by Leslie North
“What happened to your parents?”
“Same old story. String of stepfathers. Mother on government assistance. When I was thirteen, she ran off with her boyfriend, and I went to stay with my father. He’d tried straight and narrow and sober. Failed every time. When he found out my mom kept the monthly checks meant to raise me, he turned me out. For a hundred dollars a month, he turned me out. I looked for my mother for a year. Never found her.”
To Claire’s credit, she didn’t offer empty words. There were none, really. She simply reached for his hand. He charged ahead before his courage failed him.
“Those paper sacks became my lifeline, but Sol never showed himself. Never pushed. One night, I’d fallen asleep. Woke up to someone ransacking my stash. I was scrawny, couldn’t fight. So I pulled the gun I’d taken from my old man. I only meant to scare them away, but one of them went down. Not dead, but could have been. Sol showed up at the juvenile lock up. Claimed responsibility for me. Sol and his wife took me into their home that night and every night after.”
Marcus reached into his pocket and pulled out a faded, crumpled photo of a beautiful, young black woman.
“I thought maybe if I kept her, she would save me, too.” Tears threatened a vice-grip on his throat. He stared at the ceiling, swallowed them back, sniffed hard. “She did. They both did.”
Claire glanced around The Hive as if seeing it for the first time. “You’re so much more than a football player, Marcus. I wish you could see what I see.”
“Sol used to say ‘Help the kids who come after you, not because you’re famous, not because you have money, but because it’s the right thing.’ Fifteen professional athletes have come out of that gym since the day he opened. Two gold-medal Olympians. A college coach. Even a few brains like you. I want that here.”
“He must be so proud of you.”
“He died last season. Heart attack, they said. But it was a broken heart.” He studied the face in the photo. Her eyes showed the kindness she had demonstrated as long as he knew her. “Irma died the week before. Cancer.”
She squeezed his hand and rested her forehead against his. He closed his eyes and breathed in her essence, wondering if she was his Irma but admonishing himself for considering it. Love like Sol had for Irma was beyond rare. Marcus didn’t deserve love like Sol’s more than once in his lifetime.
“Thank you for telling me all this.” Her words were soft, intimate.
Her lips drew close to his. She hesitated then captured them. His body ached from the enormity of what it meant.
The truth—his truth—had not built a barrier between them; it had crumbled one.
She deepened the kiss, and he accepted all she offered. His body responded at once, the jagged line between grief and ecstasy blurred. A cavernous hole had opened where he cored out his soul, and he wanted only one thing, one person, to fill the emptiness.
But as abruptly as she began the kiss, she ended it. Claire bit her bottom lip playfully and tugged him to his feet, toward the cage door. “I have a surprise for you. Come on.”
He protested with a full-body press against the cage. He wasn’t sure he could get out of this cage, much less the building, without sinking into her fragrant warmth and telling her what it meant to him that she was still here, still with him.
Claire persisted.
She helped him cut the lights and lock up. Outside, the dry night sky lifted. With few clouds left and the storm moving out, the dawn promised sun.
“Where are we going?”
“Someplace I guarantee you’ve never been.”
9
For the life of him, Marcus had no idea why she’d brought him here.
The view of the city was breathtaking, but she knew his penthouse had a 360-view of the city. Claire drove up a winding road, her four-banger engine struggling against the grade. In the passenger seat, he felt like a praying mantis in a toy car—limbs folded, defending himself against an unknown ambush that had filled his companion with glee.
“Never broken down up here before,” he said.
She giggled. “Shush. Some of us can’t afford an Escalade. Besides, Dimitri does just fine.”
“You named your car?”
“Jo did. Kinda hot, right?”
“Only if the engine overheats.”
