His brow furrowed for a moment, and I took that finger off his lips and smoothed it over the adorable lines.
“Is it the devil and the angel again?” I teased.
The expression on his face faded into a smile. “Always.”
With a devious hum, I shifted over top of him so that I was sprawled fully over his chest. “What is the devil telling you right now? What impulse shouldn’t you follow?”
I was so intrigued because I’d never known someone like Dominic, who was so open about his bad habits when most people tried to hide them.
But instead of smiling, like I thought he might, or teasing me right back, like I’d hoped, Dominic looked torn.
I touched my lips to his. “What is it?”
“I wish I didn’t have to leave tomorrow,” he said, rubbing his thumb along my bottom lip. “I’d rather stay here with you, eat cereal in bed, go out to eat, go buy you flowers at the market.”
“We can still do all those things when you get back.”
“Maybe I won’t go to the retreat,” he said. “I won’t even get to see you before the ball, then I leave again right after.”
Dominic was staring straight up at the ceiling now, but his hand rubbed soothing circles on my back, almost like he was reassuring himself that I was still there, still real.
“You have to go,” I told him.
His eyes found mine. “Is that an official girlfriend order?”
“Yes.” I leaned down to kiss him softly. He tried to deepen it, but I pulled back when his tongue slicked over the line of my lips. “James never would’ve invited you if he didn’t think it was important.” I laid my head down on his chest and tried as best as I could to wrap my arms around him. “Whatever impulse is telling you this won’t work, that they won’t get over this, that you’re doomed to be at odds with your team.” I felt him tense underneath me, but I kept going. “You need to push that down. You’ve got too much good in you to keep hiding from people, Dominic.”
He rolled us, rearing up over me with eyes so dark, so intense, that I felt a stirring of desire kindle somewhere under my skin.
“I’m not hiding,” he said, low and dangerous.
My hands smoothed up his chest. “Not from me, you’re not. From everyone else.” He slid a hand up my leg until he pressed my knees wider, wider, and my breath hitched at how bared I was to him. “Y-you have nothing to hide.”
“Not everyone is like you, sunshine.” He curled his fingers between my legs, and my back snapped up in a helpless arch.
My hands scrambled to find purchase in the wrinkled sheets as he pulled out my pleasure like it was warm, pliable putty, stretching it impossibly far before it snapped back in a sharp, hot rush over my body.
Body trembling, I came down as he kissed over the lines of my ribs and pushed his palms up the length of my arms. This was the kind of connection I never actually thought was real. Cracked-open hearts while his body did unspeakably wonderful things to mine.
I never wanted it to end.
“What are you afraid of?” I whispered as he slid up my chest and licked the flat of his tongue over my sweat-damp skin.
He lifted his head, gaze searing and intense. Dominic sat up between my legs.
With his teeth, he tore open another foil packet, and I shivered at the look in his eyes. He wanted to stop me from saying what I was. But he didn’t.
“There is so much good in you,” I managed as he started moving forward, so slowly that my jaw clenched.
“No, there’s not.” He snapped his hips. Hard enough that I might bruise. I threw my head back from the force, bracing my hand on the wall behind my head.
“You’re so good,” I gasped. He did it again, and I wasn’t sure what I said after that. Wasn’t sure it was English, or that he could understand. His control blew my mind because he moved so steady with such sharp, unwavering intensity. I’d never walked the tightrope for this long before. Every time I was about to pitch forward over the edge, he’d slow. Then build, and build, the crest just out of reach. “Dominic,” I begged in a keening voice.
And instead of torturing us further, the man with the dark eyes and the big heart surrounded by such high, high walls, he unleashed himself on me. He exorcised whatever demons he’d heeded for so long. His gaze on mine was naked, hiding absolutely nothing of what he felt for me.
In that look, I knew he’d adore me forever. He’d move heaven and earth to protect whatever we were building, and it took every ounce of self-control not to tell him I’d fallen in love with him.
