Sacked (Gridiron #1) Read online

  I’ve done this so many times by myself that the pleasure from it is a little rote, but not now. I feel the blaze torch me from my legs up into my brain. The burn inside me is that pleasure-pain you get when you butt up against the first barrier of your body that says no, but you push on anyway and that endorphin rush floods you as a reward for your persistence.

  “Was it the dancing?” she asks huskily, like she’s conducting a scientific study.

  The cock in my hand grows harder than ever, and I’m leaking so much pre-come I don’t even need lube.

  “It’s you, baby,” I tell her. “It’s all you. Your tight body rubbing up against mine. The smell of the honey of your hair. Your sweet lips pressing against my chest when you thought I wasn’t paying attention. All you.”

  “I should leave,” she says, but makes no move in the direction of the bedroom. If anything, I swear she opens the bathroom door even more.

  I slow my strokes down to a snail’s pace, squeezing hard at the base so I don’t blow. “Only if you want to.”

  “I-I’m sorry,” she stammers out. Her eyes glue to my dick.

  “Are you?” She’s not even a little sorry. She’s intrigued as all hell. I want to grab her arm and pull her against me, but I know touching her while I’m in this condition is asking for it.

  “Kind of but…obviously I’m not leaving.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it. Her embarrassment at enjoying this is too fucking much, but my laughter doesn’t kill off a gram of my arousal. As long as she’s standing there enjoying the show, my body is primed for her. “You don’t have to leave. This is all for you.”

  11

  Ellie

  His voice is a low, husky sound that plucks at the already sensitive nerves under my skin. A small sliver of his chiseled abdomen is on display where his T-shirt rucks up. A sparse trail of dark hair arrows down to a shadowed space covered half by his hand and half by his pants. His hand pulls at his dick in hard, swift jerks, and I know in the space a heartbeat two things: I get why it’s called jacking it, and I’m not leaving unless the entire Warriors football team comes up and drags me away.

  The most illicit, hot porn scene I have ever laid eyes on is taking place in full HD color in front of me. If the house went up in flames at this precise moment, I’d burn down with it because I can’t tear my gaze away.

  The round, red head of his dick plays peek-a-boo with each twist of his wrist. I notice that he pauses right before he hits the top, almost flicking the ridged area of his circumcised head with a large finger, and that he drags his hand downward with more force that I’d think would feel pleasurable. Not for the first time, I’m struck by how very large he is.

  Huge is not at all an overstatement. His fist is big, but it doesn’t completely cover his shaft. I clench my legs together, part in fear and part in arousal. Sweet baby Jesus, Tumblr did not prepare me for this.

  “How does it feel?” The question slips out before I can stop it.

  “Good. Real good. Better since you arrived.” His wrist flicks again in steady, even motions. The muscles in his forearms ripple with every down stroke and bunch together at the upstroke. He looks so beautiful and profane at the same time.

  I struggled to gulp one breath after the other. There’s no air in this bathroom. It’s sucked up by Masters’ presence. I let out a shaky stream of air.

  Masters groans and I feel it. The sound is like a touch, winding its way across my body and then under my skin.

  “What are you thinking about?” I’m so screwed.

  He doesn’t hesitate. “You. I’m thinking about you. I’m thinking about laying my tongue on your body for the first time. What you’d taste like. I’d want to lick you everywhere. I want to know what every inch of you tastes like.”

  I must have whimpered because Masters lets out another low, rough noise. “You turned on, baby?”

  I press my lips together, but can’t stop my head from nodding. If he touches me, he’ll know how aroused I am. My skin burns. My panties are wet. I’ve never felt so turned on and he hasn’t even laid a finger on me.

  “I’m glad.” His voice sounds full of aching want. “I’m so close, baby. Help me. How would you want me to take care of you?”

  “I…I don’t know,” I stutter out because this is completely new territory for me. I’ve never watched anyone touch themselves, at least not in real life. I’ve never heard anyone, ever, ask how they could take care of me. The sad truth is I don’t have much experience with what feels good either.

