Chapter Twenty-Eight
Naomi
"Penelope Violet Hastings. Quieres casarte conmigo?”
"Sí, Eli. A thousand times, sí!”
And just like that my best friend is engaged.
The rock on her finger might be the biggest I’ve ever seen for one that still manages to look so vintage.
A huge ruby carved into the shape of a poppy flower set into a rose gold band.
It screams Nelly in taste, screams Elias just a little louder in money.
For a man who acts so humble, he’s not afraid to throw a few thousand around, especially when it’s for her.
They’re engaged, is all my brain seems willing to supply. One day soon, they’ll be married. Then Clara and Rowan will follow. Then they’ll all start having babies together and their children will be best friends and you’ll be…
I’ll be in Boston. Or D.C. Rising to the top of a game I never really asked to play.
Six months into a three-year program and I’m already questioning several life choices.
Not that I’m anywhere near as ready as these four are to settle down.
I’ve never seen myself as marriage material and my mother absconding from her own family kind of put a damper on the whole marriage and children ambition.
Picking up my Cosmo, I drain the glass, setting it back on the bar before I exit the suite. I just need a moment away from all the joy. And a moment away from him.
It’s been almost a year since we last saw each other at Clara’s graduation party. I wasn’t able to make it to Nelly’s this December since it fell right in the middle of my exam week, but I Facetimed her after.
I’m so happy she finally found something she’s good at. She’s always been a fantastic writer but telling her that and her actually believing it were two very different things so long as her parents- and Cristian- were planning a meaningless future.
Elias has been so good for her. Funding her classes, staying up late to help her study for exams, reading and editing all of her assignments.
It doesn’t hurt that his fame is also partially why she landed the internship that led to her new job.
She’s been writing pieces for an online blog since she graduated, making fantastic money, and hardly ever refers to it as work.
I think her official title is Junior Sports and Entertainment Columnist, and I couldn’t be prouder.
Of her or of Clara who has managed to be signed on with an exclusive dance company since graduating.
Miracles must be real after all if Doctor Christina Ramirez learned to fully support her daughter’s ballet ambitions. I’m still kind of pissed she never told us how good she actually is. Fucking bitch.
But of course, she has Rowan to push her in those endeavors. Who better to make sure a ballerina always hits her mark than a trained Seal? I’ve called after her practices before only to hear her screaming and raging and every now and then sobbing while Rowan patiently managed her in the background.
They’re so fucking cute it makes me sick.
Finding a blissfully empty hall, I lean my back against the wall, releasing a sigh.
I am happy for them, truly. It’s just getting harder and harder to pretend I’m not a little jealous, I guess.
I don’t have anyone like that waiting for me back in Boston.
I don’t have the possibility of some great love just coming around the corner and sweeping me off my feet—
“Todo fino?”
I look up at the one person I very much wanted to avoid.
Like me- like all of us- he’s wearing his teal blue Santos jersey.
Except he cut off his sleeves, leaving it gaping along the sides, revealing the unfairly toned muscles of his beach tanned arms. Not that I blame him, it’s hot as fuck for February and I cut off the bottom half of mine too.
“Did you follow me?” I glare, reaching up to fix the thick ribbon holding my hair in a bun atop my head.
He scoffs. “What do I look like, a puppy?” He holds up a finger immediately. “Don’t answer that.” I can’t help the smirk that lifts my lips. “You had a few,” and then it’s gone. “I was just checking on you—”
“I’m an adult, Graham.” I turn away. “I can hold my alcohol. And I hardly even had—”
“Three Cosmos is not hardly anything, Naomi and you know that.” He exhales slowly, holding up his hands. “I’m not here to chastise you. I was just making sure you’re okay. Which it appears you are, so I’ll be going before you bite my head off.”
To his credit he does turn to leave. It’s me that stops him from going when some ridiculous emotional place compels me to say, “They’re engaged.”
Graham turns back, leaning his shoulder against the wall. “They are indeed,” he nods. “About damn time too, I think.”
“Do you?” I laugh a little. “Twenty-three is the perfect age for marriage?”
“I mean, if I could go back and do it all over again? You know, if my childhood and adolescence hadn’t been absolute shit,” he shrugs. “Yeah, twenty-three would have been a good age to fall stupidly in love.”