He must have seen the same thing in mine because he braced a palm on the bed next to my head and wrenched my leg tight up against his chest.
By the time he finished, with his arm curled around the back of my neck, hand gripping my shoulder now, I was sobbing in relief. My toes curled helplessly at what he’d pulled out of me. Nothing else could be wrung from my body after that. I was limp, spent, sweaty, and deliriously happy.
Without a single word, but with so much tenderness, he cleaned me up. Then he curled his big body around mine, and I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Faith
When I woke up the next morning, it was to an empty bed and a note he’d left on the nightstand.
Good morning, sunshine. Given you were comatose when I got up, I decided to let you sleep. I won’t have my phone on me during the day but help yourself to whatever you can find in the fridge and lock the door when you leave.
I’ll see you Saturday.
It was impossible to keep the grin off my face as I stretched my sore, sore body out in his bed. Without anyone watching, I was able to tug his pillow up to my face, clutch my arms around it and inhale greedily.
If this is what good sex felt like, it was no freaking wonder it had the capacity to ruin people’s lives when they chased after it.
One night spent with Dominic Walker was a revelation, and I did not say such things lightly as a pragmatic person. Not just what had happened with us physically but it was almost like he’d lost any ability to hold his armor up anymore.
It made me wonder how he managed to keep it up for an entire football season, what kind of people he’d been surrounded by that he was able to. The guy I’d been getting to know, who was sweet and thoughtful, openly affectionate, and had a clear soft spot for kids, seemed to be a different person than the guy who walked through the doors of the Wolves training facilities, who suited up on the sidelines with his teammates.
Sitting up in his bed, I studied his bedroom because I’d been a tad distracted when we entered the night before. Like the rest of his house, it gave no clues to his personality. Nothing that I could use to get to know him even better.
“I hate this apartment,” I said out loud.
Tugging the sheet over my shoulders, I got out of bed and wandered to the closet. When I pushed open the door, I laughed out loud.
The room was huge, a closet that Lydia would’ve filled in a heartbeat, and Dominic was using less than a quarter of the space. Jeans were folded neatly on a shelf next to some white-labeled storage bins. Shaking my head, I gently studied some of the clothes that hung on matching black hangers. There was nothing showy, nothing that he’d dropped hundreds and hundreds of dollars on.
The fancy shiny apartment filled with a regular guy who didn’t quite know how to fit the space.
A black leather jacket caught my eye, and I grinned, imagining him wearing it. It was well-worn and well-loved, and because I couldn’t help my smitten self, I tugged it off the hanger and brought the jacket close to my chest.
Yes, I was smitten. It was the only way to describe all the flittering, fluttering things happening inside of my body. It reminded me of the first few days of high school, where every guy you locked eyes with was a potential crush and every conversation held opportunity, except you couldn’t quite see where it was going to go.
It was something I’d lost after Charlie. I didn’t want to lock eyes. Didn’t want to see potential crushes.
And with a smirk, I knew just how far I’d come because, in the past twelve hours, there’d been no dead fish anywhere in that bed.
There was one bad-ass Faith Pierson, though, who drove a guy like Dominic Walker out of his damn mind. It was a powerful feeling, especially as I strode naked through his closet, covered by nothing but the sheets we’d thoroughly used.
Even without him around, the effect he had was staggering. The smell of leather, and him, surrounded me, and I fought against the sensation that I missed him.
Not once had I met a man who could bulldoze his way through every single reservation I might have, every single logical next step I thought we needed. I was in his closet, wrapped in his sheets, sniffing his clothes, and missing him.
And because no one was watching and no one could judge what I was doing, I hugged the jacket to my chest.
The sound of crinkling paper had me pulling the jacket away. In the inside pocket, there was an envelope, and just past that, the worn edge of a picture.
As I saw the edge of the picture, dark hair held back by a pink barrette, I thought of what Dominic said about opposing forces telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. We all had experiences with that, right?
