Page 16 of Chasing Riddick

Alexa Play: Riptide by Vance Joy

T he version of Riddick that was relaxed and screwing around in the water was a totally different person from Coach Riddick.

He still didn’t smile, but he was softer somehow. Like the water was his safe place as much as it was mine. If I didn’t know any better, I would almost say he was having fun teaching me silly tricks.

He stayed way longer than an hour, and the sun was setting by the time we caught our last waves of the day back to shore.

“Good work, shark bait,” he said as we returned our boards to the lean-to.

Since our little Finding Nemo discussion, he’d taken to calling me that stupid nickname, and I’d be lying if it didn’t make butterflies erupt in my gut every time he said it.

It made me feel special .

Connected to him in some way.

Like we shared some inside joke that was just between the two of us.

I smiled at him as he toweled off, sliding my board next to his on the rack.

He’d made me switch my shortboard out for a longboard, explaining it was easier to hang ten on something with a bigger counterweight.

With his direction, I had the trick down within a few hours, and I couldn’t wait to show off to the rest of the surf rats after work tomorrow.

“Thanks, Riddick,” I beamed at him. He pulled on his T-shirt, and his lip was curled at the corner.

“No need to thank me, Finn. You earned it.”

Unable to contain my massive smile at his praise, I nodded jovially.

“You wanna stay for dinner? I was planning on making a feast, you know, so maybe I can graduate from shark bait to shark entree.”

His eyebrows rose in surprise, and I swore he almost laughed. Disappointment swirled in my gut as he obviously repressed the urge to smile, but I didn’t say anything about it.

“I’ve got food at home, but I’ll help you cook,” he replied easily, handing me his towel so I could dry off too.

His easy acceptance of my invitation surprised me, and I nodded, still grinning.

“Okay, great! I’m kind of a shit cook,” I admitted, and Riddick frowned as he followed me into the shack.

“The breakfast you made looked good.”

“Yeah, but anyone can make breakfast. It’s just frying shit up in a pan. Anything more advanced than that, and I get all turned around and distracted,” I admitted.

“Distracted?”

“Yeah. Focusing on stuff that doesn’t interest me is, like, really hard.

I usually need to make a game of it or something.

My mom was really good at that. She’s the one that taught me how to make breakfast, actually.

She wasn’t home for dinners much, so I was usually on my own and just made frozen shit.

She died before she could teach me how to make anything good from scratch, which sucks.

She was a really good cook; she just never had time for it.

She was always working, trying to keep a roof over our heads,” I rambled, and I opened my condo-sized fridge and pulled out a packet of chicken breasts.

Riddick pursed his lips as he considered what I’d said, then squeezed my shoulder.

“Give me those,” he ordered, gently taking the chicken away from me. He placed the styrofoam package in the sink and scanned the kitchen before settling on a bowl filled with veggies I had purchased the day before.

“Do you know how to dice an onion?” he asked me, glancing over his shoulder. There was no snideness in his tone. He was genuinely asking me, which made me feel better about the fact that I wasn’t really sure if I did.

“I think so? That’s when you chop ‘em real small, right?”

He nodded and tossed me an onion.

“Show me what you got.”

I pulled out a cutting board and got to work. He stopped me almost immediately.

“If you cut it like that, your eyes are going to be leaking all night,” he informed me. “This is the root, and it’s where that chemical that makes you tear up lives. The trick is to avoid cutting the root right off. Here…”

He sliced the onion in half and laid it face down before cutting off the end opposite the root.

Making quick work of the peel, he passed the knife into the flesh of the onion horizontally, then vertically, cutting a grid into it.

He did this all while pointedly avoiding cutting too close to the root.

“Now, you slice it like you normally would, and look, it cuts apart into a perfect, even dice.”

“Woah! That’s sweet!” I said, genuinely impressed. He’d reduced half of the onion to tiny pieces so quickly and efficiently. Usually, when I cut up veggies, I just attacked them without any rhyme or reason.

“Now you try,” he said, handing me the knife .

I nodded, taking the utensil from him and doing my best to mimic what he’d shown me. Everything was going well until I got to the part where I was supposed to slice.

