Kicked: A Bad Boy Sports Romance (7 page)

“You don't own this town, Tyce, despite what some might say,” Teagan spat at me, reaching back and freeing the gorgeous orange and red of her hair from its ponytail. It was like a fall of autumn down her back, this flaming badge of pride that I wanted so desperately to run my fingers through. “And you don't own the university. I got a scholarship, a
full ride,
and I didn't have to toss around a ball to get it.”

“I fucking earned my place here,” I growled back at her, keeping my hands by my sides as she moved up close to me, glared right through the twelve inches that separated us. The wind blew a fierce stiletto of cold across my heated skin, bringing up goose bumps over my arms. “I worked my
ass
off. You know that.”

“Do I? Because the Tyce Winship I thought I knew seems to be good and dead. The Tyce Winship that
I
knew,” Teagan continues, putting her hand over her heart, “would never have left me behind. If he had to go, he would've let me know and I would've understood. What did you think, that I was going to hold you back?”

I stared into Teagan's eyes, but I couldn't make my lips form the words.

Yes. Yes, I did. I cared too much about you, but all I can care about is football. I
have
to make something of myself. I didn't want to trap you, Teagan. I didn't want to trap
us.

“I see,” she said, licking her lips and moving away, turning around to stare into the navy blue waters of the Willamette. “Well, you can rest easy then, Tyce Winship, because I didn't come here for you. As I'm sure you remember, I don't have any family other than my mom and now, she's dead. It might come as a surprise to you, but selling movie tickets at the local theater doesn't exactly leave a lot of room for life insurance or trust funds. I got a scholarship at the U of O, so I followed the money, okay? I didn't come here for you.”

“What happened to Venus?” I asked, because I was starting to wonder if words were going to fail me completely. I wanted to shake Teagan at the same time I wanted to hug her, pull her small wild frame against me and tell her everything was going to be okay. But screw that. Screw it. No. I didn't sign up for any of this crap.

“Doesn't matter,” Teagan said, leaning over and putting her forehead against her arms. “She's dead now, so who cares? You weren't there when we needed you most. You took what you wanted from us and then you blew us off like we were nothing.” She raised her head and sent a piercing gaze my way, one that struck me right through the chest, made me feel like I was bleeding out. “And the worst part of it all is that you don't seem to give a crap.”

“That's where you're wrong,” I said, reaching out and taking her elbow in my hand. Teagan pulled away from me again, rubbing her hands down the moss green lycra fabric of her running jacket. “I'm sorry that I left, Tea.”

“Don't call me that.”

“I'm sorry that I left and that I didn't call, I wanted to.”

“Bullshit.”

I grabbed her arm again and squeezed hard, pulling her towards me.

“I did. I thought about going home so many times, about calling. But things got in the way.”

“You mean football?” she asked, lifting her chin proudly to glare at me. “Or girls. Because you seem to be having plenty of both.”

This time when Teagan pulled away from me, she turned and took off down the path.

Last time I fucked up, I let her jog away from me. Somehow, I found her anyway. That was fate or God or karma or whatever you want to call it. But fate only gives you so many chances. If I didn't fix this thing, or at least find some sort of resolution for us both, I was going to get back what I'd sown three times over.

I started running.

When I caught up to Teagan again, I grabbed her elbow again and tried to get her to stop.

“Tea, talk to me,” I said as I dragged my heels to a stop and she spun around to face me, her expression broken up with lines of hatred, frustration, but mostly sadness. Sad. She was so fucking sad. “I didn't come after you to make you cry.”

“I wish you'd just kept pretending not to know me,” she said, reaching up and rubbing her eyes. With a low growl in her throat, she dropped them back by her sides and continued to glare at me, breath coming in panting gasps. “Maybe if I'd let you fuck me, you'd be a little nicer?”

“Don't talk like that, Tea,” I growled back at her. “That's ridiculous.”

