Chapter Eighteen Keely #2
All she could do was wait and hope he was decent enough not to leave her in here overnight. Right now, she should be packing her last few essentials, grabbing road trip snacks from the convenient store by the bus stop, texting her mom her ETA.
Instead, she listened in on conversations, gauging noise levels to estimate how many team members had left the locker room. Which ones lingered.
Finally, after her toes were fully numb and she’d adjusted to her less-than-ideal oxygen saturation, the noise faded, and the locker room was empty.
Nearly. One single set of footsteps drew closer.
She readied flimsy explanations—they accidentally swapped laptops at the shelter this weekend and she only noticed today, despite having used it since then.
Or she wanted to reimburse the cost of his ruined uniform, but she didn’t know where to leave it so she tried to slip it through the slots but it got jammed.
When the door swung open and she was once again face to face with Max, she had absolutely nothing.
She stepped out and to the side, clutching the contraband laptop to her chest.
Max’s eyes dropped there, and hers dropped. . .
Everywhere.
Aside from the bleached-white towel wrapped around his waist, he was naked. This was so, so much worse than post-practice Max.
Water clung to his chest, rippling over his smooth skin and dipping into the grooves between his muscles. And there were a lot of grooves—a lot of muscles. Pectorals, obliques, abdominals. . . others she couldn’t think hard enough to remember right now.
She gulped. “You’re. . .”
“Confused,” he supplied, crossing his arms over his chest. His bare chest. “What were you doing in my locker?”
She couldn’t answer. Her tongue weighed ten thousand pounds.
His eyebrows arched. “I’ll ask it a different way. Why do you have my laptop?”
She tried meeting his eyes but got as far as his neck. She could see his pulse, a wild flutter at the base of his throat. Her tongue darted out as if to taste it.
“Keely,” Max rasped, dark edges at the beginning and end of her name that scraped a Microplane over her nerves. He stepped closer. “I’d like an answer, if you don’t mind.”
“I—I was—” Her back hit the locker next to his open one, as much as her backpack would allow. She smelled him: sea salt, cedar, vetiver, something distinctly Max. As disarming as it was, she lifted her chin. “I was borrowing it.” She gulped. “For research.”
Max’s hand splayed behind her head. His skin sliding over the metal sent a corresponding shiver down her spine. “For research,” he repeated.
She nodded, and her hair snagged on his knuckles. He frowned at it, even as he gave it a light tug.
“Very important scientific research,” she breathed. “Because I’m a scientist.”
A noncommittal sound vibrated his throat as he drew closer.
Closer.
“As a scientist, Keely, didn’t anyone ever teach you. . .” His mouth hovered over the hinge of her jaw. She bit her lip to stop her moan and tasted blood again. Max curled his other hand around Keely’s hip. Which meant there was no longer one on his towel. “Not to touch what isn’t yours?”
This was different from their normal pranks. His breath had never misted over the petal-soft skin below her ear before, and his mouth hadn’t been this close to hers. To her.
If he’d been playing this dirty the entire time, he probably would have won.
Which reminded her.
“You—you’re touching me right now,” she argued, even as she let go of the laptop with one hand so her palm could hover over his stomach.
“I—” He tensed and stepped back. “Should’ve asked first. Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” The words burned on the way out, the same way her skin did when he grazed it. “I was just going to say it seems a little—contradictory.”
He tipped his head to the side. “You don’t want me to stop?”
Her stomach tilted. “No,” she whispered, the fingertip of her index finger brushing the groove in the middle of his torso. “You could even come closer, if you wanted.”
He stepped forward again, pressing her into the locker with his body, and she gasped.
He was. . . hard.
Max Simmons was hard for her, Keely Sinclair.
A whimper escaped her lips. She smashed them together but it was too late.
He hummed. His towel had to be coming loose, didn’t it? “What was that, Key?”
Key.
She shook her head as heat soared up her spine. Her fingers climbed his chest, toying with the sharp jut of his clavicle right next to her mouth. She could lick it.
What would he taste like?
“Well, then,” he murmured. “What if instead of asking you what you were doing here, I asked you not to leave?” Bright red splotches bloomed on his neck. He wetted his lips while staring at hers. “What would you say to that?”
What would she say? She couldn’t think. Her mouth moved over words that wouldn’t form.
He tsked deep in his throat. “Cat got your tongue? Color me surprised.” His voice dragged over her skin and dropped into her lower belly. It was easy enough to imagine other scenarios in which he might also talk this way. Early in the morning.
Late at night.
His gaze traveled every peak and valley of her face, the lines and slopes. It may as well be his fingers, his tongue, for how vividly she felt it.
“You always have something to say. This little pink mouth of yours. . .” He touched his thumb to the center of her bottom lip, gentling over the teeth marks she’d made earlier. His brows furrowed. “Drives me crazy with how much it moves.”
The tip of her tongue flicked forward infinitesimally to make contact. She did taste him then, over the iron and over her fear.
“Please.” It sounded like her voice, but breathier, more desperate.
She couldn’t distinguish his next noise from a growl or a groan or a grumble, but it spiked her blood pressure and turned her limbs to melted butter.
She sagged against the lockers, and the hand that had been learning her lower lip wrapped around her instead, winding up under her bag to press against her back.
Fingers slotted in the spaces between her ribs.
Something sharp dragged along her earlobe, quickly smoothed over with something softer. His teeth; the inside of his bottom lip. “Please, what, Keely?”
“Anything, anywhere, just—” She squirmed. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she vaguely registered the towel coming loose from his waist and fluttering to the ground. She was on fire. “Please,” she said again.
“You want me to kiss you?” His nose bumped hers now, sliding up, back down until their mouths were millimeters apart. “Touch you? Strip you down like you stripped me?”
Max, her body whispered.
“Max? You in here?” The locker room door whooshed open.
Keely froze.
“Don’t come in,” Max called. His voice was hard as granite. As hard as he was, pressed into the soft flesh of Keely’s hip. “I’m—we’re not decent.”
“Oh, uh.” Nolan, Keely’s brain supplied. “Got it. I’ll. . . keep watch?”
Keely’s head thunked forward onto Max’s collarbone, face flaming hot. She tried to center herself, but her entire body pulsed, her underwear uncomfortably wet.
“I, erm—” she murmured into his chest. “I’m not really sure what that was.”
“Same.” He cleared his throat. “I need my towel.”
“Right. Let me just—” She shut her eyes.
Her other senses came alive. The rustling of the fabric, the rasp of his breathing. Her heartbeat, loud and fast in her ears. What had they done? This wasn’t on any list she’d made. Something she hadn’t expected.
“I’m good,” Max said.
She didn’t give herself time to look him over too closely, lest she continue what they’d started. Instead, she shoved his laptop into his chest, scooped her phone off the floor of his locker, and got as far away from him as possible.