Roxy Harte (26 page)

Garrett put the question to me that perhaps it was being topped, perhaps anyone who topped me would ignite this kind of visceral response. I argued that Dr. Psycho topped me, Morgana topped me; and that was true, mentally they had both topped me in the past. I do not think this has to do with my reaction to being physically topped, and if it does, so what? It doesn’t change the fact of what I’m feeling.

I love Garrett and I need the kind of attention he gives me. I am his pampered pet. I don’t want to lose him over my wanton desires, but I can’t be in as close proximity to Lord Fyre and not seek him out. It is irrational, I know. When he was inCairo , I missed him, but I could breathe. Knowing he is here…miles away, a room away, it makes no difference because I can’t think or function for the longing inside me to go to him.

Only God should be longed for so intensely, not a man.

I smile, watching him, longing for him with a very unholy nature. He kicks the ball in an odd swaggering shuffle, controlling it for a long run before another steals it away. Athletic, toned, he moves gracefully; of course I’ve seen his muscles, felt the strength in his arms and legs, but never gave any thought to what having such a hard, defined exterior might be good for. This is it. His white silk shirt, with horizontal stripes of green and yellow, hug against his chest as he runs, kicks; likewise, his white shorts ride up and cling, muscles bunching as he runs. He is glorious to watch. So glorious, even his knee-high yellow socks are sexy.

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I sit in the car watching him, knowing he knows I am here, but he doesn’t even look my way. I’m not going to get all paranoid. I could, very easily, but not yet. If play ends and he gets in his car without a single word, yeah, then I’m going to be freaked. But I don’t think that is going to happen. Last night, at the club, we shared a moment. He looked, I looked, and without saying a word, his look said it all,
I miss
you, too.

I didn’t imagine it. I didn’t.

I close my eyes for a second and when I open them again the windshield is covered with a fine mist. I squint, as if it will make seeing the men on the field easier. If I turn on my windshield wipers, will he notice? Will everyone on the field notice? I leave them off, squinting as I try to watch the game. I know nothing about soccer. It dawns on me that I don’t even know what the object of the game is. However, on quick assessment, it seems the object is to get the cute black and white ball into the big nets at either end of the field, guarded by a big guy from the other team intent on not letting the ball get into the net. So when Lord Fyre sets up the ball to kick it into the net, I hold my breath, waiting, hoping, and cheer enthusiastically when he scores. He is suddenly a hero, tackled by his teammates and hugged, ass slapped. God, watching him play makes me so happy. I can only imagine the elation he must feel being in the middle of it.

A sudden downpour, in my mind, means the game will stop. They don’t stop playing. Come on, give me a break already. You’ve been playing two hours. Granted, the view has been nice, lots of eye candy on both sides, but I want to talk to Lord Fyre and I want to talk to him now!

Rain, they keep playing.

Torrential rain turning the soccer field into a huge mud pit, they keep playing.

I have decided that Lord Fyre and his friends are insane! The only difference the rain has made is their play has turned rougher, the rain, slick grass, and resulting mud making soccer a dangerous sport. So far two bloody noses, one each side, an injured knee, not Lord Fyre but one of his teammates, and a wicked pileup that should have been photographed for the impending liability suit when all eight guys wake up in the morning unable to move.

Darkness is falling, still they play, and although the rain has stopped, the mud is still treacherous. I think they are continuing to play because of the mud. This is great fun for them. I have sat watching for over three hours, watching with no end to this game in sight, knowing the time I have to leave to be at the club by midnight is near. What would Garrett do if he knew I was here?

My stomach churns, dear God, is this what it feels like to cheat on someone? I sit here still, what have I become? I am not married, but I feel as sinful as any adulteress who has come before me. I am a sinner and still I cannot bear the thought of driving away without talking to him.

Talking does not make me an adulteress.
Thought is deed.

Yes, I thought it, but damn it, thought is not deed!

