I gestured for him to order for us. “Knock yourself out.” I grinned. “Except I"m a vegetarian.”
“For real?”
I nodded.
Cooper gave the waiter instructions for a plate of grilled fish tacos topped with cabbage for himself and a grilled vegetable plate with queso fresco and tortillas for me, no beans or rice unless they were meat-free.
“So,” Cooper began, drumming his fingers on the table. “You think you"re going to like living in St. Nacho"s?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don"t think three days is much to go on, but it feels good there, like I"m someplace I could call home.”
Cooper watched me with an unreadable look. “Shawn was concerned that you would find it a little quiet.”
“Yeah. Well.” I had some apologies to make to Shawn, and if I lived to be a hundred, I"d probably only scratch the surface. “I"m not the same man I was, Coop. I 92
Z. A. Maxfield
know there"s not a reason in the world you should believe that, or Shawn should, but it"s true.”
“I believe it,” he said, biting the lemon after giving it a squeeze into his tea. Some things are so familiar to me they catch me off guard. I had seen him do just that, order cold tea and bite into the lemon a thousand times. He always made the same face, part savoring the tart flesh of the fruit when it first hit his tongue and then part bitter shudder as the juice and pith made contact with his various taste buds. Something about that reaction was so much a part of my story that it caught my heart in a painful grip and I felt tears sting my eyes.
“Do you?” I asked hoarsely.
“Of course I do, Jordie,” he said gently, causing my tears to fall freely. His brow furrowed. “What"s this?” He reached over and put a hand on mine.
I shook my head and tried to get a grip.
Cooper
. Just seeing him made me feel safe.
Loved in a way I felt from no one else. He made me want to be more and better, and he purified me in ways I couldn"t begin to describe. The process was far from painless.
Cooper was 100 percent true; so clean and shiny it hurt sometimes to look at him.
“I believe in you, Cooper,” I told him. “If I"ve believed in nothing else in this world, I"ve always believed in you.”
Cooper grinned at me. “Have you been at the Hallmark cards again?” He was teasing—as usual—trying to get me over my emotional meltdown, but I wasn"t sure it was going to work. I wanted to tell him about Ken and about what had happened since I"d gotten to St. Nacho"s. I told him about Ken"s parents, and his brother Mark, and the terrible fight they"d had.
“Do you remember coming out to your parents?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes. “How could I forget it? I got a one-way trip to my Aunt Ally"s farm, where she tried to straighten me out by making me work like a fucking slave.”
“But eventually you came home,” he reminded me. “Eventually your parents got over the shock and the fights, and your mom convinced your dad that you should be home with your family so you could finish out your final year of school.”
“That cost her,” I muttered, suddenly not as hungry as I had been before. “I think my dad broke her ribs. He let me come home so she wouldn"t tell the police.” I was so ashamed, I couldn"t meet his eyes. “I never told you that.”
“I knew,” Cooper said softly. “He let you come home so
I
wouldn"t tell the police.
My dad and I… We were trying to keep an eye out for her. We always felt like we screwed up.” Cooper swallowed hard. “I never told you either.” For a long moment I just stared at the best friend I ever had. “Well, for fuck"s sake.”
“What?”
“I never thought I could love you more.” I got choked up again. “But now I do.
Thanks a whole lot.”
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He gripped my hand over the table. “Sorry,” he said, laughing a little. “Me too. I love you too. Welcome home.”
I was crying in my napkin when the waiter came over with our food. Cooper casually told him that I"d just received the news that I was with child. I was so busy having a nervous breakdown, laughing and crying at the same time, that my food got cold before I had a chance to eat it.
One good thing about losing it completely in a restaurant outside of town is that when it"s over you can take a walk on the beach, get it out of your system, and laugh at yourself.
We rode back down PCH, just the two of us on the almost empty road. The sky was covered with clouds, behind which the silver moon put out only enough light to ghost through occasionally, seeming to bob in the sky inside its faint halo. He pulled up just outside of my motel room and I got off the bike. I took the helmet off and handed it back, and he removed his, just so we could say good night.
