Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series

by Rivers, Mary Ann

  Their eyes met, then they both leaned toward the other at the same time. She reached up to play with his earlobe, and he dove his hand into her hair, which made her shiver a little. Their kiss was just kisses, layered one over the other.

  He kissed with his eyes closed. His lashes looked mascaraed, they were so dark against his skin. She noticed he kept his eyes closed when they had their hands all over each other, like he needed to take in everything a different way.

  “Good-bye,” she whispered.

  He leaned back, but kept his hand in her hair, sifting it, shaking out goose bumps.

  “Where’re you goin’?”

  “That’s another good-bye, right? Because you’re going. I’ve decided to make it easier. I’ll tell you ‘good-bye’ all the time, then it will be easy when you leave.”

  He looked out the windshield, and she watched the little bunch of muscles in his jaw pull on the tendon in his neck. She reached up and traced it with a finger. “Good-bye, Destiny.”

  She ignored the stab of that. It was her game after all. She started it. “See?” She bluffed. “A little rough at first, but by the time you get on that plane we’ll be sick of saying it. Are you going to buy me nachos and balls?”

  He kissed her nose, a soft second of warm dampness and prickle from his whiskers. “You said balls.”

  She laughed and got out of the limo finally. The air was so much cooler, she wished she had a sweater. They walked in and bought their piles of nachos, and he took her to the back where she tried on a couple of helmets until he was satisfied one fit, and she tried not to think about all the sweaty heads that had been inside of it. He hefted their balls out the back, down a dirt-packed path with walls of nylon netting on every side until they got to their own cage.

  She sat on the bench against the net wall. The cage was much bigger than she had imagined. Next to the bench was what looked like a huge, round half barrel made of wood and painted with a red Cleveland insignia. Inside, it was set in with a narrow bench, and right in the middle was an old steering wheel from what looked like a truck, mounted on a metal stem. On the surface of the bench was painted TUB O’ FUN.

  “What’s that?” She toed the tub.

  Hefin came over and handed her the helmet, which she dutifully put on. He set a bat down next to her, which he had also picked out. “That’s a Tub o’ Fun.”

  “What makes it fun?”

  He held the side of the tub. “Get in and find out.”

  When she stepped in to sit on the bench, she was glad he was holding it, because it moved, started to try to turn with her weight. She settled on the bench and said, “Now what?”

  “Put your hands on the wheel, and turn hard and fast in one direction. You might want to put your feet up on the opposite bench.”

  She hiked her feet up and grabbed the wheel. When she turned it, a metal grinding noise started up under the tub. “What’s that?”

  “Big ball bearings in a track, you have to pull hard to get going, then the bearings will start pullin’ you along. Here, I’ll help start you up. Show me which way you’re turnin.”

  She grabbed the wheel and started one way and suddenly she was spinning. She laughed out loud and kept turning the wheel, hand over hand, until she hardly had to turn it at all to spin fast and smooth in the tub.

  She couldn’t stop giggling, she couldn’t remember the last time she was moving purely for the sake of fun. It was like going years without dancing, then being out on the floor with the music bouncing your insides, jumping all over the place, getting sweaty, thinking Why don’t I go out dancing all the time?

  Like making out with a gorgeous Welshman in a limousine.

  Like eating pancakes in the sunshine with a view of the water and the hope of a kiss.

  She was going so fast, her palms were getting hot from the steering wheel’s friction. She spun, and her middle got light and dipping. She imagined the whole morning spinning away—that moment watching the paramedics shoulder into her sister’s apartment, PJ walking away, Sam and Sarah yelling at each other.

  When she spun that all out, she spun out her empty bank account, then the shame of her weeks on unemployment, then her dozens of rejections, even the day her boss had walked in and told her they needed to talk.

  She thought of the hours sitting in the hospital with her sister, washing blood out of her hair with a plastic hospital basin.

  She remembered the look of her father’s ashes swirling away in the winter air, mixing with the snowflakes.

  The air moving counter to the direction of her body grabbed it all away.

  She held on to the weight of telling Hefin good-bye. She imagined it as a ball bearing, following its track in the opposite direction, pulling her, yet spinning her into giddiness.

  She would lessen that weight in pieces, in a hundred different kinds of farewells. These days would be an advent, a little present every day and hour, until there were no more, but she would be different on the other side.

  She tipped her head back to let her hair fly and her helmet bounced off into the dirt. Leaning back made her dizzy as she watched the net ceiling kaleidoscope above her.

  Then she let go of the wheel and the revolutions got slower with every turn, until she felt the ball bearings under her feet roll past one more time, and the Tub o’ Fun stopped.

  Hefin was leaning back in the bench, watching her.

  “You made that look fun.”

  “It was fun. It was a Tub o’ Fun.”

  He made his little laugh into his chest, and she squeezed her eyes tight to get her brain to stop spinning.

  “Are you ready to batter up?”

  “I better not until everything stops twirling around.” She stood up and swayed a little, which made her laugh and sway more. Then his arms were around her and he was helping her step out of the tub. “Kiss me while everything’s still spinning,” she said.