Sometime between the second and third hour of play, they turned on the headlights to their cars to illuminate the field, continuing to play in the dark. Did I mention that soccer players are insane?

Finally, at twenty after ten, they start to pack it in. I am elated knowing that I have forty minutes in which
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I can talk to Lord Fyre before I have to be on the road. Forty minutes…

All the men retire to their cars, hot, muddy, exhausted, some broken and bruised; all except Lord Fyre.

He stands in the middle of the field, looking toward my car. Parked next to his, he cannot avoid me any longer, if that is what he is trying to do.

I step from my car, walking around it to stand leaning against the hood, not approaching Lord Fyre. He stands centerfield looking at me.

Just breathe, I command myself, and it is as if the playing field before me breathes with me, expanding on my inhale, imploding on my exhale. I wonder if Lord Fyre feels it, it’s as if the entire universe is waiting with me to see just what he will do.

Slowly, he starts to walk toward me. He slows halfway to the parking lot to retrieve a stray soccer ball, kicking it back and forth between his feet as he jogs forward, short even rolls, bringing the ball in.

Kick, step, step, kick.

I am enthralled by his grace of movement, watching the muscles in his legs contract. Even in the darkness I can see him, the glow of the city reflected off the clouds enough illumination for all I want to see.

Kick, step, step, kick.

Muscled and powerful, each step he takes is feral. At the edge of the grass he stops. Lifting his face, he looks at me. Playfully, he kicks the ball forward but stops its roll with a tap of his cleats, and rolls it backward, another cleat tap and it pops into the air behind him, shooting straight up, then plummeting fast, he nails it with a head spike, shooting it straight into me. Surprisingly, my reflexes are quick and I grab the ball to my chest, holding onto it, my heart pounding. He mock applauds me as he walks up to me, spiked shoes clattering on asphalt.
Clunk, clunk.

My heartbeat joins his rhythm and the surrounding night air seems to sigh as he nears, or perhaps it is only me sighing.

Reaching me, he stops far enough away that we couldn’t possibly touch. “Hello, beautiful,” he says, smiling.

“Hello yourself.” I smile back.

“God, that smile.” He sighs, shaking his head. “You could own the world with the power of that smile.”

“I don’t want the world,” I answer arrogantly. “I want you.”

“You are Garrett’s now,” he answers strongly, refusing me in that sentence, but his eyes say more than the words. His eyes dare me to refute the words, which I can’t do.

I can, however, give him the truth. “Yes, I am his, but I am also yours. I didn’t ask for this to happen, but my heart, my soul, is divided. I want both of you equally, when I am with one of you, and without the other, I ache desperately. I love you both. Can you understand that?”

“Yes, I can understand, but have you explained this to Garrett?”

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“Not in words, but he knows how I feel. He thinks I will get over you, with time.”

“And you don’t think you will?”

“I don’t want over you,” I promise, the night seeming to swell and enclose us in her protection. Lord Fyre takes the two steps that separates us and enfolds me in his arms. His body is steaming hot, his skin and clothing damp. He smells of musk, hot, healthy male scent. I close my eyes and breathe him in, wanting to remember his scent forever, hoarding his scent in case he turns me away once I have said what I came here to say. I plant soft kisses on his silk-jersey-covered chest and he kisses the top of my head in return. “I missed you,” we say to each other.

His arms hold me tighter, trying to soften the blow of the words he is waiting to say, staving off the moment as long as he can. “I’m not a cheating kind of guy, love, what I do is in the open, or I don’t do it.”

His words don’t have the intended effect if he is trying to scare me off. Through his soccer shorts, I feel his penis hardening, thick and ready, pressed against my hip, and I hear his words for what they really are, a challenge.

“Do you remember when you told me that I was the one charting the course of how my relationships would play out?” I ask him, remembering that night. I was terrified, commanded by Lord Fyre to make love to Garrett one last time, knowing that the next morning I would be joining him for three months of servitude.

“Yes.”

