Alpha Foxtrot_Offensive Line

by Tracey Ward

  She chuckles shakily. She refuses to meet my eyes. “Thanks a lot for that.”

  “Let’s get you back to the studio and find the doctor. You seriously don’t look right.”

  “No. I can… I’m fine. I—”

  Her eyes go unfocused. Her lower lip trembles.

  She vomits on my shoes.

  “Oh shit!” I jump back out of range, careful to keep my hand on her elbow to help steady to her.

  Sutton gags and spits bile from her lips, her eyes closed against what looks like real pain. She’s dry heaving. Everything that was in her stomach came up on that first wretch, but now there’s nothing. Still, her body keeps trying. She hiccups and coughs, moaning weakly.

  I come around next to her, rubbing my hand on her back consolingly. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Just let it out.”

  “So embarrassing.”

  “It’s not. It’s my fault. I made you run too hard. I shouldn’t have challenged you like that.”

  “It wasn’t the running,” she whimpers pathetically.

  When her body stills and the worst of it has passed, I take off my shirt and hand her a dry corner to wipe her face with.

  “I’m sorry about your shoes,” she mutters.

  “Don’t sweat it. I have others.”

  “This is so humiliating.”

  “We’ve all been there. But now we need to get you out of the sun. Come on.” I wrap one arm around her, putting my other hand under her elbow. “You’re going to the doctor.”

  “I don’t want to go inside the studio like this.”

  “You’re probably suffering heat stroke, Sutton. Or dehydration. You can’t just go home. You can’t drive.”

  She shakes her head stubbornly. “I can’t go in the studio. Blood in the water.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They’re sharks,” she insists forcefully. “You think they’re just women, but they’re sharks. They can’t see me like this.”

  I sigh, glancing around the empty park like it will give me an answer. It gives me jack shit because it’s not real. Nothing here is real. Not even the sharks she’s so afraid of.

  “Okay, how about this?” I suggest in my most convincing voice. “I’ll take you back to my place.”

  “Hard pass,” she laughs tremulously.

  “You just vomited on my shoes. I’m not trying to hook up.”

  “No.”

  “Not even if I agree to watch an episode off the pen drive you sent me?”

  She stiffens in my arms. Her eyes rise to mine; watery and intrigued. “Seriously? You’ll finally watch the show?”

  “I swear it. And all it took to convince me was you putting your health at risk.”

  “Six episodes.”

  I frown at her. “Three.”

  “Five.”

  “Whatever. Yes. Five.”

  Her hand goes over her mouth like she’s ready for round two. Only problem is, there’s nothing else inside her. She was all coconut water, and now that’s sprayed across the ground at our feet. She’s made of nothing but spite at this point. Even so, she won’t let me carry her to the Jeep. We make slow progress but when we finally get there and I offer to lift her up inside, she doesn’t complain.

  I give her my sunglasses as well as my hat on the drive home. She doesn’t like it but she doesn’t fight me either. That’s how weak she’s feeling. She wears them both like a suit of armor against the world that roars around her. When I glance at her, I feel my heart tighten with worry. She looks like hell. Pretty hell, but still. Hell. Her face is pale, her lips almost white. I wonder if that pink hue I’ve always admired is lipstick. Maybe it’s fake and this is the real her. White as snow. Fragile and fierce.

  “Two episodes, right?” I ask her, focusing on the road.

  I’m relieved when she chuckles softly. “Nice try. It’s seven.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  I smile, shifting my hands on the steering wheel. Reminding myself to watch the road and not her. “Why don’t we just make it an even ten?”

  “That’s the entire season.”

  I shrug. “Might as well, right?”

  “It’s two o’clock. We’ll be watching until midnight if we do that.”

  “I can hang if you can.” I glance at her with a smirk on my lips. The kind she loves to hate. “What do you think, Boss? Can you handle it?”

  She smiles smugly. “I can do anything you can do.”

