Fair Game: A Football Romance (75 page)

“I can wait, but the longer you sit there, the harder I’ll fuck you when you’ve decided to stop teasing.”

Her smile broadens. “Then I should hold still?”

“No,” I growl, changing positions to lay her down on the seat where I wanted her fifteen minutes ago to show her who the boss really is. Her hands ball into tiny fists against my chest, and laughter bubbles from her lips until I can’t take the beauty of her anymore, and I thrust into her hard and fast. I watch her transform from a playful kitten into a slinky, sensual puma. She has mind blowing natural instincts when it comes to sex. She follows every cue I give her until her eyes roll back in her head and she loses control.

This is it. This is what I’ve been waiting to see again for weeks. Her lips part and she arches against me, and we go there, to that place where heaven and hell mix for just a few seconds, combining purity and sin that explodes into the abyss.

She is absolutely the other half of me. If there were ever any doubt in my mind, there is none now. She’s fucking amazing, and she’s mine. Unspoiled, unpolluted and authentic, never touched or pleasured by another man’s hands, and never will be. As long as my heart beats and there is breath in my body, she is mine and mine alone.

Chapter Twenty-One

Holland

I curl into a ball on my side and snuggle deeper into a warm, peaceful haze of mint and spice. As the fog lifts from my brain, I peek out of one eye to see King laying in front of me, mirroring my position. He’s asleep. I close my eye and try to think . . . where am I . . . oh yes. Helicopter, beach, lunch . . . fainting, limo, and sex. Good Lord, the sex.

“Welcome back, sleepy head. I thought you’d never come around.” I open my eyes and find myself in King’s bed in his apartment. He trails his finger along the side of my cheek, ending with his hand cupping my face. The air around us is chilly. My nose is cold, and I swear I could probably see my breath if the lights were turned up brighter. The only warmth is in our little cocoon under the covers. I scoot closer to him, and he turns me around to spoon the entire length of his body.

“You have something against heat?” I ask, and he kisses my ear.

“You’re cold?”

“Uh, yeah. It’s gotta be like forty degrees in here. My nose is running.” He feels my nose for drips and, finding none, he rubs his free hand up and down my arm in an attempt to warm me, but it’s useless. I’m a Popsicle.

“I like it cold. I’ll have Sebastián turn it up when you’re here, though, if you like, but I rather like keeping you warm myself.”

“Maybe a little bit of both.”

“I can live with that.” He rolls away for only a second to get his phone from the bedside table behind us, and I shiver when the cold air rushes between us. He’s back against me in seconds, which causes me to shiver again, but for different reasons. He props up on his elbow, and I listen to him have a brief conversation with Sebastián, instructing him to turn up the thermostat.

“You can’t do that? Run a thermostat, I mean?” If he tells me no, I’m going to lose faith in him as a man. My daddy has been teaching me practical things like that for years. I can change the oil in a car, flip a breaker switch when the power goes out, change the light bulb over the stove and in the fridge, and fix just about anything that can go wrong with a toilet. Daddy’s been into DIY ever since Mama made him figure out how to do electrical and plumbing work to save money. ‘That could be Juilliard money,’ she used to tell him when the sink was leaking and he wanted to call a plumber. I felt bad that he worked so hard at his job and got bossed around by Mama at home, so I pitched in and started helping.              

Mama . . . ugh, God, the thought of her demanding that King pay for Juilliard and encourage me to have an abortion disgusts me. I hope he doesn’t want to talk about her anymore, because I don’t.

“You okay, baby?” His arms tighten around me and I feel so safe, so
at home
.

“Yeah, I’m just cold. It’s freezing in here,” I say, pulling the covers up over my shoulder. It’s a half lie. I am freezing, but more so, a piece of my heart is breaking over my mama. How could she be so awful? It’s a delay in my career, not the end of it. She’s always been pro-life, she taught me to be pro-life and she raised me in the Catholic Church. I can’t believe she blackmailed King into encouraging me to abort. Who asks a father to have his own child killed? I’m really starting to wonder if I know who she is at all.

“And yes, for the record, I am perfectly capable of running a thermostat, but the control is in the security room downstairs in the club, where they control the temperature throughout the building. I’ll keep you warm, though. Don’t worry.”