They turned off the road at a remote mailbox with the name J. Peter Smith painted on the side. A thick grove of young and old Douglas firs obscured their destination, but sun rays lit the field at the end of the dirt road like a spotlight. Marcus tried not to think about what mornings normally meant for him on game day—light movement, massive hydration, steak and eggs, and Dixieland jazz sliding low through his headphones. Sol had been from New Orleans, wanted to play trumpet his entire life until the army came knocking. The sound of the old greats never failed to reach inside Marcus, center him, make him feel invincible.
Today, he felt anything but invincible.
In the clearing, atop the hill’s crest, a modest house came into view—gabled roof, native stone, the grounds neat and trimmed. Claire parked at the semi-circular drive, wriggled a cross-body bag around her torso, and waited for him to unroll himself from the seat one limb at a time.
“Who’s here?”
“No one today. One day a week, Joan gives her volunteers a day off. She asked me to look in on things each Sunday while she’s in Finland.”
Claire used a key to unlock a side gate and led the way along a meandering garden path. A glasshouse, originally obscured by the stone residence but nearly twice its size, speared upward from the intricate gardens and stretched out across the remainder of the hill, almost the length of a football field.
“Joan was one of my mentors in college. When her husband retired to Oregon, she made it her quest to learn everything she could about the area.”
“Flowers?”
“Not just any flowers. She has the largest private collection of species native to the state, including a few that haven’t been seen in nature in a decade or more.”
It was impressive, Marcus couldn’t deny, but he still didn’t understand why Claire had brought him here.
“Joan is also one of the leading experts in the world on orchids. Buyers come to her from all over the world because of her unique hybrids.”
They entered the greenhouse, bathed in light. The entire structure had seemingly been designed to optimize sun exposure. At intervals along the building’s length, glass partitions separated the larger shell into smaller rooms. The air was moist and fragrant—almost overpowering.
“She always said orchids were the closest plant species to humans. Their blooms have a symmetry that mimics the human face, they’re simultaneously tough and fragile, and they grow in entirely different conditions from where they bloom.” Claire reached inside her bag and withdrew a rectangular black box. “And their colors are unsurpassed.”
Marcus glanced around. He stood between rows of orderly tables with fuzzy, fern-like plants sprouting along each pathway, but he was still lost.
“It’s nice,” he said, because he didn’t want to hurt her.
“I was close-minded when I came to Portland. I didn’t understand the value of football, the reason you punished your body day after day. I thought all athletes were dim-witted Neanderthals. Then I got to know one and found out he was the kind of person I aspire to be—honest, courageous, compassionate. You opened my eyes, so I wanted to repay the favor.”
Claire opened the box and pulled out a pair of dark eyeglasses.
His stomach twisted. He had heard about these filters to counteract colorblindness, had even considered getting a pair to try, but something always stopped him. What if the reality didn’t live up to the hype? All it would do would cement his fear that he would have this weakness for the rest of his life. He preferred to dwell on the side of hope.
“I don’t know, Claire.”
“I spoke to the team doc. He saw no reason not to try.”
She had just called him cou
rageous, the kind of person she aspired to be, and here he was, afraid to put on a pair of glasses. Claire had brought him all the way out here, to a theater of the mind for color. The least he could do was slip them on for a few minutes.
Her eyes blinked, expectant, wide, excited. His desire to know their color, to feel their color far beyond what he intellectually knew as green, swayed him.
Marcus nodded.
He hooked the earpieces into place, no issue. His hand was slower to rest them on his nose. Perspiration broke out under his arms and along his lip. Why did greenhouses have to be so damned hot? He closed his eyes, slid the nosepiece to his bridge and breathed through the slightly sickening wave of nausea that bubbled around the emptiness where a high-carb meal usually resided by this hour on a Sunday.
The frames were heavier than his aviators.
“I don’t know, Claire.” His voice wavered. “Feels like a clutch play in the Super Bowl.”
“Take your time.”
He turned toward the largest stretch of greenhouse and opened his eyes.