I avert my gaze to the opposite wall where annoyingly a ginormous mural of the Miami team is painted on the wall. Cristian is front and center.
“But I’m glad I didn’t.”
I blink, looking back at him. “You’re glad you spent your twenties in and out of rehab—”
“That’s not what I said,” he corrected, pushing away from the wall, closing the distance he kept carefully between us. “I said I’m glad to have not fallen in love back then.”
“And why is that?” I ask as he comes to stand in front of me.
The only man to be even slightly taller than me.
His smirk as sinful as the devil. His green eyes glimmering in the fluorescent light of the stadium hall.
He’s far too pretty, even after all this time I still have yet to meet anyone who physically compares to Graham Rosales.
“Because,” he bites his lip, dragging my gaze down to the curve of his mouth. “And you’re the lawyer here, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve been told a divorce is very expensive?”
I snort out a laugh, genuine, unfamiliar even to me. “Yes, it is very expensive.”
“See,” his hand finds my waist, his thumb brushing the bare skin just above my shorts sending a shiver rippling down my spine. “And I already have so little. You’ve seen my apartment. Divorce would leave me destitute.”
“And why,” God it’s pathetic that I’m already slightly breathless from his touch. “Would a divorce be necessary?”
Okay, so maybe we did hook up after Clara’s graduation, making it almost a year since he’s touched me like this.
Almost a year since I’ve seen the stars only he can make me see.
Graham Rosales once told me he was weak for me, but maybe I’m also weak for him?
Just a little bit? Can a girl be blamed for enjoying a decent orgasm?
He leans in, his breath ghosting along my lips as he whispers, “Because, mi reina,” fuck him and that nickname. “One look at you, and my entire kingdom would have fallen.”
Fuck it.
My fingers snag in his hair, pulling him in the final centimeter of distance that keeps his lips from mine.
The kiss is everything that it was last year, and the year before that and all the months leading up to the night he held me as if he feared it might be the last time.
We should have known then it wouldn’t be the last. That so long as we ran in the same circles, when I came home there would always be another and then another after that.
I’d bet even when I finally end up married to some bloated politician, Graham will still be the one I call just to get away from the bastard a few hours.
I don’t condone cheating… But there are only so many times a girl can fake an orgasm before she needs something real, right?
Something Earth shattering, back breaking, cosmos formulating.
I need that something so desperately right now I’m practically humping his thigh.
I am humping his thigh. Anyone who walked into this hall right now would think I’m in heat the way I’m mauling him.
My hands are already on his belt for Christ sake when I finally give his lip a bite, dragging myself away enough to moan out, “Closet. Bathroom. Anywhere.”
“Now—?!”
“Right now.”
I drag him back toward where I’m pretty sure I saw a sign for a men’s restroom. It’s blissfully empty since the game is currently in full swing and many of the suites have a private bathroom anyway. No one will be coming in here.
Well, no one except me.
It’s a scramble for belts and buttons and zippers and then Graham is turning me around, my hands brace against the counter, and he buries himself inside me with way too much ease.
“Verga, mi reina,” he groans. His hand winds around to palm my breast, anchoring my back to his chest as he pulls out so slowly only to slam back in again.
I gasp as his lips find my ear. “How many nights has this pussy cried for me, huh? Have you missed this, Naomi? Have you missed my- what did you use to call it- magic cock?”
“Fuck, Graham—” I gasp, reaching back to grip his hair. “Stop fucking talking- AH!”
He tweaks my nipple through my shirt- thank God I didn’t wear a bra- his other hand finding my clit, strumming me like a man trained to know my body perfectly. And he fucking should be, I spent months personally coaching him.
“You’re going to come for me,” Graham growls in my ear. “You’re already so close. Come on, mi reina. Give me what’s mine—”
I clap a hand over my mouth to hold in my screams because I am going to come for him.
I’m right there, right on the edge of everything inside me detonating.
His cock hits that place inside that has my walls tightening and my bones turning to jelly.
He sinks his teeth into my shoulder as he lets loose inside me, my cries of more and harder and Graham muffled only by my hand.
And that’s when the bathroom door swings open.
“Mierda, Dios mío!”
Fuck, it’s Rowan. I look over in time to see him clap a hand over his eyes, turning away from the open door. And just in time to see a blonde head pop up behind him.
