His to Win (The Alpha Soccer Saga #1) (20 page)

It was a lesson that served Patrick well in basketball, soccer, and life. Keep your head down and grind, and your effort will eventually be rewarded. Allow for no distractions, and certainly nothing as silly as wants and desires. A rising tide lifts all ships. If the team excels, everybody shares in the bounty. If the team fails, we all suffer together. In Vietnam, Ben taught Patrick, one man’s momentary distraction could have meant death for the entire unit.

But this wasn’t war. It was football. And Patrick was devastated. Going into the conversation with Ellie, he half hoped something she’d say, or the sweet sound of her voice, might change his mind about the whole thing, that he might have the courage to stand up to the ghost of Ben Sievert, that maybe his personal happiness didn’t have to be derived solely from the success of the team.

But it was too late for that now.

After giving it much thought, and staring at his phone, willing it to ring, hoping to see a text message, a Skype request, something, anything, from Ellie, he decided he’d let football solve the problem for him. Celtic were scheduled to travel to league leader Aberdeen in two days. If that game went well for Patrick and the team, he’d made the right decision. If not, Ellie wasn’t the problem after all, and something else was causing the Celtic jigsaw puzzle to not fit together quite right.

The sound of his phone ringing woke Patrick late that night, and as he fumbled for it in the dark, he expected to see Ellie’s smiling face on the screen. Instead, it was his mother calling.

Calls in the middle of the night from a loved one are rarely good news, so it was with a feeling of dread that Patrick answered.

“Hello?”

“Patrick, I’m sorry to call you so late. I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

“Mom, this isn’t about Ellie, is it?”

“Ellie? No, dear, not at all. It’s about Amina Seck. Tacko’s mother. She’s passed away.”

Patrick sat up in bed. “What? Wait a minute. She wasn’t, Mom, she wasn’t that much older than me. What happened?”

“I don’t have many details, I’ve kept in touch with the family, with Amina and Jawara, Tacko’s father and I got a message from the family. She was forty-two. It happened late last week. She’s already been buried, their tradition calls for a very quick burial. But the family is in mourning, there will be a prayer service on the eighth day, which is Saturday. I’m leaving in a few hours for Dakar, it’s almost an entire day of travel. I’ll arrive Friday evening. I feel called to be there. I know you have a match, but maybe the team could put you on, what do they call it again?”

“Compassionate leave, Mom. And yes, probably so, but do you have any details? If there’s a way I can play and still make it, I’d—”

“Patrick,” Sarah Sievert interrupted, “I’ll find out what I can, as specifically as I can, but you sound like your father right now. This is a family whose lives our family touched, through no fault of yours or anyone’s, it just happened but we’re linked now. When one of us is hurting, the rest should be there to help. I think it’s important that you find a way to attend, if you can. It’s up to you. I’ll e-mail you my itinerary and everything just get back to me and let me know.”

Patrick lay back in bed, thoughts racing. He’d see the manager in the morning at training, the team were scheduled to leave that afternoon for Aberdeen. He felt it important to be there for the Seck family, for his mother, but gnawing at the back of his mind was team, team, and team.

He didn’t sleep again that night, he sat in the dark and cold of the middle of an autumn night in Glasgow on his porch, a panorama playing in his mind. His father. His mother. Tacko and his parents in that hospital room in Manchester. Chelsea. Furman. Celtic. Ellie.

Compassionate leave was granted quickly by Celtic management, the Tacko Seck incident still fresh in the hearts of the world football community. Patrick boarded a KLM flight that morning, final destination Dakar. He’d stop in Amsterdam and Paris, beating his mother to Dakar by an hour. They’d hope for some sleep before departing Saturday morning for the Seck family home in Guediawaye, a town just northeast of Dakar proper.

Waiting for his connection in Paris, Patrick wondered why he hadn’t spent more time in the City of Light, and how he’d love to explore it with Ellie. He’d thought of so many places he wanted to take her, so many things he wanted to do with her and to experience with her. He’d only ever been to South Africa, so Senegal would be entirely new to him.

