Whispers in the Outfield

The line outside Blue Oasis stretched half a block, but Katie didn't mind waiting. The summer air was warm and the bass from inside the club pulsed through the sidewalk and up into her heels. She smoothed a hand over her dress and checked the time on her phone for the third time in five minutes.

"They'll be here," Kennedy said, reading her mind the way she always did. She looked incredible tonight, as usual, in jeans so tight they had to be painted on and a spaghetti strap top that left very little to imagination.

"I know," Katie said. "I just haven't seen Jason in four months. I can't believe he finally go traded to our local team."

"You're going to cry," Jennifer announced from beside her, already swaying slightly even though they hadn't had a single drink yet.

"I am not going to cry."

"You're totally going to cry," Charlotte said quietly, and then smiled her small, sweet smile when Katie shot her a look.

"You always cry when you say hi or good-bye." Bianca said dryly, her black hair picking up in the breeze.

Before Katie could argue the point, she heard Jason's laugh from down the street. She'd know that laugh anywhere. Deep, a little too loud, and completely unself-conscious. She spun toward the sound and found him moving up the sidewalk with a group of guys behind him, all of them tall, all of them moving with the easy confidence of athletes who knew they owned whatever room they walked into.

She didn't have time to pick out individual faces before Jason spotted her and his whole face lit up. He covered the remaining distance in about four long strides, wrapped both arms around her, and lifted her clean off the ground.

"Jason!" she shrieked, grabbing his shoulders. "Put me down!"

"Missed you too, sis." He set her down and squeezed her against his side hard enough to knock the air out of her before finally letting her breathe. He grinned down at her, dimple showing, brown eyes sparkling with that familiar mischief she had genuinely missed. "You look good."

"You look annoyingly tall," she told him, and he laughed again. "This is Kennedy, Charlotte, Jennifer a.k.a Jenny, and Bianca."

He kept his arm around her shoulder and turned toward her friends. "Ladies. You all look amazing." He said it with such easy charm that Charlotte blushed immediately and even Kennedy looked pleased.

"And these are my teammates," Jason continued, gesturing behind him. "Adam, John, Billy." He pointed to each guy in turn. They were all good-looking in that broad-shouldered, strong-jawed athletic way, the kind of guys who made women on the sidewalk slow their pace just slightly as they walked past. Katie smiled and said hello and shook hands and did the whole introduction thing on autopilot, because her attention had snagged on the last guy in the group and she could not seem to get it loose.

Dark hair. Tan skin. Broad shoulders that tapered down into a fitted shirt that was doing absolutely nothing to hide the fact that he was the most muscular man she had ever seen standing this close to her in real life. He stood slightly back from the others with one hand in his pocket and a smile that was just a little too knowing to be entirely innocent.

"And that's Caleb, he came up from Florida with me." Jason said, either completely unaware of the way her brain had momentarily short-circuited or choosing not to acknowledge it.

Caleb's eyes moved to her face and stayed there. "Hey."

"Hey," she managed back.

Smooth, Katie. Real smooth.

The line moved and they all filtered inside, and Katie made a firm, decisive, completely serious promise to herself that she was going to spend the rest of this night focused on her brother and her friends and having fun, and absolutely not on Caleb and his ridiculous shoulders.

She lasted approximately thirty minutes.

The music was good and the drinks were cold and the dance floor was already packed when the girls pulled Katie out into the middle of it. She let the bass take over and stopped thinking. This was the one place she never felt self-conscious. On the dance floor she knew exactly what she was doing, and the music told her body what it wanted before her brain caught up. She moved with her friends, laughing when Kennedy tried to show Jennifer a move and Jennifer promptly stumbled sideways into a stranger who seemed more than happy about it.

She wasn't going to look toward the bar.

She looked toward the bar.

Caleb was there, leaning against it with a drink in his hand, and he was watching her. Not glancing over. Not casually scanning the room. Watching her, steady and direct, the way someone watches something they've already decided they want. When their eyes met he didn't look away and he didn't smile. He just held her gaze for one long, charged second before she broke the eye contact and turned back to her friends, her heart doing something embarrassing and unnecessary inside her chest.

He is probably watching Kennedy or Bianca, she told herself. Everyone watches them.

She decided she needed a quick bathroom break to get out of her head and stop staring across the bar.  With a quick motion to the girls she headed down the hallway.

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Across the room, Caleb set his drink down.

He had told himself he was just going to have a good time tonight. Catch up with the guys, meet Jason's sister, have a couple of drinks. Simple. Easy. No complications. He was good at keeping things simple.

Then he'd seen her standing on the sidewalk outside the club, blonde hair curled and spilling over one shoulder, and something in his chest had done a slow, inconvenient roll that he had zero interest in examining.

