Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance) (59 page)

“Well, at least you’ll never see me get
beat up,” he said with another grin.

“It never happens?”

“Never…not anymore anyways. I might not be
able to take them down, but I do know how to protect myself.”

“That’s always a good thing,” I said. I
was thinking about Mitch now and hoping he could protect himself against an
angry cop and apparently jilted boyfriend.

“This is amazing by the way,” he said of
the food.

“Thanks. I like to cook. It’s hard just
cooking for me. I haven’t had this peanut sauce in a while. I like it.”

“Me too,” he said, cleaning his plate.

“So this fight at the end of the week,
this is a pretty important one for you?”

“Yeah, really important.” He didn’t even
really have to speak; I could see it in his eyes. He genuinely loved what he
did, that was good…I guessed. It was strange to me to think about being in love
with fighting. “If I win this one I go up against the champion next. Winning
the championship gets me professional status…endorsements and the whole bit.
It’s what I’ve been working for all these years.”

“Then I’m glad I made you protein and not
carbs,” I said with a grin. I was also glad to hear he had goals and ambition.
It was one thing my ex was seriously lacking.

“So you just got out of college this last
semester?”

“Yeah. I graduated in June.”

“Good deal. I wish I would have gone
sometimes. With fighting and Marie and Victor…things just got too out of focus for
a while. When I began really focusing again, I put all my energy into winning
this title. How was it, going to college? Did you live in the dorms or a
Sorority house or something?”

“No, I lived with my mom. I had to subsist
mostly on grants and loans so I couldn’t really afford school and room and
board.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

I laughed. “You probably wouldn’t say that
if you knew my mom.”

He put his fork down and looked at me
seriously. “Relationships with parents can get really screwed up sometimes.”

“Yeah, tell me,” I said. “I’m not the best
at relationships in general. I studied really hard in college…I got straight
A’s, I worked out hard, I ate right. I was healthier physically than I’ve ever
been and I loved it. It was good for me.”

“But…?”

I laughed. “You heard that, huh? Nothing
really. It’s just that while I was pursuing my goals, I got a little off track
with trying to help others pursue theirs. The ‘but’ was a guy I met during that
time.”

“Uh oh,” he said with a smile.

“Uh oh is right. He was a mess and I
thought that I could ‘fix’ him.”

“He was unfixable?”

I laughed again, nervously. I didn’t
usually talk about Justin. It was one of those really low points in my life
that I’d love to forget. “Yeah, he was. It took me way too long to figure that
out and when I did, he didn’t want to go away easily. It’s true that you can’t
change a person. They have to be determined to do that for themselves.”

He was quiet for a few seconds and then he
said, “Can I ask what was wrong with him that you wanted to fix?”

This was the part that I hated telling
him. What did it say about me that I dated a drug dealer, and how did I tell
someone I barely knew that I’d met him through my mom? “Don’t judge me?”

“The day I am in a position to judge
anyone,” he said with another grin. “I won’t judge, I promise.”

“He was a drug dealer,” I said.

“Oh, yeah…definitely he had issues.”

Laughing, I said, “That sums it up, pretty
much. The lifestyle was unbelievable…Constantly partying and constantly
paranoid and worried about getting caught, running from the law. Me putting up
with it for two years even more unbelievable I guess. He was addicted to it.
Not the drugs, but the money, the power it gave him, the partying and having
people calling him at all hours of the day and night…even the adrenaline that
came from worrying about getting caught…all of it. I thought he loved me and me
him. I finally had to accept that he was a creep and I was a codependent, but I
was too naïve to realize it for a long time.”

“What did your mom think of him?” He of
course would think that my mother would have objected. Most mothers would have,
but mine was definitely not the norm.

“Oh God…I think that’s a story for another
dinner,” I told him. That would just be way too much disclosure. Telling a guy
I was just getting to know that my mother was an addict who encouraged me to
date a dealer…way too much information. Too much self-disclosure was not a good
thing sometimes.

“Okay,” he said. He stood up and picked up
our plates. “I’ll tell you a sad story while we clean up. It’s only fair.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“Tell the story?”

“Oh no, you owe me that,” I said with a
laugh. “You don’t have to clean up.”

He ignored me and took the plates to the
kitchen. I followed him and opened the dishwasher. While he rinsed, I loaded
and he talked.

“When I was sixteen I got into working
out. I was always looking for something…anything that made me feel…alive, I
guess. My sister was gone off with Mitch at that time and I was stuck at home.
Our home life left a lot to be desired. My father didn’t win any awards for his
parenting skills. He was a gambler first, before everything else. He gambled
everything he could get his hands on…even if he had to borrow it from dangerous
people to do it. I was going to the gym every day and running every evening. I
had a job after school and I used every penny I made to buy healthy food and
pay for work-outs and jiu jitsu classes. Then one day right before my
seventeenth birthday I came home to find the old man beat to a bloody pulp on
the doorstep.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yeah. He borrowed money and he lost
and lost and lost. He didn’t pay them back and by then the interest was
astronomical. He was crying…I’d never seen him cry. He said they were going to
kill him. I spent a lot of my life angry with him but I didn’t want him killed,
you know?”

“I do. More than you know,” I said with my
mother in mind.

“Anyways, I heard about this underground
cage fight. The first prize was fifteen grand but you had to be eighteen. I
told the old man about it and a light-bulb went on in his head. He somehow got
me an ID that said I was eighteen and entered me. I won and he took all the
money.”

“Oh wow. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I didn’t care about the money.
I’d finally found something I was good at. It was something I knew I could get
better at. More than anything it gave me a purpose, something to look forward
to. That’s when I started fighting all the time. It gets in your blood.”

