AllFreeNovel
Share Us
If I can tell anyone, I can tell Lois.
Chapter Nine
Lois
I’ve never been with anyone, let alone a real man.
A man like Blake Barnes?
In my dreams.
It’s too easy to tell myself something is wrong when I know everything is just oh so right.
He wants to claim me properly, sure. But he’s also a perfect gentleman.
Having him make me feel something I’ve never felt before, and then follow it up with just snuggling?
I think I have died and gone to heaven.
But I don’t want to talk about him, not for a story. Story be damned, for now.
The thought of Barbara, the poky little newspaper office, it all seems so far away right now, now that I’ve found Blake.
“So who is Blake Barnes?” I ask him. Looking at his face so our eyes meet, letting him know by pressing myself back against his constant hardness and poking my tongue out, that I don’t expect the usual stuff either.
I wanna get to know my man now. And I want him to get to know me too.
“Hungry?” he asks suddenly, looking almost undecided as he leans over and fishes for something out of sight. Changing the subject.
But I know what I want.
“What happened?” I ask, skipping a million steps, but really meaning, ‘what happened to make you want to disappear?’
“Why pretend to be a ghost… to die?” I finally ask, kicking myself for breaking the rules I just made for myself, but I guess I just can’t help it.
Feeling his chin nuzzle against my neck, then my head as he pulls me closer to him, I get the feeling he’s okay with me asking.
But I promise myself not to ask too many questions from now on.
Whatever I think I know about Blake Barnes, I tell myself to let him tell me the truth from now on.
“I took a fall for someone else on the team, years ago,” he says firmly. I can feel his eyes moving to the fire as he remembers.
“A star pitcher, I’d just signed on for a new multi-million dollar deal, out celebrating. I don’t even drink.”
I feel his body tense a little, but I wait for him to go on.
“I was at a bar with the team’s captain and some other players. He’d had a few but seemed fine. He offered me a ride back to my hotel, warning me we both had training in the morning so I went along with him.”
The crash.
I remember it from the news, but I don’t say anything. This is Blake’s story, not mine.
Not yet, unless he wants it told that way.
Blake sighs, and shifts a little behind me, I try turning to face him but he only asks me point blank, “You wanna hear this story for me or for your paper?”
I move around so I’m facing him, holding onto him like nothing else.
“I want you to tell me whatever you want to.” I remind him, and myself.
“Well… you know what happened next… the whole world does.”
But I don’t. Not really.
“I know you were in a crash, that there was a public scandal…” I start to say, not meaning to interrupt him, but my own curiosity gets the better of me. “I mean… well, how could you have been driving, so many people said they saw you leave as a passenger, a sober passenger,” I add.
Blake goes quiet, and my mind starts to turn things over.
Once a reporter always a reporter, I guess. I hope he isn’t mad with me.
“You’re right,” he finally says. “I didn’t make things easier on myself by refusing the blood test. I was guilty by my refusal to cooperate. My team hushed it up the best they could, the captain kept his place, but I was pushed out of the limelight, until…”
“Go on,” I urge him, holding his huge hand in mine and listening now, not wanting to interrupt him again.
“I was an expensive bench-warmer for the rest of the season, until the training camp. I was put on a small plane to play catch up. A token gesture me even going, I mean. And well… You know that story too. The plane crashed, and I was the only man unaccounted for after everyone else was found a few days later alive and well.”
Blake stops again, blowing air out of his cheeks and tenderly stroking my hair as his eyes come back into focus on mine.
“I figured if the whole world thought I was dead, I’d just go along with it, become a ghost, like my career. Like my life had been for a whole season anyway.”
I feel a wave of sympathy for Blake. Such a great man, reduced by his circumstances to obscurity.
“But…?” I start to ask without even thinking.
“How’d I end up here?” he asks, an ironic grin on his lips as he shakes his head.
I crease a frown. “You don’t have to tell me,” I confess, figuring all that matters is me being here, right now with Blake. Not so much how he got here.