Then she was on the dance floor and it was worse. The way she moved was effortless and carefree and completely, devastatingly natural. She wasn't performing. She was just feeling it. There was something about that, about the difference between a woman who was dancing to be watched and a woman who was dancing because the music lived in her bones, that got to him in a way he hadn't expected.

He pushed off from the bar.

He told himself he'd just go dance. That was all. Nothing complicated about that.

He crossed the floor and came up behind her without saying a word as she came out of the bathroom hallway. He settled his hands on her hips and felt her go still for just a fraction of a second before glancing over her shoulder and realizing it was him.  She turned around and settled back into the rhythm, and him, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It kind of was.

They fell into sync without negotiating it. Her hips moved and his moved with them, and the music wrapped around them both and the crowd closed in and none of it mattered because there was a very specific, very consuming awareness that had reduced his entire world to the woman in front of him and the way she felt against him.

One song rolled into another and she spun around away from him, then dropped low in a slow crouch and slid back up the length of his body in one fluid move that made him suck in a breath. Her back pressed against his chest and he pulled her in tighter on instinct, his jaw going tight.

"Damn," he said low against her ear, because there was nothing else he could think to say.

He felt her smile even though he couldn't see her face.

His hands moved down her thighs and back up, and neither of them pretended this was casual anymore. He turned her, pulled her flush against him, and walked them both backward through the press of bodies until the wall met her shoulders. She didn't resist. She came with him like she'd been planning to end up there all along.

His hands settled at the small of her back and then lower, gripping her ass. Her fingers slid up along his spine and curled at the back of his neck and he felt every point of contact like a separate lit fuse. He dropped his head and caught her earlobe between his teeth, biting down gently, and heard her breath hitch. He kissed the tender spot below her ear and worked his way down the side of her neck, tasting her skin, feeling the way she arched into it and gave him better access like she couldn't help herself.

He couldn't help himself either. That was the honest truth of it.

He pressed his mouth harder against the curve of her neck, sucking hard and biting lightly, and felt her fingers tighten in his hair. Her hips pushed into his and he groaned quietly against her skin. He knew he was leaving a mark. Some distant, rational part of his brain registered that and filed it under bad idea and then the rest of him overruled it completely because she smelled incredible and felt even better and the whole world had narrowed down to this dark corner and this woman. He sucked harder, using more teeth, hands gripping her ass harder and her hips jumped into his, her nipples pebbling against his chest.

Then a sharp, fast song exploded from the DJ's booth, bright and jarring and completely wrong, and the spell cracked down the middle.

Caleb pulled back. He pressed his forehead to her shoulder for one second and let out a long, slow breath. He could see the edge of the mark he'd left on her neck and his stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Jason.

He straightened. He didn't trust himself to say anything, and he definitely didn't trust himself to look at her face, so he pushed off from the wall and moved back through the crowd toward the bar without a backward glance, jaw set, hands shoved in his pockets.

He needed a drink. He needed about six of them.

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Back against the wall, Katie stood completely still for a moment, breathing. The music was all wrong now, too loud and too fast, and her neck tingled where his mouth had been and her heart was hammering in a way that had nothing to do with dancing.

She pressed the back of her hand to her cheek, found it warm, and straightened her shoulders.

Okay. She pushed off the wall. Okay. Act normal. You are completely fine.

She walked back to her friends at the bar with her chin up and her best everything-is-totally-normal expression firmly in place. Kennedy handed her a shot glass without a word, but her eyes were sharp and dancing and she was very clearly filing information away for later. Katie took the shot, set the glass down, and deliberately did not look at where Caleb had rejoined the guys further down the bar.

"Hey girl!  Thought you'd never come back." Bianca said with a quick, mischievous smile.

Katie knocked back the shot without asking what it was. The liquor burned down her throat and settled warm in her stomach. She grabbed the next one Jennifer pointed to and downed that one too. The alcohol hit fast, loosening the knot in her chest and making the music feel a little less sharp around the edges.

Her neck still tingled where his mouth had been, and the spot felt hot under her hair. She pulled the strands forward a little more and laughed at something Charlotte said, even though she had no idea what the joke was. She was normal, she was find.

She was absolutely not fine.

She took a deep breath and braved a quick glance down the bar to where they guys were standing.

Caleb was talking to Adam, relaxed as anything, like he hadn't just pinned her against a wall and kissed her neck until her knees went weak. He didn't glance her way. Not once.

Katie reached for another shot.

By the time they all moved as a group toward Little Nero's Pizza, she had mostly convinced herself it didn't matter. The warm glow of the alcohol helped. The smell of garlic and melted cheese that rolled out through the pizzeria's door when they pushed it open helped more. She laughed at something Charlotte said and kept her shoulder bumping against Kennedy's and told herself she was absolutely, completely, one hundred percent going to pretend nothing had happened.