Page 15

The big, furry dog finally found Quinn and greeted him enthusiastically. He bent down to pet him and looked up at Rae, “I see you finally achieved one of your life’s dreams.”

“Yes, I did!” she exclaimed. “We dream big here. This is Harry.”

“I see that,” said Quinn, now playing with the dog’s ears.

“His name is Harry, you smart ass,” Rae said, the eye roll audible in her tone.

“As in Harry James Potter?”

“The very same,” she nodded. “Once a Pott-head, always a Pott-head.”

Quinn flattened his expression for his best Professor Snape impression, “Always.”

Rae giggled and Quinn’s heart jolted at the sound. She pulled her own beach towel out of her striped bag and laid it out on the other side of Quinn’s.

“You’re not joining, Rae?” Jett asked, making another dive for the football.

“Nah,” she said, taking a seat on the towel. “Not unless we’re actually playing and I can tackle you and shove your face in the dirt again.”

Jett paused before releasing the ball, flashing Rae a brief scowl. “That was a long time ago. We hadn’t really hit puberty yet so we were all basically the same size.”

“You were definitely bigger than me,” Rae said, “and you still went down like a little bitch.”

Quinn let out a burst of laughter at the memory.

It was the first time Rae had met Chris and Jett.

They were in sixth grade and their gym classes were separated by gender.

Chris and Jett had asked Quinn if he wanted to meet up and play a game of football after school, and Quinn agreed, saying that he’d bring along his friend, Rae.

He’d failed to mention, however, that Rae was a girl and both boys were shocked when he arrived at the park with her, and that she was fully willing to play tackle football with them.

Quinn assured them several times that they didn’t have to go easy on her just because she was a girl, but they’d been hesitant regardless.

Jett had paid for his hesitation. Twice, if memory served him correctly.

“Oh, are we playing this game?” Jett was worked up now, throwing the ball hard to Chris’s chest. “Okay Rae, how about the time we all played racquetball at your fancy-ass country club? You swung like you were trying to murder an intruder with a baseball bat and screamed for a solid thirty seconds when the ball went off and wouldn’t stop.

We were trapped in a fucking human pinball machine. With lots of girly screaming.”

Rae threw her head back laughing and Quinn exclaimed, “Oh my God! I remember that! I thought they were going to ban you from that place!”

“I’m honestly surprised they didn’t,” Rae breathed through her continued laughs. “I remember playing doubles on the tennis court in high school and this guy tried to cop a feel under my skirt and I literally just went at him with my tennis racket.”

“He deserved it,” Quinn shrugged. “Did they ban him?”

“No,” Rae snorted derisively, “country clubs are ultra-conservative places that worship the patriarchy. They don’t give a shit about that kind of stuff.”

“Good thing I wasn’t there for that,” Quinn said with a slight twitch of one eyebrow. He’d had quite the temper back in the day. Especially where Rae was concerned. Well, other guys and Rae and said other guys disrespecting her.

“Oh, you would’ve been banned for sure,” she agreed with a knowing grin.

Harry was now sitting between Quinn and Rae and began giving long licks to the side of Quinn’s face.

“Harry!” Rae exclaimed. She pulled a tennis ball out of her bag and threw it down the beach toward Chris. The dog immediately took off after the bright, highlighter yellow ball. “I’m sorry, he doesn’t usually do that. You must just taste good. ”

Quinn tugged at the back of his shirt, pulling it up and over his head, and looked at her with a meaningful quirk of his eyebrow.

He used his shirt to wipe his face clean of dog slobber and one corner of his mouth pulled into a mischievous grin.

He was pleased to see Rae’s cheeks flush and her gaze drop to sweep over his bare chest and stomach.

Oh, there were so many ways he could respond to that.

“I mean, um…” she sputtered. “You know, he must like your...face or something.”

“Well, I kind of figured that’s what you meant. That’s where he was licking,” Quinn said, grateful he was no longer the only one here who seemed completely flustered. “Where else were you thinking might taste good?”

Rae tried to bite back a wider grin and her nose scrunched up like it always did when she was caught in an awkward situation. She looked away toward the water. “Nowhere...I was just... thinking about your face.”

“And how good it must taste?” He pressed further, loving her adorable discomfort.

She playfully shoved his face away. “Something like that.”

