Playing Hurt - By Holly Schindler Page 0,73

space, not when we wrap our arms around each other, pull our bodies together. Somehow, though, even with our chests pressed tightly against each other, we aren’t close enough. Clint pulls off my cami and peels his damp T-shirt from his glistening chest. Skin on skin, and still, it isn’t what either of us need.

He tugs at my shorts, pulling them down to my ankles. I kick them away and slip my fingertips into the sides of my panties. I’m completely, gloriously naked. Clint’s breath draws goose bumps as he kisses the back of my neck … my arms.

We tangle around each other like lady slippers twisting to move beyond the shade. Searching out the heat of our passion the way a flower seeks the heat of the sun.

His mouth is everywhere—my breasts, my nipples. My hands follow the hard muscles in his abdomen. We lie intertwined on our bed as the mist continues to paint our bodies with a heavy coating of dew. Our hair shimmers in the fragrant spray.

We rock together like two boats bobbing on a current. He chases running droplets of mist down my skin with his tongue. I race my fingers down his legs, vowing not to let a centimeter of his skin go untouched.

Mist and sweat and desire tumble down my back and breasts and arms.

This is right. The words keep swirling through my mind like a whirlpool.

Clint quickly rolls on a condom he’s pulled from his own cast-aside shorts, his breath heavy with emotion.

Don’t stop, I tell myself as I straddle his gorgeous body. I can feel him against the inside of my leg, every bit as feverish as the heat that pulses inside me.

“Chelsea,” he moans. “Please—”

He doesn’t have to ask again.

Clint

final play

I’ve got this buzz—my arms feel loose, my legs like mush. Drunk on Chelsea. Even after we leave the waterfall, after I drop her off, drive back home. After I spend hours in my own bed, staring up at the ceiling of my room, the buzz doesn’t die. I relive it, what happened at the waterfall. But every time I do relive it, my buzz only gets stronger.

Wow. Stupid, but that’s what I just keep thinking—wow.

The next morning, Mom announces she’s scheduled an appointment with our family doctor to have my shoulder looked at. Make sure I’m not overdoing it.

For God’s sake. On Chelsea’s last day of vacation.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asks in the waiting room as I jiggle my leg and snort and rub my face.

I shake my head. Not like I’m going to admit I’ve got a thing going with a vacationer. One whose dad trusted me to be professional.

By the time the appointment’s finally over, and Mom drives back home, and I grab the keys to the truck and I get back to the resort, it’s practically dinner time.

I check the dining room of the lodge first, grateful to find the entire Keyes family crowded around a table, an emptied plate in front of each of them.

“We could totally move here,” Brandon is saying. “There’s got to be a high school for me to go to, and you guys could bring White Sugar up here—I bet you could supply the lodge with all their desserts. Mom said herself that Chef Charlie’s not a baker. You’d rack it up. And Chelsea’s going to be gone anyway.”

It’s silly, but I start to get excited by the idea. Chelsea coming home to Minnesota during her semester breaks, the two of us having Christmas together …

But her dad laughs. “Think you’re just trying to hold on to your good thing at Pike’s,” he says.

Brandon shrugs, coolly.

“’Course, you realize you wouldn’t have much of an audience in the winter,” Earl says, passing by their table. “Snows so much here it reaches the eaves of this very lodge. Nobody’d be able to get outta their houses to come hear you.”

I catch Chelsea’s eye, raise my hand in greeting.

She gives me this smile—the kind of soft grin that can only come from a woman who’s seen you from the inside out.

Brandon and her parents follow her gaze, stare right at me.

“You’re leaving?” Brandon asks, as Chelsea’s chair squeals across the tile. “She’s leaving, but I can’t play one more gig,” he says loudly.

“We have to get up at the crack of dawn to get back home, bud,” his dad tells him. “The way the Dwellers play, you guys would still be onstage when we need to pull out of town. Okay? It’s best