Physical Therapy (25 page)

Suddenly his lips looked full and luscious by the light of the moon coming through the window. “Passion,” I repeated.

“For helping others,” he reminded me with a grin.

“Nobody else is up at this hour.”

“That"s true… So you"re off the humanitarian clock?”

“Well, unless you can think of something
you
need done.” I leaned in and kissed him, grinding on him a little until he definitely had something he needed done.

“Oh, yeah,” he growled.

I leaned over to the nightstand we"d purchased at a garage sale and pulled lube and a condom out of the drawer. I turned my head sharply back because I thought I caught a glimpse of something golden and luminescent around him. Izzie was trying to convince me that it was his aura, that everyone had the capability of reading them, and that his was golden and shiny because he was happy. She told me we were still exactly in sync. That much, at least, seemed to be true.

Ken and I knew each other well enough now that we could fall together and practically glide into making effortless love. He knew my body better than I did, and I knew more than a few tricks with regard to his. It never needed more than the hint that he was ready, or I was, and we"d find each other and create that perfect space that was just ours.

He leaned me back and licked his way down to my navel. “
Yes
.” His dark hair was stark against my skin in this light, even though I"d managed to get quite brown, for me, from our frequent walks on the beach. I no longer allowed him to go in the dead of night. Often Mark and his friends showed up for an impromptu game of volleyball or a fire in one of the cement rings.

He shifted me off him and slid down to take my balls in his mouth, suckling on them one at a time, dropping under them to let his tongue slip farther down behind until he breached my hole and made me gasp with pleasure. I was ashamed of how I moaned and begged, but it never stopped me. I rolled over to get more contact, drawing my knees under myself and spreading as far as I could go. He used his thumbs to pull my ass cheeks apart and moaned when he found what he was looking for, that leverage he could always use to make me do whatever he told me to do.

He pulled away, and I"m sorry to say I whimpered when I no longer felt his touch.

He replaced his tongue with slick fingers and, at the same time, slapped my ass hard enough to leave a mark with the other hand.

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“Guh.” My face hit the pillow. “Oh
fuck
.”

“Hands on the headboard.” He always found a deep and masterful voice for this, and I loved him for it. He slapped my other ass cheek because I lay there panting too long. I knew for a fact that he could make me come just by slapping my ass and talking to me in the voice he was using right then.

“Yes.” I put my hands on the headboard, wrapping them around the slats, and his hand came down on my ass again, so hard I felt my balls fly forward and slap back.

“Yes!”
This
was why my mother couldn"t live with us.

I heard him pick up the condom, then hesitate. “Jordan—”

“Glove up,” I told him implacably.

“How many tests is it going to take?” he asked. “You"ve been negative how many times now? I"ve been negative twice since we"ve—”

“Until I"m ready.”

“I want to lose the latex.”

I turned my head to face him. Maybe it was telling that I didn"t let go of the headboard. “I will not do anything that might endanger you.”

“Jordan, you"re clean. As far as anyone could possibly know, you"re clean and so am I. Have you been with anyone besides me since we met?”

“Of course not, how could you even ask such a lame question?”

“Neither have I.” He gripped my hip with one hand and flicked the condom over the side of the bed with the other. “You"re clean.”

“I"m not sure. I"m not ready.” I felt like pleading. I didn"t
feel
clean.

“You"re clean,” he told me, lining up and starting that push into my ass. “I"m clean and I need you,” he panted. I turned back around and rested my forehead against the headboard. For the first time, it was a struggle, almost painful. “Let me in, Jordan.”

“Oh, fuck, Ken.” He stroked the skin along my back with his hand and pushed harder. “I don"t
know
. I don"t know if I can do this.” He put his hands on mine where they still gripped the slats and bit my shoulder in the fleshiest part by my neck, hard. “Let me in.” He used the voice that made me see stars; I felt him sink into me as I shivered with need and pushed back. He kept his hands on mine as he used his powerful quads to rock us both.

