Discovering Us (17 page)

I was busy with school, having practicals, exams and quizzes at least once a week it seemed. Talk about stressful. But I still made it to a lot of Jag’s home games, and I’d even gotten to go to one of his video shoots for a commercial he and another player were doing for a cell phone company, which was fascinating to watch. It was also a pretty cute ad that was about dropped calls of other companies, and they used a phone as the ball that Jag had to pitch then an outfielder dropped it. Corny, but cute.

Gwen and I still sat together at the games, and we tried calling each other when the team was out of town to make plans to shop or get lunch, but I was getting really busy with school, that most of the time, I’d had to pass.

Things kept getting more hectic, with me missing more and more games because I had to study so Jag and I rarely had time together, and it was even worse if he had back-to-back away games because we’d go weeks at a time not seeing each other. On top of all the games, in his spare time, he had tons of endorsement deals that Dirk made sure to book, so he was gone a great deal of time for those too.

One evening when he came home from some endorsement gig he’d been working on for the entire week, he walked to the dining table where I was studying and said, “We need to talk.”

I looked up at him with a smile, which fell quickly when I saw the look on his face. Crap! What was this about? “Okay…”

He sat down in the chair next to mine, turning it to face me and ran his hands over his face then up through his hair, then laced his fingers together, resting his hands on top of his head. God, he was handsome. It always just struck me at some of the weirdest times how good looking he was. Like, I’d look at him after having been hanging out with him for an hour and it’d suddenly just hit me how sexy he was.

He now made a habit of sporting scruff on his cheeks, which he knew I loved because I’d told him it gave him a really rugged look. His hair was a little longer than he’d ever worn it too, but it looked great on him. I sat watching him as he looked anywhere at me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, suddenly scared to even know.

He glanced at me and took a deep breath, expelling it then brought his hands down, taking mine into them. “I had this gig today, right?”

“Yeah?”

“I thought it was for suntan lotion or something, at least that’s what Dirk told me.”

“Yeah?”

“It wasn’t.”

“Okay…”

He bit the inside of his lip and looked down at our hands. Good grief. Just what could be so bad about this?

“It was for swimsuits from the lingerie company Alessandra models for.” He looked up at me, watching me closely.

All I’d heard was
swimsuits
,
lingerie
and
Alessandra
and it was enough to make me suck in a deep breath. Then all I could do was just look at him, finally noticing that he was wearing a blue button down that was untucked and unbuttoned halfway down to expose a white wife beater underneath, his sleeves were rolled up to expose his forearms and he had on some pretty fancy faded jeans. He hardly ever wore button down shirts and never wife beaters, spending most of his time in t-shirts like I did.

“Was Alessandra there?” I asked, remembering back to her little comment about her and Jag doing a commercial together and knowing that she’d probably made it happen by using her sexy, Brazilian voice, cooing in her agent’s ear and convincing him to hook them up.

Jag held my hands tighter and I already knew the answer.

“Yeah.”

All right. Nothing to be upset about. It wasn’t like they’d gone on a date or anything. They’d made a commercial. And I’d attended the cell phone one and saw how technical it all was, so this couldn’t have been that big of a deal.

I nodded then said, “Okay.”

“Okay?” he asked, surprised that I wasn’t ripping him a new one.

“Yeah, okay. I mean, it was a commercial, right? It couldn’t have been that bad, could it? I mean, you didn’t kiss her or anything, did you?” I cringed a little when I said those last two words, not wanting to hear that it
was
that bad.

“No. Nothing like that. It wasn’t bad. We filmed on the beach. There were around ten other girls there, so it wasn’t like it was just us.”

Oh, so now they were an “us.” Great. All I could do was sit there and nod stupidly.

“So… you’re all right with it?”

“Yeah! I’m fine!” Well, that came out two octaves too high, but it was all I had at the moment. And I wasn’t going to be
that
girl—the jealous, whining, bitchy girlfriend who was so insecure that she folded at the news of her hotter-than-hell boyfriend cozying up to the hotter-than-hell supermodel who lived down the hall.

“Good. Thanks for understanding, babe.” He leaned in with a smile and kissed my nose then got up, heading toward the bedroom to change his clothes.

