Captain, play your actual game
This is the second time in four years I've woken up wanting to vomit before getting out of bed. Two finals. The first was sophomore year, when I was young enough to be nauseous and not know what it meant.
This time, though? I'm captain enough.
I have a game-day routine and it is not negotiable. Wake at seven. Water. Twenty minutes of nothing — no phone, no film, no talking. Shower. Eat at eight-fifteen whether I want to or not. Walk-through at ten.
That’s not Nate. Nate went down to breakfast forty minutes ago with Jenny Laurent, who Maddy somehow talked into flying to Boston for a basketball game she has described, in writing, as five tall men and a ball, and when they left the lift together Nate was carrying her bag.
Nate has never carried anybody's bag in his life. He once watched me walk a mile on a rolled ankle and offered commentary.
I did not say anything about it. I have learned that much.
I open the door in a towel.
“Busy?” Maddy tilts her head.
“Nope.” I am already smiling.
It is great to see her. It is always great to see her, and I do mean always, including now, when I am approximately four minutes from being sick on a hotel carpet.
She walks in past me, which is how Maddy enters rooms, and I get the door shut before I turn around.
“Hungry?”
“Not really.” I glare at her playfully. “I’ve got none of those left.” She ate all my protein snacks yesterday then demanded more.
“It’s fine. I’m not here for food.” She puts a hand flat on my chest, turns me around and I stumble back a step, because that's just who I am now. “Nervous?”
“A little.” My voice goes up at the very end of it, which is a betrayal by my own body.
Maddy's eyes drop to the towel and come back up, and her smile changes shape entirely. “Will. You're hardly ever nervous.”
Interesting word choice. A hundred percent accurate. Extremely not the point.
And that's when I clock the skirt. Knitted. Grey. Down over her knees.
In all the months of living with this girl, I have never once seen her knees covered.
“You're wearing a long skirt.” My eyes scan down hungrily.
“I'm being respectful of the occasion.”
“Since when do you own a long skirt?”
“I own four. They’re for funerals and negotiations.” She takes another step in. “Do you want to talk about the skirt or do you want me to make you less nervous?”
Easiest answer ever. I get Maddy against the wall opposite the bed before she can ask me another question and that somehow only makes her laugh into my mouth. My hand is up under the respectful skirt, working it in about four seconds.
I hate respectful skirts.
“Twenty minutes,” I’m already kissing her jaw. “I've got the walk-through at ten, so if we—”
“No.” Her voice comes sharp.
My head jerks up. “No?”
“Nope.” Maddy puts both palms on my chest and pushes me away from her, and then keeps pushing, three steps, four, until the backs of my knees hit the bed. “Sit.”
“Maddy—”
“Sit down, Captain.”
I sit.
“You've got a whole thing today. You've got a bracket and a press pen and a man from London in the stands.” She stays standing over me, which she is enjoying enormously. “You don't get to be useful this morning. You get to sit there.”
“That's my line.” I protest in delight.
“It's a good line. And I've been waiting weeks to use it on you.”
Maddy kneels on the hotel carpet between my knees, still wearing the funeral skirt.
Four months ago, in a cafe at eight in the morning, a girl I had known for three weeks drank beetroot juice straight from the bottle and told me I was stupid to turn down her blowjob offer to focus on a game.
She was wrong about my reasons and completely right about the sentence. It wasn’t the first even faintly sexual thing she ever said to me, but I thought about it every day for eleven days and told absolutely nobody.
Maddy's been doing this to me since November.
I should have got used to it. Thank fuck, I’m not.
I still love it every single time. And she still stops halfway through to talk.
“Terms,” she raises her eyes at me.
“You're joking,” I am staring.
“I never joke about terms and you know it.”
“Maddy, I am—” I gesture, broadly, at the situation. “I am right here.” Pointing at my own semi-hard dick.
“I'm aware. It's very distracting.” She hooks one finger into the towel and does not remove it. “Term one. You eat something after this.”
A shiver working its way down my spine as she toys with the fabric. “Fine.” I mutter.
“An actual breakfast, Will, not a banana in a lift.”
“Fine.”
“Term two.” She opens the towel slowly and lays it flat on the bed. Her eyes are no longer on mine. “Seriously. Every single time.”
I glance down. My dick is hard enough to twitch a little hello in between my legs. “This isn’t term.” I lean back to the bed on my palms.
“I know. I think I’m done with terms.” Maddy puts her mouth on the inside of my thigh, licking upwards slowly while her eyes stay on mine, and my entire spine reorganises.
