Playing For Keeps (6 page)

“Mine should have, but not in a good way. After a month, every single person in my class had these pretty pink or purple plants to take to their Moms.” Kevin game me puppy dog eyes and my heart broke for what I knew was coming next. “Except me. I had…dirt. I don’t know if I underwatered them or overwatered them or, hell, dropped the seeds on the floor instead of in the cup. There was just nothing.”

“Aw, poor baby Kevin! That’s the saddest thing ever. And ever since then, you’ve hired someone to do your gardening.”

Kevin laughed. “Something like that.”

“What did you end up giving your mom for Mother’s Day?”

“I made her a book. Ten pieces of computer paper stapled together, with a crayon-drawn picture and poem on each page. It was terrible stuff. But she cried, so there you go.”

“That’s the sweetest.”

“Well, I never really drew after that, either. No way to ever live up to that masterpiece, you know?” While I laughed at his refusal to play with crayons ever again, he parked in front of the main entrance, cut the engine and got out. I waited for him to open my door, and he took my hand to help me out of his car.

Kevin keyed in the code to the front door and stepped aside for me to enter first. I tried to get a sense of Kevin’s personality as he led me down the hall and past a staircase that twisted to a lower level. His walls were painted creamy white and covered with art that I wanted to stop and ponder: photographs of landscapes with blurs in the distance, collages of paper and ink and some kind of thin metallic sheeting, paintings that almost looked like they depicted a person, if I turned my head a certain way. I wondered if he chose the art himself, or if it was the work of a designer.

I turned to Kevin and watched him fiddle with an assortment of switches on the wall. The lights dimmed, then went bright again. Music turned on, then off.

“Damn,” he muttered under his breath. And still, he struggled to find whichever switch he was looking for. My heart broke a little for him.

“How long have you lived here?”

“I bought the house two years ago.”

He bought it. There was so much more that wasn’t said in those words. How many months in two years he’d spent touring, having no control over his time. Sure, his life held a certain amount of glamour, but he didn’t even know what all the switches in his own house did. What was it like to not, truly, have a home? When the lights above us finally flared to life, I turned back to the art. No, Kevin wouldn’t have picked these out. Decorated his house. I bit my lip to keep back a surprising surge of emotion. Pity, maybe. How lonely was Kevin?

I cleared my throat. Another painting caught my eye. This one was in a frame that didn’t match the other, and it was hung slightly crookedly. Kevin came up behind me.

“Is this one of your crayon masterpieces?” I asked.

“That’s by Payton Smalls.”

My eyebrows lifted in surprise. “He’s another one of the World Wonder guys, right?”

“Yeah. This is what he does in his downtime.”

I studied the pen, ink and watercolor artwork more closely. It was a city street landscape in grays and browns. Slightly grimy, somewhat vintage. “Where is this?”

“London. He did this piece on our first world tour.”

“It’s really good.”

“I’ll pass along the compliment.” Kevin turned me away from the art to face him. “You are beautiful, tonight.” His voice was like fingers, slowly walking up my body. A delicious series of tremors followed, working their way from my toes to my shoulders. “I love that color on you.”

When I opened my mouth to thank Kevin, he raised his finger to my lips, the corners of his eyes scrunching playfully. I smiled, pushing down the laughter that bubbled up. After the unexpected sadness over Kevin’s life—despite him being wealthy, famous and adored—this, being playful, was welcome.

He threaded his fingers through mine and walked me down the hallway to a great room decorated, like the rest of the parts of the house I’d seen, in pristine, antiseptic, black and white. The room was defined by the floor to ceiling windows along an entire wall. I went up to the glass and looked out. Below, a rocky valley fell away, while ocean waves crashed against cliff rocks in the distance.

“I love this view,” I said.

He stood beside me and looked out, too, as though seeing it for the first time.

“Something just moved. Right there. See it?”

He pointed to a fat, gray object below. We watched for a few silent moments, until the object moved again, slipping into the water. A second blob followed.

“Sea lions.” I grinned. “Playing. They’re up and down the coast.”

“I didn’t even know they were out there.” Kevin moved back and indicated one of the couches. “Sit down and get comfortable. You like red wine?”

“Yeah.”

Kevin disappeared and I sunk into one of his overstuffed sofas. All alone, the room felt huge and impersonal. I stood again, searching the walls and little side tables for evidence of Kevin: his life, his family, anything. But there was nothing that felt intimate. Real. Knick-knacks and frames that hadn’t had the default photo swapped out of them, yet. I felt like too much of a voyeuristic creep to keep searching, so I sat again. But there was too much silence, too much space, and my thoughts ran away to places they shouldn’t have.

The face of his ex-girlfriend, Julia Wood, Bea had told me, flashed in my mind. She was gorgeous. A flawless face. Legs for miles. An incredible actress. Did she know the secrets of Kevin’s house? Had he been, maybe, more at home at
her
place? What did I have to offer Kevin that someone as perfect as Julia couldn’t?

I felt in over my head.

I dashed the feeling away. It didn’t matter. I was here, now.
He
wanted me here. I longed for him to kiss me bigger than he had our first time together. To put his hands over all the parts of my body screaming for his attention. I wanted to remind myself what those shoulders would feel like under my fingers, naked, hot to the touch.

I couldn’t sit still any longer. How much time did it take to pour a glass of wine? I rose, walking in the direction Kevin had gone, ignoring the array of closed doors. The house was big enough for a dozen people. Strange that only one lived here, and not very often, at that.

Finally, a drawer was slammed and I followed the sound, coming upon a massive kitchen. I paused in the entrance, watching Kevin rifle through a cupboard.

“Hey.”

He looked up, sheepishly. “I can’t find the bottle opener.”

There went my heart, again. Thump, thump, ache. “I’ll help.”

