27. Blaze
Blaze
After leaving the construction site I seriously consider making a pit stop at home to take the edge off, but I’m running late for an appointment with a guest, so instead I leave the windows down on the drive back to the retreat, hoping the cold air in my face will get my mind off Shawn’s question.
Do I want to fuck him? Do I want to fuck him?
Hell yes, I want to fuck him.
A few days ago when he told me he was booked at the retreat for another two weeks, I decided I’d take that as a sign not to worry about the future and just enjoy this while it lasted.
And I’ve enjoyed the hell out of it. I never knew how much I’d look forward to talking to someone at the end of the day, then unwinding with mutual orgasms and sleeping in the sinfully comfortable bed at the retreat.
When I’m finally done with work, I race home and run around tidying the house on fast forward speed while Misty watches me with an eyebrow cocked. “What—I’ve never had a guy over here before,” I tell my dog.
She stares at me as if to say, “He’s been here before, dumbass.”
“Yeah, but we weren’t doing stuff then,” I argue against her silent comment.
“Sheets!” I sprint to my room, grab a fresh set, and make my bed in record time.
Then I run to the kitchen and see what I can possibly make for dinner.
Shawn’s going to be hungry, working outside in the cold all day.
There are ingredients to make a stir-fry-type thing, but then I remember frozen leftover stew and defrost that in the microwave until it’s soft enough to slide into my mom’s big cast iron Dutch oven.
With the stew heating on low, I start a fire in the hearth. It’s getting going nicely when a confident knock sounds on the door.
He’s here.
Satisfied the logs have caught, I put up the safety grate and head to the front door.
Shawn’s wearing his Laurels jacket over a new thermal zip-up. His hair is messy from being under the hard hat, and he’s got a streak of dirt on the side of his neck.
I yank him inside, stick my tongue in his mouth. He kisses me back eagerly, shedding his jacket. He smells strong, like a man who’s been working all day, and tastes a little like sawdust—or maybe my imagination is running away with me.
We move together through the living room, and I wonder why I bothered to tidy up because he’s clearly not tuned into anything besides me.
God, that feels good. To have his attention on me, to have his entire world narrow down to me, Blaze Hardy.
I still can’t believe I somehow captured the attention of a guy like Shawn.
We can’t stop touching each other, and we don’t bother talking. To hell with the clean sheets in my bedroom. I push him down on the couch, the only light from the fire, kissing nonstop.
“Fuck, need this,” Shawn says when I pull his thermal and base layer off in one motion.
“Need you.” He reaches over to unlace his boots, and I watch the curve of his sexy, strong back while I wrestle with my own clothes.
Eventually, after too long, we’re both naked and he’s got me against the couch cushions, rutting that pretty cock against my thigh just like earlier at the construction site.
My hands grab his firm ass, reposition him so our cocks slide against each other.
His mouth finds a sensitive spot on my shoulder, and he bites down lightly.
I feel the electricity from his mouth to my cock. I’m so close to coming and I haven’t gotten anywhere near his ass yet.
“Shawn.”
He licks over the teeth marks he left on my shoulder. “Blaze. You wanna—”
“Yeah.” We switch so he’s the one face up on the couch cushions, and I get up and run to my room for lube and a condom.
I know from our conversations we’re both recently screened and negative for any STIs, but I also know the condom might help things go more smoothly, so to speak, for his first time bottoming.
I’m grateful for the heat coming off the fire a few feet away, and for the low light that hides my shaking hands as I squirt some lube on my fingers. “You sure about this?” I ask before I go any further.
“I can’t think about much else,” he says. “But only if you want to.”
I chuckle at both of us and our politeness.
Then I touch the inside of his knee to get him to open up for me, press two slick fingers to his rim.
I’ve touched him here before, but this time I enter him slowly.
Gently, even. I look at his face, the red on his cheeks, his green eyes slanted nearly shut.
His mouth curls up into a grin as I crook my finger upward.
He laughs, a bit shakily. “Fuck. Do it again.”
It doesn’t take long before he’s asking for more. I put on the condom and add more lube. “Like this, or do you want to turn around?”
He looks at me, gaze unfocused. “Like this.” I push into him, expecting resistance, feeling only the slick, welcoming tug of his body.
