9. Rowan
Notes
Thank you to everyone who reached out about the whole cheating boyfriend thing. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’m burying myself in this story and the fact that Rowan and Milo have finally kissed.
Rowan
I should have said something. When the elevator door opened, I should have said something about the kiss. Hell, I could have just said good night.
Instead, I just walked back to my condo without a word.
As the door clicked shut behind me, the weight of what I’d done crashed over me.
I had kissed Milo. It wasn’t a small kiss either.
No, my tongue had been in his mouth. I’d felt his hard body against mine.
I could still feel the ghost of his hands on my hips, not holding me in place, but just resting there.
I could still taste the salty sweat on his lips from his workout.
What had I been thinking?
No, I knew what I’d been thinking. I’d been upset since Ray appeared at his aunt’s that morning.
I’d convinced myself that Ray was his boyfriend or partner or something.
I didn’t think anyone could blame me for thinking that.
They’d been whispering, and their foreheads had been pressed together in a way I could only describe as intimate.
He’d also been able to just come right into the building, so unless he lived there, it meant he had a key. It meant that Milo had given him a key.
I’d been jealous.
There was no other explanation for my reaction to watching Milo and Ray together, and that was ridiculous.
Not because I knew the truth now, but because I had no right to be jealous of Milo and whoever he spent time with.
We were coworkers. At most, we were potentially friends. We weren’t more than that.
Or were we?
I sighed and walked deeper into my apartment. I needed to shower off the sweat of the gym. I needed to prepare for the next day’s flight to Roswell. I needed to stop thinking about Milo and replaying that scene in the elevator.
I decided the first item on my agenda would be the shower.
Unfortunately, the moment I stepped under the hot water, my mind started to wander back to the elevator.
I thought of the way his body felt pressed against mine and the pressure of his lips.
My cock started to thicken as my brain replayed the kiss.
His hands on my hips, his tongue invading my mouth, giving as good as he got.
I wondered how it would have progressed had the kiss happened somewhere less public.
If we’d not been in the elevator, would his hands have started to explore? Would mine?
Yes. I knew that answer with certainty. If I’d had him alone, my hands would have started to explore.
It was why I’d rushed out of the elevator so quickly.
If I hadn’t, I would have done something we both regretted, like invited him back to my condo or followed him to his.
If I’d kissed him a few moments longer, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
Instead, I was in the shower alone. My imagination was starting to wander, to fill in the blanks of how it could have gone.
Would we have gone back to his apartment?
Maybe, but I couldn’t picture it. I’d never been past his front door.
My apartment then. I closed my eyes and dragged my hand down my wet torso.
I imagined it was Milo’s fingers that wrapped around my swelling shaft and moaned out a sound of pleasure.
Would it stop there, jacking each other off against my front door?
Too desperate to touch one another that we couldn’t bother to make it any further?
What would his cock feel like in my hand?
Would it be slender or girthy? I imagined it would be on the slender side, proportionate to his lanky build.
I thumbed over the head of my cock, and I imagined it was Milo’s thumb.
In my mind, he dropped to his knees and took me into his mouth.
I pumped my cock harder as I played through scenarios in my mind.
The warm water from the shower turned my hand into a cheap imitation of his mouth. I fucked into my fist, and my other hand slammed against the porcelain wall of the shower. I was so close.
Would he let me get him off after? The mental image of me getting on my knees for him and taking him in my mouth, tasting the salt of his precum on my tongue, sent me over the edge.
My moans echoed off the shower walls as my release sprayed the porcelain and washed down the drain.
I was left panting with my hand around my cock, alone, the mental image of Milo gone the moment I came, replaced by regret.
I’d crossed a line.
I showered quickly.
By the time I was dressed, I was thinking about Milo again. My mind was a broken record, and it kept circling back to him. I needed to get my shit together and figure it out. I couldn’t do it on my own. I was learning that more and more the longer the night progressed.
I shot a text to Troy. It didn’t matter that he was across the country.
He would be able to help me figure this out.