I followed him asking where he’d gotten the clothes.

“They provided them for me,” he explained with a shrug as he took off his boots and socks, unbuttoning the top button of his jeans.

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

“Um, so when does this commercial air?” I questioned.

“They said in a couple weeks. I’ll probably be in Colorado when it does.”

Hm. So he’d thought it through as if he didn’t want to be around me when it aired. Good to know. “Oh. Okay.”

“Yeah.”

Well, weren’t we the vocal ones?

“Gotta finish studying for finals,” I said, watching as he took off his shirt leaving him in the wife beater. Wow. I’d never really liked wife beaters, but, damn, he looked good in it. It clung to his well-defined pecs and tight abs, and it made his shoulder and arm muscles look huge.

“Gonna shower,” he said back, looking back at me, his eyes turning that damned navy which made my breathing speed up.

“’Kay,” I mumbled, still not leaving the room.

“’Kay,” he muttered, walking toward me in his unbuttoned jeans and wife beater. Gah! His hands went to the hem of my t-shirt and he pulled it over my head and off, his eyes glittering down at me when he saw that I didn’t wear a bra.

Looking him over, I couldn’t keep my hands off, as I ran them up his abs then over his chest and up to his scruffy cheeks, cupping his face and pulling him down to kiss me. His hands went to my hips then slid up and under my breasts where his thumbs smoothed across my nipples. He stepped away from me and quickly pulled his wife beater off, turning it around in his hands and sliding it over my head and on me. I laughed in surprise, but when he growled deep in his throat and grabbed the back of the shirt, twisting it in his hand to make it tighter on me then yanked me closer to him, I gasped before his mouth came down hard on mine. After that, every bit of our clothing came off but the wife beater I wore.

He led me to the bathroom where he pulled me into the shower, making me keep the shirt on as he sprayed water on it. “Goddamn,” he muttered, lust flickering in his eyes as he took in my White T-shirt Contest moment, my nipples hard and straining against the thin fabric. His mouth came down hard on mine and he then proceeded to erase any thoughts of his commercial with what’s-her-face from my mind.

My cell phone rang one evening in the middle of June when Jag was in Colorado.

“Oh. My. God.” Rebecca said indignantly.

“Shit. You saw it.”

I heard her take a breath. “El, are you sitting down? Sit down.”

Shit! I’d told Rebecca about the commercial Jag was in and when it was supposed to air, and since she was two hours ahead of me, I guess it’d shown already. I sat down in the big, cushy chair I’d bought from IKEA with my Starbucks money, throwing my legs over one arm while leaning back against the other and waited on the bad news.

“You sitting?”

“Yeah.”

She took another breath before informing me, “El, you are not to watch that commercial.”

Wait, what? “Um, what?”

“El, I’m telling you, do not watch that fucking commercial.”

Oh, God. This was bad. Rebecca only cursed when she was upset. Just great.

“Why? What happens in it?”

“Oh, El, it’s not good.”

“Jesus,” I whispered. “What’d Jag do in it? Fuck Alessandra?”

“All but,” Rebecca whispered back.

Okay, now I was angry. The past weeks with Jag had been great. He hadn’t brought up the commercial again, so I assumed there wasn’t anything to it, so I let it be. “Are you fucking shitting me?” I hissed. “What happens in it?”

“You’re just gonna have to watch for yourself,” she said with a sigh. She told me what channel it’d aired on and during what program, so I grabbed the remote and turned to the station immediately.

“I will. I’ll call you after. Thanks, Bec.”

“Wish I were there to make you a Long Island iced tea,” she said. “I think you’re gonna need one.”

“I’ve got some wine. Think that’ll do the trick?”

“Is it one of those jumbo bottles?”

Oh, boy. This was just fabulous. “No, but I’ve got three bottles.”

“That should do it.”

We hung up, I got the wine, downed a glass quickly then poured another, downing it just as fast. Then I sat and waited.

Ever had one of those moments where you knew you were alive and breathing but it felt like every bit of oxygen had left your body as if you’d been punched in the gut? Yep. My gut-punching moment had occurred at exactly nine-oh-eight in the evening when, get this, the Dodgers versus the Rockies game had gone to break.

