Dialing it immediately, I turned on the charm when a giggling co-ed answered, “Pages Campus Bookstore, how may I help you today?”
“Oh, hi,” I schmoozed, leaning back against the counter and trying to picture what she might look like. “I was in the other day and the nicest girl waited on me…”
“Was it me?” she teased, but I already knew it wasn’t. Avery hadn’t said anything about working that morning and, after hanging on her every word for the last twelve hours, I knew her voice intimately by now.
“Hmmm,” I hemmed anyway. “I’m not sure. Are you brunette, about 5’10” with big brown eyes?”
“No,” she said, sounding more businesslike now. “But you just described half our staff. Can you be more specific?”
“Amy?” I asked, pretending not to know her name. “Ashley, I think her name was?”
“Avery?” she blurted out, and I knew I’d made the right decision.
“That’s it,” I said. “Avery… and what was her last name again?”
“What can I help you with, sir?” the girl asked, her voice wary now, even cautious. I couldn’t blame her. “We don’t give that type of information out over the phone.”
“Oh, no, I’m sure,” I said, my mind desperate and reeling on the fly. “It’s just that, we’re doing a project for my business class on customer service and I wanted to invite her to be a guest speaker…”
I paused, letting my voice trail off and expecting the girl to call my bluff at any moment. Instead she asked, “Avery? She was… that good?”
“I wouldn’t be calling you otherwise,” verging on a chuckle as I imagined the girl’s response if I told her just what, exactly, Avery was so good at. “It’s really important and I’ll just need her last name and then give it to my professor and he can run through the proper channels and—”
There was a sudden clamor and the girl shouted, “No, Sarah, you can’t void a transaction after you’ve already rang it through. Sir, can you call back? I’ve got an emergency on my hands and—”
I saw my opportunity and seized it. “If you could just give me her last name,” I pressed, hearing the clamor grow louder in the background. “I won’t bother you anymore. Honestly, my professor will be the one reaching out to her, not me, so—”
“Shoemaker!” she shouted, breathy and rushed. “Avery Shoemaker now, really, I have to go!”
The call ended with a clattering thunk, but I was already swiping to my search screen to call up the online student directory. Keying in the name “Avery Shoemaker,” I found an old number listed in Cressman Dorms. Knowing she no longer lived there, but guessing it would forward me to her new number, I dialed it anyway. “The number you have reached is no longer in service,” it said. “The student in question has opted for the call forwarding feature and we are connecting you now…”
I heard a standard number of beeps, held my breath and nearly gasped when Avery’s soft, velvet voice answered, tentatively at first, “Hello?”
“What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?” I blurted, as excited as a little kid at Christmas and equally unable to contain my excitement.
“Craig?” she said, laughing giddily. “What… what are you doing?”
“Calling you,” I teased, so relieved I’d found her number. I forgot all my usual rules about playing hard to get and never, ever calling a girl for a second go around—especially not the morning after our first! “Why?”
“I thought,” she hemmed, “I thought you never wanted to speak to me again.”
“What? Of course I do. Why would you say that?”
“Just… the way you left this morning,” she said. “I just felt like, well… you were running away.”
“I was on crutches,” I joked. “How fast could I run? Besides,” I added when our nervous laughter faded, “I thought you were kicking me out!”
“By offering you fresh coffee?” she asked. “I don’t even do that to my roommate and she freakin’ lives here!”
Lucky her, I thought to myself. The thought of having Avery by my side on the regular a welcome thought indeed. “Sorry,” I chuckled. “I didn’t know coffee was a come on these days. I guess… I guess we both misread each other’s signals this morning.”
“Yeah, I guess we did. But, I’m glad you called then. So we can get our signals straight, I mean.”
“Me too,” I said, eager to seal the deal. “So… uhm, about tomorrow? What are you doing? Are you free?”
“I…” she paused, making my heart hammer even more. “Yeah. I’m free, I guess. I mean, what do you have in mind?”
