by Lexi Lewis
“Fuck,” he said, letting out a messy breath. “This isn’t a dream, right?”
Eve grinned at him and reached her hand up, stroking along the bulge of his growing erection through his gym shorts. “No, not a dream. Just a…goodbye gift. If you want to look at it like that.”
Reese licked his lips, and she laughed softly as his hips pushed forward, pressing his hardening length against her hand more. “You are definitely my new best friend.”
Well. Maybe one day she would be more than that, but for now that would do. “Just wait,” she said. Eve worked her hand into his shorts and got the waistband down enough that she could pull his erection out of his boxers.
It looked as nice as it had felt, the tip flushed, and the shaft curving lightly upwards. She licked her own lips then, glancing towards the door to make sure that no one was about to turn the handle before she leaned in and pressed a kiss to the head of him.
His sharp inhale of breath made her grin, and she licked the slit before opening her mouth and taking him in.
He was hot and thick in her mouth, and she loved the way it felt. His skin was velvety on her tongue, and she took her time, exploring the ridges and veins that she could feel. But there wasn’t a lot of time for her to get acquainted with his body, so she decided that there would be another time. They would make it happen, and her goal for the moment was to make him want it to happen again.
This wasn’t like her at all, but she wanted him to go to his parents’ house with the memory of her on her knees, mouth around him while she gave him pleasure.
When was the last time she had done something strictly for herself? When had she last just…gone after something she wanted? It felt selfish, but she knew that she deserved it. She knew as she bobbed her head and took more of that sticky, hot flesh into her mouth that she was a person who had needs and wants just like every other person, and that every once in a while, it was okay to go after them.
Reese groaned, making her concentrate on him fully. The fingers of the hand on his good side threaded through her twisted hair, not forcing her down or even guiding her, but seemingly just holding on.
“Eve,” he groaned in a strangled voice, and the sound of her name on his lips like that sent shudders through her.
She brought one of her hands up to wrap around the base of him, holding where she couldn’t make her mouth reach. The other hand teased and toyed with his balls, weighing them in her palm before stroking her fingers over them lightly. And he reacted to all of it, arching and moaning, biting his lip to try and keep it all quiet.
“Eve,” he panted. “Eve, I’m not gonna…I’m so close.”
That was what she wanted to hear. Her jaw was starting to get sore because she was so out of practice with this, but from the fire between her legs, it was pretty safe to say that she was enjoying this almost as much as he was. Even with the way her jaw protested, she sped up her movements, sucking him down as far as she could and then back up, paying attention to the sensitive head.
Reese’s fingers tightened in her hair, and he managed to get out a breathless warning before he was spilling himself inside of her mouth.
It was a surprise, and Eve was glad that she had room to breathe or else she would have choked. She swallowed what he gave her, not minding the taste, and then leaned back to lick him clean and grin at him.
She wanted to do more, but for now, this would do. It would be a taste of the things that they might do later if they could. Maybe it would be enough to keep them both going.
CHAPTER 12: SETTLING
Reese would say one thing for his parents’ house. The beds were way more comfortable than the hospital beds could ever even dream of being. They were plush and had memory foam toppers, and when he woke up on the fifth day of being back at home for a while, he sighed and let himself just lay there, soaking up the comfort.
His father had insisted that he stay in bed as long as he needed to, but Reese was done with being bedridden. After he took this breather and got his mind prepared for the day, he planned to be up and on his feet, so to speak.
There wasn’t a lot to do around here as far as he was concerned, but he was going to find something to do. He couldn’t drive with the cast, but he could call a cab if he needed to, and Paul was staying in the guest room, and he was sure that they could work out some kind of deal that involved Paul driving him around for a couple of hours.
He glanced at the clock on the night stand and saw that it was just after ten in the morning. From the smell in the air, his father had made breakfast, and Reese knew that his mother would have left for work hours ago. If she was in bed after seven in the morning, she considered the day wasted, so she was long gone by now.
Reese stretched and pulled his phone from the charger, swiping across the screen to wake it up and check for any messages. There were a few emails that he planned to look at later and a couple of texts.
One was from one of his friends who looked after his gear when he needed help, wishing him well, and the other was from Eve. In the five days since he’d left the hospital, they had texted every day.
He could still remember the feeling of her mouth around him, and he’d given himself a pretty good orgasm the night before with just his hand and that memory. They had gotten in the habit of sending good morning texts when they woke up, and since she had to get her brother to school and then get to work early, hers always came in first.
Good morning, the text read. I’m sure you’re still in bed pretending to be an invalid while the rest of us do real work. But have a good day anyway. :)
The smile that curved his lips was involuntary and bright, and he quickly typed a message back, teasing her and telling her to have a good day herself.