  “One of these days I’m gonna get you on a football field and show you how wrong you are about that.”

  “Do your worst, Shane Lowry. I’m tougher than I look.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a second, Sutton Roe.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SUTTON

  Shane’s apartment isn’t what I thought it would be. It’s not as manly as I imagined. It’s softer. Homier. And so is he. For the first time, I can see him with a woman. I’ve never bothered to imagine it before because it doesn’t affect me, or I didn’t want it to, but now that I’m here where he lives, I can see it so clearly. I can imagine him bringing a girl home, offering her a drink, and making her feel comfortable with his warm smile and easy attitude. She’d grin at him. She’d flirt. He’d tell her she’s beautiful and she’d believe it. She’d feel it and she’d show him, following him to his bedroom. She’d giggle as he oafishly kicked off his shoes to strip away his pants. His underwear. Her inhibitions. His eyes would be like alcohol in her veins. She’d be drunk on him. She’d be naked and sprawled out on his California king, waiting for him and his huge body to be rough with her in the gentlest, sweetest way possible.

  Would he whisper her name? Would he bite her neck in the tender place where her pulse runs wild with lust? Would she moan? Would she arch her back so her breasts are pressed against the never-ending plane of his chest that feels like a roof hovering over her; protecting her? Would he go slow? Would he go fast? Would he ask her how she likes it and give her what she needs? What she wants? Would he let her finish first before taking for himself? Would he kiss her slowly, savoring the taste of her ecstasy before driving in deep and bringing her to the brink for a second time?

  “Sutton.”

  I blink rapidly up at Shane. “Yeah?”

  “You okay?” He sounds worried. His face is drawn with concern.

  I wonder how many times he had to say my name to get my attention. It was definitely one too many to be normal. I shift nervously on the couch, pulling the blanket he gave me up high around my neck. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Oh, that’s rude.”

  “You look beautifully tired?”

  I smile weakly. “That’s better.”

  He grins as he hands me a glass filled with ice and bubbling liquid. “Ginger ale. It should help settle your stomach.”

  “Thanks.”

  I drink it because it tastes better than the flavor of my vomit, but it won’t help. He’s already made me drink two glasses of water because he’s convinced I threw up from dehydration or overexertion. That’s not my problem, though. It was my mother. Talking about her. Thinking about her. It brought up all the ugly I keep carefully tamped down inside me, and it had to go somewhere. It couldn’t stay inside so I threw it up on his feet and the artificial field that feels like a metaphor for my life. Fake. Fake. Fake.

  Shane sits down gently on the other end of the long, gray couch. His apartment is huge. It’s very industrial with exposed plumbing and beams running across the ceiling. The floors are dark wood. The walls are painted a somber gray.

  “I like your apartment.”

  He glances around like he’s seeing it for the first time. “Thanks, but it’s not mine. It’s Colt’s. He owns the place upstairs too.”

  “And the garage underneath?”

  “Yep. Whole building. He usually rents this apartment out to tourists but when we found out the team was being moved, I sold my pl
ace. I jumped the gun. I thought it’d take longer to sell but it went in a month and I ended up homeless. He let me move in here until we leave L.A.”

  I frown. “The team is moving?”

  “Next year. This coming season will be our last in L.A. It’ll be the last for a lot of the guys too. Not everyone wants to go to Las Vegas.”

  “It’s not that far away.”

  “That’s what I figure. I don’t have anything holding me here. I might as well go and stay on the team I started out with.”

  “Do a lot of players do that?”

  “It’s rare. If you stay in long enough, you’ll get traded at least once.”

  “Do you worry about that?”

  “I try not to.”

  “Do you worry about anything?”

  Shane snorts a laugh. “Sure. I worry about a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing right now.”

  “Seriously?” I push aggressively. “You’re not worried about anything right now?”

  “Not really.”

  “That is goddamn amazing,” I whisper.