  He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his body. Their hip bones notched together, and his chest and arms felt hard—he didn’t have even a little extra on him. She wondered if she felt bony to him, the Burnside skinniness was kind of a curse, but when he slid one hand down to her butt, she guessed he was fine with seeking out the place where extra softness was never a problem.

  She looked up at him and was still spinning a little. He smiled and she felt a little dizzier.

  Not all of this thrill was from the Tub o’ Fun.

  “Hold still,” she said.

  He laughed over her mouth and this kiss was slow and kind of sloppy—her fine motor skills were wonked, still. But he just took over, touched his tongue to hers and brought it away, sucked in her bottom lip, licked the corners of her mouth.

  It was lovely, warm, and he held her so tight that all she had to do was sort of drift into it, her brain slowly settling to a stop.

  “I want to watch you hit balls first.”

  “Certainly.”

  She laughed. “Have I told you how much I like your accent?”

  “No. I like yours, too.”

  “I don’t think there is an Ohio accent. Don’t we all just sound like newsreaders?”

  “You have an accent to my ears, and I like it. I like the sound of your voice.”

  “I was looking on the Internet about Wales, and did you know that you have your very own language?”

  He smiled. “Yes, I think I remember hearing about that.”

  “Do you speak it?”

  “Most everyone in my village does. I learned in school and from my mum and dad.”

  “Say something to me.”

  Hefin kept ahold of her and kind of danced her around in a circle, looking up as if for inspiration. “Braf cwrdd â chi.”

  The words belonged to his accent, burred and soft, impossible to parse out where one started and the next began.

  “Slower.”

  “Braf cwrdd â chi,” he repeated. She watched his mouth.

  “Brahv-corth-ah-kee,” she tried.

 
; He squeezed her. “Yes, that’s it, actually. Just right.”

  She squeezed him back. Smooshed her nose against his chin until his bristles made her eyes water. “What does it mean?”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t translate until I miss a ball.”

  “Pffft.” She blew the raspberry against his neck and he jumped very satisfyingly.

  “Tell me.”

  He stood back and held on to both of her hands. “Say it again.”

  “Brahv-corth-ah-kee,” she tried to fit the burrs and dips in the best she could.

  “Braf i gyfarfod â chi, yn rhy,” he answered. “You told me, ‘nice to meet you.’ ”

  “And what did you say back to me?”

  “I said that it was ‘nice to meet you, too.’ ”

  “So we’re official now, properly introduced.”

  “Yes, one language is never enough for a proper introduction.”

  She decided she would ask him what was Welsh for good-bye later. They might need more than one language for that, too.

  “Hit some balls for me, Hefin of Aberaeron.” She moved to sit on the bench and handed him his bat.

  He swung it over his shoulder and picked up the big bucket of balls. He walked the bucket back to a big green machine at the back of their cage and put everything down to dig in his pockets, his waistband dipping below some tight little hip-dips, the sight of which made Des determined to bite them.

  He pulled out the handful of tokens he had bought from the counter and flipped a lever on the machine. “I’m going to keep it in slow for us since you’ve never done this before.”

  “Terrific.” She didn’t think there was any way she was going to hit a ball anyway.

  He dumped the balls into a big hopper and put the tokens into the machine. It made a bunch of loud machine noises, and Hefin jogged up to the batter’s box. He watched the first pitch lop out of the machine, then stood ready for the next.

  He looked so hot standing in the box, ready to swing, that she didn’t realize the next pitch had whooshed out until she watched him swing and heard the crack of his bat all at the same time. He looked over and winked at her.

  She laughed, and she watched him smack one ball after another into the back net, easy and loose. At this rate, he would never tell her anything.

  Unless she totally cheated.

  She looked around at the other cages through the net, and no one had rented any of the ones around them. She snuck her hands behind her back and unhooked her bra strap through her T-shirt. As soon as he cracked the next ball, she moved to catch his eye, and he smiled at her—she held his gaze. She waited until that moment right after the clunk of the ball entering the shoot and before he turned back to the pitch.

  That was the sweet spot, and she flashed him, the hem of her T-shirt right to her chin, her nipples bunching as soon as they hit the breeze.

  Swing and a miss.

  It was just as awesome as she imagined it would be.

  Chapter Eleven

  Hefin closed his eyes, and when he opened them, Destiny was laughing and had started tugging her shirt down.

  He threw down the bat, because that was unacceptable.

  When he reached her, she squealed, and laughed some more, and what he managed to catch hold of in the middle of their squirming half struggle were her belt loops. She let him tow her in, and he rucked her tee back up, swirled his thumb around the whole of her small breast.

  Then he found the other, and the pleasure of just looking at her breasts, deciding which one had more freckles and which nipple was a little bigger was like sitting in a comfortable part of the surf when the sun was high and there was nothing else to do.

  Mesmerizing. Without purpose except what the skin could feel.

  “Hey.” She laughed, and wiggled down the tee. “Give a girl some …”

  He kissed her. Actually, he sort of licked her, starting with the curved corner of her mouth right to the fullest part of her lower lip. While he did that, he found her belt loops again and tugged her in close. She groaned in such a perfectly agonizing way that he tugged again, and she pressed herself against his cock.

