The Team's Milk Cow novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Bench

Dex, benched six games, takes his turn with her mouth and his jokes, and the coach starts him.

Dex Hartigan came in at one the next night, and he knocked first.

He knocked on the open door, politely, with two knuckles.

"Is it okay if I come in?" he asked.

"Is it okay if I stand here and talk very fast?"

"You're already doing it," I said.

"I know."

"I do it when I'm nervous."

"I also do it when I'm not nervous, so you can't tell."

He had changed into a plain black T-shirt and track pants, and his blond curls were still wet.

He was lanky and loose, with sleeve tattoos down both arms, a lopsided grin, and a way of standing ready to apologize or run.

"Mercer told me not to bother you," Dex said.

"Then why are you here?"

"Because I've been on the bench for six games and I've been told I'm the funniest player on the team, which is what they say about players who can't play."

He smiled, and it slipped.

"And because I watched you last night, Harlow."

"You walked in on me."

"I walked in on you looking like a woman who'd just been told a secret she'd been waiting her whole life to hear."

He said it simply, without a joke on top.

I put down my rolling pin.

"Did Mercer tell you what it is?"

"He didn't have to."

"I saw the counter."

"And you're not going to laugh?"

"I'm going to laugh at everything," Dex said.

"Not at you."

I untied my apron.

Mercer hadn't asked for forever, and I hadn't given him any.

I'd said I was his for one night, and the night was over.

I wanted this one too.

I pulled my chef's jacket off over my head, and Dex stopped talking.

It might have been a first.

I wore a plain grey sports bra and it was already damp.

Two dark circles showed through the fabric.

"Oh, wow," he said.

"Okay."

"Okay, I'm going to need a second."

"Take a second."

"I'm taking a second."

"I'm taking a very long look at the second."

I laughed.

The laugh loosened something in my chest, and the milk came faster, and he saw it and groaned.

"I'm starting tomorrow," he said, and his voice cracked.

"I don't even have the lineup and I'm telling you, I'm starting."

"You're awfully confident."

"I'm awfully hard."

I laughed again, and then I pulled him across the kitchen by his shirt.

We kissed against the walk-in cooler.

He kissed like he talked, fast and warm and generous, with a smile still in it.

His hands slid under my sports bra and he pushed it up, and my breasts fell free into his palms.

"Hello," Dex whispered to them.

"I'm so sorry for everything I've ever said to a woman."

I was laughing and gasping at once.

He dropped to his knees on the tile right in front of me, put his mouth on my nipple, and stopped being funny.

It was a different kind of mouth than Mercer's.

Where Mercer took, Dex coaxed.

He licked and sucked softly and listened to every sound I made, and when I moaned, he did more of what made me moan.

The milk flowed into his mouth and down his chin.

He drank, and I put my hand on his head and held him there.

"Dex," I said.

"Keep going."

"Not leaving."

He moved to the other breast, and his hand slid into the back of my work pants.

He cupped me, firm, through my underwear.

"You're soaking," he said against my skin.

"I have been since the second you started talking."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said about me."

He got my pants down.

He got them down to my ankles and then he was lifting me by my hips and setting me on the steel counter again.

"I want to do something," he said.

"Do it."

"I want to put my face between your legs and not come up until you tell me."

"That's not a question," I said.

"It's not."

He kissed my knee, the inside of my thigh, higher.

Then he put his mouth on me.

I nearly came off the counter.

He licked me in long flat strokes and then in small quick ones, and he did it like he'd been practicing for a championship.

My heels dug into his back.

My breasts were still leaking, and the milk ran down my belly and into the dip of my navel, and he reached up and caught it on his fingers.

He brought those fingers to my mouth.

I licked them.

It tasted faintly sweet and a little like me, and I moaned around his knuckles.

"That's it," Dex said, looking up from between my thighs.

"God, that's it."

He went back to my clit, and he slid two fingers inside me, and the pressure rose so fast I couldn't breathe.

"I'm going to," I said.

"Do it," he said into my skin.

"Do it on my mouth."

I did.

I came with a cry I hope no one heard, with my hand in his curls and my back against the cooler door, and my breasts spraying a fine white mist across his T-shirt.

He licked me through it, slow and gentle, until I was shaking and spent.

Then he stood up and wiped his chin with his wrist, and his grin was back, wide and a little wrecked.

"Okay," he said.

"I need to tell the whole team that I'm a changed man."

"You will tell them nothing."

"I'll tell them nothing, I'll just play really well."

"Dex."

"Yes?"

I reached down and palmed him through his track pants.

He was rock hard.

He sucked a breath through his teeth and shut his eyes.

"Harlow, I'll score a hundred goals."

"I'm going to take the edge off you," I said, "and you'll stay quiet."

I pushed him back against the cooler and pulled his pants down.

He sprang free, long and narrow and flushed, and I took him in my hand.

I got on my knees and took him in my mouth.

He swore.

He swore in three different ways, and then he started to laugh and had to stop, because the laughing pushed him deeper.

"Don't," he gasped.

"Don't be funny while I'm, oh my God."

I took him to the back of my throat, and I hummed.

He came with a shout, and his hand tangled in my braid, and his knees shook.

I swallowed.

He slid down the cooler door until he sat on the floor with his pants around his thighs, and I sat down beside him with my breasts still bare.

"I think I'm in love," Dex said to the ceiling.

"You're not."

"I'm very much in something."

He leaned his curly head against my shoulder, and we sat there on the cold floor with the dough rising behind us.

At six the coach came through for his coffee.

I had a clean jacket on by then, and my braid was fixed, and Dex had been gone an hour.

The coach stirred sugar into his cup and looked at a clipboard.

"Hartigan starts tonight," he said, to nobody.

"Don't ask me why."

I kept my face very still.

At noon the sous chef came in for her shift and gave me a long strange look.

"The guys are saying something about you in the dining room," she said.

"What?"

"I don't know yet."

"But they're all smiling."

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