11. Shira

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Shira

For a wild second, Felix looks like he's about to say no. Did I totally bungle this? No, if nothing else, dancing taught me to read a situation—to discern what guys want, to sell them on a fantasy that never really matches a reality. Only now, it's my fantasy too. If Felix agrees.

He's still studying us. Under me, Blake doesn't exactly fidget but his hand flexes, curling and uncurling, as if he's equally nervous. As if there's more riding on this than just a proposition made across a hot tub—an attraction to men he won't acknowledge, a craving for a wild night after a lifetime of living on the straight and narrow. Maybe something deeper than that, something that's lacing through his and Felix's new friendship.

Blake doesn't want to pressure me. Am I doing the same thing—pressing him to conform with some big-league lifestyle that he's clearly spent the past six years avoiding? No, he's hard and getting harder from the feel of it. Under his breath, almost inaudibly, he whispers a c'mon the way he might beg a home run ball to just clear the fence.

But with each second Felix doesn't answer, my heart starts beating a little harder.

"That's up to Shira," he says finally.

Oh, I see how it is. This whole situation is completely heterosexual if they both pretend it's for me.

Fine. If that's the kind of cover they need, then that's the kind of cover I can provide. "What if…" I begin, dragging it out. I roll my ass against Blake's lap like I'm proving a point, even if the point is just his gasp. His hair has sprung free of its pomade. It's gratifying: perfect Blake Forsyth, frayed at the edges.

If you asked me a month ago what Blake might say to a potential threesome with a teammate he just met, I would have guessed an easy answer: a flat, uncompromising no . But when I asked if maybe, possibly, he wanted to share this experience with Felix, he clearly didn't hate the idea. Liked it , if the pulse of his cock against my ass was anything to go from.

Impulse can only carry us so far. We probably need to talk about things before they go any further. "Okay, rule one," I say. "What if what happens at a Fayetteville hotel stays here?"

From a few feet away on the bench, Felix nods.

"What could happen?" Blake's mouth is close to my neck. The puff of his breath cools the drops of water there.

"Whatever you want to," I answer.

"You want me to provide a checklist?" he asks.

"I know how much you like to plan. And…" I lower my voice, not so low Felix can't hear, but low enough that it doesn't feel like I'm broadcasting it to an entire city. "You've had a month to really consider it."

From across the hot tub, Felix swallows visibly. "You haven't, uh, been together before?"

Blake tenses, as if he's bracing for something—for Felix to make fun of him, for me to lie on his behalf as cover.

"That's rule two," I say. "Everyone gets to go at their own pace."

"Sure," Felix says, as if that's obvious.

Beneath me, Blake relaxes. "I have another rule. Or a suggestion. For the group." It has more of that take charge tone I'm used to from him, the one I suspect he probably uses during clubhouse meetings. "If something feels good, say it."

Not what I expected. Then again, nothing about this trip has gone as expected. "You want to make me feel good?" I purr.

"Yes," Blake says. "I want that more than anything."

What guys would say at the club, sometimes. Usually my cue to moan exaggeratedly as I mentally composed grocery lists.

Not with Felix . Feeling good meant him treating me like a person when most customers treated me like a vending machine.

Feeling good with Blake means something I'm just now seeing the shape of—how much he wants to break free from the boundaries he's set for himself. Or that others have imposed on him.

"How's that all sound, Felix?" I ask.

His lips tick up at the edge. "I guess I'm a visual learner—I'd need to see it in action."

"Oh, is that how it is?"

That gets him to smirk. "Seems like."

Blake's hand tightens at my waist—does he regret agreeing to this already? But no, he presses a kiss to my pool-water-damp hair. "What do you say, sweetheart—you want to give him a show?"

A suggestion that makes my pulse beat a little fast. So I cover Blake's hand with mine and slide it down my stomach, lower, lower, until his fingers are resting at the boundary of my swimsuit.

Above the water, we're just having a good time. Under it, this is something else entirely. Still, it's almost private. Water foams around my waist and over his wrist and forearm. We might be giving Felix a show but there'll still be something left to the imagination. How I used to pick out dancing outfits: ninety percent naked is sometimes sexier than being entirely unclothed. I giggle at the memory.

"You good?" Blake asks.

"You tell me." I slide his hand under my swimsuit, almost—almost—where I want him. Blake's breathing picks up. My nipples tighten to hard points against my triangle top. I don't have any idea how we look.

Or, given how Felix is watching us, eyes hot—maybe I do.

People have called me wild: men at the club, when they didn't realize how much control it took to wrap myself around a pole and make it look effortless. When I told everyone I wanted to be a dancer instead of going to college.

A different kind of wild from being on a fifth-floor deck under the cover of the pale urban night. It's February . It's probably still snowing at home . Something about that makes this even more surreal.

