Hitting the Curve Page 6

  “You sure about that, princess?” I growl as she takes me in her hands.

  She nods against my mouth, her whispers punctuated by searing kisses.

  “I need you. Inside me. Now.”

  I scoop her up, maintaining our lip lock as I carry her to my bed. I throw her down hard enough that she bounces up a bit, her eyes going wide as I climb in behind her.

  “Like this?” She asks, spreading her legs wide. I grip her behind the knees, helping her open herself for me.

  “To start. I’ll want you in every way before we’re done.” I rub myself against her. She’s absolutely drenched, and I can feel her slick arousal coating the head of my cock and dripping along the shaft, thin rivulets tracing the veins that stand out on my manhood.

  “Fuck, you really do have a bat between your legs.” She murmurs as she glances down, watching her outer lips be spread apart by the swollen head of my dick.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll go slow.” I tease, rubbing myself against her, making sure to grind myself against her clit.

  She shakes her head rapidly, her hair tossing back and forth as she does.

  “No. I told you, I want you to fuck me.” her hand clamps down on my wrist as she tries to impale herself onto me.

  Without another word I lean in, helping guide myself home. There’s a pregnant pause as she stretches to accommodate, and then I’m sliding inside her slick pussy, opening her up for the first time.

  “Oh my god that feels good.” Charity gasps, the words strained, her tendons standing out at her neck and thighs as her body tenses.

  “I told you this is what you needed.” I rumble, one hand on the headboard behind her, the other moving between us to rub her clit in tight circles as I ease myself in and out of her.

  “What are you — holy shit!” Charity gasps as thirty seconds after she loses her virginity, she has her first orgasm. Her entire body clenches around mine, making her pussy so tight that I can’t budge my cock an inch. Her eyes roll, chest heaving in huge sobs as she comes so hard she almost starts crying beneath me.

  I’m not surprised. One week of build-up has me ready to bust already. I can’t imagine ten years of edging.

  “Good girl,” I whisper against her, riding out the shockwaves of her inaugural climax. I keep my hand steady against her, working my cock slowly in and out. I pump my hips slowly, savoring the exquisite feel of her silken walls milking me like a velvet-fisted glove.

  “Jesus, Levi, is it always this good?” Charity’s voice is awed and almost a little scared, a breathy whisper that makes me chuckle.

  “No, sha.”

  Her moue of disappointment is cut short by me moving inside her, thrusting deep and hitting her g-spot hard enough to make her eyes slam wide open.

  “It gets better.”

  Chapter 13

  Charity

  “That’s the way baseball go” — Merle Haggard

  — I’ll be there. I promise.

  Levi’s text is waiting for me when I blink awake the next morning.

  It takes longer than it should to make sense of my surroundings. Sunshine is streaming in through the window, splashing across the queen-sized bed I’m sprawled on. The sheets are loosened from two different corners, the blankets bunched up in a knot on the floor, somewhere near the tangled remnants of my clothes.

  Just like that, it all comes back to me.

  Last night, last week, every moment of my life that led up to the moment Levi sank into my body and tilted the axis of my entire world. There’s no use denying it anymore; he did more than give me my first orgasm.

  And my second third and— well, we lost track at some point.

  Levi Miller has changed me. More than a sexual awakening, I can’t imagine any part of my life without the brightness of his smile, the challenge of his wit, the penetrating way his green eyes work their way under every one of my defenses. He lays me bare in all the best ways. I’ll forever be grateful to Professor Thorburn and her overly-strict grading rubric for bringing us together.

  “Shit!”

  Realization dawns on me like a rain of ice water. I sit up, scrabbling to check the time on my phone. There’s less than half an hour before class— and the presentation Levi and I are supposed to give together. His dorm room suddenly feels alien, like waking up in a new foster home for the first time in too many years.

  I know he has practice first thing every morning, but his absence resounds inside me. Tears threaten, a dry lump forming somewhere in the back of my throat. I look back down at the phone in my hand.