He stopped talking and all of a sudden,
the room was completely silent. He turned toward me and I knew he was going to
kiss me and I knew we would have sex. It was one of those moments…if I leaned
in for the kiss, the wheels would be in motion. My body completely overrode my
brain and I just went with it.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Kissing him felt like…I didn’t even know
what to compare it to. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced. It was
just so good. I had to wonder how someone got so good at kissing. Was it
experience? Natural talent? Did it really matter?

He put his hand on the side of my face and
brushed my hair back with his fingers. It tickled and I shuddered. Then he
guided my head and my lips where he wanted them. Once we were aligned, he
attacked my lips with his. A full-on assault with not just his lips but with
his tongue taking long, slow strokes into my mouth and his teeth nibbling on my
lips…it was so erotic that for a few seconds my mouth was the only part of my
body that mattered. But then I felt him pushing on my tank top and I remembered
how badly I wanted him to touch the rest of me too. We broke the kiss long
enough for him to push it off over my head and he resumed the kiss while his
hands found my breasts, cupping them tenderly at first and sending goose bumps
racing down both my arms. I was so into it that I barely registered when my bra
was unhooked and slipped off…until I felt the cool air on my hard nipples and
he broke the kiss again to lean down and take one into his mouth. Then the
fireworks started going off in my head.

He had the hard nipple of my right breast
between his lips and he was flicking back and forth and up and down with his
sweet, wet tongue. I threw my head back and he reached a hand up while he
sucked on the other nipple and pulled the elastic band off my braid. He deftly
unbraided my hair and sucked my nipples at the same time. He definitely got
points for coordination.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I
remembered that I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to get involved with
this man…it was a bad idea…right? I moaned as he sucked my right breast into
his mouth. He kept the suction going while his tongue continued to work the
nipple…There was nothing at all bad about what we were doing. It was all good.
It was sex between two consenting adults. Who the fuck cared about a
relationship? I could’ve lived on this alone. I felt him pushing down on my
shorts, then, and I helped him, wriggling free of the elastic band and then
stepping out of them when they hit the floor. I was still in my pink lacy
thong, but that was it, right there in the kitchen. He had pulled his mouth up
off my nipple and was looking at me like I was a steak and he was a lion. I was
ready to be devoured.

He kissed me again and I felt his hand
between my legs. I opened my thighs for him and felt one of his fingers slip
under the thin layer of lace and press against my entrance. I groaned into our
kiss and I felt his lips curl up into a smile.

“You’re so wet, baby,” he whispered
against my lips. I didn’t respond, with words. But I thought the movement of my
hips told the story. As he said that, he shoved his finger into me and I moaned
loudly. He slid another one in to meet it and we stood there in the kitchen
while he kissed me and finger-fucked me, and it felt like the most natural,
right thing in the world. “Do you want me, Jessie?” he asked, kissing me again.
His tongue searched mine out and wrapped it up in such a tight embrace that I
couldn’t answer.

When he finally pulled back, my legs were
shaking so hard that I could barely stand and in a breathless voice I said,
“Yes…oh yeah I do!”

“You do what?” he said with another grin.

“I do want you…so bad!” I wanted him in an
almost animalistic way. I wanted him there in the kitchen on the tile floors,
or the tile counters…I just wanted him. He could’ve pushed my ass up against the
cold stainless steel of the refrigerator and taken me right there, and I
wouldn’t have complained.

“Mm, good,” he said as he moved his
fingers around inside me. He put the other hand on my ass and squeezed it as he
pulled my hips harder into his. I could feel how hard he was, his cock was
stretching the fabric of his jeans, begging for release.

He pulled his fingers out of me and I
watched, still shaking all over as he drew them across his lips and then licked
them clean. I reached down and unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans and pushed
down on them. He helped me and then we attacked the white T-shirt. We were on
even ground now, both of us in our underwear. He had his hands in the tops of
my panties as he suddenly twirled me around to face away from him. I reached
out for the counter to steady myself and I felt my panties being swept down my
legs. I stepped out of them and when he leaned into me again, his were gone
too. He pulled my hair out of the way and attached his lips and teeth to a soft
spot on my neck as the thumb and forefinger of his hand worked their magic on
my now engorged nipples. I could feel his hard cock boring into my ass cheek
and the evidence of my own arousal was slowly running down the insides of my
thighs. He played with my nipples with one hand and I could feel the other
sliding the condom he must have had in his pocket over his throbbing erection.
Once he had it on, he slid his hands down across my abdomen and my pelvis,
finally reaching the tops of my thighs. He squeezed them and then gently pushed
them apart. Then he put his hand on the small of my back and pushed me forward
just a bit until I was completely exposed to him from behind.

I was ready, more than ready, and when the
head of his cock found the slick, hot entrance to my pussy and he thrust into
me, I cried out. He let his cock slide all the way into me, filling me up with
his full length before pulling back again. He plunged forward again with a
grunt as I gripped the edge of the counter and pushed back against him. He would
pull out and plunge in and every time he did I would push back and he would hit
bottom. He was fucking me slow and deliberately and it felt great, but at that
moment, I needed more.

In a throaty voice that I almost didn’t
recognize myself I said, “Harder.”

He made another grunting noise and
obliged. He grabbed a hip in each hand and began to really fuck me. I felt his
body slamming against mine as the sweat began to drip and run all over our skin
became slick with the friction. He slid his right arm up, leaving the left hand
on my hip and he wrapped that arm around me just above my breasts. It was
almost like being restrained, I couldn’t move at all…but I’d have to have been
crazy to want to. He was in control now. He was doing all the work…and I was experiencing
pleasure that my brain could barely comprehend. It wasn’t long before he cried
out again and pushed me forward so that his head was against my back as his
cock twitched and swelled and finally exploded.