Chapter 15 – Carly
We sat on the blanket overlooking Laramie, and the view was spectacular, but I couldn’t see a thing. My eyes were closed, my lips locked with Brad’s, and this was so much better than a view of childhood memories.
We were supposed to be fighting, but God, he was hot. I tried to be angry with him. He was wrong, wasn’t he? But the way he’d grabbed me and kissed me made me forget my argument. It had been his plan, I was sure of it, but I didn’t have what it took to push him away and keep fighting.
I didn’t want to keep fighting. I wanted to fuck. The atmosphere was loaded with sexual tension, and I wanted to get rid of it. I needed a release. I needed to get rid of the tension that had been pending for years and years. I needed to get rid of all the anger that I had been harboring for Brad and all the blame that I had been putting on him.
And having sex with him now, fucking each other senseless, was the way to do it. I didn’t know how else to do it. All I knew was that whatever we were feeling now was unstoppable, and if there wasn’t a reason to stop it, then we could keep going.
I couldn’t remember what we were fighting about, anyway.
Brad’s tongue slipped into my mouth, and I sighed into his mouth, melting against him. I wrapped my arms around his neck, and he put his arms around me, pulling me against his body. I was suddenly hot, my hoodie too much. My clothes irritated my skin.
I needed him to pull my clothes from my body, to take me. Right here, right now. I had no idea where it was coming from. This wasn’t how I was, but Brad’s dominance had me panting, and I wanted him. God, I wanted him.
I didn’t wait for him to make the first move. I pulled his shirt over his head. He fumbled to get my hoodie off, my shirt sitting askew when he managed to get me out of it. He pulled my shirt off, and I was only in my bra. The air was chilly on my skin, but I didn’t care. I was blazing hot.
Brad and I lay back on the blanket, our naked upper bodies pressed against each other, tugging and groping at each other. We had passed the point of no return, and I didn’t care. There wasn’t even a voice of reason screaming at me in the back of my mind. This was it. This was all.
Brad ground his body against mine, his hard cock rubbing against my crotch, and I breathed hard through our kissing. His hand was in my hair, and he closed his fist, tugging my head back roughly so that I was just this side of pain. His mouth moved to my neck, and he nibbled and kissed my jaw to my collarbone and back. My hands were on his naked back, my nails digging into his skin, kneading him like a cat.
I managed to unbutton and unzip Brad’s jeans and worked them down his body as we rubbed up against each other. He did the same for me, and bit by bit, we undressed each other. We were relatively sheltered by the two cars on either side, but we were still out in the open. I was too taken by lust to worry too much about it.
“Hell yeah,” Brad whispered into my ear. “I love seeing your hot body.”
When we were in our underwear, Brad unclasped my bra, and I was almost completely naked. He took a nipple into his mouth, hands kneading both my breasts, and I gasped and moaned, dizzy with desire. He sucked harder, making my nipples tingle, and I gasped. I had my hands in his short hair, closing my fingers lightly on his scalp. He used his teeth, nibbling nipple, tugging on it with his teeth until I cried out. It was pure pleasure, and it drove me wild.
I rubbed his cock through the material of his boxers. He was hard and firm, the material wet with his arousal, and I wanted him inside me. I thought about sucking him off, taking him in my mouth and giving him the time of his life, but we were too urgent, too eager for each other to take it that slowly.
The thought had barely formed in my mind when Brad abandoned my breasts and pulled my panties off, getting rid of them. I wondered briefly if we would be able to find them again, but the thought disappeared when Brad cupped my pussy and his fingers slid into my wet slit.
“You’re so wet,” he said, and his words were like fire on my skin.
I shivered when his fingers slipped over my clit, moving in circles, working me up into a frenzy. He pushed his fingers into me, and I whimpered as he finger-fucked me.
With his other hand, he played with my clit until I was putty in his hands, whimpering and moaning as he made me cum. He looked down at my pussy, spread open and dripping wet for him, while he said, “I love how much I make you cum.”
He removed his hand, pushed me down, and positioned himself between my legs. The dominance he was displaying made me shiver, in a good way. He hurried to put the condom on. I was wet enough to be able to skip the foreplay. Brad pushed into me, sliding in with ease, and I gasped as he pushed in all the way to the hilt. I shuddered around him and wrapped my legs around his body.
Brad didn’t wait for an invitation. He started fucking me hard and fast, pushing in and out with a speed that left me breathless. My breathing was only encouraged by his chest on mine and his thrusting pushing air in and out of my body.