We searched the kitchen. When Kevin reached for the same handle as me, I grabbed a spatula from the last drawer I’d searched and playfully swatted his wrist. He laughed. Grabbed a whisk. Held it up with a twinkle in his eye.

“On garde.”

I stepped forward with some fancy footwork and he burst out laughing. “That’s not giving me any faith in your dancing skills.”

“Ah!” I gasped. Then bonked him on the head. “Take it back!”

He smoothly twisted away from me and rattled the whisk over his head. “You’re going to have to prove me wrong.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to make me want to dance, then.”

He dropped the whisk. Grabbed my waist in one, swift movement and hauled me onto the counter. The smile slid from his face.

“I plan to make you dance. And squirm.”

My chest rose and fell, slowly. He kissed me, and all our playing and teasing morphed into something else. A hunger.

“May I undress you?” he asked.

“Here?”

“Here.”

I hesitated. But it wasn’t as though I didn’t want to peel off these layers of fabric for him. It wasn’t as though the entire car ride here, with the warm air and the way we looked at one another, hadn’t been a delicious, lingering kind of foreplay where breaths were like fingers over face and neck and bodice. Even his simple question was heady with desire.

I nodded.

He lifted my right leg. Started with my shoes, pulling each off slowly, studying the curves of my ankles, holding my calf delicately in his palm. He lined the shoes up on the counter, then found the zipper on the side of my pants and released the teeth. He dragged his hands up the length of my legs to the waist of my pants, then gathered folds of fabric over his hands and wrists as he went back down, spreading his hands over my hips, inching across my thighs, collecting the garment on the floor.

My breathing picked up, my breasts rising and falling in time with his careful, deliberate movements. I wondered if I should have felt embarrassed or exposed, sitting here under the bright lights of the kitchen. Being the only one of the two of us undressing. But I didn’t. There was only the thrill of Kevin, whose name few people really knew, slowly lifting my top over my ribs, over my breasts, over my head, then admiring my body with an obvious glint of appreciation in his eyes was empowering, not embarrassing. I loved the way he was adoring me. Being attentive, giving appreciation while, at the same time, taking what he wanted. He cupped my breasts over my bra, staring into my eyes the whole time, asking wordless permission.

Sometimes, back at Delta Gamma, a bunch of us would watch a sexy movie or T.V. show. We’d talk about the bad boys, how they took what they wanted, how they were in control. And there was definitely something appealing about that. About losing control and submitting to someone else. But there was an edge to it, too. I never was quite comfortable with the bad boy hero sweeping the woman, literally at times, off her feet. Surprising her or, God forbid, stalking her.

And now I knew why.

Those guys didn’t ask for permission. They didn’t create safety by indicating that the couple was in it together. But the way Kevin paused before each movement, checking on me, questioning? That was so fucking sexy I could hardly stand it.

I nodded at him, almost imperceptivity. He saw. Reached around and unhooked my bra, then cupped my breasts again, moving his thumbs softly over the rounded flesh. His hands dropped and, again, he paused. When I assented, he slipped my panties down, lifting my hips slightly to get them from under me, then inched them down my legs.

When I was fully undressed, he stepped back and looked at me. I was proud of my body. It was slender and strong, with definition in my abs and my triceps, where I worked hardest when I was on stage, playing my guitar. I blinked up at him.

The way he was looking at me brought up my body temperature, made my pulse pound, tightened my longing for him, sped up the thrumming in my nerve endings. He untucked his shirt, but left it at that, not taking it off fully. I stuck my bottom lip out and he laughed.

“May I touch you?”

I nodded. Yes, please, please, please. I craved those fingers everywhere.

His fingertips were feathers on my legs, walking up my calves. When he got to the backs of my knees, I discovered, for the first time, that I was mildly ticklish there. A giggle escaped and his chest rumbled, too, and he tickled again.

He left my knees and gripped my thighs and my smile faded. My nostrils flared. He kneaded my muscles, worked his hands inwards, massaging the delicate skin of my inner thighs. It felt amazing. Blood rushed to my hips and my pulse quickened. He spread his hands over my belly, then my breasts again, up my neck, which I tilted back, and over my mouth. We locked eyes staring, for a full minute, his hand keeping me silent, the pressure on my lips almost as good as a kiss.

He moved his hands to grip my hips and slide me forward, so that I was on the very edge of the counter. Our faces were almost touching, our breath mingling. The pulse in my neck pounded steadily, anticipating his next move. I breathed in the scent of him. There was so little sound and movement that it was easy to be completely tuned in to one another. I felt like the only thing in the world. Jimmy’s moved closer, pressing his lips to my ear, then my neck. Heat flared over the skin he touched. His head dropped, slowly, his tongue tracing a line over my chest, between my breasts and down my stomach. I wrapped my hands around the back of his head. Closed my eyes.

I was naked, in Jimmy Keats’ kitchen, and his tongue was searching my body. Tasting me. Reaching for my clit.

“You know what’s nice about musicians?” he asked, his face buried between my thighs.

“Hm?”

“They’re good with their mouths.”

I laughed a little, my body relaxing completely. “And their fingers, too. I’ll show you, later.”

“I’ll show you, now.”

Jimmy slipped one finger inside me, pressing high and forward, finding and stroking the sensitive area behind my clit. I moaned, tremors dancing over my legs and through my belly. His tongue flicked my clit, making me squirm, but then he slowed down and my body sank into his movements.

“Amazing,” I whispered.

He slid another finger inside. I rocked against his move, demanding more, loving that he was responding to my actions, taking them and lifting the sensations higher and harder. Giving more each time. His lips closed around my clit and he sucked. I gripped the counter with one hand and the cupboard above me with the other and threw my head back. My elbow knock a series of metal canisters to the ground. Their clanging blended with my cries of pleasure.