But it wasn’t an actual person with horns or wings. It was just our own internal compass telling us which instinct we should listen to. Maybe his compass was calibrated differently than mine because of his upbringing, the things he went through, but something about being in his closet, surrounded by his things, I found myself following the impulse that I might normally have ignored.
The picture came out with a gentle tug, and at the sight of her face, I felt a strange thump in my stomach, a stirring of recognition that took a moment to filter through my brain.
It was a school picture, the same boring gray background that we’d all had at some point in our lives. She couldn’t have been much more than six in the picture because her big smile showed all the perfectly neat little baby teeth she wouldn’t have lost yet at that age.
Her eyes were big, heavily lashed, just like Dominic’s, and for a moment, I wondered if it was his daughter. She wore a tie-dye shirt, and that recognition again, it rang like a bell somewhere in the back of my head.
When I flipped the picture over, I understood why.
In big, childish writing, with her y written backward, was scrawled Ivy Lee Walker, 6 years old.
When he’d adopted the koala, the name he sent, where the In Honor Of that still proclaimed it hers at the zoo, read Ivy Lee. I’d always assumed it was her last name, not her middle name.
My heart raced, thoughts and realizations tumbling through my head in a big sloppy mess.
How was this even possible?
I’d seen her picture once before. It was one of the only photos Nick had ever sent me, on the anniversary of her death, about a year after we’d first started chatting.
But by the time he sent me one of his little sister, she’d lost her hair and had wrapped a tie-dye scarf around her head. But it was—undoubtedly, unequivocally, illogically, impossibly—the same little girl.
“Holy shitsticks,” I breathed out. I whipped around, staring at the rumpled bed like it would explain itself to me after what had happened.
But of course, there was no one there to help me figure out why or how.
All the different conversations I’d had with both of them melted together in my head, which was impressive because I was still standing naked in Dominic’s closet. I scrambled to the kitchen, where my purse had ended up on the floor. It was lying underneath my dress, and my cheeks were flaming hot as I kicked that out of the way. My phone had a few texts from Tori, telling me to enjoy my night, and then another one from Dominic, which he must have sent just after he left the apartment earlier that morning.
When I clicked on it, my breath caught because he’d taken a picture of me sleeping. It was like peeping through someone’s window at a scene I wasn’t meant to see. Something intimate and sexy. Dominic must’ve crouched next to the bed with his camera up close to my face.
The sheet appeared nowhere in the shot, so while I looked like I wasn’t covered, he’d managed a shot where nothing showed that I didn’t want captured on his camera. My mouth was slightly open, lips pursed, and my lashes long and dark against my cheeks as I slept. All the dark hair around my head looked tangled and mussed, and in the bottom of the frame, the shadow my cleavage showed where my arm covered my breasts.
And then I saw the text that accompanied it, and my breath caught for an entirely different reason.
Dominic: Don’t say I don’t ever ignore my baser instincts because seeing you like this, it was almost impossible not to touch you, to wake you up the way I wanted to.
Dominic: I’ll be back in twenty-six hours, and I’m not even pretending I wanted to be gone that long right now. I’ll see you tomorrow, sunshine.
I covered my mouth with a shaking hand because the things I was feeling, knowing he was Nick, knowing that he wasn’t putting on some show to get me in bed, wasn’t pretending to be something he wasn’t, I could’ve burst into happy tears right there in his really awful family room.
I tried to type out a response, but it immediately came back as undeliverable.
Me: Tomorrow. I really, really wish you were here right now.
When the bright red notification that it was undeliverable popped up, I snatched up my dress with a frustrated huff. Tugging on my clothes with all this knowledge bubbling around in my body was so … frustrating. No, it was worse than that. It was like hours of foreplay, but I was left without the climax, the thing that had been building and building and building.
There was no way I could just sit on this.