  She licked him back. “Pull up like that on my jeans again,” she whispered. “Feels so good.”

  Oh God.

  Her request triggered some deep mental pornography of a schoolmate he’d had, a girl who told him she’d meet him in the school lavatory between classes and let him kiss her. And she had, and had also lifted her uniform skirt and tugged rhythmically and purposefully on the gusset of her panties when he’d tentatively tried tongue kissing for the first time.

  Gripping Destiny’s loose waistband in both of his hands and pulling, so she could ride the taut denim seam between her legs as he sucked on her tongue, he was very afraid that this encounter would end similarly to the one in that overwarm lavatory.

  With his come sliding around, hot, inside his briefs and a rap on the door signaling they’d been discovered.

  But he recklessly rubbed his lips over hers, unable to relax into a good kiss because they were both breathing too hard. He kept up the pulling with one hand, but let another travel over her fly and lower, to push a knuckle where she might like the pressure. He could feel her lips there separate with a slick give that made him squeeze his arse in counterpressure to the hot and sudden heartbeat in his dick.

  “I need to sit.”

  He almost didn’t understand her, but her panting combined with her sudden weight against him made him understand. He backed them up against the bench. Her hands were under his tee, grasping at his skin.

  “Dig your nails in,” he breathed as he got her straddled around his waist on the bench. When she complied, a soft scratch first, and then a stinging pressure along his spine, he pushed on her lower back, hard, so they could fuck against the other, clothes bunching and damp.

  “Crazy, crazy, crazy,” she whispered, between kisses at his neck.

  “Yes,” he said. It was. Weeks of pining after the other, just looking, his dreams about her, her possible dreams about him—it meant this. It meant this was between them.

  A live thing.

  He rubbed a hand over her shoulders, trying to soothe them a little, but then he encountered the ends of her unhooked bra under her shirt, and that was what made him pull up on both of their shirts, so that their naked skin could rub together.

  Why the feel of just their trunks sliding against each other’s was what sent his hand down his own trousers, to squeeze and to rub, and why his self-abuse was what sent Destiny’s hand between her own legs was all some mystery equal to why the tides waned so shallow in the summer a boy could wade leagues out into the sea and still catch glimpses of the bottom swirling over his feet.

  “Let’s go back to the limo,” Destiny breathed into his ear.

  Yes, he thought back. Let me lay you out underneath me and come all over you while you come all over me. He realized he would come, if he said those words, or anything like them. When the tip of her wet tongue curled into his ear, her breath fast and hot and loud, he almost did, just for the selfish rush of letting go like he did in the school lavatory, the radiator burning his back as he came with the entire wildness of girlhood displayed before him.

  “Now,” is what he said.

  She moved away from his ear, and he grabbed her around the waist to help her off his lap. He felt broken up and lame, limping with sludgy fever in every joint and limb. She stood, and he grabbed her hip bones and used them as handles to raise himself from the bench.

  There were baseballs littered all over the ground, and the machine whirred, empty and loud.

  How had they even heard each other? But it was as if his ears still rang with their breath, the strained and wet gasps they’d made.

  “Come on,” Destiny said, and pulled him out of the cages. They walked with their hands interlaced, palm to palm. He could see the twisted outline of her bra resting against her breastbone, under her tee, her nipples so hard her shirt did nothing to disguise the d
iscrete texture of them. His cock looked obscene poking out against the back of his fly. He’d appear less ready for sex if he were completely naked.

  Somehow, they met no one along the way. Hefin refused to analyze why this disappointed him.

  When Destiny put her key in the back door of the limousine, she looked over at him and grinned.

  “We shouldn’t.” She started to turn the lock.

  “Certainly not.”

  She abandoned her key ring in the door and put her arms around him, her cheek against his chest. He could feel her nipples poking him. “I’ve already had a long day, you know.”

  “You have.”

  “I might not be thinking straight.”

  “I’m certainly not.” He held her and looked at the blue Ohio sky, a blue the sky never was over Wales. “Are you tellin’ me that if I join you in the backseat of this limousine and take advantage of the privacy windows and acres of horizontal surfaces that I’d be taking advantage of your less-than-straight thinking?”

  “No. Well, yes. But only because I wanted you to.”

  “But we shouldn’t?” He jumped because suddenly her hand was over his poking dick, pressing, as if she was testing its resistance against her palm, which, he could tell her, was significant.

  “It’s our first date. You’re going back to Wales. Then you’re going to go work in China, which is about as far away as I can imagine. My sister received emergency medical attention today.” She looked up at him, her forehead wrinkled, her eyebrows trying to kiss. “But for some reason, the more I think about all of that, the hornier I get for you.”

  He closed his eyes. The things she says. “Tell me what to do. I trust you’ll know.”

  She reached back and turned the key and the lock tumbled open with a muted clunk. She looked at him, and there was something in her face that was the same as when he helped her out of the Tub o’ Fun.