  He laughs, full and intoxicating. I smile as I listen to it. “I just don’t see the point in worrying about what I can’t change. And right now, there’s nothing in my life I’d change, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

  I still don’t get it. I can’t imagine a world where I didn’t worry. It sounds terrifyingly liberating. It makes my heart race to think about, like imagining you can fly. It’s invigorating and scary and so outside sane thought that you can’t really understand it. You can only dream and wonder. That’s what Shane looks like to me right then. Like a wonderful, terrifying dream.

  It takes some coaxing, but I finally get Shane to plug the pen drive into his DVD player. We watch the first two episodes of last season’s DNA in quick succession, barely saying a word to one another. I doze off for a little bit about an hour in and wake up to find myself stretched out low on the couch. My head is on the armrest and my feet are in Shane’s lap. His hand rests absently on my ankles, his fingers slowly rubbing them through the thick fabric of the blanket.

  It's almost too much. Part of me is screaming inside, telling me to sit up. To kick off his touch. I should go home and I should be alone, but I don’t want to do any of that. There’s another part of me, a quieter, scarier part, that’s comfortable here under the warmth of his blanket in his home with his hand on me. I feel oddly settled for the first time in a long time, and I’m not quite ready for that feeling to end.

  When the second episode is over, Shane reaches for the remote with his free hand. He deftly changes the TV to a live channel. It’s ESPN.

  “Nope,” I mumble from inside my cocoon.

  His hand freezes on my ankles. “Shit, I thought you were asleep.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.” I roll my hand at the screen. “Change it back. Next episode.”

  “Just let me check the score.”

  “To what?”

  “The Mariners/Dodgers game.”

  “Baseball, right?”

  He casts me a disappointed look. “You’re being difficult on purpose.”

  I smile. “Maybe.”

  “You don’t follow sports at all, do you?”

  “None of them.”

  “Wow. Okay, yeah, it’s baseball.” He gestures to the screen. “The Mariners are Seattle. They’re playing the L.A. Dodgers. It’s a big match up for me because it’s my two teams.”

  “Who would my team be?”

  “No one because you don’t care.”

  I kick at him gently, jostling his arm. “But what if I did? Who’s the New York team?”

  “There are two of them. The Mets and the Yankees.”

  “Okay… I pick the Yankees.”

  “Of course you do,” he mutters, his eyes on the game.

  I scowl at him. “Why did you say it like that?”

  “Because the Yankees are baseball royalty.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Name one baseball player,” he challenges.

  I roll my eyes. “I don’t know any. I don’t watch.”

  “Just name any player you can think of. Alive or dead. I’m sure you’ve heard names before in movies or on TV.”

  I look up at the ceiling, thinking. “Um… Joe DiMaggio.”

  “He played for the Yankees. Try again.”

  “Babe Ruth.”

  “Yankee. He played for Boston and Atlanta too, but his good years were with the Yankees.” He looks at me with an amused grin. “Go again.”

  “I think I see where this is going.”

  “Come on. One more.”

  “Okay, fine,” I sigh. “Lou Gehrig.”

  “Yankee.”

  I drop my jaw, feigning shock. “What?!”

  Shane laughs. His hand rubs my leg again, and I’m not sure he even realizes he’s doing it. He massages my calf gently, sending shivers down my spine. “That’s what I’m saying. The Yankees are the most famous baseball team out there. They’ve won a lot of pennants. And you love a winner.”

  “I do,” I admit greedily. “They’re my favorite.”

  “Then yes, the Yankees are your team.”

  “Cool. Now turn the show back on.”

  Shane laughs but he listens. He turns us back to DNA, immediately going to the last episode.

  “What are you doing?” I protest. “We’re on episode three.”

  “And we’ll watch episode three. But first I want to watch you win.”

  I smile, stretching my legs out farther into his lap as I sink down deeper into the couch. He puts down the remote to massage my calf with both hands as the opening number begins.

  “Is this bugging you?” he asks quietly, his eyes on the screen.