His nausea lifted. His eyes adjusted slowly after the brightness. The flowers crowded him, lifting from their perches on leaves and blooms and scampering closer, closer, closer until he damned near tasted them. The disconnect between what he expected and what he saw left him suspended in time and thought and breath. Everything appeared outlined, sharp. Distinct.
Marcus reached for the closest bloom. “What’s this color called?”
“It’s a light orange. Like a ripe peach.”
“Orange,” he repeated. As a variation of red, orange had always been a lighter version of apples and stop signs and the blood he left on the field.
“And this?” He stroked a petal on the next flower, soft as a woman’s skin.
“The outside is yellow, the inside burgundy.”
“I never knew what burgundy was. That the color of the Rogues?”
“And the Redskins. And Forty-niners.”
“Look at you,” he teased. “Knowing your teams. I’ll make a football junkie outta you yet.”
Claire laughed.
Talking with her, interacting with her, felt warm, comfortable. He wanted to stay in that place forever, but he had colors to see and someone special to inspire.
He glanced across the rows of flowers. Hundreds. Thousands. Some colors clustered on multiple plants. Many stretched lone, high, unique. Marcus knew there were basic colors, like a box of eight crayons—the brown of the football, the green of the field, the yellow and black of everything inside The Hive. Never had he guessed there would be twenty variations of each.
A sharp sting organized in his nose. His eyes watered. From the new input, from his pupils being overwhelmed, he told himself. But mostly because he would finally know Claire’s eyes.
He turned and tilted her chin to the sky, a sky such an impossible shade of blue, it looked like a child’s drawing. The brilliant sunlight filtered down through her dark lashes, thick with mascara. Her gray and silver and black makeup was all familiar colors because he never bought any other color clothing. But her eyes—he sank into the hue of her eyes.
Claire’s simple description that day on the field—green—did not do them justice. Her eyes were a soft shade, velvety, with brown flecks. Individual colors co-existing within a hair’s breadth of each other, no longer blending. He became lost in the spiral and thought that if he should never emerge, he would die happy.
“Green?” Grateful the dark lenses concealed his tears, he pushed ahead with questions. He grasped for control where he felt none.
“Hazel, really. A mixture of green and brown.”
“And mine?”
“A blue lighter than the sky. More like a glacier.”
Marcus nodded. “My father used to say I had my mother’s eyes, like it was a bad thing. She was white. I always got teased. Never really fit in with the brothers, ya know?”
“Those blues single-handedly earned you People magazine’s sexiest man alive, sports category, 2013.”
“You saw that?”
“Jo practically wallpapered our bathroom with it.”
Marcus laughed. Heat that surpassed the greenhouse temperature migrated to his cheeks. “I don’t know what to say, Claire.”
“Tell me again that you want me, and I’ll show you the best part of my surprise.”
Her words rocketed to his manhood. His cock gave a ravenous lurch, the unexpected ache inside the flimsy fabric of his athletic pants sated only with the counter-pressure of pulling her full length against him. The light, the colors made him feel exposed and raw, but she had assured them they were alone. Everything he wanted to do to her, with her, on the mat in The Hive surged back.
In the sunlight, the milky swell of her breasts, shoved into a most illogical clothing selection under his jersey, were better than cream. They were pink cream, a shade lighter than the rest of her skin, so much lighter than his. They swelled in invitation and pressed, soft and yielding, against his shirt.
Damn. She was magnificent—all gold and red streaks in her brown hair, her lips a glossy color that defied red, defied blue, some delightful mix between. A tiny spray of freckles, which had always just blended into her skin, dusted her nose and cheeks in the sharp relief of his new vision. She had conditioned him from the first moment to notice her details. He could spend a lifetime memorizing the many shades of Claire.
Echoing her words wasn’t enough. He seized her lips and wasted no time breaching the barrier of maybe, the barrier of decorum and propriety and professionalism she had given him permission to surpass. He kissed her how he wanted to take her: slow, wet, with as much care as the flowers surrounding them required.