My message thread with Nick had my heart turning over again because all the things I knew about him, paired with what I’d learned about Dominic, I could hardly keep my fingers steady enough to type.
TurboGirl: Let me know when you get this. I need to talk to you.
The message sent, but I couldn’t tell if it delivered or not, so I set my phone down with a groan. It got worse when I opened his kitchen cupboards and saw about ten boxes of cereal. My smile probably looked borderline psychotic. After a bowl of Captain Crunch, I finished dressing. And because I’d been raised to pick up my mess, I made his bed carefully, the edges of the sheets neatly folded.
As I walked out of the apartment, I tapped out another text.
Me: I don’t know what your schedule is like, but this is a code red BFF situation, and if you have plans after work, I need you to cancel them pronto.
Tori: Code red? Yeesh. Okay. Did the bad boy turn out to be a waste of good underwear?
Me: Not even close to a waste. I’ll tell you everything later.
Tori: I can be home by four.
Faith
“Did you know that female koalas in captivity often mate with other females, and their sexual encounters can last up to five times as long as female-male encounters?”
Tori froze for only a moment but recovered quickly, setting down her drink and giving me an even look.
“First,” she said calmly, “I have a degree in Zoo Science, you dingbat, so yes, I knew that.” Then her lips curled up into a smile. “And second, are we actually surprised by the fact that men can’t last long?”
Pushing the hardcover koala book away from me, I gave her a smug look. “Some men can.”
“Oh geez, with the bragging and the smirking and the delicious sex memories.” Tori took a sip of her drink. She was being remarkably calm, not pushing me for the dirty details. “So we like him? The tattooed bad boy who adores you?”
It made me laugh, but honestly, I couldn’t argue. Three times, he’d worshipped me, and if we’d had time or the energy, he might have gone for round four, judging by the text I’d had waiting on my phone.
But instead of answering her question, I played with the edge of the koala book. Naturally, koalas reminded me of Ivy, which was why I’d pulled the book out in the first place.
Reminded me of him. All day, I turned the situation over in my head until I thought I’d go crazy for not being able to process it with someone. Anyone.
And this wasn’t something I wanted to tell him over the phone when he was working for one of his sponsors all day.
“I have to tell you something crazy,” I started.
Tori’s shoulders slumped in relief. “Holy shit, finally, I have been dying here pretending like I didn’t want to shake it out of you.”
“You know Nick, right?”
At my careful shift in the topic, Tori paused in confusion, then rolled her eyes. “Obvs. Drives me crazy when I can hear you tap-tap-tapping on your phone when you’re sitting next to me on the couch.”
I held my breath before I blurted it out on a rushed exhale. “Nick is Dominic Walker.”
Her cup hit the table with a loud thunk. “I’m sorry, what now?”
“They’re the same guy.”
“Shut up.”
With a shrug, I couldn’t help but laugh at her dumbstruck expression. “I know! I couldn’t believe it, but I saw a picture of his sister before I left his apartment.”
“After your sex-fest. With the guy that is both people.”
I covered my face with my hands. “Yes.”
“How does this shit even happen to you? Honestly.”
“I don’t know,” I wailed. My hands settled back into my lap, and I felt the whole roller coaster again. It was insane. And amazing. And insane. “He’s like, one of my best friends, Tor.”
“Umm, who’s your best friend?”
I gave her a look.
“Sorry. Just wanted to verify that I haven’t lost my place because that’s like … the whole package he’s got right there.”
“You have not lost your place. But yes, it’s him. He’s Nick. Which is even crazier because he was such an asshole the day we met—” My voice trailed off. Everything clicked into place.
“What?”
“Holy shit,” I whispered. “That’s why he was acting so crazy the day we met. The attitude and why he reeked of alcohol. Oh my gosh, Tori, it was the anniversary of Ivy’s death. That’s why he got trashed on the field, and that’s why he was in such a terrible mood.”
The Lie : a bad boy sports romance Page 19