I peered around my empty, lonely apartment, wondering why it had never looked that way to me before. I used to enjoy my bachelorhood and enjoyed every solitary moment I could. Suddenly, the walls looked bare and the whole place looked a little dreary.
“I’ve got to clean my locker out for the season.” I figured it was better for Avery to know what she was in for now than showing up and being disappointed. “It always bums me out and I was hoping, well, this year… you might be my date?”
She snorted. “Do you always bring a date? To clean your locker?”
“Never before, no.”
“Do the other guys?”
“The other guys all cleaned their lockers out last night,” I said, imagining the chaotic scene post-game as managers went around collecting dirty jock straps and gym socks. “It’s… kind of a tradition.”
“And tomorrow?” Avery asked, her voice quieter and soft.
I pictured her there, legs curled up on the couch, cell phone on her knee, speaker on, waiting for a reply. “It’s… kind of a new tradition,” I said. “Like… me sleeping over or calling the next day.”
She snorted. “Careful, Craig,” she said, without actually accepting my invitation. “You keep going like this, you’ll lose your player cred.”
I peered around my apartment before grinning. She was probably right. “I’m counting on it, Avery. I’ll pick you up tomorrow around, say… 4?”
She paused, taking a long breath before she asked, “What should I wear?”
I chuckled. “As little as possible,” and hung up before either of us could change our minds…
Eleven
Avery
“It’s so… big.”
And I wasn’t kidding, either. The space was huge—and quiet. Rows and rows of giant lockers standing next to one another, all surrounding a vast, open space dotted with benches and wheeled carts. The walls held framed jerseys, from players past I presumed, along with various pennants and posters designed to motivate the players. It smelled surprisingly normal for being what it was—a men’s college locker room.
“It pretty small when you’ve got forty or fifty guys in here,” Craig said, dangerous and fuckable in all black. “Slapping towels and grabbing ass and talking shit, trust me.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, imagining Craig in a clingy white towel—and nothing else—making my libido do back flips just behind—and below—my belly button. “So,” I fake-coughed, trying to change the subject so I wouldn’t melt into a puddle of desire at his feet, “which one’s yours?”
He limped a few feet over, relying on a small black cane that matched his track pants and black T-shirt, both doing little to disguise his lean, angular body. “That’s new,” I said as he used it to tap locker #25.
He looked at it almost fondly. “Got a visit from the team doctor after I talked to you yesterday morning,” he explained. “After a quick exam, he said I don’t need crutches anymore so he gave me… this.”
“Does it still hurt?” I asked, admiring the veins in Craig’s arms as he leaned on the cane to peer back at me with those soft hazel eyes.
He shrugged, leaning on it with one hand to open his locker with the other. “It’s more like numb,” he said, as he dialed out the combination on the lock he’d no doubt memorized since his first day on the team. “I’m kind of getting used to it.”
“It certainly h
asn’t slowed you down any,” I said, watching him fill his empty gym bag with various items from his locker. There were T-shirts and socks, of course, but also old water bottles and various creams and lotions for back and knee pain. I’d always thought of football as a dangerous sport, and watching a wounded Craig unpack a locker full of last minute remedies, it appeared I wasn’t far off the mark. And yet he was resilient, strong, working through the healing process with an attitude of quiet acceptance.
I’d come to admire Craig’s natural beauty and his undeniable sexiness—to say nothing of his amazing skills in the bedroom. But as we lingered in the empty locker room, I began to see him as more than just sex-on-a-stick, but a man as well. It was quite suddenly, a profound and exciting proposition.
He turned, dropping his gym bag to the floor with a heavy, “thwock” sound. “I guess when I’m around you,” he said, “I don’t want to waste any time.”
I wagged a finger, half-flattered and half-frustrated by his corniness. “Just when I was starting to think you’re sweet, Craig, you use a line like that.”
I was only half-joking and, as usual, he played along, his quick wit rivaling his speedy body. “It’s true,” he said, literally crossing his heart. “I can’t help but feel like all of this is some kind of limited engagement.”