The regular programming had been preempted by the game. How ironic was that? So I’d been sitting there watching Jag pitch thinking that maybe the commercial wasn’t that bad, that Rebecca had just been overly preparing me because I’d told her about Alessandra and she knew the chick just royally chapped my ass. But when I actually saw it, I knew Rebecca had seriously been concerned for me. And she should’ve been. Good lord, even having self medicated with several glasses of White Zinfandel that Mrs. Jensen had gotten from the Napa Valley tour she and Jag’s dad had gone on when they’d moved him and that she’d sent back with us the Christmas before, I still hadn’t been prepared.

After seeing the ad, I’d sat there stunned after pausing the DVR, then I’d backed the son of a bitch up and recorded the damned thing so I could watch it again and again, torturing myself to shreds, I supposed.

I rewound and watched again as it showed Jag walking along the beach barefooted, wearing the outfit he’d worn home the night of the filming, as the nine models passed by him with their perfect bikini-clad bodies looking at him seductively as he ignored them. Then he looked wistfully out at the waves while flashbacks showed of him and Alessandra rolling around in a bed together. And that was the moment I thought that I was going to throw up. But being the masochist that I was, I kept the stupid thing rolling. Next it showed him stopping as he looked out at the ocean as if he’d seen something. The next scene showed Alessandra appearing out of the waves like she was some kind of sea goddess and walking toward him with a sexy smile on her face and wearing a bikini that barely covered her fucking tits or ass at all. After her slow motion approach that showed plenty of slomo boob jiggling, she ended up running to Jag where he swept her up in his arms, twirling her around as they looked longingly into each other’s eyes. The camera then started panning back showing him setting her down, their bodies still melded together, her arms wrapped around his neck, his hands going to her face as he leaned down as if to kiss her. And even though he’d said they hadn’t, it looked so real and you really couldn’t tell if they’d kissed because the back of his head was to the camera and by then it’d panned farther away while some guy said something and some words flashed on the screen, all of which I paid no attention to.

“Oh, God,” I whispered then ran to the bathroom and emptied my stomach of all the wine I’d drunk.

Aside from the obvious, one of the worst moments of all was when programming went back to the game and the announcers went on and on about the commercial and what a lucky man Jag was to have gotten to work with Alessandra, that she was a gorgeous woman, and that they hoped he didn’t have a wife or girlfriend because they’d be green with envy right about now.

While I was in the bathroom washing out my mouth, my phone rang. I walked into the living room and picked it up, knowing it was Rebecca.

“Oh, God, Bec. What the fuck was that?” I asked.

“I don’t know, babe. I wish I could tell you, though.”

Okay, I had to be rational. Jag was young. He was new to all of this, so he’d probably just followed along with what the director had told him, not realizing how graphic it’d been, or if he had, he probably felt as if he couldn’t really say anything. I mean, I guess it really wasn’t that graphic but for the fact that Alessandra barely had any clothes on, but to me, his girlfriend of five years, it had been particularly licentious. But I had to give him the benefit of the doubt, I supposed.

“Bec, I’ve gotta be rational here,” I told her.

“You don’t have to be anything but pissed, El,” she replied.

“Well, I am that, but Jag’s no pro at this stuff. I mean, he was probably just taking direction and doing what they told him to do.”

“Maybe,” she capitulated grudgingly.

“I’ll just have to talk to him about it and see what he has to say after he watches it.”

“Yeah, do that and then let me know what he has to say for himself,” she snapped.

I knew she was angry for me and that’s what a best friend should do, but I also knew that Jag wouldn’t willingly have hurt me, so I’d just wait and see what he had to say.

“Thanks for being such a good friend, Bec. I’m glad I’ve got you on my side,” I told her.

“Same, El. I’m here for you always and I understand what you’re saying,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to beat the shit out of both of them.”

I chuckled at that then we talked a bit more before hanging up. I didn’t turn the TV back on that night. I didn’t have one shit left to give about Jag’s game and I damn sure didn’t want to risk seeing that Godforsaken commercial again. When he called the next day, I’d get my answers. I went to bed, hoping I’d been right about him.