He could always see through my bullshit, and he’d been doing that since we’d met in college.
He’d been a business major who hung around the football team.
He’d been obsessed with the sport, and as I got to know him, I’d learned he had big dreams of being an agent.
He graduated before my junior year and got a job at a sports agency firm in Fayetteville.
When I put my name into the ALF draft the next year, I hired him despite many people warning me against it.
I shouldn’t work with a friend.
I should find someone more experienced to negotiate my contracts, not some first-year agent whose biggest client was a minor league hockey player.
But I’d had faith in him, and he’d never once steered me wrong in all the years I’d been in the ALF. Not in my professional life, and not in my personal one either. When he’d married my oldest sister, Raina, I’d been his best man. I was even godfather to their two children.
Unfortunately, he was married to my oldest sister, a fact I didn’t think about until minutes after I sent my text and my phone began to ring.
Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est. It was an inside joke between me and my sister, a song she sang at me when people acted scared of me due to my size.
Of course, I’d set it as my ringtone for her when I first got a cell phone, and I’d made sure to keep it with every upgrade.
I heaved a heavy sigh and answered the call. My sister and best friend’s faces appeared on the screen, smushed together in front of the familiar warm yellow walls of their living room. A pang of homesickness washed over me.
“You know, when I texted you, I didn’t expect a two-for-one combo,” I teased Troy in lieu of a greeting.
My sister made a face at me. God, I missed her so much.
I missed both of them. “You think I’m letting Troy handle this one alone?
You’re having boy problems,” she cooed. “I’ve been waiting for you to have partner problems for years.
Girl problems, boy problems, nonbinary problems, not at all picky. It’s just about time.”
“Fuck you, Rai.”
“Ignore her. Tell us what’s going on. Who is this guy?” Troy cut in.
I drew in a deep breath and braced myself for the fall out of telling them what had happened. “Milo Tobitt. He’s—”
“Your teammate,” Troy interrupted sharply. “Please tell me you’re not freaking out because you have a crush on your teammate.”
“I’m not freaking out because I have a crush on my teammate.” I looked up, meeting his eyes from across the country. “I’m calling you because I kissed him.”
Raina let out a snort of laughter while Troy’s mouth fell open in shock.
I didn’t blame him. In all the years he’d known me, I’d stuck to appropriate partners.
There’d been the cheerleader I’d been dating when we met.
There was the girl I’d dated from junior year until halfway through my second year in the ALF when it became clear that she was more interested in being a WAG than being my girlfriend.
There’d been the across the street neighbor, a single father who had been my first boyfriend.
We’d broken up a few months before Rusty Sinclair came out, because he didn’t want to be kept a secret and I didn’t want to risk my career.
I’d had a few other short-term relationships, but they’d not been with someone like Milo.
I’d barely even had a crush on anyone that wasn’t appropriate, barring a few innocent crushes on teachers, older babysitters, or celebrities I’d never met.
It was no wonder Troy was shocked.
“You kissed Milo Tobitt,” Troy repeated after the shock wore off. “Why?”
“Because he likes him. Duh,” Raina answered for me.
“He’s your teammate. Do I need to list the number of ways this could be a disaster?”
“No,” I told him as I laid back against the leather couch in my living room.
“I know the number of ways this could go wrong. We could fuck up the vibes of the locker room. We could be distracted during the game. We could fall in love and then one of us gets traded, which fucks over both of us and our teams.”
“You could get traded to teams that have to play one another, and then you’ll have to deal with playing against each other,” Troy provided. “Or get traded to teams that only play each other once every four years, and then you’d never see each other.”
I’d thought about all these scenarios. None of them ended well.
“What about Johan Jones and Liam Lowe?” Raina asked after a few beats of silence. “They’re teammates, right? Your teammates.” I nodded. “Well, everyone knows they’ve been dating for a long time. They have to face the same stuff, but it hasn’t stopped them from being happy.”
“And they’re idiots who probably didn’t think it through when they decided to give into the temptation,” Troy pointed out. He groaned. “As your agent, I have to advise against this.”