Finally, Blake's fingers go where I want them—the callused tips of his fingers against the throb of my clit. He strokes a few times, exploratory, as if he's trying to figure me out. "That's it, that's it," he says in my ear in a low, praising drawl. "Get my hand all wet." Like that's something he wants, that he's been thinking about for the month we've been together.

"You gonna taste me off your fingers?" I ask.

That gets an un-Blake-like growl. He raises his hand to his own tongue. "Clearly, I got some work to do."

Across the tub, Felix has stilled. His eyes are wide, seeking, like he can't quite believe any of this.

"You enjoying the show?" I tease.

Silently, he nods.

The show. Fuck. We're giving someone a show all right . I scan around for the unblinking eye of a security camera.

Blake must feel me tense, because his hand recedes from my stomach. "We can stop," he whispers.

"Hey, I'm good." I kiss him, quick, reassuring. "There just might be a camera."

"Oh. Huh. Yeah." Like he's just now realizing that we're in relative public. He does a similar perusal of the deck area, his gaze landing on the chair where he shaved Felix's beard, the chaise holding our clothes and phones. The table, harboring drinks in a bucket of ice. It's funny how quickly you get attached to a place. Or a person. Or people. "I don't see a camera," he says.

"Just 'cause you can't see 'em doesn't mean they aren't there." I bite my lip before I can add more. Like that there were cameras everywhere in the club, mostly to keep the dancers safe and to avoid accusations that we rolled clients.

He shifts me gently off his lap, then rises from the hot tub. Felix follows, adjusting himself in the wet cling of his swimsuit. "You take this side and I'll take that one," Felix says.

They spend a minute staring up at the half-roof that shields the hot tub from the upper floors. "Got it," Felix says. Sure enough, there's a camera mounted in the corner, not one of those black half-spheres we had at the club, but one like an old camcorder.

Blake drags over a chair. "Here, steady this."

"You sure you don't want me to do it?" Felix asks.

Blake laughs. "I wanna stay in this thing's blind spot. No chance you wouldn't be seen being all—" He makes a gesture denoting the span of Felix's shoulders.

"I could," Felix presses. "Someone has to keep you out of trouble."

Blake laughs again. "You think you two are keeping me out of trouble?" He doesn't exactly sound mad about it. The opposite, in fact. "Now duck your big body down and hold this chair."

Felix does as he's told, steadying the chair as Blake climbs up it. The camera's mounted high, but Blake is tall, his fingers agile and reaching. Slowly, he snakes an arm under it, shifting the camera until it peers out into the parking lot.

"Are we adding this to the list— evading security ?" Felix asks.

"Only because I've learned from experience." Blake hops down from the chair, grinning. "Now we're alone."

For a brief second, some part of me is almost disappointed that the only souvenir we'll have from this trip is memories. Another part of me has to wonder: would he do all that to protect us if he knew the truth about me and Felix?

Both of them pad back to the hot tub. Blake slides beside me and pulls me on his lap. Felix sits on the bench near us—closer than before.

"That better?" Blake's arms tighten around me.

"Sure." I lift a teasing shoulder.

A second later, Blake's lips are on my neck. His hand plunges into the water, at my waist, lower, lower. "Show me what you want."

"Touch me," I breathe, and he does, fingers light over the tip of my breast, his other below the elastic of my swimsuit, dipping toward my pussy. "Fuck." The word is out before I can stop it. What Blake heard me yell that first day in Boston and still asked me out.

"You need something?" he asks, innocent as anything. His middle finger pushes down farther, parting my folds and rubbing me with brief unsatisfying pressure.

I'm pretty good at teasing people. Hell, I built an entire career on teasing people. It's a different thing entirely to be on the other side of it. A whine gathers in my throat.

"You gonna do something or you just gonna waste my time?" I ask.

Blake actually laughs and rolls my nipple between his fingers. Exactly once.

Well, two people can play this game. He might be good, but I'm a professional. I grind my hips, slow, and get the gratification of his cock against my ass, the gasp of his breath in my ear. The action makes my breasts shift, testing the sparse limits of my triangle top.

From across the hot tub, Felix groans. "Don't take this the wrong way, but the girl you're dating has incredible—" He cuts himself off, laughing.

Blake makes a disapproving noise. For a second, I wonder if Felix went too far. Until Blake says, "My girlfriend, you mean."

"You all work that out?" As if that was something Felix encouraged.

"Sure seems like it." Blake tucks me closer to him and kisses my neck. Increases the pace of his hand with his middle and ring fingers straddling my clit. With the water counteracting some of the slickness gathering between my legs, it's almost enough. Almost.

"How's that feel?" Blake asks, low.

I should lie. We're doing this in front of Felix, and I should moan and gasp and not embarrass him by saying that he's doing…all right, but not quite what I need.

