Page 67 of Trick Play
Piper’s face is pale, and she’s clutching a pillow to her chest. My brows pull together as I take her in. “Are you cold? We can get under the covers. Gimme a sec, and I’ll snuggle you and keep you warm.” I give her my most charming smile, hoping that’ll ease whatever’s going on right now.
She licks her lips, her eyes glued to my phone. “Has that been on this whole time?”
Propping myself up on my elbow, I put my phone on Do Not Disturb without even reading the texts. Whoever it is can wait. Because something’s going on here, and I definitely need to figure out what it is.
“Yes,” I answer in the same careful voice. “Should it not be?”
She shakes her head slowly, her eyes still on my phone like it’s a venomous snake poised to strike.
Clearing my throat, I look between the phone now on my side table and her again, and I think back to every other time we’ve been together. She’s turned off our phones more than once. Always mine first. And now that I think about it, the first time, she didn’t seem like she was going to turn off hers until I prompted her to. And she’s told me to leave it in the other room more than once too.
“Piper, is there some reason you’re not okay with me having my phone while we have sex?”
She stands, still clutching the pillow to her torso, and moves carefully around the room, crouching to gather up her clothes that were strewn around moments ago. When she straightens, clothes in hand, her gaze darts between me, my phone, her clothes, and the pillow, like she’s trying to figure out that riddle where you have to take a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage across the river on a boat that can only carry yourself and one other thing. Except it’s clear the riddle is how can she get dressed without revealing any part of her naked body to me or my phone.
I pick up my phone again, and she tenses. “Cal,” she starts, but I hold up my phone facing her, holding down the button to turn it off so she can see the screen go dark.
“There.” I set it down. “It’s off. Can you come back to bed, now?”
Her shoulders visibly drop, and the tight lines of her face relax as she climbs back on the bed, still holding the pillow in front of her, but this time more like a comfort object than a shield.
I glance at my phone one more time before moving closer to her. She lets me gather her into my arms, but avoids my gaze.
I kiss her shoulder and stroke her back, waiting until she seems more relaxed before broaching what just happened. Clearing my throat, I settle us so I’m propped up on my pillows against the wall and she’s leaning back against me, my arms around her and under the pillow. Her grip on it has relaxed, though, and while it’s still on her torso, I could easily pick it up and move it away if I were so inclined.
“So … what was that?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light.
But it does nothing to ease what is clearly something she doesn’t want to talk about. She lets out a heavy sigh, her eyes falling closed.
“I just want to understand,” I whisper softly, brushing a kiss over her cheek. “If that’s a thing that you need, phones off all the time, I’ll do it, but you have to tell me. You have to talk to me. Okay?”
She nods, eyes still closed. And when she starts speaking, it’s in a flat voice like she’s reciting a story that happened to someone else, some random person she doesn’t know as she tells me about an ex in California, some douchey fratboy asshole, who took pics of her during sex and shared them with his frat brothers as some kind of … game, I guess.
But her dispassionate recitation does nothing to calm the rage that’s strong enough that I have to slide out from behind her and pace the small space at the foot of my bed, staring at the walls and calculating if it’s worth the physical pain and cost of repair to punch a hole in one of them, not to mention the shit I’d get from my coaches if I show up tomorrow with scraped up knuckles.
Deciding I can’t risk it, I stop, my back to Piper, and force myself to take a deep breath.
“Cal?” she says in a quiet, tentative voice. I’ve never heard her sound like that before, so uncertain. So worried.
I whirl around, doing my best to master my temper. “I’m sorry, Piper,” I say in a quiet voice.
She nods, her face drawn. “Sure. No problem. I understand.” Setting the pillow aside, she reaches for her clothes again, but I stop her with my hand on hers, confusion overtaking the rage.
“What are you doing?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Piper
My eyes fly to Cal’s, unsure what to make of anything that just happened in the last ten minutes or so.
When I heard his phone vibrate, I panicked. In my excitement at seeing him, I didn’t even think to make him turn it off. And my eyes were closed for … I don’t know how long while we fucked. Could he have taken a picture when I was unaware of what was going on?
I don’t think so … he had one hand on me the whole time and his other was occupied holding him up.
But he did want a topless pic while he was gone.
And what if he did snap a pic and send it to his friends, and the texts he was getting were his buddies congratulating him or something? At least that’s what was going through my head when I saw the phone, reliving every moment of our encounter from an analytical perspective, trying to decide if he ever had the actual opportunity to take a picture, clutching the pillow over me, the first option to cover myself I had available, just in case he didn’t take one before and wanted to rectify the situation.