It feels good—it always feels good to push inside something hot and wet—but the way Shawn licks his lips and grabs my hips with his big hands, urging me forward, all of that is even better.
Everything’s better when it’s him. I thrust a few times, letting us both get used to it.
His cock’s only semihard, but then he splays open fully, one foot resting on the floor, and he pushes up to meet my thrust, and it’s so fucking good I can’t stop.
I snap into him; he howls out what sounds like a yes.
One of his hands leaves me to strip his cock, and then he says, “go harder,” so I do, and then he comes, head thrown back, neck glistening in the firelight, come coating his treasure trail.
“Holy motherfucking shit on a stick,” I say, because I’m coming, too, hard and unstoppable.
Shawn rolls his hips, opens his eyes. “You have the dirtiest mouth on you when you’re coming,” he says, sounding drunk.
“It’s involuntary, I swear.”
He grins, his mouth soft. “I like it. You’re uninhibited.”
I smile and ease out of him, grabbing a handful of tissues from a box on the coffee table to catch some of the mess and deposit the condom into. “You’re pretty uninhibited yourself.”
I drop the tissues on the ground, grab a couple of fresh ones, and hand them to him. Before he cleans up, he pushes a finger through the come on his belly. “That was so hot, Blaze.”
“Yeah?” I lean down and kiss him on the mouth. “Did I live up to the elf king’s performance?” One night last week, Shawn told me about the book series he’d stumbled upon in The Snug and how, uh, inspiring he found it.
“He’s an elf prince,” he corrects, laughing. “And you were even better. I knew you would be.”
I love the idea of him thinking about me, fantasizing about me. “Maybe I should read one of those books to get some ideas for next time. But now I gotta check the stew.”
“Is that what smells so good? You cooked?”
“I cooked like a month ago. You get defrosted leftovers and biscuits from a mix.” I get up and contemplate putting my clothes back on. In the end, I throw on my boxers and jeans, put on my flannel but leave it unbuttoned. “You can shower if you want. Clean towels in the bathroom.”
He looks incredible naked on the couch, lit up by the flickering fire that permeates the room with the gentle smell of burning logs and warm orange light. He’s still got come glistening on his abs, and he smiles at me like I’ve promised him a four-star meal. “Sounds good. Give me a minute.”
Openly, I watch him walk away buck naked, his enticing backside lit up by the fire and tempting me to forget about dinner and jump in the shower with him.
Humming, I wander over to the kitchen and check on the stew. It’s bubbling away so I mix up the biscuits and throw them in the oven, setting the timer because I have a feeling if I do get into the shower with Shawn, we’ll be facing charred lumps of dough by the time I remember them on my own.
But before I can knock on the bathroom door, he’s coming out freshly scrubbed, towel wrapped around his narrow waist.
“That was fast.”
“No reason to linger without you in there with me.”
Holy shit. I want to push him back in there and get him all dirty again, but he’s probably hungry.
“I’ll be quick, too. If you hear a beeping noise, can you take the biscuits out of the oven?”
“Sure thing.”
A little while later we’re eating on the couch, and Shawn’s noises of appreciation are going straight to my dick. “Are you sure Nolan didn’t make this? It’s so good.”
“Anything tastes good after spending a day working in the fresh air,” I reason. “Not to mention our…other activities. But I’m glad you like it.”
“Seriously, this is amazing. I wish I could cook.”
“You could learn.”
“Maybe I will,” he says. “I was talking about this with Davy the other day when I was getting a massage. They said they didn’t go to school for massage therapy until they turned forty.
And Marika didn’t open the retreat until she was, what—fifty?
I’m not too old to learn new things. And I like learning stuff, getting good at stuff.
It took me twenty years to get good at baseball, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing I could be good at. ”
I grin. “That’s awesome, Shawn.”
“And I was thinking—”
“What?”
He lifts his shoulders, drops them down. “Just, I don’t know. I think I should stick around here for a while, keep learning from the guys on the crew. It’s nice being a part of a team again.”
My skin abruptly feels cold, even though the fire has warmed up the house nicely. “You want to hang around here?”
“Yeah. I mean, I like it here. And I can afford to stay at Sanctuary Lake indefinitely, if Marika’s got the space.”