Deciding that he couldn’t put off getting up for any longer, he pushed the covers back and struggled to his feet, waiting for his balance to adjust to the perpetually unwieldy weight of the cast on his leg. God, he couldn’t wait to get rid of the thing. It was itchy and hot, and it made getting ready take twice as long.
He pulled a shirt over his head and then sat back down on his bed to struggle into the wide legged gym shorts that had become a permanent part of his wardrobe while he had to have a cast on.
Running fingers through his hair to settle it from the unruly tangle it became every night, he headed out of the room to the bathroom, grateful as he had never been as a kid that his parents’ house only had one floor, not counting the basement. Stairs were just not going to be happening for a while.
Once he’d washed his face and rinsed his mouth out, he hobbled into the kitchen, giving his dad a crooked little smile as he watched the older man dance in place while he made pancakes.
Anthony Abbot was older than his wife by a good ten years, and while Reese’s mother was still very much a force to be reckoned with in the work force, her husband had retired from working for other people and had his own tax business that he did from the comfort of his own living room. It made his dad happy, and Reese had forgotten how much the sight of his father dancing around the kitchen while he cooked breakfast could cheer him up.
“Morning, Dad,” he said with a smile, going to sit at the table, leg propped up on the chair opposite him.
“Good morning,” Anthony replied, grinning back and sliding a plate piled high with fluffy pancakes in front of him. “Hungry?”
“Always.” Reese pulled the syrup closer and was going to struggle up to pour himself a cup of coffee, when one was presented to him. “Thanks, Dad,” he said with another smile.
Mornings were always the best time. It was before the boredom had a chance to really settle in, and Reese always found himself in a better mood, then.
“Is Paul still here?” Reese asked as she dumped syrup over his breakfast and tore into it. So much better than anything the hospital could come up with.
“No, he was up and out the door around the same time as your mother,” Anthony replied. “I offered to make him breakfast, but he said he doesn’t do
breakfast.”
Reese snorted. “No, he doesn’t. He pounds a cup of coffee and that’s about it. I’ve never seen him eat before noon.”
Anthony shook his head. “That’s not healthy, but I guess he’s been getting by this long doing it. It can’t be killing him or anything.” He shrugged and dished up his own plate of breakfast, and father and son sat together to eat.
The peace of the morning lasted into afternoon, but by the time Reese’s mother had come home from work, Reese’s familiar agitation at being home was starting to show. It definitely didn’t help that Paul had shown up right before Carolyn and hissed that there was something he needed to tell him.
Getting privacy in this house was practically unheard of, but the two clustered in the guest room, which was furthest away from the kitchen where Anthony was making dinner while chatting to his wife.
“What is it?” Reese wanted to know. He rarely saw his friend and agent look so serious.
“We’ve found out some more about the situation.”
That was what they had started calling the sabotage issue since they’d come to stay with Reese’s parents. He still wasn’t sure that he wanted them to know about this, after all.
“What? Is it bad?”
“Well, it’s not good,” Paul replied with a sigh. “I managed to track down the guy who was in charge of looking over all the equipment before the runs. Apparently there was a significant amount of time when things were left untended, and there is security footage of someone coming up and going into the equipment room. He was wearing a staff shirt, so I guess that’s why no one bothered to say anything. But no one could identify him when I asked.”
“So you think he messed with my stuff?”
Paul shrugged. “It’s the best guess, so yeah. That’s not all, though. Apparently there was some guy in the crowd who was supposedly writing for some magazine, and he was doing a poll of the spectators for who they thought was going to come out on top. According to someone who was there, if they said your name, the guy would then ask them how they would feel if you were to ‘have a fall from grace’.” He made air quotes around the words. “Then apparently he’d ask how they would feel if you stopped competing all together.”
Reese’s stomach twisted. That definitely sounded more deliberate than he had been expecting, and even though he’d already known that whoever this was had the goal of messing with him and keeping him from competing, this was hard to hear. He felt sick that there was someone out there who disliked him enough to want him to be out of the game that badly.
“So…what are we going to do?” Reese asked, keeping his voice steady. It wouldn’t do to fall apart because of this. He’d told himself that he wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of him doing what he loved, and that included whoever this guy was.
“I’m going to try and see if I can talk to some more spectators. It seems like a good bet that most of them were from around here, so they shouldn’t be that hard to track down. If I can get a good enough description, it will give us something to go on.”
“But there’s a good chance we won’t find out who it is, right?” Reese said. There would have been hundreds of people there, and it could have been anyone.
