Richard's POVI didn't move.Every rational part of my brain was telling me to turn around. I came out here with a stick because I thought it might be a bear. I found this instead. The correct response was to leave.I stood at the tree line and looked at Andre Williams standing in a lake in the dark and I did not leave.On the pitch I had always filed Andre as physically built for the game. Shoulder width. Core strength. The kind of body that told you what kind of contact you were dealing with before the first whistle. I had kept that information exactly where it was useful and categorized and did not require anything else from me.That was the pitch.This was something else entirely.From the bank, in the dark, with nothing between us except water and thirty feet of quiet, I could see all of it. His back was broad and deep brown, the kind of brown that caught even the faint moonlight and held it with a warmth that the water around him simply couldn't match. The low light moved acros

Richard's POVI stood at the tree line and could not move.Andre was at the bank, chest still wet, water tracking down his dark skin in slow lines that my eyes followed without permission. His shorts were dark blue and sitting low on his hips and clinging to everything they covered and it was immediately, uncomfortably obvious that there was nothing underneath them. The fabric left nothing to the imagination and my imagination didn't need the help anyway given that I had just watched him stroke his cock in a lake for the past several minutes and gotten hard doing it.I swallowed.I thought: I thought I'd put all of this behind me.I didn't examine what I meant by that. I didn't have time.Andre looked at me. Then at the stick in my hand. Then back at my face. His expression moved through something before it settled."Why are you here?" he said.My mouth was closed. My lips were pressed together and my brain was producing nothing useful and all I could think about was the lake and the

Richard's POV"Black bear," Andre said.His voice was low and controlled. I did not feel low and controlled. I felt like a man standing in a dark forest in shorts who had followed a sound with a stick and ended up here."Okay," I said. I said it to the dark in front of me because I was still facing the trees and the growl had come from somewhere very close and I was not ready to move any part of my body in any direction."You know what they say about black bears?" Andre said."I don't know anything about black bears," I said. "I'm from a city.""If it's black, fight back."I turned my head just enough to look at him sideways. "That's your advice right now.""That's what you do.""Every nature documentary I have ever watched says don't engage," I said. "Stay still. Stay low. Don't make yourself a threat. Wait it out.""That's grizzlies.""I am not confident enough in that distinction to bet my life on it.""O'Reilly." His voice dropped. "Don't be a little bitch on me now. Not after eve

Andre's POV"We are never speaking of this," I said.Richard looked at me in the dark for a moment. Said nothing. I decided to take that as agreement.We walked back through the trees separately. Not together, not side by side, just two people heading in the same direction who were not acknowledging that they were heading in the same direction. The clearing appeared through the trees and I kept my eyes forward and I did not look at Richard and I especially did not look at the destroyed shirt hanging off his shoulder and the expanse of his chest catching what was left of the moonlight.I was not looking at that.I got to my tent. Unzipped it. Got in.I lay on my back in the dark and stared at the canvas above me and knew immediately that I was not going to sleep.Richard's chest was burned into the back of my eyelids with a specificity I had no precedent for. I had seen it for maybe forty-five seconds total. The adrenaline of the bear, the dark, the torn fabric hanging off one shoulde

Andre's POVThe next morning, the coordinator read the pairings out one by one.I was standing at the back of the group with my coffee going cold in my hand and my eyes on the treeline and my body still carrying the unfinished business of last night like a second kit bag. I had slept eventually. Badly. With my hands very deliberately at my sides."Williams," the coordinator said. He looked down at his clipboard. "O'Reilly."I stared at him.He moved on to the next pairing without looking up.I stood there with my cold coffee and looked at the side of his head and waited for some part of this situation to improve. It didn't.The activity was a treasure hunt. Hidden coins scattered across a mapped section of the forest, pairs from different programs working together to find them all. The coordinator explained it with the specific enthusiasm of a man who believed deeply in the bonding power of structured outdoor activities. He talked about cooperation and communication and the value of b

36 (Ha!)

Richard's POVThe forest moved past in the specific silence Andre had enforced since the hunt started.I kept my eyes on the map and the ground and didn't try conversation again. Andre found coins fast, three in the first twenty minutes, tucked at the base of marked trees, each one dropped into his pocket without a word. I found two. We were functional together in the way two people could be functional when they agreed to treat each other as equipment rather than people.It almost worked.The path forked.I studied the map. The right fork matched the grid coordinates for the next marked zone, elevation lines, distance, angle from our entry point all tracking clean."Right," I said."Left."I held the map out. "The coordinates say right.""Left runs parallel to the stream," Andre said. "Easier terrain, faster movement.""Faster movement in the wrong direction.""I've been navigating terrain like this since I was a kid. The map's a suggestion, not a mandate.""The map is literally the ma

All Chapters of Rough Play (A MLM Sports Romance): Chapter 31 - Chapter 36

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36 (Ha!)