I don’t think about how he’s casually able to spend thousands of dollars a week while working construction because, oh yeah, he was a highly paid professional athlete. I think about the fact that he wants to stay. And if he stays, that means we can be together.
My stomach bubbles as if the stew inside me is still boiling. “You’d want that?”
“I think so,” he says, scraping the bottom of his bowl. “I mean, what do I have to go back for?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t talked a lot about what your life is like back home.” As much as I want him to stay, I don’t want to be the default prize.
He looks at me earnestly. “What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about crashing the Lamborghini again.” Ever since the night I watched the video, I haven’t known how to put my feelings about it into words. Now he’s offering me—us—a future, of sorts, and I need to know more.
He sits back, eyebrows raised. “The car accident? What about it?”
“What happened?”
“I told you; I lost control. It was stupid. I was lucky it wasn’t worse.”
I shake my head. “But why did you lose control?”
He looks at me for a moment, then touches the inside of his right arm. It’s covered by his long-sleeved shirt, but I know that’s where his scar is. “I had Tommy John surgery.”
I’m not sure where he’s going with this, but I play along. We haven’t talked about this either. “Isn’t that usually for pitchers?” I ask.
“Usually. I got injured; the doctors said I needed it. They did a good job—I healed up. But my throwing arm never came fully back. At the same time, there was a big reshuffle in the Laurels’ management.
New guys came in who didn’t think I was worth my spot on the team.
Didn’t even send me back to the minors—just cut me.
With a single snip.” He rubs his inner elbow over the scar.
I’m not sure he realizes he’s doing it. “You know what happened. Everything I had—everything I was—gone. My entire life evaporated, and it left me with nothing. Left me feeling like nothing.”
I’m about to remind him of our conversation on the mountaintop in the dark, but he keeps talking.
“I was in denial for a while, kept thinking they’d hire me back. The night I crashed, I met with my therapist, and he said I needed to accept that I’d never play professional baseball again.”
I didn’t know Shawn had a therapist. There are so many things I don’t know about him.
“He was right—but I wasn’t ready to deal with that reality, I guess. I went for a drive, and I wasn’t trying to crash, I swear.” He gets off the couch, shuffles forward on his knees, and puts his hands on my thighs, looking up at me earnestly.
“But when I hit the gas coming off a red light a little too hard, it was like I didn’t want to ease off.
I wanted something bad to happen, maybe?
To feel something other than the worthlessness I’d been feeling ever since being cut.
I don’t even know. It happened fast. And when I woke up in the hospital, I immediately knew I’d fucked up. ”
“Holy shit.” This is a lot to process. I don’t regret asking him to share, but I don’t know which part to respond to first. I go with, “I’m glad you’re okay.
” What if he’d died in that crash and I never had the chance to know him?
I swallow against irrational fear. “And you did fuck up. You could have hurt someone else, not just yourself.”
His eyes are wide and beseeching. “I know. Like I said, I’m so lucky it wasn’t worse. But I’m glad it happened, in a selfish way, because Callie sent me here and you helped me see I had a chance to build a new life.”
“And you want to build that life here?”
“I am doing it here,” he says firmly. “I have a purpose again; I have something to work toward. I have you.” His cheeks look a little red. Maybe it’s the heat coming off the fireplace. He looks at me steadily. “I’m happy here.”
Shawn’s changed since he got to the lake. He arrived tentative and sad, polite on the outside, hurting on the inside. He’s embraced his self-improvement project with open arms, and I’m glad he’s found something to give his life meaning again.
But isn’t this a bit too easy? It seems too much to hope for that I could be a long-term part of his life. It is too much to hope for.
But damned if I don’t hope, anyway.
“I’m happy, too.” It must be the right answer, because he launches himself at me, wrapping me in a hug.
He laughs, a little giddy, like he just found out he made the All-Star team.
He’s big and warm, and he nuzzles the side of my neck like a puppy.
I feel like I could live in this moment forever, but the caretaker in me asks, “You want more to eat?”
He nips my earlobe, then licks the sting away. My entire body shivers.
“What I really want to do is go back to bed. With you.” His voice is a growl.
Looks like the clean sheets won’t go to waste after all.