  — I’ll be there. I promise.

  I take a deep breath, attempting to calm my racing heart.

  The room might not be mine, but it’s not nearly as alien as I initially thought. A battered glove tossed in the corner. A polaroid of a chubby-cheeked toddler with a note scrawled to uncle Levi tacked to a bulletin board. The scent of grass and spring air and wood that is intrinsically him. Everywhere, the room is filled with touches of Levi, little reminders that I’m not alone anymore.

  Levi and I don’t see eye to eye on everything. There are times the man makes me want to strangle him in the most literal sense. But he’s kept all of his promises, big and small. He may have torn down all of my walls, but he’s also bared himself to me, proved himself as much more than a pretty boy athlete breezing his way through school on Easy Street.

  One more deep breath for good luck and I’m up and throwing on the first set of clothes I stumble across; my jeans from last night and one of Levi’s shirts. It only takes me two tries to get my shoes tied. I grab the ball cap he gave me the first time I went to see him play as I head out.

  I even manage to slink into class with a whole two minutes to spare.

  Which is good, because it will take me at least that long to catch my breath after hustling across campus. I find a seat towards the back of the lecture hall and start calculating. There are enough students in here that Levi and I may get lucky. There’s no way we’ll get through all the presentations in one sitting.

  “There you are.” Pru hustles up the last few steps to plop herself in the empty seat beside me with all her usual flourish. “Nobody’s seen you at the library for days. Did you catch something?”

  “Oh I caught something alright.” Despite the direness of my situation, I can’t help but dissolve into a fit of giggles.

  Pru narrows her eyes at me, taking in the rumpled, oversized Braves tee and the way my JBF curls tumble every which way from under the brim of my borrowed cap.

  “Oh. My. God.” She brings her hand to her mouth in an obvious combination of shock and admiration. Her own laugh escapes from in between maroon fingernails. “You and Miller? I knew it.”

  “Good morning.” Thorburn’s icy tone casts its usual pall over the room, cutting off the dull hum of conversation like a light switch.

  “I want details. All of them,” Pru manages one last hushed stage whisper before whipping around in her seat to face the front of the room.

  Her excitement reignites my own. Everything about last night feels magical. I can still feel Levi inside of me every time I close my eyes, a not-unpleasant ache between my legs that thrums and throbs in time with every heartbeat.

  It isn’t until I see the neatly typed and labeled file folder on Pru’s desk that the worry returns, creeping up my throat like acid. My hands feel bare, my backpack suddenly more barren than it's ever been. Still, maybe—

  “So let’s begin our presentations with an unlikely grouping. Charity Williams, Levi Miller. Come on up.” Professor Thorburn’s words echo in my own head, immediately dispelling any hope I might have had about a stay of execution. The phone in my pocket remains terrifyingly silent, and I don’t dare take it out to check for messages now.

  The teacher’s heels click across the tiled floor, each step a stiletto through my heart.

  He isn’t here. He promised.

  Every step towards the front of the class is its own separate panic attack. My pulse is a roar
in my ears by the time I make it to the last stair. I’ve never been more aware of my own empty hands in my life. Three hundred pairs of eyes turn to look at me in unison, all of them as acutely aware of Levi’s absence as I am.

  I open my mouth to speak, say something. Anything.

  Close it again when I realize I can’t speak around the hard lump lodged in my throat— not without crying, at least.

  Get it together, Charity. You aren’t about to drop the ball just because he did.

  “The Oxford English Dictionary defines an orgasm as the physical and emotional sensation experienced at the peak of sexual excitement.” I begin, trying to pull together the presentation from the scraps of my memory.

  A week of late nights studying should be able to produce more than one measly definition, but try as I might, I can’t come up with anything better than parroting the OED. When I should have been learning facts and figures, I was studying the lines of Levi’s face, memorizing the color of his eyes, trying to ascertain the hidden ingredient in his scent.

