Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 100523 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 503(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100523 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 503(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Done.
“Do you mind?”
What? Hold on. She just asked me something. Fuck. I have no clue what I do or don’t mind. I hate that I drifted off while she was talking to me, even though I drifted to thoughts of her. “What did you say?” I ask, offering a guilty smile that ought to cover my sin.
She smiles warmly. “The olive oil. To your left. Do you mind handing it to me?”
I set down the knife, grab the bottle, and give it to her like a fucking champ of a sous chef who is in the zone all the time.
As she drizzles some in the pan, she asks gently, “Where’d you go? Were you replaying the game again?”
My heart squeezes at the question. Quinn never asked. No one I’ve dated really has. Everyone assumes I’m bored when I drift off. But she asks the question with genuine care and interest, as if she thinks I must have gone someplace important—like at the farmers’ market when I was moody dwelling on the game. Now she’s asked me to open up to her as part of the girlfriend lessons.
No fucking way am I going to blurt out that I was picturing a future I’ll never have with her. So I omit that while still being as open as I can. “Just thinking about some plays we reviewed today. I’m going to do an extra workout tomorrow. Hey, you know what else I wanted to know?” I ask, doing a one-eighty back to our sexperiment. “What about the dildo? When did you buy that?”
She drops the chicken cubes in the sizzling pan and shoots me a playful look. “Last night after I left the sidewalk sale. There was a Good Vibes shop selling their wares, so I grabbed one.”
I need a moment with that image. “Let me get this right. You walked home from the sidewalk sale with a dildo in your purse?”
“I took a Lyft,” she corrects.
“Did you practice last night?”
“And this morning too.”
My brain sticks on that image. Rachel in bed, or on the couch, or here at the counter, sucking on a schlong to get ready for me.
Now, that’s an image I could get lost in, but I’m all focus now, so when she gestures to a drawer and asks, “Can you grab my lucky spatula?” I say hell yes.
“It’s the red one,” she adds.
I grab it. “Why is this spatula lucky?”
She stops to think. “Hmm. Good question. I think because I used it when my girlfriends came over for my ‘you’re free’ dinner.”
I regard the spatula with dirty deeds on my brain. “Want to find other ways to get lucky with it?”
Later, she’s bent over the kitchen counter and I’m balls-deep in her, smacking her ass with the lucky spatula.
“Yes, mark me, Carter, please,” she cries out.
“You love it when I mark you,” I rasp out.
“I do,” she says, nodding savagely, urging me on.
Another smack. Another moan.
Then a plea. “Harder.”
I give it to her exactly how she wants it, and soon she’s coming, and I’m following her there, my world blinking off for mind-numbing seconds of inimitable bliss inside my woman.
Only she’s not mine.
Not really. She’s only mine for a few more dates.
But I will savor them all. “Can I spend the night again?”
“For easy access?”
“No. Because I want to.”
I can’t see her smile, but I can sense it. I can feel it, too, in how she reaches back to touch my hip. “Me too.”
I’ll take that me too and keep it close for now.
31
SOMEDAY
Carter
“If you think about it, we’re doing a public service with this How To Date series,” I say to Rachel as I drive us to the mini golf course a few days later on Saturday afternoon. It’s our bye week, so there’s no football game tomorrow. I am so relaxed I’m beyond relaxed. Bye weeks are like mini vacations tucked into the middle of a ball-busting, back-breaking schedule. You can do whatever you want. Like, date on a Saturday. Wild. “We’re going to help a whole generation of romantics embarking on first dates,” I add.
“We’ve so got this. Four reasons why mini golf is an awesome first date,” Rachel says, then we rattle off the reasons we picked already that we’ll share on camera as we play.
“You know what to do with your hands,” I begin. “You put them on the club, instead of having to endure awkward moments sitting across the table from each other at a coffee shop wondering Do I put them on the table or keep them in my lap?”
“Hands are so weird,” she says, agreeing, then shifts to the next tip. “Two, it’s a safe place for women. Lots of families and people are around, so that’s a plus for the ladies,” she adds as I flick on the blinker to turn right.