I chuckled, surprised by how easily he read my mind. “I thought I was the only one doing that.”
“What are we doing?” he asked, slumping down onto one of the benches scattered in front of the lockers. The lighting was dim above us, casting sexy shadows of him that made my belly flutter.
“You tell me,” I said, sitting on the closest bench, crossing my legs daintily beneath a dark crinkle skirt that matched my wheat-colored sweater. He’d said to wear as little as possible for our so-called locker room date tonight, but what was more important was how easily I could slip off what I was wearing. After several tries, this was the best outfit for the job I could find. “This was your idea, remember?”
“I think I was still drunk when I asked you to come here tonight,” he mumbled, looking chagrined as he kicked at the gym bag at his feet.
“From what?” I asked, incredulously. “You had half a bottled margarita all night! And burned that off doing, well… you know… all night long!”
He chuckled, hanging his head and shaking it, a charming move that made him seem boyish and mischievous. A devilish combination, if ever I’d seen one. “Drunk on… this,” he insisted, almost passionately, lifting his head and waving a hand at me then back to himself. “Drunk on you, drunk on me, drunk on… us.”
I blushed at his gushiness. It seemed so unlike the macho, ladies’ man I’d seen on the football field, and yet so… charming. His voice was loud and echoed through the empty locker room. His hand was frantic as it dashed through the air, his posture eager as he leaned gently forward, our eyes meeting across the dimly lit space between us.
“There’s that word again, Craig,” I said cautiously, feeling the vast room stretch out quietly around us as, somewhere in the distance, a soda machine hummed—the only ambient noise. “You keep talking like… like… we’re actually on a date.”
“We are,” he insisted, waving his hand. His hands were so big and strong, every time I saw them, I flashed back to how well he’d used them the other night. How many times they’d made me come. “This is officially date number two if my math is correct.”
“Dude, we’re in a locker room.”
“Yes, we are. Let’s just call this the Locker Room Date.” He laughed a little. “You, me and an empty locker room. How sexy does that sound?”
I opened my mouth to say something, then sealed it shut again. He was kind of right. I’d told him foreplay only on the first date, and that’s just what we’d done. Now here I was, in my best pair of panties and without a bra, wondering if Craig had only asked me out on a second date to prove he could sleep with me—or if he actually wanted to spend more time with me.
I realized as we sat there, that I didn’t even care. Yes, I’d love to spend more time with Craig in a boyfriend-girlfriend kind of way, but the chances of that were about as good as me making the football team. And yet, here I was all the same. I had to admit that I wanted to make it to the second date, as well. I just wasn’t too keen on the locker room. Maybe it was a jock thing. Screwing by the empty lockers, like a conquest or something
Craig’s luscious body, sweaty and panting on that hot, glorious night hadn’t satisfied me as I thought it might. And you’d think, given the number of orgasms I’d had, I’d have enough to last a lifetime. Instead, I wanted more—much more—and I’d come here tonight to get it.
I knew I’d be disappointed if I left without sleeping with Craig. I wondered if he knew that—or if he expected it—and yet, his gentle demeanor and cheesy lines made it clear he was nervous.
I liked that. A lot. More than I probably should and certainly enough to put his mind at ease. “So, if this is our second date,” I teased, uncrossing then crossing my legs again, careful to do it slow so his eyes could travel up my legs to where the wrinkles of my skirt covered my knees. “Are you ready for what happens next?”
He nodded, inching forward on his bench until he was on the edge of the seat. “Trust me, Avery, I’ve thought of nothing else ever since I left your place the other day.”
“Me too,” I grunted, no longer wanting to be coy or play hard to get. “When you called, I just… couldn’t believe it.”
“And yet, you’re here,” he reminded me. “Why?”
Our eyes met, wide and unflinching. “I guess,” I hemmed, not looking away as he awaited my reply, “…for the same reason you did.”
