Chapter 3: The Morning After Text
The grey morning light felt accusatory. Alessia lay on her back, one arm flung over her eyes, the sheet tangled around her hips. Every muscle ached with a delicious, specific tenderness. When she shifted, she felt it—a deep, internal reminder of how he’d taken her against the tiles, the ghost of his grip on her hips.
She could smell him on her skin, even after her own shower. She could still feel the stretch.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. Once. Then again.
With a reluctant groan, she fumbled for it. The screen burned her sleep-soft eyes.
A message from Josh.
I can still taste you.
Three hours had passed since he’d whispered a rough goodbye in the empty parking lot, their knuckles brushing like teenagers. Three hours of silence, and now this. Five words that sent a lightning bolt of pure, liquid heat straight to her core.
She stared at the text, her breath catching. The careful walls they’d spent years building were rubble. There was no pretending now. No going back to just banter over a protein shake.
A reckless, dizzying power surged through her. She let her free hand slide down her stomach, under the waistband of her knickers. She was already wet, thinking of him. Of the sounds he’d made. She captured the feeling with her phone, a quick, blurry shot of her fingers slipping through her own slick folds.
She sent it. Then typed the caption.
Come finish what you started.
She threw the phone onto the duvet as if it had burned her, her heart hammering against her ribs. What had she done? This was insanity. It was a signed confession. It was—
Her phone buzzed again.
Be there in twenty. Door unlocked.
He’d been waiting for her invitation. The realization made her thighs clench. He’d been sitting somewhere, just as wrecked as she was, waiting for a sign. She scrambled out of bed, pulling on a long, worn Arsenal t-shirt that hung to her mid-thigh. She didn’t brush her hair. She didn’t make coffee. She just paced the short length of her living room, the floorboards cool under her bare feet, listening for the sound of his car.
Eighteen minutes later, the front door clicked open.
He stood there, filling the frame. He wore a dark hoodie and joggers, his hair still damp from what must have been another shower. His eyes found hers instantly, a dark, hungry look that erased the distance between them in a second. He closed the door softly behind him, locking it.
Neither of them spoke.
He crossed the room in five long strides. There was no greeting. His hands came up to frame her face, his thumbs tracing her cheekbones, a shocking tenderness after the violence of the night before. He just looked at her, his breath uneven.
“You’re real,” he murmured, as if confirming it for himself.
Then he kissed her. It was slower than in the shower, deeper, a rediscovery. She could taste mint and the faint, underlying taste of coffee. She wound her arms around his neck, pulling him closer, rising onto her toes to meet his height. His hands slid down, over the thin cotton of her shirt, gripping her ass and lifting her clean off the floor. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her like that, mouth still locked on hers, through the doorway into her bedroom.
He laid her down on the crumpled sheets, coming down over her, his weight a solid, welcome anchor. He broke the kiss to trail his mouth down her throat, his stubble scraping her sensitive skin.
“I’ve thought of nothing else,” he said into the hollow of her collarbone. His voice was raw. “Nothing. All night. Just the way you came for me.”
“Josh…” His name was a plea.
He nudged her thighs apart with his knee, settling between them. The hard ridge of his cock pressed against her through his joggers and her knickers. He rocked against her, once, twice, a slow, maddening promise that made her arch off the bed.
“Tell me you want it,” he said, his eyes searching hers. “Slow this time. I want to see you. All of you.”
“I want it. God, I want you. Please.”
He hooked his fingers in the waistband of her knickers and pulled them down her legs, discarding them. He did the same with her t-shirt, dragging it up over her head until she lay bare before him. The morning light gilded her skin. He sat back on his heels, just looking, his gaze a physical caress that left her trembling.
“Fuck, Alessia,” he breathed. “You’re so beautiful it hurts.”
He leaned down and took one nipple into his mouth, sucking deeply, his tongue circling the peak. She cried out, her fingers tunneling into his curls. He worshipped her breasts with his mouth and hands until she was writhing, until soft, desperate whimpers fell from her lips. His mouth blazed a trail down her stomach, over the quivering muscles, and then lower.
He didn’t ask. He simply put his shoulders under her thighs and dragged her to his mouth.
The first flat stroke of his tongue made her entire body jolt. “Oh, fuck!”
He ate her like a man starving. Slow, deep laps interspersed with the sharp, focused point of his tongue circling her clit. He used his fingers too, one, then two, sliding inside her with an obscene, wet sound, crooking them to press against a spot that made her vision flash white.