The thing I always liked best about us—about Cooper and me—is that neither of us needed to speak to make ourselves understood. Not when we were kids, and apparently, not now. I stood for more than a minute, just drinking him in, the warmth of his gaze on me, the sweetness of his smile. He looked back at me the entire time, letting me know that it was still there between us, that magic that was our refuge.
“Go home,” I said at last. “Say hi to Shawn for me.” He turned and roared off down the street, his taillight fading until it became another blur of memory.
94
Z. A. Maxfield
Chapter Fifteen
I pulled the motel key from my pocket and turned to open the door. Behind me a car pulled up, shining its lights on me and idling, the radio tuned loud. When the driver didn"t cut the engine after a bit, I turned to find that it was Ken"s Tahoe.
I waited to see whether he wanted to talk or just let his SUV glare at me for a while. Eventually he got out and made his way slowly to where I was standing with my back against the door.
“You aren"t wasting any time,” he remarked.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He had the grace to sort of deflate. “I went by the gym, and Izzie said you left early with some guy.”
I sighed. “That was Cooper.”
He toed the ground in front of his foot.
“Go home, Ken.”
He let one of his crutches dangle on his forearm and put his hand on the door next to my head. The next thing I knew, he was kissing me, stepping into my body with his.
Tiny sparks of electricity snapped wherever we touched, and it wasn"t long before I was shaking with need. He pulled his lips away, and I was glad to see his eyes were dark and wide. Whatever was between us, we shared it. He still had me crushed to the door when he slid his hand down my arm to take the key from me.
“All right?” he asked before inserting the key in the lock. His eyes met mine, and they begged me to let him in. “Say it"s all right, Jordan.” I nodded because I couldn"t make my voice work. He keyed the door and we all but fell inside.
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“This is crazy,” I whispered. He lurched against me and steadied himself against the inside wall as he dropped his crutches and clung to me.
“You"re so hot,” he told me, slipping his hands beneath my clothes. “I want to feel your skin. Come here.” Jackets and shirts hit the floor. I definitely heard a button pop off his shirt and ping against the cheap laminated dresser before it rolled under the bed and hit the wooden platform there. He was kissing me hard, fucking me with his mouth while he held on to me and edged me across the room. We nearly lost our balance then, but he gripped my ass with both hands and steadied himself somehow. We tottered in a move that was almost like a dance for a minute but remained upright.
I loved the soft little needy noises he made, how touching different parts of his body in new ways changed the pitch and tone. I was determined to learn him, to play him like an instrument, to become a prodigy and make him sing for me in ways he didn"t even know he was capable of yet.
We hit the bed together, me backward and bending at the knee until I sat on the edge. He knelt around my thighs, straddling me. His dick seemed hard and huge against my belly, and he curled around me like a cat.
“Does it always feel like this?” he asked, pushing the hair back off my face, a gesture I found tender and at odds with his size. “When I"m with you, it"s like I just get it right. There"s a thousand baseball analogies…” He pushed me onto my back and started unbuckling my belt. “It"s like that perfect
crack
sound a bat makes before a home run ball flies out of the park.”
“Mmph,” I said, because I could hardly get my brain in gear once he rubbed my dick with his hand. “Oh,
jeez
.”
“Like that?” he asked, pulling open the button-front fly of my jeans and digging my cock out of my briefs. “You want it too.”
“Not really.” I felt like being a shit.
“Liar.” He flicked my dick with a finger and got a reaction he didn"t expect when I gasped and leaked a pearly drop of precum onto his hand. “You like that?” Caught out, I rolled my eyes.
“You
like
that!” He laughed at me. “Papi likes it rough.” Okay, yeah. It wasn"t a secret, but I wasn"t bound to share it with men I didn"t trust. I knew Ken wasn"t the type to hurt me, but looking in his eyes, I found definite signs of an answering kink. He was smiling enigmatically at me.
Fuck
. If he knew any more about my body, he"d own it completely.
He experimented briefly with another flick. I bit my lip. “Aw, this just makes my day,” he told me, practically lifting me in those beefy arms of his and sliding us both farther up onto the bed. He loomed over me, shoving his pants down and awkwardly climbing out of them.
