The only question that passed through my mind, as the bed creaked beneath us, and the headboard slammed into the wall was, What the hell took us so long?
Our bodies were a symphony. Thunderous percussion of desire with desire. The echoing strings of my cries, and the roaring bass of his passion as he careened forward into me. The friction, the unfathomable penetration, the rising heat of our bodies dripping sensuously into one another– the downright animalistic way he fucked me, all the tender foreplay of the evening giving way to this hurricane of desire, this massive force unleashed between us at long, long last.
My whole body ached. I held to him desperately, writhing with pleasure beneath him as his perfect ass flexed and pushed, throwing his football player's physique so deep inside me that I thought the two of us might never again separate.
And that was when the moment came. The winning touchdown, so to speak...
Luc cried out. He held me in his powerful arms, gripping me fiercely, and I held him in return, never letting go. His body piled forward. He roared. I felt him surge through my body, deeper and deeper, impossibly deep, my g-spot crying out with pleasure.
I screamed, and actually bit down against his shoulder, causing him to push up even deeper inside me. I felt the rush of his heat, spilling into me. Sweet, violet pulses as his body twitched and shook, his ass tightening, pushing up with each new flood of pleasure, filling me with his love, overwhelming me, and at last setting off a final, devastating rush of orgasm inside me.
The whole room seemed to grow brighter around me. Every muscle in my body tightened around him, never wanting to let him go, never wanting to let this moment pass us by. I gripped him, shaking, screaming, buried beneath floods of sensation, the likes of which I'd never before experienced, or even fathomed.
All I could do was hold onto him for dear life. Trust this man who I hardly knew, yet whom I'd known nearly my entire life, to carry me through the storm he was putting me through. I had no idea whether he could carry me through. But in that moment I was all too happy to simply strap myself to his mast and trust that he would, trust that this man, this incredible man could carry me through whatever storms surfaced on the horizon.
After all, we'd made it this far together, after all these years. Next to that, as I still lay trembling in his strong arms, I felt as though we could easily weather any storm life decided to throw at us.
4
Luc
We laid there in the afterglow, basking in each other's warmth, the sheets a tangled mess around us. Sylvia rested her angelic head against my chest, her cool dark hair flowing over the plains of my musculature. She had one hand lifted up, tracing out the lines of my body with her index finger, sending pleasant tingles along my spine with each movement she made.
God, I wondered, how soon was too soon to tell someone you were in love with them? Because all at once, I was certain that I must be. That I must have been, in fact, for all these years, even though I'd been denying it before tonight.
The words burned on the tip of my tongue, and I hesitated, wanting so badly to let them pass. Instead I sighed, and settled for a pale fraction of what I truly meant to say.
“You're so beautiful,” I whispered to her, running my fingers slowly through her hair.
I saw a smile form upon her lips in profile.
“You're beautiful,” she said, circling my left nipple with her fingertips. I felt a twitch in my loins suddenly, and the temptation of taking her again despite how vigorously we'd gone at it the first time. But the moment was far too perfect, far too pure for that. I wanted this silence, this bonding between us. It felt hard earned, precious, and I didn't want to let my immediate animal urges destroy that.
And so instead I leaned in, and kissed the crown of her head. She gave a contented sigh, and I continued to stroke her hair.
“What the hell took us so long?” I finally asked, and she laughed.
“You tell me,” she said softly. “I always thought you were out of my league. Both in school and especially now.”
“Are you serious?” I asked. I could imagine her point of view– I understood why she might have thought that, but I didn't agree with it at all.
“I mean, yeah– I was just this shy, bookish young girl, swooning over her best friend's brother on the football team, two years older than I was. Even with my body pumping out hormones like nobody's business, I knew how naive I was.”
“You were just modest,” he said. “Honestly, I think that's what I sort of liked about you.”
She laughed, lightly shook her head so that her soft hair brushed against my chest. “That wasn't modesty,” she corrected me. “That was humility. There's a difference. Modesty is where you know you're good and pretend not to be. Like you were on TV last Sunday, pretending like you hadn't just single handedly carried your team to victory a few minutes earlier.”
I laughed. “Okay, I see your point.”
“For me it was genuine humility,” she continued. “I didn't think I was worth your time of day, or anyone's for that matter. I always had a tough time at the school.”
“What? You? Little miss valedictorian?” I said, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
“There's a lot more to school than just grades,” she said, and I nodded.
“Fair enough,” I said, remembering that I'd basically coasted through high school as well as college on athletics and popularity.
“I never really felt like I belonged there,” she went on, then corrected, “Scratch that. I didn't belong there. I knew that from day one. I'd been so excited when I found out I'd got accepted because of my grades, but then instantly I felt petrified. That school was for rich families, people who belonged their by virtue of wealth and little else. I mean, no offense...”
“No, you're right,” I said, never having considered her perspective on this matter.
“And here I was, this girl from a lower middle class family in the suburbs, without all the advantages that most of the other students there had automatically in life. I always felt like I had to work twice as hard as the other kids just to try and prove myself, and that was just in academics. You can forget about the social aspect of things. I was as good as a pariah.”