“Rowan? Qué pasó- Ay, Dios mío!” Clara’s blue eyes are so wide they nearly fall out of her little face. “NAOMI?!”
Rowan turns to his girlfriend, pulling her in until he can hide her face in his chest, simultaneously pushing her out the door. “What the fuck, Graham?!”
“Cono, toca antes de entrar!” The man still inside me shouts back.
“Es público!”
“Will you just get out!” I shout, hand falling to brace the sink again. “God fucking dammit!”
The door bangs shut against the frame as Graham slips out of me. And starts laughing. Actually laughing. I glare at him in the mirror as I rip my shorts back up my thighs. “This is absolutely not funny!”
He shrugs. “It’s a little funny—”
“Put your dick away!”
Graham rolls his eyes but, as always, does as I say. He’s buckling his belt when I open the bathroom door, finding my blushing friend and her very annoyed boyfriend standing just outside the door. “There is a bathroom,” I remind them through my teeth. “In the suite.”
“It’s currently occupied,” Clara explains, cheeks going, if possible, even more red. Which means Elias and Nelly are using it to do exactly what we were just doing. “We’re sorry, we didn’t mean to—”
“I thought you two were done with all this?!” Rowan demands, pointing between us.
“It’s an ongoing situation—”
“Wait!” I hold up a hand, pointing at Rowan. “You knew?!”
Clara looks just as shocked. “Knew what?!” She demanded. “What is going on?!”
Rowan rolled his eyes, gesturing to us again. “They were fucking in secret the entire spring before she left for D.C.”
“You were WHAT?!”
“How did you know?!”
“I’ve known this man twenty years,” Rowan pointed at Graham. “You think I don’t know when he’s regularly getting laid? And it’s not like you two were subtle! You bickered like an old married couple every fucking time we got you in a room—”
“We did not!”
It does not help our case at all that the protest comes out in unison. I glare at Graham who has the biggest shit eating grin on his face. The face of a man who did, in fact, just get laid. In a public restroom no less because I have no decency left when it comes to him.
Sucking at my teeth, I turn back to our friends. “It’s not what it looks like.”
“Bullshit,” Graham scoffs.
“It meant nothing,” I say more firmly, throwing him another you better shut the fuck up look.
Except he doesn’t cower the way he used to. He doesn’t fall to submission. In fact, his eyes darken, narrow, heat that isn’t desire boiling their green depths.
“Fuck you, Naomi,” he snaps. Clara actually gasps behind me. My jaw tightens. “I’m fucking done with your shit.”
“Shut up, Graham—”
“Why? Because all I’ve ever done is shut up and fucking love you and try to help you while you just continue to just use me!
Well, no more,” he throws his hands up with such ferocity he nearly smacks Rowan in the face.
“I’m fucking done! Consider this the last time. Have fun with your fucking vibrator.”
He turns away, storming back down the hall toward the suite. “Graham!” Rowan calls after him, looking between us with wide eyes. “What the fuck is going on?!”
He just gives us the finger over his shoulder. “Have an amazing flight back to Boston, bitch!”
For a moment I just stand there, staring at his back, my fists clenched at my sides and still able to feel his cum between my thighs.
Graham has never spoken to me like that before.
He’s always been submissive, pleading, needy.
For the first time something in my chest starts to crack, a hint of the guilt and shame I work so hard to keep at bay creeping through. My fingers tremble ever so slightly.
“Naomi…” Clara reaches for me, fixing the back of my shirt where it got folded weird in our coupling. “You okay…?”
“Fine,” I straighten. “Like I said, it meant nothing.” Turning back to her, I force a smile. “Come on, I need a drink.”
The request for their discretion remains silent between us as we walk back to the suite.
Neither of them say anything to Elias or Nelly about what they saw.
Not at the game, or after. Graham stays in the balcony seats, watching the game with too much focus, and I remain inside- a fresh drink in hand- not at all watching him.
Because it meant nothing.
Because we are still nothing.
Because tomorrow morning I’m flying back to Boston and he’ll remain here. Just a bartender in Lightning Cove. Just a more present member of my best friends’ lives than I’m ever going to be again.
Our paths will continue to cross as we orbit each other like twin stars. Until one day gravity collapses and one or both of us falls away, lost to our individual voids.