“Get on top of me,” Brad breathed, and before I knew it, he spun me around so that I was on top of him, his cock still inside of me.
We barely broke our rhythm. I started riding him, bucking my hips back and forth, sliding his cock in and out of my body faster and faster. The first orgasm came crashing down on me, rocking my body and tightening my core so much that Brad gasped. I paused only a second before I carried on rocking my hips, but now I was more sensitive, and it was another sensation altogether.
Brad wrapped his arms around my hips and held me in place, my chest on his, my mouth by his ear so that he heard my moaning and breathing. He hammered into me from beneath, fucking me hard, holding me in place as he used my body.
I loved it.
I didn’t know how much time passed. I was lost in the feeling of him pounding in and out of my body, making me numb in all the right places.
Another orgasm shattered through me, and I collapsed on Brad’s chest, unable to keep myself up any longer. Brad rolled us over again, and he was on top, my legs wide open and him between them, pushing into me again. He resumed the pace once again.
There was no room for soft and gentle, not tonight. We had done that before, and there would be a time for that again, but tonight was about consuming each other until all the tension was gone and there was nothing left but the two of us, raw and vulnerable and free.
I orgasmed again. This time, I was starting to become numb and tired. I couldn’t keep up the pace. Brad was still going strong, though. He was pumping in and out of me, and even though I was spent, the sexual bliss that came with his thrusting was still amazing.
I moaned and gasped and let him have his way with me. His chest was on my breasts, our skins slick with sweat, our breathing hard and cumbersome. I held onto his shoulders as he thrust into me, and I moaned and panted and cried out.
Brad started pumping into me harder and faster. I hadn’t known it was possible, but he thrust into me even faster, kicking into a new gear that I hadn’t known he had. This whole time, it had been for me. Now, it was for him.
He pushed harder into me, hammering into me. A moment later, he pushed himself into me as deep as he could, and he came with a groan. I felt him jerking and spasming deep inside me, and I shuddered.
The orgasm finally died down, and we lay in a tangle of limbs, breathing hard. He was getting soft, and he slipped out of me, still on top of me, his head on my shoulder while he removed the condom.
“Hey,” I whispered, putting my hand on his cheeks. “We have to get dressed.”
I was getting painfully aware of our nakedness, of how exposed we were out here in nature, butt naked and having sex.
“Yeah,” Brad agreed, reluctantly.
He rolled off me, and I sat up. A flash went off, and I was blinded for a moment.
“What the fuck?” Brad shouted, and he jumped up. I grabbed the blanket and wrapped it around my body as another flash went off.
“You piece of shit!” Brad shouted and ran toward the flashing camera.
A man stood at the start of the dirt road with a camera around his neck, snapping photos as Brad ran stark naked toward him, his hand swinging in the air.
The cameraman turned around and ran away. I heard a motorbike engine start and pull off, and Brad screaming and shouting profanities. I sat on the blanket, frozen for a second. It had been a camera.
He’d had a camera, and he’d taken photos of us. Naked. On top of each other. It didn’t matter that the blanket was around me now. It hadn’t been, then.
I had been seen naked with Brad, and they had photos.
Brad came back. He didn’t seem to care at all that he was naked. I snapped back to reality and scrambled for my clothes. I got dressed as quickly as I could.
“He got away,” Brad said. He seemed upset about it. I was, too.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Carly, don’t run away,” he said, grabbing my wrist when I tried to run to my car. “Please, we have to talk about this.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about it. There’s nothing to say. This was a terrible mistake. I shouldn’t have come here.”
“The cameraman was out of line completely, but you can’t tell me this was a mistake.”
I shook my head. I felt like crying. I had no control over this, and it scared the hell out of me. A fight had turned into passion, and now, it had turned into a nightmare. I had to get out of here and into my own room, hiding away from the world that had now seen a side of me that I hadn’t even known existed until tonight.
“Let me go, Brad,” I said.
“Not until we talk.”
I yanked my hand back with a shout. “I said let me go!”
I stormed to my car and got into it, throwing it into reverse. Brad jumped out of the way. He knew I wouldn’t look out for him. When I made up my mind about something, I could be really set in my ways.
I raced to the dirt road that led down the hill. I hurried as fast as I could, and left Brad alone in the dark on the hill that had once been our spot.
It was all ruined now, of course. It wasn’t our spot anymore. It was a place of nightmares. Everything had gone wrong there tonight, and I didn’t want to go back. Ever. Again.