“Wait– you mean one of those orange tropical fruits?” I asked her.
She looked suddenly up at me, a look of concern on her face. Then I laughed, and shook my head.
“I'm kidding,” I said, “I'm not that big of a meathead.”
“I wasn't sure there for a second,” she said playfully.
“But that's sort of how it was for me,” I said. “I mean, I know it's not the same really. To be on the outside looking in, that's got to be tough, any way you slice it. But I sort of always had the opposite perspective. I knew I was no Einstein. People smart, the way Vanessa is, but she at least managed decent grades throughout school. I was always insecure about my academics, and used sports and popularity to mask that. I think that's true for a lot of guys like me. They hide their insecurities, make it seem like they're indestructible. Of course, most guys don't go on to play professional football, so the behavior they learn leaves them stuck in life, trapped in the same bad habits with no way to step back and examine their lives.”
She was turned to face me now, arms crossed on my chest, head resting on her hands.
“I've honestly never thought about that,” she said. “I just thought I was too small for you to ever recognize, and that was all there was to it.”
“Oh I recognized you,” I said, smiling at the memory now edging forward from the back of my mind.
“What?” she said, smiling at the look on my face, and I laughed, shaking my head.
“God... It's so embarrassing,” I said.
“Now you have to tell me,” she said.
“No, I can't!” I protested, laughing.
“Tell me Mr. Stalworth!” she ordered playfully, moving up onto the pillow beside me, and lightly twisting on my nipple like it was some horrible method of torture to g
et me to talk.
“Oh, God... Okay, okay!” I said, shooing her hand away. “I was just thinking about all the times you used to come over to our house in high school with Vanessa. You know, to study or whatever?”
“Yeah,” she nodded.
“Well, you remember how you guys would always come in through the garage, and I had that little weight bench set up out there?”
“God, do I?” she said, biting her lip, and I felt another twitch suddenly between my legs.
“Oh, God, this is embarrassing,” I said, grinning with one hand on my forehead.
“You have to tell me!” she insisted, twisting my nipple again, and I laughed.
“Well whenever I heard you two coming from outside the garage door, I would always rush to take my shirt off, and then bump up the amount of reps I'd said I'd done so far while I was lifting by about a hundred. All just to impress you.”
“Oh my God, are you serious?” she said, and it was the widest I'd ever seen her smiling. I partly wished that it wasn't at my expense, yet I found that I couldn't help but smile back at her almost as broadly.
“Well, did it work?” I asked her, and she bit her lip again, wordlessly giving me my answer.
“It sure as hell didn't help my shyness any,” she said. “But I was most certainly impressed. I used to actually have dreams about you on that weight bench.”
I laughed. “Well, at least now I feel vindicated.”
“But God, you faked your reps for me? That's hilarious! And so sweet... Now that you mention it, I remember one time we came through and I heard you counting one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three... And I turned to Vanessa later and was like damn, how hard does your brother go at it?”
“Yeah, that was fake,” I said, smirking. “One hundred percent, genuinely fake.”
“It was sweet, though. Genuinely sweet,” she said, her brown eyes softening, gazing up at me in hazy focus. “I never would have guessed you noticed me enough to go through the trouble.”
“I always noticed you,” I said. “From the first time you stepped through our door.”
She smiled so beautifully. She leaned up toward me, and kissed me once more.
Her lips were so divine. I ran my fingers through her hair, holding her close, never wanting to let her go. She climbed up onto me, and I thought I could feel her becoming as aroused as I was the heat of her body radiated through me. I gripped her soft round buttocks and pulled her into me. Our tongues slid into each other's mouths, and we sustained ourselves on one another's oxygen, my heart beating in my ears as we kissed.
At last we rested again, my newly formed erection pressed up against her, her soft body bearing down upon mine. We stared into one another, her rich dark eyes gazing softly, endlessly down into mine.
“Can I ask you something?” she said softly.
“Of course. Anything,” I said.
She swallowed, shifted her eyes to the side, and seemed to consider her words carefully. I let my fingers dance along the course of her spine, down to the small of her back, hoping this might set her at ease.
“I'm not expecting an answer, either way,” she said. “I just need to know. I just need to understand, so I can try to frame all of this in my mind.”
“What is it?” I asked, fixing her seriously with my gaze.
At last she sighed, and said, “When this is all over... Tonight, I mean... In your mind, is it only tonight? Will I step out that door in the morning, and never hear from you again? Or does this... Does this mean the same thing to you as it does to me? I just need to know. I need to be able to manage my expectations, if...”
Before she could finish, I lifted a finger to her lips, and very gently silenced her.
“Sylvia,” I said, and her name felt like honey on my lips. “I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. And I don't think this was one of them. My only mistake was waiting as long as I did to get to know you. And now that fate, or the universe, or whatever you want to call it has brought us here, I want to stay right here, in this moment. Follow it wherever it takes us. And if that's what you want, then that's what I want as well.”