Aside from the exotics, Patrick daydreamed as the plane ascended into the sky above Paris, the place he most wanted to take Ellie would be a lonely dirt road in Berkeley County, South Carolina.

The house Patrick grew up in wasn’t exactly in the country but if you were looking to get lost in the middle of nowhere you’d drive right through his neighborhood to get there.

Behind his house, where a dead end road terminated, his father and uncle had taken it upon themselves to clear out the forest and flatten a dirt road that curved through the woods, across a bridge over a creek, and along the backside of his uncle’s corn field. Start to finish, it was a little over five hundred yards, and while not exactly sanctioned by county government, nobody was going to tell a pair of Vietnam vets, who both happened to be fathers of star athletes, that they couldn’t build a road joining their properties.

Patrick had walked that road a million times, tagging along with his older cousins, his grandfather, or any other combination of friends, parents, aunts, and uncles. In all those trips, he’d never encountered a stranger. Wild and completely private, it was his place to unwind, whether he needed a jog; a slow, meandering walk; or a quiet place to commune with nature.

He closed his eyes and reclined back as far as his seat would allow, picturing a bright spring day walking that well-worn path with Ellie.

In his mind’s eye, she was barefoot, wildflowers tucked behind an ear, a yellow sundress hugging her curves.

“Patrick, this must be what it’s like to climb down off your cloud and take a walk in heaven,”
Ellie gushed. The stream babbled nearby, birds sang, and the scent of lilac and honeysuckle filled the air.

Patrick suddenly grabbed Ellie’s arm and pulled her off the path, behind an oak, raising a finger to his lips. With his other hand, he pointed down the road. Ellie gasped as she watched two does stroll casually across, not twenty yards away. One of them stopped and looked around, catching the scent of two humans nearby but decided they belonged, they were nonthreatening, and the pair of white-tails continued their search for a buck, ghosting back into the forest.

Ellie was giddy at the sight of them and when they were gone she excitedly asked
“Patrick, how did you—”

Patrick cut her off with a kiss. Gentle at first, then more insistent. She returned the kiss vigorously, his hands palming her ass through the flimsy material of the dress. She whimpered as his kisses became deeper, their intentions more clear. He meant to take her, to have her, right there in the daylight, in the woods, in nature.

She made no move to resist him as his hands bunched her dress up over her ass, palms directly on her flesh, finding nothing blocking his progress toward her sex. Her hands were flung around the back of his neck as they kissed, and she could feel one of his hands come to rest low on her hip.

The hand on her ass separated her flesh from the bark of the oak he’d nudged her toward. The tree sloped gently away from Ellie, giving her room to recline slightly with the trunk.

Never breaking their kiss, Patrick placed a hand on her mound, rubbing in circles with the heel of his palm, a single finger slipping inside her. She groaned hungrily at the entry, pulling him in closer.

“Patrick, mmmm, oh fuck, somebody might see! Oh God, yes. Right there,”
she half gasped as his hand worked expertly between her legs.

“Nobody uses this road but the birds and the bees, Ellie, and they’re already intimately familiar with what we’re doing,”
Patrick replied, the sweet sound of her laughter interrupted by the moans of her orgasm as she rutted against his hand.

Ellie’s legs abandoned her, and she stayed upright thanks only to her grip around Patrick’s neck, and his hands upon which she was more or less seated.

Once she regained her faculties, she yanked his shorts and underwear down in one tug, desperate to feel something more substantial inside her. His cock jutted nobly from below his flat stomach, and she took hold of it, pulling him against her. He crouched slightly and rose up and into her with a single thrust. She could feel the fullness all the way up her midsection and seemingly into her throat. His thrusts, by the necessity of the position, were short, quick, stabbing motions. His hands were on her ass, using it as an anchor to keep his rhythm.