  “Miss Williams, is there a problem?” Thorburn’s voice is a whip crack, so sharp it makes me jump. I recompose myself and give her my best smile.

  “No problem, ma’am. I promise. It’s just that Levi was supposed to do the beginning, and he’s…”

  “Right here. Sorry I’m late, folks. I hoped we would be going second.”

  Levi strides forward from the back of the classroom like a titan descending from the clouds. He has a garment bag thrown over one shoulder, a pile of posterboard under his other arm.

  I blink as I give him the once over, my jaw-dropping. Levi’s hair is slick and parted, his button-down shirt is tucked into pressed slacks. He’s wearing an emerald tie the exact shade of his eyes, which are currently hidden behind the thickest pair of glasses I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “Mr. Miller. You’re late.” Professor Thorburn doesn’t sound mad, but looks can be deceiving.

  “I am sorry about that, ma’am. I had to stop off and get my partner her presentation outfit, she didn’t bring it to my place last night.”

  Maybe that mini-hurricane will finally find me and wipe my embarrassment from the earth.

  “I don’t suppose she has time to change now that we’re going first, huh?” Levi raises an eyebrow at Thorburn, who simply gives a shake of her head. There is a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth though as she gestures at us.

  “Well, get on with it.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Charity, if I can ask you to display our visual aids for now?” Levi hands me a stack of posters I’ve never seen before in my life. When did he have time to make these? As I take them, I note the smudge of fresh ink and the telltale scent of still wet glue.

  He snuck out early to make sure we got an A. That’s real love.

  “Thank you. Fellow classmates, I’m sure we’ll hear a lot today about the science of an orgasm. The cold, hard facts. But we aren’t cold, hard things. If this were about robotic orgasms, well, that would be that. But we’re flesh and blood. Human beings aren’t just pleasure machines. You don’t insert tab A into slot B and follow the instructions until you achieve the desired result.”

  Levi pauses, sweeping the room with a measured glance.

  “Well, you do, but there’s more to it than that, yeah?”

  The class chuckles around us.

  “Charity, if you would?”

  I start to ask him if I’d what, but then I see it: the clever son-of-a-bitch taped my part of the presentation to the back of the poster I’m holding.

  “The female orgasm is something that is elusive to many. I should know, before last night, I…” I trail off as I realize exactly what I’m saying, but Levi’s presence lends me the strength to be courageous. I glance across the lines, memorizing them, before setting the poster down and looking up at the faces around me.

  “Before last night, I’d never had a single orgasm. I wondered if I was doing it wrong, or if I was just broken. Anorgasmic. It does affect almost five percent of women, and I just chalked it up to that. Despite that, I kept trying. I tried everything. Fingers. Toys. I rode the washing machine like I was trying to break a bronco. But nothing worked until last night.”

  Levi has to be taken aback: I went wildly off his script. He doesn’t show it, though, just takes it all in stride like it was part of the plan.

  “So our conclusions are pretty straightforward, actually. Whether it’s clitoral, vaginal, or another of the thirty-three flavors of orgasm, there’s more than just manual stimulation that’s necessary to unlock the beauty of a real earth-shattering climax. It’s the human element. A relationship, if you will.”

  The next poster has the most immaculate bubble lettering I’ve ever seen in my life. A giggle escapes me as I glance at it, but when Levi glances back at me, I wave him away.

  “As I was saying, you need to know the other person. It isn’t always good enough to just grab someone off of the street or swipe right on Tindr. Sometimes we need more. We need a real connection. Emotion doesn’t just make us feel things, it makes the things we feel better.”

  With that, Levi takes a step back and grabs my hand, giving it a squeeze.

  “Now, with the prologue out of the way, let’s get down to specifics…”

  I stifle a groan. Somehow, I know levi Miller is about to get incredibly specific about the quantity and quality of my orgasms, but before he can, Thorburn cuts him off.

