Hook Shot (Hoops 3)

My heart contracts. He has no idea how much I know. I know how it feels for your mother to choose a lover over you. How it feels for her to choose not to have you with her. Not just for a night, but for years. To forfeit an entire childhood for an unworthy man.

“I get it,” I say simply, inadequately conveying my understanding. “Simone should be first. I’ll never begrudge you that.”

His eyes, usually so guarded, aren’t that way now with me. His face is as intimidating as the rest of him. Handsome, but comprised of sharp lines and blunt bones—austere. But when he looks at me, the hard lines soften and it’s like watching rock melt. I’m the sun.

I feel that power for a moment—the power to make someone as hard as Kenan look tender. That power surges, and then it converts into responsibility.

Gentleness is power under control.

And I feel the urge, despite him being so much bigger, a hundred and fifty pounds heavier, and ten times stronger—to be gentle with Kenan. To be careful with the power he vests in me every time he shows me more, tells me more.

I feel a sense of responsibility that a man like him, who has been betrayed by someone who should have been faithful, might just choose to trust again. To risk trusting with me again. We’re not so different, he and I. I was betrayed by the one who should have protected me, too. Not a wife, but a mother—by a family’s complicit silence. We’re not so different, and maybe that’s what my cotton candy clouds are trying to tell me. It’s a good day. A good day to trust again.

Standing on the rail makes me tall enough to reach him. I touch his face, caress the strong rise of bone beneath the mahogany skin, and turn him toward me until our lips brush together. He pulls back the slightest bit with a stare that doesn’t waver.

“Remember what I said.” His voice is husky and heavy, maybe with the weight of this no-turning-back moment. “When we kiss again, you have to make it happen, and it means you want to be more than friends.”

I close the space he inserted between our lips, and lick into the seam. He gasps, and his eyes close immediately.

“I want to be more than friends,” I whisper over his lips. “Open your eyes and don’t look away.”

When he opens his eyes, they lock with mine, and I suck his lower lip and lick into the corners. He angles his head to capture my top lip between his, never dropping his glance. His hand, huge and encompassing, curves at the back of my head, his fingers curling at my nape. He deepens the kiss, tasting me with surging, hungry licks that make me whimper and moan. Now it’s my turn to gasp and close my eyes because the contact is so charged it sends a current down my spine and through my toes.

“Don’t look away,” he echoes back to me.

We set a frantic rhythm of bobbing heads as the kiss grows more urgent. I’m turning my head and he’s angling his, both trying to delve deeper without breaking the electric thread of our gaze. While our tongues mate and our lips beg and our bodies strain to learn the shape of each other, we never look away. And it’s more intense than fucking.

This kiss wipes away every man who came before him in a baptism of greedy lips and searching tongues, dipping me, dousing me, saving me.

Changing me.

I’m new. Different.

Even when it ends, our lips still cling, loathe to let go of this revival that purifies even the air we breathe. And here, trapped between our lips, each breath is holy. Here between our chests, our hearts bang like ancient drums. Here between our eyes, his and mine, a searing glance sees everything.

It’s the best kiss of my life. It’s my first glimpse of real intimacy.

And it’s almost more than I can bear.

18

Kenan

I had Simone all day yesterday, and she spent the night. Now it’s Monday, and I haven’t been able to see Lotus again. I want to badly after our “not date.” It may not have been a date, but it was definitely a kiss. I want a repeat as soon as possible. I’m getting off the elevator to Dr. Packer’s office when my phone flashes with an incoming notification from a local florist.

Your package has been delivered.

That August is good for something. My San Diego Waves teammate, married to Lotus’s cousin Iris, has been bugging me ever since I asked for Lotus’s number.

“So how’d the date go?” he’d called to ask yesterday.

“What date?” I’d asked, deliberately obtuse.

“Brooklyn.” There’d been barely checked eagerness and frustration in his voice. “If you play this right, we could practically be brothers.”

“As appealing as permanently chaining myself to a wet-behind-the-ears rookie is,” I had said, letting the barb I always use with him sink in, “I think I’ll handle this myself.”

“You don’t think Lotus told Iris every detail?”