My silence goes on too long. Blake stops. Fuck, I should have just said yes, that's good. Except that Blake shifts me from his lap, then picks me up and seats me on the edge of the hot tub, pushing my knees apart so he can stand between them.

My skin comes up in goose bumps almost immediately—from the heat of his gaze and the chill of the air. He skims his hands up my thighs, then calls to Felix, "Get her a towel."

Felix does, sloshing across the deck to a bin holding a set of fluffy white hotel towels, then returns with a handful of them that he gives to Blake, who spreads them out.

Blake encourages me up and back, until I'm sitting on terrycloth. They're thick enough to provide a cushion between me and the synthetic wood of the deck, like he didn't want me to be even momentarily uncomfortable.

"Let's try this again." Blake lowers his mouth to mine, kissing me, at my lips, my jaw, moving down my neck. And I'm about to thread my fingers back through his hair, to push him to my breast and demand the attention of his mouth, when he pauses. "You gonna tell me when I'm doing something you like?" he asks.

I laugh and nod. "Sure, I promise."

"You gonna tell me when I could be doing something better?"

My stomach drops. So he knows I was trying to spare his feelings.

"Honest feedback is the only real way to improve," he says, in a media-polished tone like he might use when being interviewed postgame.

I can't help it: I crack up. Blake smiles up at me, boyish, eyes lit with laughter. Next to me, Felix is also laughing, and fuck, this feels good, the three of us together, bound together in a way I can't quite name. What happens here stays here…

But what if it didn't?

I don't have long to contemplate that. Blake takes my hand and puts it in his hair. "Pull it if you don't like something."

"How about I pull it if I do?"

"Even better." He thumbs my swimsuit top back to reveal my nipple, then seals his mouth over it. It's warm, wet, his tongue flicking. That ache returns between my legs, the urge to have him fuck me out here protected by the shelter of his body and the sealed-up door leading back to our real lives.

Not just him. Felix hasn't moved. He's watching, hungrily, eyes flicking from mine to Blake's shoulders and back. "How's that?" he asks me.

"For a guy who talks slow, he's pretty good with his tongue."

Blake's laughter vibrates against my skin. "You gonna joke while I do all the work?"

"If she's still talking in complete sentences"—Felix inches over, heat rolling off him as he settles next to me—"you got more work to do."

"Yes, sir." Blake says it with a certain Southern sarcasm, the way bless your heart can be weaponized as an insult. Then the humor drops from his face. His shoulders stiffen as if bracing for a rebuke—like someone in his past has done that.

Who told you that you couldn't have this? A question I'm beginning to see the answer to in the pinch of Blake's eyebrows every time he frowns over a text.

Over Blake's shoulder, Felix is giving me the same heated look he used to throw at me in the club, now amplified. "You ready to give him some honest feedback?" he asks.

"I'm ready to get his mouth on my pussy," I fire back, then almost immediately bite my tongue. That's too much, too demanding.

Blake hasn't minded before, but I shouldn't test those limits. Now he's looking at me, uncertain. Fuck. I fucked this up.

Until he turns to Felix. "I know when I'm good at something," Blake says. "And I know when I'm not." He drags his hand up the back of his neck. His cheeks go a faintly embarrassed pink. "I really haven't dated that much. And people expect me to be good at things naturally and don't always tell me when I'm only…okay. At least off the field."

A few things slot into place: Blake's exes I couldn't find online. His hesitance at the physical part of our relationship. And his discomfort at us teasing him about being good at everything. It's hard to know if you're pleasing a partner if they lie to you about it. What I was just doing—to spare his feelings. Being the girl I assumed he wanted and not the one he needed me to be.

Demure only gets you so far in life. "You want to add another item to the list?" I ask.

Blake goes red. But he's nodding. "I might also need a second opinion."

What Felix said about the shaving job Blake did on his face, now tossed back at him playfully. Felix's eyebrows rise. "Are you asking me to help you eat out your girlfriend's pussy?"

"You seem like you'd be honest if I was bad at it." Blake shrugs sheepishly.

"In my experience, it's pretty easy to know if you're doing a good job," Felix says. "If Shira's calling your name, for one thing."

Blake's eyebrows go up like he's rising to a challenge. But he doesn't move quite yet. Possibly because he and Felix haven't broken eye contact.

"You all gonna get to it or not?" I ask.

"People from Boston are so impatient," Blake teases. But he sinks, knees on the underwater bench, until he's eye level with my waist. He drags a thumb under my swimsuit bottoms. "Can I take these off?"

I nod and lift myself up enough that he can pull them down, leaving me exposed. I should feel vulnerable—I'm half naked, in public, with only the bare modesty of a rucked-up bikini top. I should, and maybe I do, but it's a different kind of vulnerability when Blake kisses my belly. When he runs his fingers up and down the insides of my thighs and spreads my knees.