“No, not like that; you’re going to chop your fingers off!” He barked, a tinge of alarm coloring his usually calm, even tone.

“What? Then how?—”

Suddenly, he was behind me, caging me in with his arms.

He lay each of his hands over mine, and I shivered as he rumbled instructions into my ear.

“Curl your fingers on your left hand… like this, so you don’t accidentally cut yourself,” he murmured, his hot breath sending sheets of goosebumps down the side of my neck.

“Now, run your knife through the onion; you don’t even need to take the tip off the cutting board; just use a rocking motion…”

I had a sudden visual of me using a rocking motion while grinding on top of him, and my dick swelled between my legs again.

“Focus, Finn,” he hummed in my ear, and I pretended not to notice the fact that he was so close that the tip of his nose was pressed into my hair.

I swallowed embarrassingly loudly, and I was sure he heard it. Powering forward, I tried to focus on the motion he was guiding my hand through.

“Good. Yeah, perfect. Just like that,” he murmured as I diced through the onion, my movements becoming more steady and confident with each swipe of the knife.

God. Why was everything he said so fucking hot?

We were cutting an onion, for Christ’s sake. It shouldn’t be turning me on this much!

He told me to stop a few inches before the root and stepped away. I felt cold, suddenly, missing the way his warm, hard body had been pressed up against mine .

“There. Now you know how to properly dice an onion. Let’s do a sweet pepper next, and then we’ll season the chicken. Did you buy any rice?” he asked, completely unaffected by what had just happened.

“Uhm. Yeah. In the cupboard over there.” I pointed, and he moved to retrieve it.

And this is how the rest of dinner prep went. Riddick teaching me new things while unintentionally turning me the fuck on.

Every time he touched me, my whole body reacted to him, and by the time we sat down at the table, I was so tired of being hard.

I could barely stand it anymore.

“So. How is it?” he asked as I took my first bite of chicken. We’d barbequed it on a tiny charcoal grill that Riddick found around the back of the shack.

He’d shown me how to season it with salt, pepper, onion, and garlic powder, and honestly, it was way better than any frozen chicken dinner I’d ever had.

I groaned in appreciation as the chicken melted in my mouth.

“ Fuck, that’s good.”

Riddick watched me eat with his usual enigmatic expression, his gaze never straying from my face as I dug into my meal.

“You sure you don’t want any?” I asked. “You must be starving. You haven’t eaten all day.”

“I told you. I have food at home. You work hard for your money. I don’t need to eat all your groceries. Especially when you clearly need it more than I do.”

I laughed. “You’re going to make me fat.”

“No. I’m going to make you strong, and hopefully, that’ll be enough to save you.”

I sighed, pushing my now empty plate away from me.

“You’re always such a downer.”

He was staring at the corner of my mouth with a small frown on his face .

“You have barbeque sauce right here,” he said, tapping his finger against his lip.

I poked my tongue out of my mouth in an effort to lick it up, and his eyes followed the motion like a hawk.

My mouth flooded with the smokey-sweet taste of BBQ, and I drew my tongue back in.

“There. Did I get it?” I asked, and before I knew what was happening, he was reaching across the table and cupping the side of my cheek. He brushed his calloused thumb over my lips, wiping the sauce away and causing my breath to hitch in my chest.

Okay. That was definitely a flirt…

Dudes didn’t wipe sauce off other dudes’ mouths unless they were into said dude… did they?

“Riddick…” I murmured, my gaze darting back and forth between his eyes, trying my hardest to see if he was giving me any indication at all that these intense feelings I seemed to be developing for him weren’t one-sided.

He pulled back, and for a split second, I thought he was going to suck the barbeque sauce off his thumb, but he didn’t.

He wiped it off on a paper towel and stood up, grabbing my empty plate and striding over to the sink to rinse it.

“I’ve got to head out,” he said gruffly.

“Wait, can we talk about?—”

“Goodnight, Finn,” he barked abruptly. The softness in his tone was gone, and he was hard and cold again as he made his way to the front door.

“Riddick—”

“I’ll see you in the morning. Same rules apply.”

Then, the door shut, and he was gone.