“You were talking about this,” I say softly, stroking his hard length through his silk shorts. “You were talking about opening myself to you, of giving myself to you, of creating a relationship with you; but all I heard was a promise of three months, a promise of darkness filled with pleasure and pain. You wanted to make love to me then.”

“Yes.” His answer is a sigh caught by the dark night surrounding us.

“You want me still?” I ask, continuing before he has a chance to answer, “Enough to share me with Garrett?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” I wrap my hands into his damp ponytail and pull him into a kiss, whispering against his mouth.

“I’m tired of always wanting what I can’t have. I want you both. Help me make that happen. Please.”

“What you’re asking will be difficult.”

“No more difficult than waking each morning only to die a little more each day because half of me is missing! Always missing! If I am with you, I miss him; if I am with him, I miss you. Only the two of you can make me whole. Help me?”

I watch him nod his head and make him say the words. “Promise me?”

“Do you even realize what you’re asking for?” he asks incredulously, then, seeing my quick nod, promises, “I’ll help you.”

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“Starting now?”

He frowns, but he thinks enough like me to understand what I am not saying. He warns, “This will change everything.”

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I just expected him to say more, to expand on how to make this work, some compelling argument to take to Garrett. He doesn’t. He takes the soccer ball I’d forgotten I held and tosses it into the front seat of his car. Taking my hand, he leads me into the darkness of the soccer field and again it seems like the field is alive, breathing with my breath, inhaling, exhaling. He turns me to face him and the air seems suddenly too thick to breathe. I hadn’t really thought this through. I hadn’t really thought that he…and I…would…not now…and a small part of my brain screams at me, what are you doing, what about Garrett? Then Lord Fyre lowers me onto the wet grass and muddy center of the soccer field and I feel my heartbeat swell against the earth. My shirt soaks through, wetting my back, the damp earth soaking through my jeans as well. He follows me down, supporting his weight between knees and one hand, as if doing a girlie one-handed pushup. He strokes the side of my face.

“I’ve done so much to you, but never this. I’ve never made love to you.”

If I was thinking about asking him to stop a second before with the intention of cluing Garrett in on my wants, my desires, my needs, that one sentence disconnects all logical thought.
He wants to make love
to me.

“Nervous?” I ask breathlessly, feeling a slight tremor in the hand stroking my cheek.

“Do I look nervous?” he asks casually, striving to look tough.

“Yes.” I giggle nervously.

“You can stop this.”

I pull my lower lip between my teeth, afraid to say a word. He takes my silence as a green light and, pushing back onto both knees, he unzips my blue jeans and pulls them and my panties in one fluid motion down to just past my knees. He leaves the fabric there, wrapped around my legs, I try to kick them free, but he stills my leg with a touch. “No, leave them.”

Relaxing back onto the damp earth, two sensations strike me at once, water and mud pushing into my ass crack, cold and slimy, and his hands sliding under my shirt, covering me with mud. I look at him and he pulls his hands out from under my shirt, dipping his hands back into the earth with a look on his face that challenges me to try to make him stop. He pulls up two fistfuls of mud, an evil grin twisting his mouth.

I smile. It feels like an evil smile, but I have no idea what it looks like, I only know that I don’t want him to stop.

He slides his hands under my shirt again, this time lifting it above my breasts as he slides his mud-filled hands up my body. Pushing my bra up, swirling his hands over me, he leaves a muddy trail around my breasts. It is cold and slick. Lord Fyre makes it feel erotic and desire shoots through me, soaking my wet pussy even more.

“Make love to me now,” I beg.

“After three months of torturing me with the need you’re feeling only now, I think you can wait until I’m ready, sweetheart.”

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I swallow, catching his gaze, seeing the truth for the first time. “You ached for me this badly for three months?”

“Every moment I was with you, yes, and even before that, perhaps from the first moment I laid eyes on you.”

He takes my knees and pushes them into my chest, commanding, “Hold your legs.”