He wraps his long, lean muscles around my limbs, curling around me like a cat and nuzzling into my neck. His warm breath on my skin causes another shiver to race up my spine. Under the heavy gold and black duvet, he protects me from the chill in the air. It occurs to me that he protects me from so many things in my life right now—the critical eyes of the world, my mother, the Juilliard admissions board, and probably other things I don’t even want to know about. He is on
my
side all the way . . . or
our
side, I should say. All three of us.

“Well, that’s a relief. I thought I was going to have to find a replacement for you.” Braving the cold air, I slide my hand out from under the covers, along his scruffy jawline, and back into the soft curls on the nape of his neck.

“Oh, baby, no one can replace me. I’m the King. And I’m deeply wounded to know such an insignificant task would make you reconsider our relationship,” he says, nibbling my earlobe. I feel bad for teasing him.

“You’re right. You’re irreplaceable, and I love you too much to ever let you go—even when you try to freeze me to death.” I’ve never told him that before, but now seems like the right time to start, and he doesn’t miss a beat returning the sentiment.

“I love you too, sweet Holland, so, so much. You’ll never know just how much.”

“Thank you for having my back . . . with my mama, ya know, and the Juilliard people. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

“I’m more than happy to have your back anytime,” he says, pressing his thick length into my backside. “
And
your front.” His hand slinks up from my waist to cup my breast. “And all the parts in between,” he says, kissing my neck. Electricity zaps across the surface of my skin, igniting a fire in my core. Now I’m hot, but I don’t know if it’s from King’s heat kicking in or
King’s heat kicking in
.

“Are you trying to get me pregnant again?”

“Maybe.” His scruff plays against my cheek when he smiles against it.

“I don’t think I can handle more than one.” King plunges us into darkness when he pulls the duvet over our heads and rolls me underneath him.

“You’re not doing this alone, baby. You’ve got me, and I can do anything.” I believe him beyond a shadow of a doubt. We could have a litter of kids, and I think King would rise to the occasion—pun intended.

***

Four hours later, at home, on my back in my own bed, with my hands behind my head, I’m feeling opposite of how I did at King’s today. Funny how a place I’ve spent every day of my life in feels so irrelevant, and the place I’ve spent nearly no time in feels like home. It’s not the place, though. It’s the company. My parents are at each other all the time about my
situation
, as Mama calls it, and they’re miserable to be around.

They think they’re being sly and secretive, but I hear their slightly raised voices at night in the room next to mine, arguing about whether or not I should keep my baby. It’s not up to them. It’s my damn baby. Daddy isn’t happy about any of this, and what good father would be, but thankfully, he wants whatever I want. He says it’s my body and my life, and that God doesn’t make mistakes. He must have wanted me to have a baby, or he wouldn’t have given me one.

It’s a simple way of thinking, I suppose, but I believe it’s true. Mama, on the other hand, sounds like she’s going to have an aneurism or break her teeth off when she gets going about my future and my career and how hard
she’s
worked, how much
she’s
sacrificed, and what a waste it is to throw it all away for a baby. She even had the gall to say I could have a baby anytime, but I can only go to Juilliard now. To hear her talk about it, you’d think it was her own talent and career that’s being wasted.

I want to go back to King’s where I feel wanted and loved. King asked me to live with him today, and I happily accepted, but he thought it would be best to ease my parents into the idea. My birthday is next month, and I’ll be twenty. Twenty sounds so much better than nineteen when you’re talking about pregnancy. People are so judgmental about teen pregnancy. When a teenager gets pregnant, they say she got knocked up, but when it’s a twenty-year-old, she’s having a baby.

“Why aren’t you practicing?” Mama asks from my open door. One of her strange new rules is that I have to keep my door open at all times, so I didn’t even know she was standing there. I don’t know what the hell she thinks she’s going to accomplish with the new rule. I’m already pregnant. What else could happen?

“I was just resting. I’ll start now,” I say, slowly sitting up and swinging my legs over the edge of the bed without getting dizzy or nauseated. King was right. Moving slowly is much better.               When I pick up my violin and raise my bow, I expect her to leave me alone, but she hangs back, pressing her hand against the door jamb and looking down at the floor.