My breath quickens. My nipples go impossibly tighter. Heat traces through my core, and I sigh an exhale.

"Oh, yeah, you're clearly terrible at this," Felix says to Blake.

"Maybe I just needed the right encouragement."

"I'm encouraging you to get to it," I laugh.

Blake sinks lower, mouth a hot line as he kisses his way down my belly, as he makes the first sighing contact with my pussy, tongue against my clit. He kisses me like he would my mouth, slow but without much rhythm or pressure. Not bad, just not as practiced as the rest of him, and something about that makes me like him even more.

After a second, he draws back.

I nudge his shoulder playfully. "I hope you don't think you're done."

He laughs and shakes his head. "I thought about what you'd taste like." A confession that makes the tips of his ears go red. How he managed to get through twenty-something years as a man on this Earth—as a ballplayer around other ballplayers—and still retain that wholesomeness, I don't understand.

"Am I what you imagined?" I try to ask it casually, even as my heart beats against my ribs. And what if it turns out I'm not?

"Better than I could've dreamed. But I might need some specific direction." His ears go even redder. "Put your hand in my hair." He says it quickly, like he's embarrassed to be asking. Why would he…? Right. Because he wasn't talking to me.

Felix settles his hand on the back of Blake's neck in a hard grip, then traces his way up into his hair. Tension raises the muscles of his forearm. "Fuck, you look good like this." And it's not clear who he's talking to. Or it's possible—likely—he's talking to us both.

He pushes Blake back down between my thighs, to the aching juncture of my pussy. I'm wet and I get wetter when Blake licks me, when Felix starts moving his face in a steady, demanding rhythm, urging him on.

"Use your tongue around her clit," Felix says. "Make it so she can't think of anything else."

For a second, I think Blake might buck—guys sometimes say they want directions but mostly they just want confirmation of what they'd do anyway. Then he licks me—short strokes interspersed with longer ones, and grunts when I give a happy sigh.

It goes on like that: Felix giving advice and correction and encouragement, the last of which deepens Blake's flush. Tension gathers at the base of my spine. I tighten my thighs around Blake's ears, get the long groan of his approval, like this is just as much for him as it is for me.

"Fuck, Blake, that's so good." I'm almost, almost there, just on the edge, I'd tip over if not for how Felix pulls him back, sudden enough that Blake's hair goes taut at the roots.

"Is there a problem?" Blake asks it in that same fake polite tone I've realized hides a deep well of sarcasm. But his lips and chin are wet, his eyes glassy and pleased. "She must be having a good time if she's calling my name."

"Sure." A word accompanied by Felix's exaggerated shrug.

"You don't sound convinced."

"Get her to call you ‘daddy' and maybe I will be."

For a second, the only noise on the deck is rise and fall of our breathing. Then Blake says, "Yes, sir." This time, there's no teasing to it.

Blake's hands wrap around my hips, fingers tight without pressing. Careful in a way I'm not used to people being with my body. He licks me a few times and huffs a laugh when my thighs tighten even further.

"Sorry," I say.

He pulls up fractionally. "Yeah, let's adjust." Then he reaches and hooks my ankles over his shoulders, until his face is settled between the two pillars of my thighs. "Now you can really squeeze the breath out of me."

I laugh and tap my hand atop Felix's, into the soft product-y strands of Blake's hair. It's gone from fraying to truly disarrayed. Perfect . My fingers play over the ridges of Felix's knuckles, rough from cold, from work outdoors. A bubble of affection rises in me.

This stays here. None of this can come with us. And yet…

It can't. It can't be anything but what it is—three people and a few drinks and a warm night.

But at least it can be what it is. Blake flicks his tongue again, followed by the barest scraping of his teeth.

I clench hard, on air. "Give me your fingers. I want you inside me."

He looks up at me, panting hard. "Like this?" He strokes the rim of my cunt, then inserts the barest tip of his finger.

"Don't tease," I laugh.

"You heard her," Felix commands. "Fuck her the way she wants and maybe we'll do the same for you."

Blake's eyes widen, like he's caught on that we . He strokes me, two fingers inside, thumb against my clit, and it's hardly enough but that's all it takes, and I tilt my hips and enjoy Blake's long moan into my pussy and Felix's hand in his hair and the feeling inside me that bursts like a firecracker, sudden and bright and flashing.

After, I lie there panting, wrung out, enjoying the rhythm of my breath. Blake's chest is heaving and I'm almost tempted to ask if he came too before he turns to Felix with a grin.

"That work for you, sir?" Then Blake's smile falters as if we've hit some invisible limit he has for himself. Or like he doesn't know how to ask for what he really wants .

Sometimes, a situation calls for finesse. And sometimes it calls for a certain directness. If there's one thing I have, it's that.

"Hey, guys," I say, "I have an idea."