The Baller (13 page)

Lowering his head, he pushed down my bra cup with his thumb and drew a nipple into his hungry mouth. I closed my eyes as his tongue swirled and sucked. He alternated between breasts, licking and nibbling until I was panting.

When he ran his hand under my skirt, he groaned at finding I wasn’t wearing any underwear. “Fuck. You took them off.” He slid one finger inside me. I was already wet and ready. He groaned and added a second finger. “I really wanted to take my time with you the first time. But I need to be inside you right now. I’ll make it up to you later. I promise.”

He wasn’t kidding. A minute later, I heard the tear of a condom wrapper, and I was up against the wall. “Tell me this is okay. I want to take you against the wall. Hard.”

“It’s more than okay.”

“Thank fuck.” He bunched my skirt up and lifted me into the air. “Wrap your legs around me.”

I did, and he walked us to the wall and pinned my back up against it. He positioned himself and then lifted me up slightly, bringing me down onto his cock. I gripped his shoulders, a moan billowing from my lips as he sunk inside of me. Then he stilled. “You okay?”

“Very.”

He reclaimed my mouth and began to ease in and out of me. My body wrapped around him like a fist and each gentle stroke massaged up and down, zapping more and more nerves to life. I didn’t remember anything feeling that good before, especially not the first time.

After he sufficiently unraveled my tight body, he began to move faster. Harder. Longer, deeper, stronger strokes. One hand gripped my ass tightly. His rhythm ramped to a pounding, and we both groaned as he seated himself deep and began to gyrate his hips around, grinding the base of his cock against my clit.

Letting go, my muscles began to spasm around him. “Brody.”

He amped up his pace even more. “Fuucck.” As he drove into me relentlessly, my body finally gave in, pulsing in orgasm all around him. When my body went limp, he sped up his pace for a few thrusts, then rooted himself deep within me, allowing his own release.

Many hours and more orgasms later, my head lay on Brody’s chest as I listened to his heartbeat. Filled with new hope, I fell asleep feeling oddly calm. Maybe it was euphoria from the best sex of my life, maybe it was the way I felt safe and protected as Brody wrapped me tightly in his arms. Whatever it was, the feeling wouldn’t last long.

Brody

It was late by the time I finally got to Marlene’s place. It took me nearly two hours to drag my ass out of bed once Delilah left for work. And I’d made her late, too—but I couldn’t resist one more go around when I saw her in that little black skirt she was wearing. She was dressed so prim and proper, with her high-heeled pumps and her hair pinned up on top of her head. My hard-on was raging to bend the librarian over the bedframe. She left with her clothes slightly disheveled, her hair hanging loose and a just-fucked smile on her flush face. It was a good look for her. A
really
good look.

I’d be paying for a night of pretty strenuous cardio later. Midweek practices were always the hardest. It was going to be a killer after last night and barely any sleep. But I didn’t give a shit. I hadn’t felt this good in a damn long time. Four years, to be exact.

Grouper was cleaning the floor in the dining room when I passed by on the way to see Marlene. Without a ball to float his way, some improvisation was needed. The lunch service was done for the afternoon, but the staff was still putting away the leftovers, so I grabbed three small milks from a crate that one of Grouper’s maintenance guys was lifting and yelled, “Go long. Or you’re going to be cleaning up a puddle of cow piss.”

Grouper grumbled something but took off running toward the other end of the food hall. I sailed the first two mini milk cartons into his hands. Just as he was about to catch the third one, Shannon yelled to me and distracted Grouper. The third milk went through his open hands and hit him in the shoulder, right before falling to the ground and exploding all over the place.

“You can’t throw for shit.”

“Super Bowl MVP, old man. Super Bowl MVP.”

Shannon’s face warned me my afternoon was not going to be as uplifting as my morning.

“What’s up, Shannon?”

“She’s having a bad day, Brody.” Her voice cracked as she reached out and touched my forearm. The nurses at Marlene’s home were incredible. They’d seen so much heartbreak with these old people; it took a lot for them to get choked up.

“Physically or mentally?”

“Mentally. She remembers some things about Willow. Things she hasn’t remembered in a long time.”

Marlene was distraught and crying when I entered her room. I sat down on the side of her bed and took her hand. “What’s going on, Marlene?” I couldn’t judge what her memory was haunting her with, and I didn’t want to make it any worse than it needed to be.

“It’s Willow.”

Over the past four years I had learned to talk about Willow. It hadn’t been easy at first, but time had dulled the pain that hearing her name had made me feel in the beginning.

“What about Willow?”

“She called me last night. Said she was going to come see me next week for my birthday. Then the police came this morning.”

I looked to Shannon, who shook her head. “Someone did call her phone last night.” She lifted Marlene’s chart and flipped the pages. “The night nurse wrote it down. We suspect it was a telemarketer. Maybe the person happened to have had the name Willow?”

Marlene began to sob.

Shannon whispered, “She’s been doing that off and on for hours. Keeps rambling on about the police and a body in the river.”

Blocking Willow from my daily life was one thing, but the memories were still buried inside of me. Our memories. The good ones outnumbered the bad, even if the bad ones overshadowed the good.

“It’s okay, Marlene. It’s going to be okay.”

I was reassuring her the same way I had four years ago in the hospital waiting room. The same internal battle haunted me. Only now, Marlene’s dementia wasn’t early-onset. The days when she remembered the details of her granddaughter’s life were few and far between. There was less reason to tell her the whole truth now than there had been back then.

“Blue. She was so blue, Brody.”

The vision that had taken me almost a year to stop seeing every time I closed my eyes came barreling back. Willow being wheeled into the emergency room. By the time the river incident happened, she was already frail. My Willow was long gone, replaced by a three-bag-a-day heroin junkie who would disappear for weeks at a time. Her occasional visits were usually to steal what we were no longer willing to give her.