  The guys I’ve slept with—all three of them—have been entirely forgettable. I can barely conjure the face of the guy I slept with the summer before I went to college. My junior college hookup was a guy I worked with in Alumni and Development.

  “Nothing? You have no requests?” His motion has slowed again, the fierceness in his face lessening, which means he’s not as tuned into this moment.

  A fierce yearning grips me. I want him to come. I feel ownership over his orgasm, as if I watch this then I can own him, and in that moment, I’d do anything to stoke his fire. There’s an honesty in his voice, the clear way he looks at me with need that I have never seen before, that loosens my lips and words that I have never spoken spill out of me.

  “I know what I’d like to do to you,” I begin.

  A small smile appears at the corners of his mouth. “That’s good. Tell me.”

  “I’m not sure if I could take much in. You’re…big.” That’s an understatement, like saying he’s good at football. “I’d have to use my hands. I hear the tip is very sensitive.”

  He nods. “Yeah. Right under here.”

  His finger flicks that spot under the ruddy head of his dick. It’s so red it almost looks painful. His body quakes as he roughly jerks his hand up and down his shaft. I want to rush over and push his hands aside. Let me. I can do this really well.

  Some vestige of self-protection exists, because my feet are nailed to the floor. I’m not leaving, but I can’t get closer either.

  “I’d lay my tongue there then,” I say, shocking myself at the brazen words falling out of my mouth. I blame this on Masters too. His eyes gleam with approval.

  “There isn’t a spot on your sweet body, Ellie, which I wouldn’t want to lay my tongue on.” His hand goes down. “I’m standing here wondering what you taste like.” Up again. “What the skin behind your ear feels like against my tongue.” Down. I feel dizzy. His tongue creeps out to rub against the middle of his lower lip. “Whether you are honey or mint or—” He breaks off with a deep guttural moan as if the idea feels too much for him. “I suspect I’ll be addicted.”

  I’ll be addicted. As if it’s foregone conclusion for him, and those words, full of want and need and determination, are their own kind of aphrodisiac.

  “I’d like to taste you, too. You look…weighty. Like, you on my tongue would be substantial.”

  “That a good thing, baby?” His eyes are almost closed—just mere slits as he stares at me.

  “Yeah,” I croak. I clear my throat and try again. “Yes. It’d feel like you made a mark.”

  His eyes flutter shut and he swallows hard. I watch mesmerized as his Adam’s apple bobs up and down his throat. “Fuck, yes. I’d like to mark you.” He speeds up, his hand moving faster, squeezing harder. “I’d like to mark you with my mouth and with my come until everyone and anyone who came into contact with you would know you were mine.”

  I gasp in shock at the same moment that he begins to come. He throws his head back as the long, ropey seed jets from his body into his waiting hand. He looks amazing, and I’ve never wanted anything so badly in my short life.

  My body trembles from the aftershock of his orgasm. His eyes drop to mine—a laser beam holding me as captive as any rope.

  “How was it?” I manage to eke out, despite having witnessed the most erotic scene of my entire life. The hoarseness of my voice, the genuine interest, takes away any flippancy I try to inject.

  “Bett
er than I’ve ever felt before,” he says again with his disarming honesty. “But not as good as it will be with you.”

  12

  Ellie

  I'd like to say that I stand there boldly and have a rational discussion with Masters about what happened. I don’t. Oh, I stand there and gawk while he flushes some tissue down the toilet and washes his hands. I get a little lightheaded when he reaches down, calmly tucks his still sizeable shaft inside his shorts, and zips up. But the moment he takes a step in my direction, my hypnosis breaks and I flee like a chicken chased by a whole den of foxes. I hear him call my name, but I ignore it and sprint out of the bedroom. At the bottom of the stairs, I swell with relief when I see Jack leaning against the wall outside the room where he’d been playing the video game.