Suddenly, accompanied by a yelp of surprise from Ellie, Patrick rose to his full stature, lifting her from the ground, back against the trunk of the oak tree. His hands were under her ass, but a great deal of her weight felt as if it were being supported solely by the thick cock on which she was impaled. He wasn’t going in and out so much as he was grinding his hips against her. It was an entirely new sensation, and she knew it wouldn’t take long for climax to take her. The undulations of his hips were frenzied, his intense stare gazing deep into her soul. The scents and sounds of the woods that seemed so peaceful minutes ago now represented something savage and primal. Man had evolved over thousands of years into the perfect specimen of Patrick Sievert, yet something in nature took him back to his roots, back to a caveman fucking the prize he’d taken in the woods. This same wild grove of trees that stood on this spot for centuries. Uncivilized. Wild. The basest of man’s hungers were provided here. Deer to eat. A stream from which to drink. Trees for shade. Her cunt for fucking.

She came violently, biting down so hard on Patrick’s shoulder that she was sure she tasted blood through his T-shirt. It was a shuddering, pulsating climax, and she swore she felt the oak shake behind her, heard birds take flight in blind panic at the sounds coming from both of them.

As her orgasm subsided, his began. Pumping what felt like a gallon of his seed into her, growling through gritted teeth, never breaking eye contact with her. The two of them collapsed onto soft moss, kissing gently as sleep breezed through the wood and into them.

Patrick’s daydream left him throbbing, forcing him to subtly adjust the embarrassing bulge in his trousers before it was noticed by a flight attendant or fellow passenger.

What a great way to cap off the week that would be
, Patrick thought to himself,
ejected from an international flight for lewdness
.

Meanwhile, Ellie had cried her eyes out and rid herself of every other spare drop of liquid in her body by finally agreeing to Meg’s interminable requests to join her in the gym, where she’d overdone it to the point where by day three PP (Meg’s idea: Post-Patrick), Ellie nearly had to crawl from her bed to the bathroom she was so sore all over.

This would be a great time for one of those ice whirlpools Patrick uses after he plays
, Ellie imagined, then caught herself. Meg, as somebody with significantly more experience jumping in and out of relationships and beds than Ellie would ever have, consoled her friend briefly before pushing her in direction of her tried and true man-hangover cure: drink until you forget, work out like a demon, and find a new guy.

The drinking the evening after the breakup call with Patrick rivalled anything Ellie or Meg had done in college. Both of them called in sick for work the following day, knowing they’d be in no shape to face the light of day. The two friends went through bottle after bottle of wine, and only Maisie’s insistent scratching at the door to be let out woke either of them before noon.

Meg had them in the gym for a grueling workout late that afternoon, both of them throwing up in the process. Ellie begged off the idea of hitting the bars Friday night. She’d managed to busy herself away from most thoughts of Patrick, but he crept in once in a while. Like the ice whirlpool. Which only led Ellie to thinking of watching him slide into that whirlpool, presumably naked, which sent her into a place Meg warned her not to go, no matter how great the memories of sex with Patrick might be.

Sarah Sievert arrived in Dakar exhausted, but the sight of her son waiting at baggage claim for her put an extra spring in her step.

They embraced long and hard before gathering up her things and heading for the hotel, hopeful they could sleep before what was sure to be an emotionally draining prayer service for Amina Seck.

The Sieverts were welcomed as honored guests by the extended Seck family and gathered friends.

As practicing Muslims most of the actual prayers were performed at the local mosque and out of respect Patrick and his mother remained at the Seck home with a few other stragglers.

Over conversation there it became evident that the consensus believed that Amina Seck died of a broken heart. Her only child, Tacko, was considered something of a miracle baby as Amina had suffered miscarriages before and after his birth, and he’d been a sickly child, not expected to live long. Instead, he’d grown tall and strong, fleet of foot and as bright a young star on the soccer field as his nation had produced in many years.  

His premature death had completely devastated both his parents, but his mother was never able to come to terms with it. Her general health declined steadily to the point she’d been bedridden for a few weeks, with no cause apparent to the finest doctors in Dakar. Where medical science failed, witch doctors tried their potions and remedies, all to no avail.

Once the business at the mosque was conducted, the house filled with people, elderly relatives who could pass for one hundred or even older, all the way down to newborn babies. The Sieverts, despite being the only white faces in attendance, as well as being in almost as decidedly a religious minority, felt nothing but warmth, compassion, and love.