When a delightful little moan escaped her throat, he lifted her to a flower table, toppling three pots, maybe more. She wrapped her legs around his hips and clenched him to her until his erection collided with the heat she generated at her zenith, all while her sweet mouth trailed kisses along his jaw and down his neck. He was dying to peel her clothing off, piece by piece, and sample every nuanced pigment of her until he reached her pussy, spread her saturated folds, and discovered, for the first time, the color and taste and scent of sugared perfection.
Reluctantly, he leaned away from her to clear the remainder of the high table. He wanted her naked, her tantalizing curves shaming the red and orange and yet-to-be-identified blossoms, showing them true beauty, a rivalry of splendor with the potential to drive him past the brink of sensory insanity.
When he settled back between her welcoming legs and the chunky black heels adorning her feet, he realized her comical, goalpost tights extended only as high as mid-thigh. Thin, silky, straps were the only visual break between the delicate lace cuff holding her tights in place and her panties.
Marcus sucked in a breath. If he wasn’t careful, he would do his own fucking pollination before he even got his dick free of his pants. He had to rein in his lust.
If he was to draw her panties into his mouth, taste her through the fabric before he knew her wetness on his tongue, he had to know the color.
He gently slipped his fingertip beneath the lace at her hip. Her panties were almost the color her lipstick had been before he devoured her lips. He had to attach a word.
“What color are these?”
The corner of Claire’s mouth tugged into a smile. “Magenta.”
Magenta was Marcus’s new favorite color. He salivated in anticipation.
At the reminder of his new, colored world, he hesitated. “Are the glasses weird? I can take them off.”
Claire bit her bottom lip. “Then I can’t introduce you to pale rose.”
With a jaunty lift of her brow, she lifted her left breast clear of the corset. Areolas the faintest shade of skin swelled and tightened, transforming the center nub into a shade deeper, richer, than the surrounding flesh.
A fresh wave of lust crashed through him.
He would have never guessed Claire’s spreadsheets and tight schedule maske
d a subversive freedom that incited him to possess other things spread, other things tight. That she reserved her exhibition for moments of intimacy made Marcus feel like he had rare access to the real Claire, a woman who already had an addictive authenticity.
His response to her breast invitation was deft fingers and a hot mouth. He used his tongue to tug her nipple tighter against the roof of his mouth; and when he had coaxed it to the hardness of the granite mountain beneath them, alternating sucking and pinching, he lifted the ample weight of her right breast free of its lace confines and challenged himself to surpass the stimulating impact he had on the first.
She arched her back to leverage herself closer. When the angle shift wasn’t enough, she raised on her elbows to unzip the corset from behind.
Relief that it wasn’t the old-fashioned lace-up kind permeated his exhale. He feared his dick might explode should he have to labor through that particular trapping. The structured piece slid mercifully free of her torso, allowing her soft, fluid breasts to settle into their natural span. He gave them the combined attention he would give a new route—replaying, puzzling, manipulating, taking his time in reaching his goal. He had wanted Claire too long to post any gains rushing.
The clonk of her shoes dropping to the greenhouse dirt reminded him there were other colors to explore.
She snaked her right heel to his passing shoulder, and he forgot all about the task it had been conditioned for all these weeks. Content to be her foothold until the end of time, he returned his attention toward his ultimate goal. He unhooked her garters and alternated rolling her leggings off and kissing her recently vacated skin. When he had slipped them both free, she hooked her heels on the wood table’s worn, gray edge and splayed her knees so wide that the outer folds of her pussy surpassed the edge of her panties.
Pale rose.
His balls clenched. Relentlessly heavy. Insufferably scorched.
Claire jumped ahead of his plan to remove the magenta panties with his teeth. The knot of her straight-laced behavior continued to unravel as she yanked the fabric aside, giving him full, immediate access and an eyeful of the most enticing human flesh ever.