Page 33 of Cherry Picking
It’s slow, sweet, and soft. The opposite of how we started.
We hold each other, Griff just short of climbing into bed with me. He clasps onto the back of my neck, his other hand slipping under my hospital gown to knead the meat of my thigh.
The cool air grows warm as the tension and friction between us picks up. It’s intimate but not sexual. Griffin’s heart bleeds into mine with every press of his lips, with every swirl of his tongue, with every quiet whimper he thinks I don’t hear but that I feel in every fiber of my being.
I hear footsteps that sound too close, and I instantly regret the way I stiffen and stop responding to the kiss.
Griffin pulls away with a tight smile, looking toward the door as it clicks open.
Doctor Nash has been with the team for a couple of years, so I know without a shadow of a doubt that the look on his face isn’t a good one. There’s an older doctor with him, the one I saw when they first admitted me, and he’s got an envelope in hand that I can only assume are my scans.
“Mr. Easton.” Nash nods to me, then furrows his brow just slightly. “Foster.”
Griffin is back in his own chair—a reasonable distance for a worried teammate—and I already miss his warmth.
“What do we got, Doc?” I twine my hands together in my lap to distract from the tremble starting up.
I’ve been preparing for this for years. Ever since that first awful break in the majors.
“We’re looking at surgery,” Nash says as the other doctor pulls out some of the scans. “I’m not going to lie to you, Easton; this is going to put you out for the rest of the season. And I can’t in good conscience tell you to aim for getting back on the ice at all.”
There it is. It should feel like a blow. I should feel like my life’s purpose has just been ripped from me.
But it hasn’t. I’ve been playing on borrowed time—getting by for the sake of it—for so long that what I feel is almost akin to relief.
And then I catch a glimpse of Griffin’s heartbroken expression. Just a glimpse before he masks it with a clenched jaw.
“But you’ll work with me through healing, won’t you?” I ask. “Until I decide to quit or you deem me unfit to return?”
Doctor Nash rolls his eyes but nods. “I won’t be leaving any players behind. Especially not one as resilient as you.”
He saw me through the ACL tear two years ago, and he kept a close eye on me when I joined the team in the first place. I traded between a few teams when I came down from the NAPH because everyone was worried how a damaged major league player would play.
Coach Pickman and Doctor Nash were the first people to take a chance on me.
Looks like that chance has run its course.
They tell me that they’ll get the surgery scheduled for some time in the next few days, and that they’ll keep me here until then. I can see that Griffin wants to object, wants there to be any other solution than this one, but this is where we are. This is where the chips fall.
Once it’s just the two of us again, Griffin wastes no time climbing into the bed on my uninjured side. I wrap my arm around his shoulders, and he rests his cheek on my chest. It’s silent other than the sounds of our breathing and the soft rustle of clothes as I stroke over his back.
“It’s not the end of the world,” I say, and he turns his face into my neck. “Better than one of us getting traded.”
He huffs a quiet laugh into my skin and tightens his arm around my waist.
“What? You mean you’re just going to laze around at home alone, waiting for me to come back from games or practice like a 1950’s househusband?”
The cheekiness earns him a pinch to his side, and when he laughs I brush my nose through his hair and breathe him in.
“They didn’t have househusbands then.”
“Shut up.”
He tips his head up, bright eyes watching me with a hint of mist at the corners, and I couldn’t say which one of us initiates, but one second we’re sharing an intimate moment, and the next we’re all teeth and tongues and hands.
There’s a prickling sensation in my spine that warns me we could be caught, but Griff’s pressure on top of me, his mouth hungry on mine, it takes that worry and washes it down to the recesses of my mind.
He avoids bearing his weight on my lap, instead sitting up on his knees—caging my body—and leaning down to keep us connected. It’d be a lie to say the attention isn’t making me hard,but I don’t have the balls to ask him to jerk me off in a damn hospital room.