“What to do?” He sighed, an exaggerated, blowy kind of sigh, as he pulled his belt from his trousers. It was a long, drawn-out process, during which he didn"t take his 96
Z. A. Maxfield
eyes off mine. And those eyes, blue, but darker now, shadowed around the edges with a smudgy ring and hungry-looking, pinned me right to the bed like a trophy deer on a wall.
I tried to say something, but the way he was looking at me made the sound come out thick and garbled. At last, I got out, “Guh-huh.” It was the best I could do.
“Looks like I found the key,” he said, taking his belt and cinching it around my wrists. He gave it a yank. It was tight, but it didn"t cut off the circulation. I knew that I should never let anyone restrain me without a thorough understanding of the situation and the parameters. For my peace of mind, I needed some ground rules. I needed a safe word if I was going to sub, but I doubted if he"d know a sub wasn"t a sandwich or even what a safe word was.
“If I say „snowman," you stop what you"re doing, no questions asked, do you agree?”
He froze. “Do you think I"m going to hurt you?”
I shook my head. “No. It"s just the way you play.” His hands dropped to his sides. “You „play" like this often?” I couldn"t see what was going on in his head, but suddenly the air crackled with tension. The mood had definitely changed from one of carefree sexual exploration to…what? I didn"t know.
“I have, yes.” I sat up, my wrists still bound, to lean back against the headboard.
“Is there no end to your accomplishments?” He sat back on his haunches.
I couldn"t imagine what he meant by that, so I sat while he stewed. I sometimes forgot how young he was. At twenty-three I was in jail; you don"t stay young in jail. It was obvious in this light. His soft brown hair looked shaggy from where I"d messed with it, and his frown deepened as I tried to decide what to say. He looked like a kid whose mentor had ridiculed him.
“Why does it matter?” I asked him. “I"m almost thirty years old; you can"t expect me to be—”
“Inexperienced? Like me, you mean?” He started to untie my wrists, and I pulled my hands back to prevent him.
“I never said that.”
“But it"s obvious, isn"t it? It would be different if you were tying me up.” I grinned.
“What?” he asked, not at all happy with me.
“I begin to see what kind of a competitor you must have been as an athlete.” He flopped onto his side, looking utterly defeated. “Must have been. Could have been. Never got the chance. Was.”
“Oh, Ken.” I sighed. “I"m sorry, man. I didn"t mean it that way.”
“It doesn"t matter.”
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“Yes, it does,” I told him. “It matters very much to me. It matters if what I said hurt you.”
“It didn"t. I just forget sometimes that this isn"t new to you. I forget that I"m the one who just came out, whose parents think he"s lost his mind, whose brother hates him. And then I think for what? So you can
play
with me?”
“Whoa!” I held up my hands, but I couldn"t do that time-out thing because I was bound. “Snowman.”
He shut his mouth and glared at me.
“Yeah, playing isn"t new. Subbing isn"t new. Sex isn"t new. But you"re new, Ken, and I swear to you it"s a new kind of new.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?” he growled, clamping a hand on the pillow and yanking it out from under my back.
What
did
I mean by that? “I don"t know!” I snapped at him. “How the fuck should I know?”
He raised his eyebrows and cracked a hint of a smile. “Are you having an episode?” I was so glad to see his smile that I put my bound hands around his neck and kissed him. I enjoyed the way his blue eyes lost focus.
“It doesn"t matter what happened before, Ken,” I told him. “I"m telling you, truthfully, that how I want
you
is new.”
“My parents think it"s pity. Or remorse.”
“You"re kidding.”
“They say you"re trying to relieve your guilty conscience.”
“So what, I"m hitting the hospitals? Trolling the meetings of chapters of MADD?
Looking for people damaged by drunk drivers so that I can show them a good time?” I guess I made it sound funny, even though that was the last thing I was feeling.
“You make that sound like a bad thing,” he teased. Then his eyes became serious.
“Why else would you want me?”
“You think—” I got a grip. “Whatever your parents might think of me personally, they"d have to be awfully damned dense if they can"t see why I"d want to be with you. I think a better question is what the hell do you see in me?”