“You taste like heaven,” he growled against her, the vibration pushing her closer to the edge. “Better than I dreamed. And I dreamed a lot.”
She was coming apart under his mouth, her hips lifting off the bed to meet his relentless tongue. The orgasm built like a wave, slow and immense, tightening every muscle before it shattered her. She came with a choked scream, her thighs clamping around his head, her back bowing off the mattress.
Before the last tremor had even faded, he was moving. Shedding his clothes in frantic, awkward movements. Then he was there, nudging at her entrance, his tip slick with her release and his own pre-cum. He pushed in slowly, so slowly, filling her inch by unbearable inch, his eyes locked on hers, watching every flicker of feeling on her face.
“Look at me,” he whispered, bottoming out inside her with a long, low groan. “I need you to look at me.”
She forced her eyes open. He was braced above her, his biceps corded with tension, a sheen of sweat already on his temples. The feeling of him, buried deep, stretched full, was overwhelming. It was possession. It was home.
He began to move. A slow, rolling rhythm of his hips, a deep, dragging withdrawal followed by a steady, complete surge back in. Each stroke was a deliberate act of worship, a world away from the frantic fucking in the shower. This was something else. Something terrifying.
“You feel that?” he breathed, his forehead touching hers. “That’s me. That’s all me, Less. I’m never gonna feel right without this. Without you.”
Tears pricked the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t speak. She just wrapped her legs higher around his back, urging him deeper, meeting each thrust with a roll of her own hips. The friction was exquisite, a building fire in her belly. He shifted his angle, and on the next thrust, he hit a spot that made her see stars.
“Right there,” she sobbed. “Don’t stop. Please, Josh, don’t stop.”
His control began to fray. His thrusts grew harder, faster, losing their measured pace. The bedframe knocked a quiet, persistent rhythm against the wall. The air filled with the sound of their skin slapping, their mingled gasps, the ragged, filthy praise he muttered into her neck.
“Take my cock, yes. Just like that. Your perfect, tight pussy. Mine. Say it’s mine.”
“It’s yours,” she choked out, the confession tearing from her. “It’s always been yours.”
His rhythm stuttered. He drove into her, once, twice, three more brutal, perfect times, and then with a broken shout, he came. She felt the hot, pulsing release deep inside her, the convulsive clench of his body, and it tipped her over a second edge. Her own climax ripped through her, a silent, shaking wave that left her blind and deaf to everything but the feeling of him shuddering in her arms.
He collapsed, his dead weight a comfort, his face buried in her neck. Their hearts hammered against each other, a frantic, syncing beat that slowly began to calm. He was still inside her, softening. Neither moved.
Minutes bled away, marked only by their slowing breath. Finally, he rolled to the side, pulling her with him, keeping her nestled against his chest. His fingers traced idle patterns on her shoulder.
The reality of her flat, the morning light, the familiar view of her misplaced boots and a stack of match reports on her dresser, began to seep back in. The fantasy of the hidden shower stall was gone. This was her life. And he was now, irrevocably, tangled in the centre of it.
Her phone buzzed again, from the living room. Then again. And again. Not a message. A call.
Josh stiffened. “Yours?”
“Probably my mum. Sunday check-in.” She made no move to get it.
It stopped. Then, a second later, started buzzing again with a new, insistent tone.
Josh’s phone, from the pocket of his discarded joggers on the floor, began to vibrate violently, skittering on the wooden boards.
They looked at each other. A cold dread, separate from the sweat cooling on their skin, began to crawl up her spine.
“That’s not your mum,” Josh said quietly.
He disentangled himself and got up, retrieving his phone. He stared at the screen, his face hardening into an expression she’d only ever seen on the pitch after a bad foul. A mask of cold, focused anger.
“It’s Simon.” Their agent. “And I’ve got twelve missed calls from him.”
He answered, putting it on speaker. “Simon. What’s—”
The agent’s voice cut through the room, tinny and frantic. “Where the hell have you been? Do not, under any circumstances, go online. Do not look at the fucking headlines. I’m on my way to you. Where are you?”
Josh’s eyes met Alessia’s. The warmth of seconds before was gone, frozen solid.
“I’m at Alessia’s,” Josh said, his voice dangerously flat.
A long, pained silence stretched from the speaker. Then Simon’s voice, heavy with a dread that mirrored their own.
“Well, you’d better let me in. The story’s already broken. Someone got a photo of you leaving the training ground together last night. It’s all over Twitter. The Mail’s running with ‘Arsenal’s Secret Scandal: Star Strikers in Forbidden Romance.’ We have a massive fucking problem.”