Page 11 of Plight
“Oh no!” she objected, her tiny finger snaking its way between us and nearly poking me in the eye. “No, no, NO!”
“No what?”
She pointed to my lips. “No that.”
Just as I was about to lick them again, teasingly, because I knew she both loved and hated it, my mother called my name. Fuck, not now.
“Elliot, I need your help lifting these logs.”
Danielle snapped her head toward my mother’s squawking voice before flicking her eyes to me then back to my mother, her enthusiastic eye-tennis a good indication that she was getting ready to confess.
“Please don’t,” I begged.
Her mouth opened, and I panicked and did what any normal, longstanding, lovesick friend who hadn’t been in this position before would do.
I kissed her.
Hard.
Unashamedly.
A wave of heat hit me once again, but unlike before, nothing could compare to the inferno blazing up my legs and exploding into my heads the moment my lips touched hers. And yeah, it was definitely heads, as in plural, because the head of my cock was its own Survivor torch. It was life in a jungle of trousers and boxer briefs, and there was absolutely no extinguishing it while she was in my arms.
“Ell … ee … ot,” she mumbled around my tongue. “What … are … you—”
Mum giggled. “Ooooooh! Look at you two no longer hiding in your closets. JEANETTE, are you seeing this?”
Danielle squirmed just like my eleven-month-old nephew did when I picked him up for a hug, but when I softly and meticulously stroked her tongue with mine, her fight waned and she fell limp against me. Victory.
In that moment, the world faded away. There was no mum, no Jeanette, no fake Chris, and no barking dogs. It was just Danielle and I, like when we were kids, except we’d never been this close, enough that I could feel her breath on my face, thread my fingers through her hair, and clench my hand over her hip … close enough for her nails to dig into my skin like a Velociraptor. Jesus Christ!
Fighting the pain shooting up my arm for as long as possible, I persisted against her sudden attack. But I was only human — a human that could bleed and probably was.
“What are you doing?” I groaned, pulling back to assess the damage she’d inflicted to my arm
“What am I doing?” she growled, quietly. Danielle fired an embarrassed, sweet smile toward our gawking mothers then turned back to me, her sweetness gone. “The question is what are you doing?”
“I’m kissing you. What does it look like?”
“Did I say you could kiss me?”
I rubbed my arm and fake chuckled for the purpose of keeping up our ruse. “No. I didn’t know I needed a written invitation?”
“Well …” she paused, her chest huffing, her face gorgeously flushed. “You do.”
We stared at one another for a few moments more before she turned on her heel and stormed off, and, thankfully, it was in the opposite direction of our grinning mothers.
Over an hour later, shehadn’t returned. I was worried, and not because I thought she’d confessed my excellent lie. I was fairly sure she hadn’t, seeing as I was still alive and kicking and that my mother wasn’t in tears nor giving me her silent treatment. So I was confident our secret was still … secret. What I wasn’t confident over was Danielle’s whereabouts or frame of mind, and I honestly felt like a bucket of shit as a result.
I’d come on strongly because I hadn’t been able to help myself. I hadn’t seen her in so long and it had made me a little needy. She hadn’t changed and yet she’d changed so much. She was a woman now; a feisty, sexy as hell woman that drew me to her like a moth to a flame. There was just something about her, about our connection and our past that fizzled like a firecracker between us. And it couldn’t just be me that felt it — forces and feelings such as those were never singular.
Plunging my shovel into the ground, I pushed it in further with my foot before levering what felt like my billionth scoop of dirt before dumping it into the wheelbarrow beside me. I couldn’t complain, though; the constant movement was keeping my balls from freezing solid. I adjusted them, for added reassurance, then pushed the wheelbarrow across the garden site toward the skip bin, slowing when I heard distant music that sounded like a ringtone.
Lowering the handles to place the wheelbarrow down, I pivoted one hundred and eighty degrees, heading toward the sound, a heavy drumbeat, which I soon recognised as the theme song to Game of Thrones. Humming along to the tune while scouring the ground in front of my feet, the song’s volume increased with every step I took until I spotted a phone.
I reached into the grass and picked it up, answering it. “Hello?”
“Who’s this?”