  I shake my head even though he can’t see it. “No. It feels good.”

  “You have a knot in this one.”

  “I know. It’s been there all week. I’ll give you everything I own if you can work it out.”

  He snickers. “Hell of an offer after telling me you’re broke.”

  “I might not be rolling as deep as you but I’m a far cry from broke.”

  “You mind if I put my hands under the blanket to get deeper into the muscle?”

  “Do whatever you have to do.”

  He puts his palms against my skin. They’re so hot it’s a shock. His touch makes the hair on my arms stand on end. I’m watching the TV but I’m hyper aware of his hands. He’s strong but gentle. He kneads the muscles in my legs with an expert touch, alternating between deep pressure and soothing strokes.

  “Is this okay?” he asks, his voice so low I can hardly hear it.

  I swallow roughly. “Yes.”

  On the screen, Tina and her partner dive into a Paso Doble that will earn them some of the highest marks of the night.

  Under the blanket, Shane’s hand drags along the back of my knee.

  Inside my body, I start to burn.

  He’s pushing boundaries. He’s doing it slowly, giving me plenty of time to complain, but I don’t. I can’t. His touch is everything I’ve wanted for weeks. I haven’t been able to shake the memory of kissing him in the rehearsal room. I think about it all the time. I’m thinking about it now as he moves his other hand up my calf, around the front of my knee, and between my thighs. His fingertips brush the tender skin that’s pressed together, asking permission.

  I’m breathless when I give it. When I open my legs to let him in.

  He doesn’t dive in right away. He takes his time exploring the ticklishness that lies just at the edge of my tight workout shorts. He teases me slowly. Painfully. I’m panting with need by the time he brushes one thick fingertip under the elastic material, pushing upward until he grazes the edge of my underwear.

  We aren’t looking at each other. We’re staring at the screen, pretending to watch the show, but in reality we’re both between my legs. I’m with him as he tugs at the thin material of
my underwear. We’re one when he drags his finger down the center of my body, making me gasp. Making me buck.

  That’s his undoing and mine. We stop pretending to care about the television. Fuck the show. Fuck the whole competition. Fuck the world. Just, please, for the love of God, let him fuck me.

  I toss the blanket aside as he sits up on his knees on the couch. There’s a fierceness in his eyes as he leans over me, replacing the warmth and weight of the blanket with his body. It makes me tremble with desire that feels like lightning in my veins.

  His kiss is tender and slow. He takes his time with me, exploring my mouth, and I moan low in the back of my throat with a devilish delight at how thorough he is. We stay like that for five minutes or an hour or a day – I lose track of time and myself. At one point I’m gasping, ready for him to take it to the next level before I lose my mind, but the next minute I’m giggling as he runs his hand up my side, tickling my skin. He smiles against my mouth and I swear to God, I can taste it. It’s like icing on a cupcake I’d never eat in my wildest dreams, but I love the flavor of it. The easiness of him is something I can’t understand but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it.

  I tug at his shirt, yanking it up over his head to find more of him. All of him. As I kiss him, he becomes everything I’ve ever denied myself rolled into one, massive package of joys. The ridges of his stomach that count out a perfect six. The thick tresses of his hair the slide smoothly through my fingers. The hard roll of muscle that builds the landscape on his back. The tattoos on his shoulders. The thick cords of strength in his neck. He’s candy and cake and soda. He’s birthdays and swimming pools in the summertime. He’s every kiss I never got as a girl. He’s the fun, flirty sex I’ve been too afraid to have as a woman. He’s big enough to be everything I want and need him to be, and he does it so effortlessly it hurts. It almost makes me angry how good he feels.

  He mumbles something about a condom. He hesitates after he says it, waiting for me to complain or pump the brakes, but I don’t. I stare up at him silently, smoothing my hands over the warm skin on his chest that bristles with wiry black hair. He has a tattoo of a bear there. A Kodiak. I look into his inky eyes that stare back blankly, and I nod to Shane.