Marlene’s cry broke into a sob. I wrapped my arms around her. The night they pulled Willow from the East River wasn’t a night I ever wanted to reenact. Unfortunately, this was our second go around on the highlight reel of Marlene’s life. If only the memories people lost were just the bad ones.

“They don’t think she’s going to make it, Brody.”

“I know. It’s okay, Marlene. It’s okay.”

Bits and pieces of that night continued to flush out for the next hour. “Eighty degrees. They said her body temperature was eighty degrees.”

“They’re trying to warm her up. They’re doing everything they can, Marlene.”

I went along for the ride. There was no reason to make things worse. Like last time, I comforted her until the episode passed. There was no reason to break her heart all over again, to catch her up on all the bad things just so she could live through hell again . . . and likely not remember it the next day.

The sedative the nurse gave Marlene finally kicked in and she calmed down, eventually falling asleep.

“You got one of those injections for me?” I joked when Shannon came in to check on us.

“You have practice today?”

“I do.”

She smiled ruefully. “Then no. But if you’d like to speak to Dr. Pallen, she’s making rounds. I can page her to come in and talk to you.”

“Thanks, Shannon. But I’m good. How long will that thing knock her out for?”

“She’ll probably be out for most of the day.” She put her hand on my shoulder as I sat watching Marlene sleep. “Don’t worry, Brody. We’ll keep a good eye on her. We’ll call you if anything happens or if she wakes up upset again.”

“I’ll stop back after practice tonight.”

“I’ll make sure the night nurses know she can have a visitor after hours.”

“Thanks.”

***

To say I got my ass kicked during practice would be putting it too mildly. Between the physical toll of staying up all night and my head being a fucking mess from the shit that had gone down with Marlene, it was no surprise that I found myself tossed around like a sack of hay. At one point, the practice squad actually started to go easy on me. Which just pissed off Coach even more than my slacking.

After practice, my knee was blown up like a balloon from all the twisting it did every time I got my ass knocked down. The team physical therapist ordered me a fifteen-minute soak in the ice bathtub. As if the morning’s stroll down memory lane hadn’t fucked with me enough, a soak in freezing water was just what I needed to remind me all over again of Willow’s ice-cold body being pulled from the Hudson.

Delilah

Brody texted every day after our night together. And we’d spoken on the phone twice. I’d grown up only catching glimpses of my dad during football season, so I wasn’t surprised he was busy. But that didn’t stop me from feeling disappointed. The sex had been nothing short of spectacular. Yet it was the hours we’d spent in bed talking that had me feeling something that I hadn’t felt in years.
Hope.
That’s what our night together gave me. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. As I boarded the plane to Texas for the Steel’s away game, I was reminded why I’d given up hope after Drew. Because getting your hopes crushed
sucked
.

I headed to my assigned seat in row twenty-six as the captain came over the loudspeaker and asked everyone to take their seats quickly. We’d been cleared for departure early, and with a storm front moving in he didn’t want to lose our place in the takeoff queue.
Great. A freaking storm. Just what I want to hear.
The traffic on the way to the airport had been so heavy, I hadn’t had time to grab a drink and get my Xanax down until five minutes ago. I was going to be a disaster for takeoff.

As I arrived at my row, Brody looked up and caught my eye from his seat a few rows back. Feeling awkward, I smiled and rushed to stow my bag. I was checking my seatbelt for the third time when Brody’s voice startled me.

“Connors,” he addressed the reporter sitting next to me. “Row thirty-one.” He thumbed toward the back of the plane.

The reporter looked up at Brody, then at me. “We’re about to take off.”

“Yeah, that’s why you should hurry up.”

“All my stuff is in the overhead.”

“I’ll bring it to you once we’re in the air. There’s a bottle of Merlot waiting and an empty seat next to you.”

He huffed, but Connors made the switch. Brody settled in beside me.

“Guess you didn’t notice the empty seat next to me.”

I actually hadn’t. “I was preoccupied with getting seated. And trying not to focus on the fact that we’re going to be in the air, and my Xanax has another twenty minutes before it kicks in.”

Just then, the plane began to taxi away from the gate. It was barely a bump, and we were moving at a snail’s pace, yet my hands gripped the arms of the seat.

Brody peeled back my white-knuckled fingers and laced them with his. “I got you.”

“When we’re careening from the sky five hundred miles an hour toward the Earth, will you have me then?”

His eyebrows shot up. My insides were starting to freak out, and I couldn’t control it. I felt my heart racing inside my chest. Brody turned around in his chair and spoke to the reporter behind us. “Five rows back. Thirty-one A. Pass that bottle of Merlot up.”

I downed a glass before we took off. It wasn’t really helping. Especially not when the captain came on again to give us an update, letting us all know we were third in line for takeoff, and we should be on our way in five minutes.

“You know, I earn a good living with that hand.” Brody’s eyes narrowed on our joined hands. Mine was squeezing all the color from his, except where my nails were nearly piercing his skin.

“Sorry.”

“I’m teasing. Squeeze away.” He leaned toward me. “I like the feel of your nails digging into me. I miss the way they scratch at my back when you’re close and I slow down.”

“Really? You’re going to go there when I’m busy trying to have a panic attack?”

He chuckled. “You need a distraction.”

“Well, how about talking to me about the weather. Or sports? Did you know the Eagles’ punter holds the record for the most consecutive games for a player since 1971? Or that there are currently eight players named Smith in the league, which is the record for—” I was rambling. Mid-sentence, Brody decided to shut me up. His mouth descended upon mine, kissing me in that way that made me weak in the knees. Aggressive, controlling, it felt like he couldn’t get enough.