Chapter 16 – Brad
My phone rang shrilly and incessantly until I rolled over and snatched it off the nightstand. I lay on my stomach, my face in the pillows, and pressed the phone against my ear.
“Do you get a kick out of doing exactly what I asked you not to do?” Kina’s voice asked, and she sounded pissed.
“What?” I asked, trying to figure out what she was talking about. My head was still foggy with sleep.
“Is this some kind of joke to you? I’m helping you out, free of charge, and you’re throwing it back in my face.”
I sat up, rubbing my eyes. “Kina, slow down,” I said. “What happened?”
She laughed sarcastically. “It has to be nice living in the land of oblivion.”
I heard Jacob in the background, telling Kina to calm down.
“The hell I’m going to calm down. If he wants to be a dick, fine, but this comes back to me. And I’m not even getting paid for it.”
She was talking to Jacob, but she hadn’t taken the phone away from her ear, and I heard every word of it loud and clear.
“Still here,” I said, getting out of bed.
“Good, so you heard it,” she snapped. “I’m curious, why did you bother to call me about your image back in Laramie if you don’t care at all?”
I shook my head. “What are you talking about? Of course, I care. I’ve been trying my best to defuse the situation here.”
Kina laughed again, and I was starting to get irritated with it.
“Yeah, sure. You defused it perfectly. Having a date with a local is exactly what you need to do to get the press off your case. Well done, Brad.”
God, she was bitchy when she was angry. How did Jacob deal with this? I heard him plead with her to calm down in the background, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to happen. She was angry, and if she knew I’d seen Carly last night, she had found out somewhere else because I hadn’t told Jacob that I was going to see Carly. Unless she was referring to our drinks together, which was where the press must have seen us in the first place.
“I’m allowed to go out with people,” I said.
“Sure, you are,” Kina said. “But you can’t do what everyone else does when you’re being watched like a hawk. You can’t mess around like that.”
I shook my head. “It was just a date, Kina. Surely that’s not a crime, even when the world watches me?”
“Yeah, well a date is fine, but getting naked in public isn’t quite what the world had in mind.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, but the moment I asked it, last night rushed back to me. The photo that they had gotten, the flash, the man on the motorcycle.
“Just hold on,” I said to Kina.
I walked into the living room, picked up the remote, and switched on the television. I flipped to the news channel. And there it was. The reason Kina was so mad at me. Photos of me and Carly on the blanket last night were scattered all over the show. Our bodies were blurred out in all the right places, but it wasn’t hard to guess what we’d been doing.
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Kina said coldly. I could understand why she was so angry now. I had done exactly what she’d asked me not to do. It hadn’t been on purpose, but there it was.
The whole thing last night had felt like a bad dream. I’d found out the hard way that my attempts to shake the press hadn’t worked. I’d been so proud of myself that I’d gotten away from them, believing that my car had been fast enough, that my driving had been skilled enough.
Like an idiot, I had believed I’d won. As if there was ever winning against the paparazzi. They always knew how to find someone, how to get to the bottom of a story, no matter how invasive they had to be.
I should have known better. Instead, I was plastered all over the news with Carly, and we were both naked. I had subjected her to the side effects of being with someone famous in a way much worse than it would have been if we’d gone dancing together.
There was so much that needed to be done now to clear this up. It was so much harder to get rid of bad publicity than to earn good publicity, and this was very bad.
For a moment, I wondered if I should get a PR Manager of my own, someone that could help me out the way Kina had helped Jacob when he’d been transferred from Texas with an assault charge on his name and very few fans that cared about him.
“I’ll call you back, Kina,” I said. “I’m sorry about this.”
“Don’t be sorry, be careful,” she said. “We’ll have to fix this.”
“I’ll figure something out.”
I hung up. I wondered how this would impact me. It put me in a bad light, sure. There would be gossip for months, not to mention that they would hunt Carly down now to find out who she was and where she fit into the picture.
The upside was that it had nothing to do with alcohol or drugs, so it wouldn’t directly affect my game, but Coach Rudi wasn’t happy with his players being on the news for anything. Even scandals with women, which was what the Sharks seemed to be infamous for most of the time. At least three of my teammates had been involved in scandals with women that I knew about.
What bothered me the most was how this would affect Carly. Her life would never be the same again. If this blew over— and that might take time— she would always be marked as the woman who was caught sleeping with Brad Williams, famous football player. She would carry this with her for a long time to come, and that was what I’d hoped to avoid. God, what a mess.