  “Thank you, Mr. Miller, Miss Williams. Congratulations, that was an excellent presentation. It cuts to the heart of the matter, which is, of course, the heart.”

  We shuffle back to our seats, still holding hands. I give his a squeeze before I pull out my phone and shoot my lover two texts.

  — Thank you for keeping your promise.

  — Can we do more research after class?

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Levi

  Every ballfield is different, but they all smell the same. Fresh cut grass, well-oiled leather, hot popcorn and cold beer. They’re nostalgic, the smells of my youth spent on the bleachers, determined that someday I would be out on the field.

  “Show them what you got, rook,” The General Manager gives my shoulder a touch as I climb my way out of the dugout. Other players would get a harder slap, but he’d sooner cut his own hand off than risk hurting my pitching arm.

  The crowd roars as I take the field for the first time. I give them a wave as the announcer starts to go through the opposing starting line-up. I’m a bit of a spectacle: most pitchers don’t hit, most teams wouldn’t make their rookie pitcher their lead-off batter.

  I proved my worth in training camp, though. The rest of the team has my back. Not even the slightest grumble from them, not after I showed that I could hit every ball thrown my way.

  Every player is different, but we all have our rituals. Mine is pretty simple. Two swings, to make sure the weight of the bat is right. I’ve come across a few corked bats in my time, don’t want to risk picking one up by accident. Tap my cleats, make sure they’re free of any clumps of grass or mud.

  Then I look out into the stands. Used to be I would look without really looking. Just let my eyes wash over the crowd. I was always seeking something there, but I never knew what it was. That changed after I met Charity.

  Now I look for her.

  As always, she’s there. Completely surrounded by books, laptop in her lap, but when I glance out her blue eyes are shining back at me. They stand out among the sea of faces, two brilliantly glittering sapphires that captivate me every bit as much now as they did the day we met.

  No. Their hold on me has grown even stronger. For a moment I pause, frozen in place as electricity leaps and arcs, even separated by the space between us. It seems to stretch forever, but then I hear the announcer.

  “Laaaadies and gentlemen, now coming up to the plate in his Major league debut, number one, Leviii Milllllller!”

  The roar is deafening now, and my view of Charity is
lost as the people around her stand and cheer. It breaks the spell and lets me get my head back in the game.

  As usual, I have a plan as I step up to the plate. The great thing about the Majors is that there’s no shortage of videotape of past games. I’ve studied dozens of them at this point. The guy on the mound about to toss to me has absolutely no idea what he’s getting into.

  I’ve got a perfect trap ready to spring.

  I glance over at Charity as I step up to the plate. She gives me a wink that almost puts my well-laid plans right out of my head, but I recover just in time.

  First pitch: The classic fastball.

  Most pitchers have routines and rhythms. Pitchers in the Show pitch dozens of games a year. It becomes impossible to customize every throw to each hitter. There’s just too many in baseball. So they fall into the trap of throwing in a pattern.

  I already know exactly what kind of pattern I’m getting today. One I can exploit. I probably could hit the fastball, but I don’t want to risk it. Not when I can guarantee something better.

  I swing, and I miss. The crowd grows a bit quiet at that, and there’s a spring in the pitcher’s step. All according to plan.

  Second: A sinker.

  If I was up against someone less egotistical, this might not work. They’d be wary of me, giving me nothing but breaking balls that I couldn’t help but hit grounders off of. This guy, though, thinks that I’m not good enough. He’s underestimating me. After years of proving people wrong, I welcome being the underdog. It’s where I’m most comfortable — proving people wrong.

  I line up a beautiful swing that whiffs. The umpire calls strike two, the crowd grows completely silent, and the other team begins to cheer for their guy.

  Perfect.

  The third pitch is a textbook changeup. It looks just like the fastball — same windup, same delivery — but it’s deceptively slow. It’s the kind of thing you throw when you know you’re in someone’s head. He thinks I’m expecting the heat.