I knew exactly what we must look like, his ass flexing and snapping as he fucked me, and me with my head hanging, my hands gripping, taking it and loving it, melting.

The image of that powerful body covering mine always got my head in the game even before my body started its unstoppable slide into climax.

I felt my orgasm like a tight ball of energy that started in my spine and radiated down my legs and back up, and soon I was incoherent with pleasure, making some sort of howling sound as I shot. He was groaning and pushing me closer and closer to the headboard. As soon as I let myself go and shuddered against him, I felt him, hot and sticky, inside me, so slick it felt like we were flying.

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Z. A. Maxfield

We fell on our sides together, and he wrapped a possessive arm around my chest and pulled me back against him. I could feel his cum dripping out of my ass, and I
liked
it. I started to laugh softly, and I can never really remember when it turned into tears.

“Damn,” he whispered. “I love you.”

“Me too.” I was snorting with laughter while tears were wetting the pillow. “Oh,
fuck you
. Me too.”

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Epilogue

Everyone I knew was in the stands for the Fourth of July baseball game between the Narcs, the official team of the Santo Ignacio police department, and the Sparks, Santo Ignacio"s firefighters.

A coin toss decided which team got to claim the town"s very own unofficial secret weapon, Ken Ashton. Ken wasn"t likely to play pro ball, ever, and we"d all felt the pain and bitter disappointment of that. He could still put on a suicide squeeze play or drop a sacrifice bunt on a Chiclet anywhere in the infield no matter who was pitching, and before every hometown game, a coin was tossed and the battle waged to get him on their team. This time, the coin toss went to the Narcs, who hated my suggestion that they wear T-shirts that bore the logo
N
for Narcs followed by SIPD for Santo Ignacio Police Department on them, but they acquiesced when they realized my mother"s fledgling bakery business had not only paid for the shirts and placed a giant ad on the back, but would be providing after-game treats as well.

I"d long since gotten over that “Casey at the Bat” nervousness when they called Ken in to pinch-hit, always with the bunt in mind and always with runners on base. Of course, the opposition was determined to walk him before he even got off the bench these days, but when they had the bases loaded like today, they didn"t have any choice but to pitch to him. He always took a practice swing in the on deck circle with a wolfish smile that frankly turned my insides to goo.

Andy, who was bearlike but fast, was limbering up to run for him if he got on base, but no one believed it would ever come to that. Getting on base wasn"t his goal, so the fact that he rarely achieved it didn"t bother him much. If there were fewer than two outs, he planned to advance the runners. Sometimes, though, with men on base late in a game, they put him on, even if there were two outs, because more than once he"d knocked a ball into the parking lot, and then he had all the time in the world to make his way around the bases. He no longer needed crutches or even a cane, but he had a 144

Z. A. Maxfield

pretty clear limp and his left foot dragged just a little. Sometimes he tripped and fell in a mass of man and muscle that was just plain hard to watch. I noticed his eyes always sought mine afterward, as if he found something there that made it all right.

Marty Flyfenster was on the mound for the Sparks. Marty was known by all to be a competitive hothead. He"d been roughed up for two base hits and given up a walk before Ken came up, and I could tell he was touchy and maybe getting a little wild. He had two outs and he was looking to make Ken the third so he could get out of the inning.

The first pitch was high and outside, and I thought he probably hadn"t meant for it to be. The second swept so close to Ken"s ear that my man had to hit the dirt. I was on my feet in an instant, but Ken, knowing that I wasn"t the coolest-headed guy around when it came to him getting dusted off by an inside pitch, turned and waved me down again.

There was a lot of muttering in the stands around me, as we were clearly in the

“everyone in this row LOVES Ken Ashton” section. My mother was sitting with Ken"s mother, Lydia, having struck up a tentative friendship when Lydia realized the futility of hoping I would go away. Mark was sitting on my other side with his father and the rest of the Ashton siblings.

“No pie for you!” my mother barked at Flyfenster in a shockingly loud voice.