  I grab his arm. “I’m ready to go.”

  I don’t look behind me, afraid that I might see Masters and I’ll be caught up in his tractor beam of a personality. Jack, the prize brother that he is, doesn’t ask me a single question, but slips his phone into his front pocket and follows me out of the house.

  “You didn't even want to see where I'm living?”

  It’s not a sincere question. He wants to know why the hell I’m trotting down Carpenter Avenue like the house behind us caught on fire.

  “Yes, tomorrow. Or the day after.” Or whenever Masters isn’t around.

  It's as if he reads my mind, because he asks, “What’s going on with you and Masters?”

  “Me and Masters? There’s nothing going on between the two of us. I barely know him,” I squeak. Truth is, I actually know a lot about him. He’s a good—no great—college football player. He’s got a sly sense of humor. He’s a good sport. He claims to be a virgin. He told me the hottest sexual experience of his life was me watching him masturbate. That lightheaded feeling comes over me again and I trip.

  Jack catches me and sets me upright. With his hands around my shoulders like iron, I can’t do anything but stand there while he looks at me searchingly. “It didn't seem like nothing when he whispered in your ear before dinner. He made half the table move so he could sit across from you. You disappeared for a very long time and Ahmed said he saw Masters practically lose his virginity on the dance floor to a brunette.”

  “Why does that brunette have to be me?” I pretend to be hurt by the accusation, but it doesn’t play with Jack.

  “Ellie,” he says in gentle consternation, “I may be a terrible writer, and it might take me a couple hours to get through thirty pages in a textbook, but I can still add two and two together. I’m not dumb.”

  “I know you’re not dumb.”

  Jack hates it when his intelligence gets insulted. In middle school, he got flagged as slow, which infuriated our dad. He threw a fit, both at school and at home, which embarrassed and humiliated Jack. I started helping Jack then, slowly and silently. Anything to keep him from getting yelled at by Dad, anything to keep that destroyed look off Jack’s face.

  It started innocently by proofing a paper, inserting commas, correcting homonyms, stuff like that. My mother caught me, and I thought I would get into big trouble. Instead she came in later and told me that I needed to do it for every paper. Then every open book test. Thank goodness I didn’t have to take the SAT for him. I’m not sure how we would have pulled that one off.

  Jack doesn’t know. When I finished “proofing,” I’d put all the papers in a pretty binding and Jack would turn those in.

  If he found out, he would kill me. He would absolutely murder me and leave my body out for the crows. I hate my parents, and worse, I hate myself for agreeing to the masquerade. Please let him have a breakout season.

  “You know I don’t care. I want to know. I’d prefer to hear it from you than from someone in the locker room.”

  “I thought you guys had a no girlfriends, wives, or sisters rule in the locker room.”

  Jack scoffs. “That rule is fucked constantly. Back at Wyoming, one girl dated three of the players. If the players go there, then they have to chill out about the repercussions, and they did. It’s not ideal, but shit like that happens. If you were interested in Masters, I’d be okay.”

  “How can you be?” I explode. “Don’t you remember what happened?”

  “I remember that Travis Farrington was an asshole who threw away a chance at a state championship because he couldn’t get in your pants. That’s on him, not you.”

  “Jack, you had to go to junior college for two years before you got your D1 scholarship!”

  “So?”

  “So!”

  “Yeah, so? I went to the best juco in the nation. I played a shit ton of pro style, spread offense football. I racked up god-like numbers and got an offer from the best college program in the nation. Now, I’m a starting tight end for a team favored to at least make the playoffs, if not win it all outright. By my calculations, I should send Farrington a fucking gift basket. I won’t because he’s a douchebag. Look, if you want to be with Masters, be with him. Don’t let this stupid football thing stop you. Shit, he plays on defense. He’s not in charge of who throws me the ball and when. Plus that guy wants to win more than anything. As long as I’m valuable on the field, I could fuck goats in the locker room.”