Her beautiful face, tense for a long moment, softened. The look of trust in her eyes was everything to me. She nodded, leaned in, and kissed me again.
The two of us became lost together once more beneath the covers, our bodies and souls entangled, the night an even more magical one than the recent eve of my Superbowl win.
I didn't dare say it so soon, but at that moment I knew– I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this woman. It’d taken us ten long years to get to this place, and as far as I was concerned, no force in the universe would ever tear us apart again.
5
Sylvia
He was such a beautiful thing. A mountain range, lying there beneath the covers, sheets draped over his loins like some sort of classical sculpture.
I couldn't believe how lucky I was. There were simply no words to describe it.
I'd fallen asleep before he had, after our second round of lovemaking. But then I'd awoken, deep in the middle of the night. I'd experienced a moment of disorientation in these unfamiliar surroundings, still not totally fathoming that this could be anything more than a dream. I would wake up and be in the Crusaders locker room again, a cloud of suds covering up his genitals. I would wake up again from there and be right back in my room, that same Superbowl Sunday, shifting into Monday, snow falling softly outside my window.
But no. This was real. He was real. I could reach out and touch him. And I did.
He was so solid. So firm, and so tangible.
He seemed lost within the deepest of sleeps, not stirring, evidently even more exhausted than I was.
I smiled up at him, leaned up, and kissed him softly on the cheek. Still he didn't stir, and I was glad for that. I liked watching him too much. Admiring his beauty in silence.
My body still rang at his touch, at the memory of all that we'd done together.
Very slowly, only when it became absolutely necessary, I pulled myself away from him. I stretched on the edge of the bed, and peered out onto the floor beneath, trying to sort out Luc's clothes from my own.
I managed to find my panties and slip into them, then decided to slide into Luc's own overlarge t-shirt instead of my dress.
I stepped down from the bed as silently as I could, and turned to Luc again, still dead asleep and motionless. I wondered if he might be dreaming about me, how many nights he might have spent dreaming about me before now. The thought made me smile.
I crept out of his room and into the pitch black hallway, wondering if I could navigate it well enough to race my bladder to his bathroom. I managed to find it after some degree of difficulty, a devastating relief immediately washing over me once I did.
A few minutes later I was heading back the other way, dozing as I paced along through the hallway, ready to lay back down by Luc's side and crash the moment I hit the mattress.
I stopped about halfway through the hall to his bedroom, in front of a wide picture window overlooking a sprawling back yard blanketed in glistening snow. It was still twinkling silently and serenely down from the heavens, much harder than it had been out on the balcony.
Oh no! I thought. I might end up snowed in here, and forced to spend the rest of the weekend with him! What a tragedy that would be!
I smiled to myself, and gazed off into the distance.
I always noticed you, he'd said, and my heart stirred.
It hadn't only been me all those years. It hadn't all been some teenage fantasy, carried long past maturity into adulthood.
I always noticed you.
Me. The wallflower. The bookworm. The long lost Bronte sister. Apple of the eye of the Superbowl Champion of the world. The great Luc Stalworth, the finest male ever conceived of on God's green earth.
I always noticed you.
His eyes, staring back at me, staring back at me.
Blue eyes on brown eyes.
B
lack eyes staring back at me, somehow reflecting against the endless dark of the picture window.
A knot formed in my chest, choked the wind out of me. I thought I must be dreaming, hallucinating.
I turned, and dove just in time as a jet black silhouette dove forward at me, missing me by inches.
I screamed, staggered backward.
“Luc, what are you doing?!” I asked, my mind failing to parse the details of my situation in a timely manner. Finally it clicked, as the man rose up from the floor, wheeling back around in my direction.
This man was too short. Too thin. His eyes far, far too black.
This wasn't Luc.
“Get back here, you bitch!”
“Luc!”
I shrieked, wheeled around as he leapt at me. I stormed back along the hallway as fast as my bare feet could carry me, heart storming in my chest as I struggled to elude him.
This can't be happening! This can't be happening! The part with Luc was real, but this– this must surely be a dream! A play by my subconscious, from sleeping in a place that's unfamiliar, in a situation where I know I don't belong...
But the man's echoing footsteps were too loud, too real for him not to be there. My exhaustion was too thorough not to be true, my lungs on fire as I surged from hallway to hallway, no idea where the hell I was going, or even where there was to go, but simply needing to put as much distance between me and my assailant as humanly possible.
“Stop fucking running!” the man shouted. “I've got a fucking gun, you know!”
There was bright flash, a loud bang. I screamed. Something cracked several yards ahead of me, though I had no clue what it was. It was a warning shot, clearly, but I had no idea how serious he was about using his gun on me, or whether it was simply a motivating tool.
I was in no hurry whatsoever to find out...
I rounded a corner that drew up unexpectedly in the darkness, and got just enough of a lead on my attacker that I thought I might be able to hide.
The Red Zone: Second Chance Sports Romance Page 4