Page 83 of Dirty Player
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“What a fucktwit,” Melissa exclaimed after I filled her in on Patrick’s phone call from earlier in the week.
I swallowed my sip of wine before I choked on it. It was Saturday, and for the first night since I’d been in Raleigh, I was alone. No Beaux, no Oliver, just my newly bought and set up television—complete with satellite so I never had to worry about missing a single football game all season—and Melissa’s made-up curse words.
“But Oliver, man, he sounds like a man I wouldn’t mind being claimed by. Not in that way, at least.”
“Yeah, he’s something else.”
It was safe to say I was falling fast.
It seemed surreal at the same time that it was natural.
What didn’t feel natural was the little white box I’d found sitting on the nightstand next to my bed this morning when I went back to grab my purse after Oliver had left.
It was too big to be jewelry. It was also way too soon for him to be giving me jewelry, despite the amount of money he made.
Maybe he left it by accident. Maybe it wasn’t for me, but something he’d forgotten.
Maybe he wanted me to wait until he called me after the game like he’d promised he would.
I’d spent hours downstairs thinking of the rectangular box. It seemed to shout through the floor, down to my workroom in Stamped, “open me, open me, open me, come on, you know you want to.”
I’d caved two hours earlier, curiosity almost killing me.
Now, I was going to kill him.
The box hadn’t contained jewelry. It hadn’t even contained a memento, something cheesy to remember him when he played in his away games.
Nope.
A butt plug.
Butt. Plug. It wasn’t a small one, either. He’d mentioned it once and, interested in what he’d done to me, I’d hoped we’d go there. We hadn’t. For the past week he had backed off the backdoor entrance. After the first time he’d pressed a finger inside of me, though, I had looked butt plugs up online.
The plug he’d left surreptitiously next to my nightstand, giving me a clear indication he wanted this, was much smaller than him. It was alsonota beginner, small-sized plug.
Hence the sudden need I had for wine.
“I tell you what, Shanna Banana,” Melissa said.
It occurred to me that she’d been speaking, but I’d drifted off. I dragged off my eyes off the box I could spy down the hallway and focused on her.
“Patrick was never good enough for you. I know Beaux told you that, and now I’m telling you that. I stayed silent even though I never liked the guy, but you did and you deserved your happy, but Patrick was never going to be it for you. And frankly, I’m glad you’ve now got a large dick sticking it to you so you can realize that there are men out there who are real men and not the pussy guy Patrick is.”
She was right, in a sense. I was tired of defending the guy, talking about him, and even thinking about him.
“Well, it’s done now,” I murmured and took another drink of wine. “Let’s put it behind us.”
“Yes, let’s. Now, let’s talk more about this hunk of a man you have. He isfine…”
She continued speaking and rambling, like she usually did, and I quit listening. The truth was, there was no comparison between Oliver’s six foot four, two-fifty, muscled frame that held a bit of thickness around his sides and Patrick at five-ten and one-eighty. Both were built and in shape for their build, but Oliver was on another level.
A man who had spent years honing his body into a machine was no match, physically, for a man who occasionally ran on the weekends and lifted weights only when the spirit moved him.
While Melissa rattled on, I continued thinking about all the years I’d spent with Patrick, finally letting the truth everyone spoke to me sink into me like it should have long ago.
They were right about Patrick. Patrick had always expected me to bow to him, to go along with what he wanted because he was a McDonnelly.