  “Is that a quote? Because it sounds like something Masters would say.”

  Jack smirks. “There’s nothing going on, but you know the types of things he’d say?”

  My shoulders slump. “I don't know what’s going on. It’s complicated. I didn’t mean to dance with him or anything. He came out of nowhere and wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Jack’s face tightens, so I hurry and add, “Not like that. He didn’t force me. I just…” I spread my hands. “I have no explanation for it.”

  “I do.” He squeezes my shoulders and his quiet support seeps into me. “You wanted to, and that’s enough. You don’t have to have a reason. I already told you the past doesn’t mean shit to me.” He releases me and then slings an arm around my shoulder, propelling me down the sidewalk toward my apartment. “You and me got a new start at junior college, and we can keep it going here. Only two more years, and Mom and Dad won’t have any say in our lives.” Jack toes the line for me, too. “Enjoy yourself here. If Masters is the guy you want, if he wants you to be his first,” Jack chuckles at this, “then you should go for it. Just don’t tell me any details.”

  Oh, Jack. His kindness kills me. Every giving, unselfish word that comes out of his mouth drives the stake deeper into my guilty heart. It does exactly the opposite of what his motivational speech intends to. If anything, I need to stay away from Masters even more. “It’s more than Farrington.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Because you always look at everything in a positive light. Because it’s naïve to think that Farrington did something unusual. If Masters decided your team should turn against you, then the entire team would shut you out and it would get a hundred times worse. Because I’m cheating for you and I’m scared that if I get close to someone on the team, my secret will slip out and that can’t happen.

  Those are all the reasons I can’t give voice to. So I settle for a response that I’m not sure that Jack will even buy but it’s the only one I have right now.

  “I just want someone who’s not an athlete.”

  Jack sighs. “If that’s how you want to play it. We drew the short end of the stick when it comes to parents, but I’ve always had the team. You’ve only had me. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to have another person on your side, Ellie. Besides, you could do a lot worse than Masters. He’s a good leader. Very chill in the locker room. Easy to talk to. He knows everyone’s names, even the redshirt freshmen.”

  “You date him if he’s so wonderful,” I retort. I want to talk myself out of my stupid attraction to Masters, not develop it.

  “He doesn’t swing that way,” Jack grins. “Plus, I don’t do virgins. Too clingy.”

  “You’re a jerk, Jack.”

  He laughs and ruffles my hair. I wish I could lean into
him, but Jack is right. I’ve relied on him far too long. It’s time for me to make my own way.

  13

  Knox

  I slept like a baby. After Ellie left, I went straight to bed. I wasn’t lying when I told her it was the best orgasm I’d ever had. In fact, I’m a little concerned that I won’t be able to come without her around, now that I know what it could feel like.

  I suspect that jacking off is all I’ll be doing in the foreseeable future. She’s skittish, and if I rush too fast I might be on the ass end of a hit it and quit it if she ever did give in.

  About two seconds after my orgasm ran through me like a freight train, her eager, captive expression turned to embarrassment and then apprehension. I’m not sure if she is more afraid of me or what she’s feeling but we’ve got plenty of time to work that through.

  In the morning, I get up and run five miles like it’s nothing, and then meet Matty at the weight room.

  “That smoothie this morning tasted fucking awesome. What d’you think she put in it?” he asks.

  I think back. “Spinach, because it looked green. Banana. Maybe strawberries?”

  “Papaya,” Hammer grunts between blows of the sledgehammer on the tire. “Got to be because it tasted sweet.”

  “Papaya? Where the fuck did that come from?” Matty scoffs. “It was pineapple.”

  “We had pineapple three days ago, and this tasted sweeter, so it was something else.” Hammer jabs twenty pounds of iron in Matty’s direction. “Papaya is a sweeter fruit.”

  “Where the fuck are they getting papaya?” Matty sits up and places his hands on his hips.

  “Same place they’re getting the pineapple and bananas, dumbshit.”