She came undone again, clutching the sheets as waves of pleasure crashed over her. Then Beau fell on top of her, kissing her, and pumping into her afterglow until his entire body seized up, and he groaned out his release.
A few minutes later he rolled off of her, sprawling on his side of the large bed with his arms and legs spread wide.
They lay there quietly for a few seconds, then he said, “Big finger?”
Josie giggled, feeling like a girl half her age, almost literally, like she was seventeen again and just as wide-eyed over Beau Prescott as she used to be. “I didn’t know what else to call it.”
“Well, you’re going to have to come up with something better than that,” he said. “That’s even worse than kit kat.”
She rolled her eyes but couldn’t keep the smile off her face. “Whatever you say, Mr. Prescott.”
They both laughed a little more, then fell silent again. Josie began to feel awkward. Should she leave? Wasn’t there an old saying about how men didn’t pay women to have sex with them, they paid them to leave afterwards?
But then he reached for her. “Come here,” he said, pulling her into his arms and curling a hand around her head, so she had no choice but to lie on his chest.
A few minutes later, she got up the nerve to ask. “Do you want me to go back to my bed? I don’t want to overstay my welcome.”
He didn’t answer.
“Beau.”
Still no answer.
She carefully slid off his sunglasses and sure enough his eyes were closed. So she guessed she was staying.
She reached across him to place the sunglasses on his nightstand, then curled up close and settled in, all the while trying to ignore how good it felt to have just done something that went against every moral fiber in her body.
CHAPTER 11
ONE MOMENT THE STADIUM WAS ROARING and the next, everything went completely silent. It had always been like this for Beau after the ball was snapped, from the very first time he played quarterback. It was as if a mute button had been pushed, one that turned off all the distracting sounds and sent the world into slow motion.
One of his best wide receivers was open in the end zone, but there was also a two-hundred-and-fifty pound linebacker blitzing toward him with the ferocity of a rabid dog.
Beau feinted to the side, and cocked his arm to throw the ball, but then something hit him from behind—a three-hundred pound defensive end he was told later.
That guy was just trying to do his job, which was to take out the quarterback before he could throw the ball. If Beau hadn’t been totally focused on his receivers, maybe he would have heard him coming. Maybe he would have thrown the ball away, or dumped it off to his hot receiver.
But Beau didn’t see the big lineman coming, so it was a complete surprise when he got hit from behind. He didn’t go down, but the force of the blow sent his helmet flying.
For a moment he just stood there stared at his helmet in a daze, trying to figure out why it was no longer on his head. Helmets weren’t supposed to come off. The NFL had all sorts of rules about chin straps being securely tightened because the last thing you wanted was to get hit when your helmet was off.
“Don’t look at the coach.”
“What?” He looked up and all the other football players were gone off the field, except for one. A tall, muscular guy dressed in the Suns uniform. He looked exactly like him, except he had on a pair of Ray-Bans.
“Don’t look at the coach,” the quarterback who looked exactly like him said again. “If you dive for your helmet, then you’ll get away with just a concussion. If you look at the coach, then it becomes a freak accident.”
“I don’t understand,” Beau said to his other self. “What’s the difference?”
“If you look at the coach, that means you won’t have a helmet on, and your occipital lobe will be unprotected when the other guy hits you.”
Beau scrunched up his forehead and looked at the coach to see if he could see what other-Beau was seeing. “What other guy—?”
That’s when the blitzing linebacker hit him from what should have been his left side, but ended up being square in the back of his head, sending a white hot flash through the part of his brain that housed his primary visual cortex.
Then the world went black.
Beau woke with a start. His eyes opened to nothing, an unnerving absence of visual sensation that he would have been hard put to describe even if he wanted to. And just like every morning since taking that unexpected second hit, his heart seized with panic until he remembered what had happened, that he was blind now.
But unlike those other mornings, the disappointment of waking up without his sight gave way to another realization: He wasn’t alone in bed. Josie Witherspoon lie next to him. He could feel her thin arm flung across his stomach and the warmth of her steady breath across his chest where her head rested.