Her hand wraps around the base of my dick before she moves to lick it from the bottom, all the way to the top, pressing softly on the split of the head.
Yeah. I’m never getting used to this. My stomach clenches instinctively at the softness of the wet touch and a low groan escapes me.
“Mhm…” She takes me deeper and holds it and my vision goes grey at the corners.
She kisses my dick like she’s saying goodnight to it, looks up and grins. “You seriously have the perfect perfect dick, Willy. All veiny, and mine.”
Jesus fucking Christ. She compliments my dick like it has personally done something magnificent, and apparently I’m pathetic enough to store every single one.
I try for a soft chuckle but what comes out is a moan.
My gaze goes down to her tongue swirling around my split before Maddy takes more of me inside her mouth. Her hand works my base while her pink lips curve around my thick length, sucking me off like I’m the most delicious thing she tastes.
I can’t look away from the sight. Her eyes stay on mine, absolutely alight.
I’ve had girls treat this like a favour before. Fair enough. It’s a lot of work. They don’t call it a job for nothing.
Maddy doesn’t. Maddy is enjoying me, openly, like she’s having as much fun as I am, and that is the part that undoes me every time.
“Fuck. Baby—” I attempt to say something nice. Or at least a thank you.
Maddy hums low. How the fuck does that work? All words die in my throat. My head falls backwards and my hips come off the bed when she takes me deeper. I’m pretty sure I’m growling.
Knock— Knock. Two solid knocks on the door.
Holy hell. Now?
“We’re busy.” Maddy comes off me just long enough to yell to the door.
She doesn’t wait another second to go right back in. Not even slowing down, and I have to put a fist against my own mouth to stop any more sounds to escape.
My dick goes all the way to her throat. Harvard. The bracket. My father. London. Gone.
I get about nine seconds of warning. “Baby — baby, I’m—” Maddy takes that as a sign to finish me off for good. No mercy. It takes me a full minute to come back after I shoot.
When I can see again, my back is already on the bed, my chest heaving hard. Maddy’s already sitting back on her heels on the carpet. Her skirt is somehow still immaculate.
And she looks, no joke, outrageously pleased with herself. The girl takes enormous pride in getting me off, all the time.
“I’m the fucking luckiest dude alive.” I laugh at myself before popping myself up on my elbows to see Maddy better.
“How's the nerves?” She wipes her thumb along the corner of her mouth
“Come here.” I sit up and open my arms, though they feel like someone else’s.
“That's not an answer.” She grins.
“Come here.” I demand again.
“Why?” She gives me a suspicious look.
“Because I want to hold you.” Too bad. I’m a clingy bastard after a phenomenal head.
She still doesn’t move.
Yeah. I know this one. Something matters too much and she doesn’t know what to do with it. Gives first. Asks for nothing.
Nope. Not happening.
“Will, you've got a walk-through,” she protests as I lean down and wrap my arms around her waist.
“Get up here.” I pull her up onto the bed so she lies on top of me. “I know my own schedule pretty well, baby.”
She squeaks when my hands move firmly to her thighs. “You don’t have time.”
Exactly. I get the respectful skirt up around her hips and Maddy finally stops arguing.
She lasts about forty seconds before she runs out of things to say, which is the fastest I have ever seen it happen. None of the running commentary she usually provides in the manner of a girl reviewing a hotel.
Just one hand flat against the bedsheet and my name, twice, in a voice I have already clocked as my favourite sound. I would frame it if I could.
I flip her over and go straight down between her legs. Maddy said it herself, we don’t have time.
“…Will.” She gasps.
I give her a little gentle suck. “Yeah.”
“Too much.” She cries.
Ah. I thought she liked it the day before yesterday. Guess it’s changed. My tongue softens on her clit.
“Fingers…” Maddy breathes out.
I lick her one more time then lift my head. “Say please.”
“No,” she protests breathlessly, and then she does, twice.
At 9:41 she is lying diagonally across the bed with one arm flung over her eyes, breathing like she's run stairs. I am on the edge of it with a shoe in each hand, not putting either of them on.
“Willy.” Her hand presses on my back.
“Yeah.” I turn to her slowly.
“How's the nerves?”
I stop, and I actually check. The way you test an ankle, putting weight on it slowly to find out whether it holds.
There's nothing there.
Two hours and nineteen minutes before a final against a team that has held this title three straight years, in their own city, and my head is completely, silently quiet.
“Gone,” I tell her.
Maddy lifts her arm off her eyes and looks at me upside down. Her hair is a catastrophe, her top is crumpled. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in a hotel room or anywhere else.
“Told you I was best at that.”
“You are unbelievably arrogant.”