When he angled his body sideways, I noticed his eyes were screwed shut and his hand was fisting his cock. His very erect cock. I froze, the air getting trapped in my lungs. And holy shit, my body’s response to him was completely perplexing. It had been for a long time if I was being honest. I didn’t understand it before, but I supposed I was forced to now as my shaft began filling with blood and protruding against my thin sweats.
Still, I didn’t back away, baffled but entranced by his tight fist beating his meat into submission. Okay, I needed to leave before this got ugly. And even more confusing.
As I turned to go, I heard my name. At least I thought I did.
“Oh fuck, Girard.” His voice sounded hoarse and irritated.
Holy shit, was he calling me out?
But when I heard him groan, I glanced back just in time to watch him unload his jizz down the drain. All my nerve endings buzzed to life like a stadium under the lights, and I couldn’t move even if I tried. My feet were heavy, as if I were standing in drying cement, and my cock was really fucking hard.
Maclain opened his eyes and twisted the shower handle, then briefly glanced in my direction. He blinked rapidly, in stunned silence, his mouth hanging open as his chest heaved from his powerful orgasm.
It was as if all the sound in the room was blotted out as we stared at each other. Gawked was more like it.
And then suddenly everything was loud in the hollow space as his face contorted into a sneer. “The fuck you looking at?”
“I… Nothing. I thought I heard someone call my name.”
“Sure as hell wasn’t me,” he rumbled, reaching for his towel and drying off, ignoring what just happened, except…his hands were shaking.
My brain was all fuzzy, like maybe I’d imagined it or wished it into being. Was that even possible? What else could explain how goddamned uncomfortable it felt between us right then? I thrust aside the thought that Maclain had jacked off while thinking of me. It didn’t seem plausible, not where he was concerned.
“Yeah, okay.” My cheeks were on fire as I stumbled away. I couldn’t get out the door fast enough, and when I finally reached my car in the parking lot, I still felt too close. Too heated. Too…everything.
I growled in frustration as I turned the key in the ignition and got the fuck out of there. Maybe with some distance, everything would begin making sense. If not, the rest of our season was about to get awkward as shit.
1
Maclain
January
* * *
I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant by myself, the chips and salsa left uneaten as my father ran late. Again.
The restaurant was a halfway point between the university in Lexington and my childhood home in Louisville. The drive was about an hour for each of us, but Dad was a busy man, as he so often liked to remind me. So shaving off time by meeting in the middle helped the occasional dinners actually take place.
This was how it had always been with my dad, and even more so after Mom died from cancer when I was ten years old. He raised me mainly with help from babysitters, but at least he hadn’t cast me aside. And he definitely could’ve because we weren’t related by blood. But he’d promised my mom he’d take care of me—and I’d realized soon after how much he regretted it. We were never close, but he’s been in my life since I was three, so really, he was the only father figure I knew. Some role model. He was constantly working and made tons of fake promises that I continued to fall for throughout adolescence. By senior year of high school, I’d turned rather bitter about the whole arrangement, even though I pretty much had free rein of my life—something any teen would want, right? Instead, I’d dreamed about what everyone else had.
But I couldn’t complain. Much. I was healthy, had a good education and a college scholarship. I had taken to baseball early on, and my last memories of Mom were of her sitting in the stands during Little League games. My stepdad would make it sometimes too, most likely to please her, but after she passed, the different teams I’d belonged to provided the only real sense of kinship I had. So I continued playing, if only to cling to some sense of normalcy. Plus, I was pretty darned good at it, even if sometimes I was my own worst enemy on the field.
My phone buzzed with a text, and I looked down, fully expecting it to be my stepdad canceling on me. But it was from Coach. Well, specifically, from his son, Kellan, who was the Pirates’ bat boy, a.k.a. unofficial clubhouse manager.