“To clean out my locker?” he teased, standing abruptly and, wincing as he reached for his cane with one hand and me with the other. I accepted his grip willingly and rose to face him.
“Well,” I said, “that and a private tour of the locker room.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, leading me from the central area and down a wide corridor toward the showers.
“Is… anyone else here?” I asked, the desire welling up higher and higher with each step into the big, tiled space.
“Just you and me,” he said, turning slightly to face me. The light was brighter here, and Craig’s face with all its hard angles and lean edges looked effortlessly beautiful and simply irresistible. “They give the janitorial staff the week off once the season ends. The other guys are all long gone and Coach takes this weekend off every year to visit his cabin on the shore, so… it’s just you and me, baby.”
Baby. The word thrilled me—in every conceivable way. Craig Robinson, all to myself, in an empty locker room. “Sounds like you’ve thought of everything,” I said as he reached for my arms and clasped them gently in his big, strong hands.
“Like I said,” he murmured, squeezing them tight and pulling me close. “I’ve thought of this moment since I left your place the other day. I want—I want to fuck you so bad.”
He punctuated his words with a kiss that made it clear he wasn’t joking. It was sensual and deep, a slow, teasing, kiss that warmed me until I could feel my pussy melt between my trembling thighs.
“Wow. Why me?” I gasped when he finally released me, his arms drifting down my own to clasp my hands.
“Because you’re you.” he replied, putting the question to rest. “I can’t explain it, and don’t want to try. I only know what I feel, Avery, and what I feel right now is I want to spend every minute I can with you.” He sighed. “I want to kiss you, touch you, hold you, make you feel like you are the only woman in the whole world.”
I could only nod, giving myself over to the moment. “I… I’d like that,” I finally choked out as Craig smiled and gently squeezed my hands before unlacing his fingers from mine. Tenderly, but eagerly, he slid my sweater off, revealing my bare breasts, and we both peered down at my hard, achy nipples.
“Jesus,” he said. A word that said so little, yet implied so much. �
��Jesus…”
I blushed and turned away and just as tenderly, he slid off my skirt and then my panties. And, just like that, I stood naked on the gleaming white tiles of the men’s shower room. “I could stand here all day looking at you,” he mused, until I clucked my tongue and covered myself up with two well-placed hands.
“Screw that,” I said, nodding toward his fully clothed form. “Your turn or no dice!”
He undressed quickly, tossing the cane aside, using the wall beside him for support. He was soon out of his shoes, sweats, his shirt and boxer briefs. At last we stood, naked and alone.
“Now what?” I asked, and winking, he reached for my hand. It was a soft and touching gesture, his hand so warm and large as we walked into the shower space. Evenly spaced along one wall were eight large metal towers, each with four spigots surrounding the top.
“Now we get clean while we get down and dirty.” He waggled his eyebrows at me and turned to press a button about waist high. Immediately, the shower head above him erupted in a fine, warm spray, dousing him as he flinched and let go of my hand.
Now it was my turn to marvel at his nakedness, marble hard and glistening pale beneath the spray. “Jesus,” I said, watching streams of water running down his bare chest and over his flat, hard belly before trickling down the length of his curved cock.
I pressed a small button marked soap and held my hand beneath it, a soft, white dollop emerging onto my palm. With a trembling hand, I reached for his cock, thick and hard between my fingers as I gently created a lather that covered him from base to tip and back again.
“You don’t waste any time, do you?” he murmured, his eyes half-closed as I teased and lathered his stiff slippery erection while the gentle spray from the shower casually washed the soap away.
“Like you said, Craig,” I murmured, reaching for a fresh dollop of soap before lathering it across his balls. “When I’m with you, I feel like I don’t have a minute to waste.”
Twelve
Craig
Avery’s hands worked me over—warm and soapy—as I struggled to keep myself under control. I’d been worried she might have thought I was too forward, dragging her into the showers like this, but instead, she’d surprised me again by coming willingly.
Time Out: A Holiday Sports Romance Page 6