Chapter 11
Lando
Choosing Harry Ellis might have been a mistake. I may live to regret this.
I make a habit of going for hot guys. Hot guys with fat wallets and even fatter egos.
Hot guys who’ve sometimes had more revolutions around the sun than my father.
Hot guys who’ll turn themselves into a desperate mess just for one moment of my time, who’ll beg, who’re willing to throw everything away for a quick fuck.
And okay, Harry is hot. Not in the typical alphahole way I’m usually drawn to, but in a .
. . cute, accessible way. He’s like a teddy bear—short, thick, with stressball cheeks that beg to be grandma-pinched, dimples, and I cannot stress this enough, phenomenal cakes.
He’s wearing a salmon-pink T-shirt that clashes horribly with his ginger hair, and tatty Vans that are now covered in manure.
He’s shy, and goofy, and easily embarrassed.
He blurts out random things, fumbles his words, and for a professional rugby player, he’s kinda clumsy. He’s also patently inexperienced.
I want to squeeze him and stroke his hair and feed him wagyu beef and Almas caviar and venison and other pointless rich-people foods he probably would never have tried.
I also want to run, as fast and as far away as I can, before I actually start to like him as a person.
The worst part of this whole situation is that I chose Harry in advance.
Having Daisy Bosley, daughter of rugby legend Owen Bosley, as a bestie hasn’t helped. Especially when ninety-five per cent of her conversation is about rugby, and has been since she was a kid.
I’m used to watching the games with her, used to her sharing Instagram reels with me—including, one time, a thirst-trap montage of Harry.
In the video, which I accidentally saved to my favourites and have zero regrets about, Harry is shown spraying water from a bottle all over his face, stretching his quads, stretching his triceps, wiping sweat from his brow with the front of his own shirt, and lining a ball up for a conversion kick.
Everything’s in slow motion, and it’s frankly a work of art.
The comments were all horny rugby wives and sports gays. Things like:
“I now identify as that guy’s water bottle.”
“Ladies, theys, and gays of taste, we meet again in the comments.”
“I got pregnant from watching this.”
I liked each one. Daisy had sent me the video a few months after it was initially posted. Her message to me read, “This is the kid who has beef with Matty.”
I’d replied with, “I’ll take two.”
Then I’d promptly forgotten all about him until last week, when Mathias mentioned a joke Harry had made at the celebratory dinner the Cents lads went to after their win against Leicester. The joke was about bottoming, and suddenly I was sitting up and paying attention.
There I was thinking this hot ginger koala bear of a man was straight. So then—and here’s where I cemented my poor decision-making skills—I’d spent the next few days googling everything I could about Harry Sebastian Eugene Ellis . . .
Born on the eighteenth of January 2004—Capricorn, same star sign as me—to Donna and Jason Ellis of Wrigsham near Bath.
Has five siblings. Three older—including twin sisters—and two younger.
Went to Greenhills Primary School and Wrigsham Academy comprehensive secondary school.
Graduated from A levels straight into Bath Cents academy team before making the main team last September.
Is afraid of flying but dreams of travel.
He’s ambitious and wants to play at a national level.
He routinely wipes his palms on his shorts before taking a kick, talks with a Westcountry accent and a slight lisp, and stims by tugging on his earlobe when he’s nervous.
I also read that he’s anosmic—no sense of smell from birth—which explains why he’s oversprayed some cheap pharmacy-grade eau de cologne.
And yeah, it’s cute. It’s all very cute. And I have made a grave mistake.
He’s also, despite his general inexperience, a great kisser.
Gentle but firm, and not slobbery or too tonguesy.
He’s threading a hand through my hair and the other is flat against my lower back, pulling me close and eliminating any gap between our bodies, but he’s not grinding against me or possessively grabbing at my flesh, and it’s . . . different from what I’m used to.
“Shall we go inside?” I say, easing a space between our lips, and pretending I’m as turned on as he is by panting into his mouth.
It’s not that I don’t like kissing, or cuddling, or any of this “run-up” stuff.
I actually love it. I love kissing, and soft gentle touches, massages, cuddles, falling asleep in the crook of someone’s arm.
It’s just that in my experience those things rarely happen without the guy expecting sex. And they rarely last long.
A few minutes of snogging and they’re already scuffing their cock against my hip like a horny hound, trying to figure out the quickest, easiest, and most efficient way to bend me over.
Harry isn’t like that. He’s not grinding against me, chasing the friction.