Quinn and Rae sat together exchanging pleasant conversation and reliving old memories while Chris and Jett tossed the football around. He passed Rae a drink from the cooler and they took turns throwing the tennis ball for Harry, even though Quinn could only throw left-handed.

“Hang onto this for a sec,” Rae said, holding her drink out toward Quinn. He grabbed it from her and was caught off guard when she pulled her tank top over her head.

Oh...fuck. I am fucked.

Rae’s skin was all golden, with various tan lines on her shoulders from the time she spent outside.

Her torso was long and lean, with a flat, toned stomach.

She had small breasts tucked inside her triangle bikini top.

Small, but perfectly rounded and they fit her shape just right.

Quinn’s cock stirred in his board shorts .

Rae reached for the tie holding her skirt together on the side and unknotted it, pulling the skirt away from her body and folding it into her bag. Her bikini bottoms were the same sunshine yellow as the top and he could see where they cinched in the middle of her ass, making them very cheeky.

He was unaware of how long his eyes roamed up and down her body, from her pink-painted toes all the way back to the swell of breasts just barely out of sight.

He did know that he was staring, however, and he couldn’t stop.

He just wanted to look at her like this.

..admire her form and the work she must have put in to sculpt every inch so precisely.

It wasn’t until he realized his mouth was actually watering that he snapped his gaze up to hers.

“Don’t get a lot of girls in bikinis in sunny Los Angeles?” Rae asked with a smirk.

“Um…” Quinn’s throat was dry as he tried to form words.

“No. I mean, yes. There are. Lots of them. Just no...” He did another slow sweep of her body, gaze hovering over her thighs, imagining all the ways he’d like to see them- around his waist, thrown over his shoulders, up close with his head between them.

Now he’d completely forgotten what he’d been planning to say.

He felt his eyes glaze over as he stupidly muttered, “legs.”

“They don’t have legs?” Rae questioned, her eyebrows pulling together in confusion.

“What?” Quinn looked up at her again, nearly drooling.

He cleared his throat and smoothed a hand through his hair.

“Oh, um...shit. I mean, yes they have legs...obviously. That was dumb. I just meant…” The quirk of Rae’s eyebrow told him he’d been caught.

He let the smile break across his face, “I’m busted.

I was staring at your legs and...zoned out.

” He laughed shyly and handed her drink back. “You look great, Rae.”

She looked away with a quiet laugh and muttered, “Thanks.” She seemed to muse to herself and bit her lip. After taking a long pull of her summer shandy she said, “I wouldn’t think someone who has one-nighters with supermodels would be speechless at the sight of some legs.”

Oh. Ouch. He didn’t know why that felt like such a blow, but coming from Rae it did. With his teammates he’d have something cocky to say, something that would puff up his ego. But he suddenly found himself wanting to do the exact opposite of that with her.

Luckily he was saved from having to come up with a response when Chris stopped by the cooler to grab a drink and took a seat on the towel on Quinn’s other side.

“I know you’re not giving our boy shit about his sex life, Rae-Rae,” Chris said, popping the tab of his beer can. “Rumor has it you could’ve given him a run for his money in college.”

Quinn turned slowly toward her, giving her a look as if to say “oh really?”

Her mouth hung open as she tried to force her smile back and she gasped, “You traitor!”

“Yeah, Rae,” Jett said, taking a swig of Labatt Blue as he plopped down on the last beach towel. “You are still in the double digits, right?”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Rae said, just as Harry dropped the slobbery tennis ball in front of her. She picked it up and threw it at Jett. “I have not slept with a hundred guys. That’s gross.”

“Oh, what are you at then? Ninety...eight?” Jett laughed, whipping the tennis ball down the shoreline.

“ No. We’re not having this discussion,” Rae said. “I’m surprised you’d even want to bring it up seeing as how embarrassing it is for you, Flower.”

Quinn wanted to laugh at the jab toward Jett but was caught off guard by the sick churning feeling in his stomach at the thought of her being with other guys.

Let alone a lot of other guys apparently.

He reminded himself he had absolutely no right to feel that way.

She was completely right about the one-nighters and probably any other impression she’d made of him, so he couldn’t reasonably feel upset by what he was hearing.

But that was the thing about his lifelong attraction to Rae- it wasn’t entirely reasonable. It wasn’t reasonable that he’d always felt like she was his when he’d never done anything to make it so, and it wasn’t reasonable to think that she’d been pining after him all this time like he had for her.