“Well…yeah. I guess so. But I’m not giving up so easily. I have a couple other ideas that might get this guy to come to us if we need him to. You focus on getting better, and I’ll focus on hunting whoever this is down and giving them a piece of my mind.”
Reese smiled, but his heart wasn’t really in it, and it didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah, okay.”
Paul clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man. Now let’s go see what your dad is making for dinner. I haven’t eaten all day.”
CHAPTER 13: UNSETTLED
Eve hummed under her breath as she let herself into her apartment. She’d worked a shorter shift that day, the nurse who she had covered for that night a couple weeks ago (a night she couldn’t forget) having offered to take some of her shift in case she wanted to go home early. It had been ridiculously nice of her, and it sort of just confirmed Eve’s suspicions that some favoritism had been in play when it came to her shift being changed. But at least it had been made right.
Being home earlier than usual meant that she’d be able to go pick Devin up from his after school program, and she texted Carla to let her know.
She flipped through the stack of mail on the kitchen counter, finally having more than five minutes to go over it. There was a letter from their aunt, a couple of bills, the usual slew of junk mail and advertisements. The bills got put to the side with a bright pink sticky note on the small pile where she wrote down the dates that they needed to be paid by.
There was another hour before Devin needed to be picked up, so she decided to just…relax. A pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream was in the freezer, and she settled on the couch with it, watching the news and just unwinding from the day.
It was so rare to have a moment to breathe in the middle of the day like this, and she was determined to enjoy it.
Lately her head had been full of swirling thoughts. Mostly about Reese and how they were going to make this fledgling thing between them work. At least he understood, she thought. He knew that her brother and her job were going to have to be priorities in her life, and he’d told her that since he had very little to do until he was all the way healed, he had no problems with working around her schedule.
All in all, things were looking up. Devin was doing well in school, her bank account was not as full as she’d like it to be, but it was enough to make sure everything got paid and there would be a little extra this month, so maybe they could have a few nicer things. Her job was still going well, and even though she missed the dash of humor that Reese had added to her day, being able to text him was helping a lot. They’d even talked on the phone a few nights ago, his soft voice had lulled her to sleep after a long day of work.
Now she ate ice cream from the carton and watched a news story about adopting dogs from an animal shelter, wondering how much extra trouble it would be to get Devin a dog.
In her pocket, her phone vibrated, and she put down her spoon to fish it out of her pocket. The number was unfamiliar, and not even an area code of the city, so she frowned, not sure who would be calling her.
Muting the television with one hand, she hit the button to answer the call with the other. “Hello?”
At first silence, then. “Hello, Evelyn.”
Her blood ran cold.
Even over the phone, and even after not hearing it for a good number of years, she recognized that voice. Her father. The man who had ruined things time and time again for her and her mother. The man who had run out on her mother when Eve was about ten only to come back and beg for forgiveness a couple years later. Her mother had wanted them to be a family, so she’d taken him back, but then he’d just knocked her up again and walked right back out.
He was scum, in Eve’s opinion. He’d never hit her, but she knew that was because her mother had literally been her shield. She’d taken the brunt of the man’s anger so that her daughter wouldn’t have to.
He hadn’t even come to the funeral when her mother had died, and Eve had been glad for that. He didn’t deserve to say goodbye. He deserved to rot in hell.
“Eve, are you there?”
She wanted to hang up on him and block his number, but if he was back again, that could only mean he wanted something, and she needed to know what it was.
“How did you get my number?”
“From Cousin Sharon.”
Of course. She was on her father’s side of the family, and she was always advocating that they let the past be ‘water under the bridge’.
“What do you want?”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me Amanda was dead?” There was a tinge of some emotion in his voice, but if it was real, Eve would eat her remote.
“Why do you care? You hadn’t been to see her in seven years. You just walked out, and you didn’t deserve to know.”
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“She was my wife,” he fired back.
Eve snorted. “Yeah, right. Because you cared so much about her. What do you want?”
He was silent for a bit and then he sighed. “I want to meet my son. And you’re not going to keep me from him, Eve, do you hear me?
The world ground to a halt.
Swirl: Taking Spills
Book 2
By: Lexi Lewis
CHAPTER 1: OUT OF THE BAG
“Someone is trying to kill you?”
Reese groaned. This was exactly what he had been trying to avoid when he’d decided not to tell them about what was going on. “No one said that, Mom. Can we please not do the drama thing right now?”
“He just said that your accident was caused by someone else, didn’t he? Deliberately? How is that not someone trying to kill you?” His mother demanded.
He opened his mouth and then closed it again before glaring at Paul and giving him a look that clearly said ‘fix this’. His agent had just had to go and open his big mouth around his mother, and now she was doing the melodrama thing she was so good at when she was concerned.