He seems content to move slowly and let me lead everything, but I need the opposite to be true.
Need him to be feral for me. I need him to drag me up to my bedroom, throw me onto the bed, and fuck me as though he’s addicted to me.
Unless . . .
Wait . . . am I losing my touch?
Or maybe he just doesn’t fancy me?
No, that can’t be right. I cycle back through the memories of earlier at the pub. The way Harry looked over at me while he was singing. The sheer number of times he caught my eye.
Yeah, okay, there’s zero chance he doesn’t fancy me.
I guide him through the service kitchen entrance, through the halls, up the stairs, and through the corridors. All the while his eyes are saucers, roving this way and that, taking in as much as he can. His mouth hangs open the entire time.
“I’ve been to National Trust houses that aren’t as posh as this,” he says.
I flick the lamps on in my bedroom and toss my jacket onto a nearby chair.
“It’s haunted, isn’t it? It’s definitely haunted.” I’m pretty sure he’s talking to himself. He doesn’t move any closer to my bed, so I kiss him again. “Oh,” he says, and melts into my touch.
But he’s being too gentle, too hesitant. I stick my tongue into his mouth, and we both whine. Better. We walk backwards to the bed, and collapse onto it when the mattress hits our thighs.
Harry’s not making any of the moves the men I fuck usually make, and my head is a swirling mess. I’m not accustomed to taking the lead. A strange ickiness settles in the pit of my stomach, and when I go to lift Harry’s T-shirt over his head, he flinches.
He flinches.
“Um.” I laugh to hide my anxiety. “Do you still want this?”
“Yes!” he shouts. “Yes, I still want to.” He strips off his T-shirt and tosses it to the edge of the bed.
Harry has freckles all over his torso. He’s muscular, his body sculpted from an adolescence of doing nothing but playing rugby.
“Now I understand why they call you Abs.” I crawl up to him and straddle his thighs as he drops backwards onto his elbows.
“Actually, it’s because of Prince—” Harry shakes his head. “Not even remotely important right now.”
I bring my lips down to his chest and plant the gentlest kiss between his pecs. He sucks in a breath and raises a brow but doesn’t try to guide me. If Harry’s not going to take the initiative here, I will, or we’ll be here all night.
Though maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
I use the pattern of his freckles and moles to forge a path down his chest with my tongue.
His stomach muscles spasm as he forgets and then remembers to breathe.
When I reach the fly of his jeans, I pause and look up for consent.
This isn’t something I ordinarily have to do.
By now the guy would already have taken his cock out and would be trying to fuck my face with it.
Harry doesn’t offer me any words, he simply purses his lips together and then rolls his eyes in a slow blink.
“Is this okay?” I ask.
He nods, and I flip the button open and pull down his fly. “Um . . .” He releases a long, shaky breath, and I tug his boxers down at the front. “I’m sorry.”
Harry’s dick flops out. He’s soft.
“What?” The word slips out of my mouth before I’ve thought it through.
Harry flinches again. It’s as though I’ve tried to slap him.
I want to correct my mistake, make him feel at ease, but some other greater emotion stirs inside me. “Is there something wrong with me?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Oh my god! Is there?” For some stupid reason, I jump off the bed and run to the mirror. I look the same as I always do, but I feel hideous. Repulsive.
Unwanted.
Harry is beside me in an instant, zipping up his jeans in the process. “No. God, I promise there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s . . . just . . . fuck, I’m so fucking nervous. I’ve never done this with a guy before. Shit. I’m not normally this . . . this . . . I’m not normally like this, I promise.”
He sits at the end of the bed and wraps his entire hand around the lower part of his ear.
“It’s . . .” I don’t know what I want to say. It’s fine? It’s not fine? It’s like you’ve taken a knife and sliced right through my sense of self-worth?
Damn, how stupid does that sound?
It’s the first time this has ever happened to me. Once a guy couldn’t maintain his erection because he was almost OD’ing on molly, but Harry’s only had a few beers, he’s perfectly lucid.
“You’re not hard either?” he says. I think it’s a question.
My fight, flight, or freeze response kicks in, and I stop dead in my tracks.
“How—” I meant to say, “How do you know?” but my words weren’t wording at all.
Harry seemed to understand what I was getting at. “When you were kissing me on the bed, my knee was wedged between your legs and . . . I couldn’t feel . . . like it was all kinda squishy down there.”