“Why did you kiss me yesterday?” she asked suddenly, looking back at me with dry eyes and a tight line for a mouth. I kept thinking she would cry again, but I guess I'd seen all there was to see of that. “You never tried before, not once. I mean, you kissed all my friends. You
fucked
all of my friends. But not me, never me. Why is that?”

“I have no idea,” I whispered harshly, my voice tight and my eyes flicking across her face, searching for something more. What I was looking for, I really had no clue, but I couldn't stop
searching
for it. “To any of the above. I don't fucking know. I'm sorry I teased you like that. I was so … God, I was fucking shocked as hell to see you. I didn't know what to do, so I said some shit. I didn't mean any of it. I'm not sure what came over me. I'd never say those things to you normally.”

“Of course you wouldn't,” she murmured, shaking her head and looking down at the forest floor beneath our feet. It was a blanket of red, yellow, and orange leaves with a sprinkling of pine needles. Night was falling quick and the orange streetlights around us were starting to pop on, drawing flurries of moths to their pale glow.

Teagan looked up at me again and then took a sudden step forward, leaning her full chest against the hard planes of my abs, putting her small hands softly on either side of my face. She pressed her fingers against my cheeks and teased my lower lip with the gentlest of kisses, like a breath of wind against my mouth.

I wasn't used to that. I was used to hard, heavy bursts of tongue and groping hands, the taste of beer and weed and desperation. This wasn't like that, not at all.

Before I could stop myself, I was wrapping my arms around Teagan's waist and pushing her back, pressing her tight against the trunk of a tree. Her mouth opened to my demands, welcoming me with a small moan of either pleasure or pain, I'm not sure. Either way, she accepted me by tilting her head back, dropping her arms to my shoulders.

I kissed Teagan back the only way I knew how, returning that gentle press of lips with a firm, fierce insistence that even I didn't understand. I ran from this girl; I was still running from this girl. If I didn't stay away from her, she'd become an obsession. Instinctively, I knew that. In that moment, with my rigid cock pressed tight against her body, her panting breaths filling my mouth, I couldn't stop.

My tattooed right hand dove into her black leggings, finding her hot and wet and ready for me. I slicked a finger along her swollen heat, feeling the stiff, tender flesh of her clit at the top. I teased Teagan with that hand while I kissed her fucking face off, my tongue annihilating hers in a kiss that was too personal, too intimate. Teagan could reminisce all she wanted about our childhood together, but right now, we were strangers to each other, as foreign and far apart as me and any of the girls I spent the night with.

Deep down though, I knew this was different. I didn't accept it,
refused
to accept it. But I knew.

I cupped Teagan's face with my left hand, holding her gingerly with my fingers while I kept her body pressed into the rough bark of the tree with my own. Thrusting my hips against her, I rubbed my cock between us, moaning into her mouth as I finally slipped a pair of fingers into her pussy.
Holy shit, she's tight,
I thought as I struggled to push in, all the way to my knuckles, forcing her legs apart with my hand. I ended up having to move my left hand back down to take her thigh, keep her balanced while I slid in and out, slow and deliberate, careful.

The wind picked up, whipping my dark hair around my face, mixing her red-orange strands with my own as we continued to kiss. I opened my eyes then and looked at her, at her shuttered lashes and rosy cheeks, at the wind chill turning her forehead and nose a pale pink color. Or maybe that was the motion of my hand, working her tight muscles into the fluttering pulse of a butterfly, one that cupped my hand with each beat of its wings.

When I moved my hand to my own jeans in a deliberate move, Teagan didn't stop me. I bit her lower lip as I dragged the zipper down and freed my dick, holding the heavy length in my hand as I stroked some pre-ejac down the shaft, getting myself ready for her. It didn't cross my mind then that I didn't have a condom. Should've maybe, but didn't. With other girls, hell yeah. It was the first thought on my mind when I smiled at them across the room. With Teagan … it didn't seem to matter so much. I just wanted her, all of her, as close to me as I could get.