I dialed her number and waited for it to ring. I hoped she would answer. I needed to talk to her. I needed to find out if she was okay. No doubt, she had seen the news already. She had been frantic last night about the photo, horrified that she had been caught in such a compromising position.
She wasn’t answering her phone. I had half expected it, although it pissed me off. I needed to talk to her. When something like this happened, we had to stick together, not ignore each other.
When I got her voicemail, I hung up without leaving a message and dialed again. If I kept ringing her, she had to answer. She had to pick up the phone and talk to me. I hated it when she was ignoring me like this. It wasn’t the first time. Lately, it seemed like it was all she did.
When I’d tried a few times, I decided to stop. It was no use if she wasn’t going to answer. Maybe she wasn’t with her phone, and I would end up looking like a creeper. I doubted she wasn’t near her phone, though.
My phone beeped with a text message a few minutes later.
I don’t want to talk to you. You’ve ruined my life.
I was suddenly furious. Who the hell did she think she was, blaming me for this? If she didn’t want to talk, we could text.
It takes two to tango, sweetheart. I wasn’t naked and willing all by myself.
Maybe it was a little snappy for me, but I was angry that she was blaming me for this. It wasn’t my fault. I had tried to protect her, after all. I had thought our spot would be secluded enough. I had thought that nothing would go wrong. Everything I had done was to protect her. Turned out that I had thought wrong.
That’s rich, Brad. Leave me alone.
She wasn’t even going to fight with me. I wanted something— anything— from her. I needed to talk to her, so we could sort it out. At least that, if nothing else. I sent more messages, but she stopped replying. This was what she did best, I realized. She withdrew.
When her dad had dragged her away all those years ago, I had felt guilty for not fighting enough for her. When I’d walked away from her on graduation day, I had felt like a fool for leaving the girl I loved. This time, it was all her. She was walking away from this. She wasn’t fighting for it.
But why should she? What were we? I had no idea where we stood, and whatever we might have been before was over now. I was sure of it.
I sank down onto the couch, my head in my hands. I knew this feeling too well. The feeling of losing Carly. The feeling of being talked about and judged by people who didn’t know me.
I hated it when something like this happened. Until now, I had been lucky. I hadn’t been involved in any scandals. That had mainly been because I hadn’t been interested in much, other than playing my game and doing my training and spending time with the few friends I had. Since Carly, I even been with any other women. I couldn’t get her out of my head for all these years and now that I’d been able to be with her again, I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life with that same issue.
Was this what it had been like for Jacob, as well as for Hanson and Brian? My three closest friends on my team had all been through scandals with women.
A knock on the front door pulled me out of the spiral of my thoughts. My mom wasn’t home, it seemed, so I got up and walked to the door.
When I opened it, Charles Donovan stood in front of me. He was seething with rage, and I had seen this look on him before. He had that same look in his eyes that he’d had when he’d pinned me against the wall and threatened me, telling me to stay away from Carly. I was pretty sure he probably brought a gun again.
I opened my mouth to speak, but he didn’t let me get that far. His fist shot out, and he punched me in the nose with a force that made my head snap back. I staggered to keep my balance.
“I told you not to come around here,” he said, sneering at me.
I pressed my hand against my nose, and it came away red and wet. I was gushing blood onto my shirt. My nose ached, and my head throbbed. Charles turned around and stormed away.
Maybe I deserved that. I closed the front door and walked to the bathroom, my shirt pressed against my nose. It was full of blood, anyway. I tried to get the bleeding to stop with tissues and a cold, wet washcloth. Still, it took a while for the bleeding to stop.
When I finally managed it, I turned and inspected my face in the mirror. I had blood on my upper lip and chin, and my shirt was stained with so much blood it looked like I’d been shot. My head still ached, but it was no match for how horrid I felt.
I was reliving that day, six years ago, all over again. He hadn’t assaulted me then, not like this. It had been scary, but it hadn’t hurt. This time, it hurt like a bitch. Not only physically, but my ego was pretty damn dented.
I didn’t blame him for hitting me, though. Not this time. His daughter was naked, all over the news, and it was all my fault. This time, he was within his right to tell me to stay away from her. What was worse was that he hadn’t even needed to tell me to stay away from her. She was enforcing that all by herself, telling me to leave her alone.
I picked up my phone and tried to call her again. It was like Kina said: I did exactly what I was told not to do. Pity that Carly still didn’t answer. Not that I’d expected her to. I’m just not the type of guy to give up.