“What did you two do today?” Her eyes never leave her feet. She’s nervous. She wants to know if he asked me to get an abortion. She still doesn’t know that I know that she’s trying to blackmail King, and I’m not telling her. I want to see her squirm.

“Nothing much. We had lunch and talked, that’s all.”

“Lunch . . . and talking,” she repeats.

“Yeah.”

Squirm, Mama, squirm.

“Did you talk about the . . . about . . .”

“The baby? No, we didn’t.” I drag my bow across the strings, playing the first notes of Brahms’s
Lullaby
just to irritate her. She looks up at me, wide-eyed, but she composes herself quickly. I blink innocently and begin playing scales to warm up, essentially dismissing her, but she doesn’t move.

I continue my scales, and when I’m finished, I switch to a piece of my favorite music, trying to get lost in it—but it’s impossible with her standing there, staring at me. I play louder and louder, trying to get my message across, and at some point she gets it and leaves. With my back to the door, I can’t see her go, but I don’t feel her eyes boring a hole in my back anymore. Only then am I able to let my fingers fly up and down the strings with the passion and determination of a person fighting for her life. I feel as though I’m fighting for my life lately, the life that I want with King and the life inside of me that my mama wants to smudge out.

Two hours later, I tuck my violin into its case. I’m exhausted after my long day with King, but if I hadn’t practiced for a little while, Mama would never have been satisfied.

I catch my reflection in the mirror over my dresser when I turn around. “You’re going to be a mother. You . . . Holland Bennett . . . a mama.” I turn to the side and smooth my hands over my belly. This doesn’t feel real. I mean, the nausea is real as hell, but the baby growing in there won’t be until I can see it. We have an appointment with the obstetrician later this week, and I’ll be having my first ultrasound. Maybe then it will feel real.

***

Twelve weeks, twenty weeks, thirty weeks, and now thirty-four. It’s January and I’m freezing. My teeth are chattering as I wait on the sidewalk in front of
STRINGS
for Sebastián to pull the car around. It’s forty degrees, which isn’t cold by most people’s standards, but when you’re used to sixty degree highs, forty is damn near arctic.

I couldn’t see my toes anymore if I tried. My eight-and-a-half-month pregnant belly blocks my view of anything below my waist. King assures me my shoes match when he helps me dress every day. He tends to me tirelessly every day, picking things up off the floor that I’ve dropped and making sure I don’t slip getting into the tub. He even painted my toenails once, but he ended up taking me for a pedicure the next day because he messed them up so badly. I would have never known they were a mess except that he laid me down in bed and lifted my foot up high to show me.

I moved in above the club with King when I was five months along because my mama was insufferable. She pouted and complained and bitched and moaned on and on about my decision to keep the baby. She had me so depressed that there were days that King had to come and force me out of bed.

It got so bad that Daddy moved into a hotel nearby after a huge blowout in the middle of the grocery store. Right there, between the celery and the tomatoes, she lost her shit and started screaming that she’d wasted her entire life supporting my dream, and that I was an ungrateful, selfish daughter with no respect. He turned around and left her gripping the shopping cart in the hard light of the produce aisle, with customers staring while she shouted after him. And when she noticed, she shouted at them to mind their own business. I know this because Mr. Jefferies told Mrs. Moore, who of course passed the juicy gossip on to her book club that Savannah’s mother attends. Small world.

I visited Daddy in his hotel room one afternoon and listened as he confirmed the story. I felt so guilty, but he assured me that it was a long time coming and that they had been pretending for years to be happy for my sake—and that made me feel even guiltier.

I hated leaving him there. The room was so cold and unlike home, with no photographs or knickknacks, only generic lamps and a clock radio that was cemented to the bedside table. King offered to put him up somewhere nicer, but he declined, as I knew he would. Daddy’s too proud for that.

Daddy was the only buffer between my mother and me, so when he left, I did too. King insisted. He said the stress wasn’t good for the baby or me, but I knew he just really wanted to have me under his roof, and to be honest, it was a huge relief. He was right, too, of course. I got more rest, ate healthier, got more exercise—in and out of bed—and felt a million times better.

King has also been teaching me to drive, and yeah . . . that’s been interesting. I never got my license when everybody else did in high school. I never went anywhere besides practice and school, and if I did, Mama insisted on driving me.