I pulled back, enjoying the moist swell of Teagan's lower lip, the flutter of her lashes as she opened those jade green eyes of hers and looked back at me. Her pupils were dark and dilated, thick and black with desire, as I withdrew my hand and curled my fingers around the waistband of her leggings.

No protests.

I knew this was a stupid idea, that we were standing in the middle of a public park, but I didn't care. I dragged her leggings down her hips and tore off her left tennis shoe so I could free the fabric from her body. I left it hanging on the other side and stood back up, lifting her small frame like it was nothing. She might not have weighed much, but she felt like the world in my hands.

Teagan spread her legs wide, wrapped them as tight around me as she could get and looked me straight in the eyes as I slid into her. It happened so quick, just one smooth thrust and I was as far inside as I could get. She cried out and squeezed me hard, dropping her forehead to my shoulder and making a sound in her throat that I couldn't interpret.

It was hard for me to breathe, to move. Warm, wet heat surrounded me on all sides, bore down on me with enough pressure that I found it hard to think, to realize what any of this meant. It didn't matter. I started to move, using the sounds Teagan was making to judge the speed, the strength of my thrusts. I pushed into her, melded our bodies together, fucked her slow but hard, purposefully. Her soft body yielded to mine, pulled me in and reassured me with the thumping pulse of her heart. I could feel it there, circling my cock, beating against me with her panting breaths.

“It hurts, Tyce,” Teagan whispered, her voice hoarse and rough. “It really hurts.”

“What hurts?” I asked, turning my face, breathing hot against her cheek as she raised her head. I could barely get the words out. I was hardly even myself in that moment, succumbing to the wants of my body, to basic desires and needs and feelings I'd been carrying with me for years. “The tree?” In the scrambled state my brain was in, I really thought that was a logical response.

“All of it,” Teagan gasped as I pulled back, my hands tight on her ass, her legs still firmly wrapped around me. “Everything.”

“Do you want me to stop?” I whispered against her ear, enjoying the shudder that passed through her body and back into mine. When she didn't answer, I thrust in again, feeling the connection of our hips straight up my spine and into my brain. “Do you?”

“No,” she stated quietly but firmly. With a small growl, I adjusted her weight and started to move faster, deeper, more. I moved our sweaty bodies together in a blur of wetness and heat and flickering white pulses of pleasure.

When I came, it was with an earth shattering amount of power, enough to thoroughly knock the sense from my brain as I sagged against Teagan and held her tight. Half of me wanted to stay like that forever. The other half, the angry, twisted dirty half, he wanted to drop her and run like hell. What I was so scared of, I wasn't sure. It was stupid and irrational and it didn't make any sense, but it was there.

“Could you put me down, please?” Teagan asked after a moment, and I slid out with a groan, realizing as I reached down to adjust my pants that there was blood. Not a lot, but a little. I looked back up at her as she struggled to fix her leggings. “Could you grab my shoe?” she whispered hoarsely, refusing to look at me.

I felt sick to my stomach as I finished buttoning my pants and squatted down to grab her sneaker.

“Teagan,” I began as I stood back up, but she didn't let me finish, snatching the shoe away from me and stumbling a bit as she tried to slip it back on. When I reached out to help her, she pulled back from me.

“I should go,” she told me, but she stayed right where she was, leaning against the tree with her breath coming in heavy gasps and her hands quivering by her sides. When she finally looked over at me, her lips were swollen from our kisses and her eyes looked like they were ringed in liner, lit up by desire but also by confusion. Surprise. A lack of surety.

“Are you a virgin?” I asked, still trying to figure out what was going on. I mean, I'd known Teagan was a virgin when I'd left, but I'd assumed … I'd assumed. That was the problem. I'd just
assumed.
My heart started to pound against my ribcage and my hands squeezed into fists.
What the fuck did I just do?