Everything would have gone on like nothing had happened if Flyfenster hadn"t smirked when Ken got awkwardly back to his feet.

Whatever Ken had been planning, everything changed with that single quirk of Flyfenster"s mouth. When the next ball came over the plate, low and over the outside corner, just perfect for Ken to golf right out to the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise on the other side of the park, he pulled back and lined it right at Flyfenster"s head. To his credit, Marty put a gloved hand up and knocked it down, grabbing it in short order to fist it to first. His throw was off, though, and he one-hopped it; it took a bad bounce and went past EMT Jason Lents, the first baseman, who I knew from my accident wielded a tiny flashlight better than a baseball glove. When Lents had to chase it, Ken looked wildly around him for some clue of what to do.

Everyone was screaming. We were, by now, all on our feet, and the noise was deafening around me. Instinct took over, and Ken put his head down, rounding first base and heading for second. First one run scored, and then a second, but the real drama was Ken tearing for second base as though his ass were on fire, trying to beat the tag. His body mechanics fought him all the way, but his nature, competitive and predatory, gave second baseman Mario Cruz, another EMT, something to think about as Ken dived all-out for the bag.

The ball left Lents"s hand like a rocket as soon as he caught up with it and headed straight for Cruz"s perfectly positioned glove. Jim from Nacho"s Bar was there to call it.

Dust flew everywhere, and when the collision took place, bodies audibly slammed together and cleats skidded along in the dirt. Cruz was shorter than Ken and stockier.

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For Ken it must have been like hitting a brick wall. I could see he got his hand in, under Cruz"s glove, but I couldn"t tell whether he"d beaten a tag. Whatever else happened, the momentum of his run caused his feet to fly up when his body was stopped, and they rolled together for a second like a cartoon fight in the dirt before everything came to a thudding halt.

Jim had to jump back out of the way, but threw his hands down, spreading them wide. “SAFE!” he screamed. The stands emptied, and even though it was only the fourth inning, for all intents and purposes the game was over. Lents and Cruz joined in on a dog pile of men and women on Ken, who required Steri-Strips on his chin where he split it open. One or two of the new NSIPD T-shirts got all bloody as the Narcs held them to Ken"s face while someone ran for a first-aid kit. Cooper cranked up the PA system and started playing ZZ Top"s “Decision or Collision,” shooting me a wide grin and a thumbs-up sign.

Eventually all the chaos died down. I was sitting on the bench with Ken when Shawn and Cooper came over to give us plastic bowls of my mother"s apple pie with ice cream on top. I said, “Thank you for the pie,” to Shawn in ASL, and even though it wasn"t exactly as though I"d recited the Gettysburg Address, he hugged me hard and sat down next to me like I was his new best friend.

Izzie and Andy stopped by and sat on the ground, each with their own bowls of pie. “Your mom is a genius.” Izzie swirled her pie with her ice cream until it looked like mush. “She told me your dad filed for divorce. How is she taking that?”

“He tried to browbeat her over the phone. Told her that she owns whatever she had on her back and not to try to come back for anything else. Mom told him he had nothing she wanted, ever again. She"s tougher than I thought.”

“He has no right.” She frowned. “There are laws…”

“I think my mom is getting a kick out of spitting in his face.” I looked down at my pie, a new apple-cranberry my mother was calling Freedom Pie for the Fourth and, I suspected, for her own Independence Day. “I don"t know if he"ll let it end there; I"d be surprised if he did.” If he did, it was because he was already moving on with someone else. There had always been women in town who found my dad attractive, even with all his faults, and he"d held that over my mother"s head enough times for me to wonder if he hadn"t made good his threat.

Cooper patted my arm. “If he tries anything, everyone in this town will stand against him; you know that.”

I felt relieved because I did know that.

“They still match?” Andy asked Izzie, jerking a chin to let her know he was talking about Ken and me. “Their auras?”

“Like bookends,” she said.

Andy laughed through his nose to keep from spewing his pie. Ken brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. I"d been paying so much attention to Ken, I didn"t know