts so smoothly through the water there’s barely a ripple, then follow. I swim on her heels and she does what I asked, taking her laps at an easy pace and stopping at the edge after ten.

  The sun is just setting over the gym when I come up next her and stand. “So?”

  She treads over to the rope between us and crosses her arms over it, resting her chin on her forearms. “My body was screaming at me to keep going. I think it misses the endorphin rush.”

  “But you stopped. Smart.”

  “Yeah, well…” She taps a finger on her temple. “This is still in charge, however much my body would love to override it.”

  I wish I could say the same for myself. My head knows that everything I want from this girl is wrong, but my body isn’t listening.

  She’s both tough and vulnerable. She’s got strength I never could have dreamed of having at her age. She’s self-aware and not afraid of who she is. But as much as I know it’s not a façade, I feel there’s more than I know that’s made her this way. I want to know everything about her.

  I press my back against the pool wall next to her to keep from doing anything stupid. “Did
the doctor say when you’d be cleared to play?”

  “He said it depends on how I feel. I’m supposed to increase my exertion level a little at a time over the next week, and if I feel okay, he’ll clear me.”

  I press myself up to sit on the edge. “Then we’re definitely not going to push it. I need your head on straight.”

  Her brows lift and she blows out a sardonic laugh. “You’re assuming it started that way.”

  She presses up on the pool edge to pull herself out of the water, but her hand slips. It’s as if time lags and I see it happening in slow motion. I’m not going to let anything else happen to Addie on my watch. On reflex, my hand darts out and I grab her shoulder before her chin comes smashing down on the cement. The next second, she’s in my arms. Between my knees.

  I’m frozen by her proximity—by the silk of her skin on mine. By the desire I see in her eyes and all over her face.

  My heart launches into a gallop as she slithers the rest of the way into my lap, planting that firm, round ass on my thighs. And God help me, there’s nothing I can do to keep my body from reacting. She turns to face me, her hot breath feathering across my lips, and I know from the look in her hooded eyes, hungry and wanting, but also a little scared, that my growing hard-on hasn’t gone unnoticed.

  I grasp her hips. I think I mean to slide her onto the pool deck next to me, but my fingers dig in to soft flesh and pull her closer.

  When I remember to breathe, it comes in a shaky rasp. “Are you okay?”

  Her gaze trickles down my face as she gives me an anemic nod, and it sends a shudder through me as if it were her fingers caressing oh so softly over my skin. When the trail of her gaze stalls on my lips, I can’t help but lick them, sure I’ll taste her there.

  And then I do when she closes the few inches between us and her mouth finds mine.

  Chapter 14

  Addie

  His spicy scent wraps me in a cocoon of bliss and I stop thinking. I know this because when a shard of coherent thought pierces the bubble, I find my lips are on his. I don’t even know how they got there. Not only that, but I have a death grip around his neck. In my shock, the reflex is to let him go…but then I realize he’s kissing me back. His kiss feels like liquid fire burning through me. A low moan vibrates between us, and somewhere in the back of my mind I know it’s mine. The rumble deep in his chest that answers my moan feeds my hunger for him.