Page 14 of Bourbon Bliss
She picked up the silver ice cream scoop and waved it back and forth. “Of course, of course. I should have known. You want anything else with this? Cheese fondue? It’s awful cold for ice cream.”
“The ice cream will be sufficient, thank you.”
She smiled as she scooped out a round ball of rocky road ice cream and placed it on top of a pointed cone. “Here you go. One scoop of rocky road on a sugar cone.”
I took my ice cream and paid, then chose a seat at one of the round tables near a window. No one else was in the shop. She didn’t do much business in the winter. Ice cream was much more popular when the weather was hot, although her selection of cheeses did attract customers, particularly on the weekends. But weekdays in the early afternoons were typically quiet in the winter—often just me and one or two other customers—which was exactly why I came in every Tuesday for an ice cream cone when the weather was cold. I liked being where other people weren’t.
The door jingled and I looked up from my cone to find George Thompson entering the shop. The former all-pro receiver—and until his injury, star of my fantasy football team—was significantly taller in person than I’d expected. It was illogical, given that I’d known his height and weight—and all his other pertinent statistics—before I’d ever seen him in person. But his size was surprisingly intimidating.
He ran a hand through his thick brown hair as he studied the selection. He hadn’t seemed to notice me sitting here. He was indeed tall, and wide. Broad shoulders stretched the limits of his winter coat and his arms looked so long.
When I’d seen him at Moonshine, he’d been seated. I hadn’t gotten an adequate assessment of his size. Even in the hot spring, I hadn’t realized how big he was. Certain body parts had certainly appeared very large. I felt my cheeks warm as I recalled seeing his erect penis beneath the water. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a man naked, and he hadn’t appeared to care that I’d seen him unclothed, so it was curious that I now felt a surge of embarrassment over the incident.
What an odd sensation. My facial capillaries were flushing with blood and no doubt turning my cheeks red. It made me unsure whether I should look away, or perhaps sneak out of the shop before he could see me. I had a strange desire to flee.
But then my eyes traveled down his long arms to his hands.
Those hands that were so adept at catching a football, protecting it from the grasps of opposing players who meant to take it from him. Those hands were so… appealing. Long, thick fingers. Wide palms. They were huge. Much bigger than they appeared on TV.
Of course, that made sense. Typically, players were surrounded by their teammates on televised games. Seeing a large man next to other large men had the effect of disguising their size difference compared to the average person.
There were no other players here. Just George Thompson, with his height, and his broad shoulders, and his huge hands.
And other huge things, currently hidden by his pants.
I tore my eyes away. My heart rate had increased and the blood rushing to my face intensified. I could feel my pulse thumping in the hollow of my throat, beating in my wrists. My stomach tingled with an unfamiliar swirl of sensation.
Was I getting sick? Perhaps I’d eaten something questionable and I was feeling the beginnings of a bout of food poisoning. I looked at my ice cream. The bottom of the scoop near the cone was beginning to soften. A drip was forming, but the odd fluttering in my stomach made me reluctant to eat any.
“You might want to lick that before it drips on you.”
“What?” I heard my voice ask the question and a part of my brain scoffed at my own ridiculousness. I knew exactly what he’d said, and what he’d meant. There was no need to ask him to repeat himself. But I just had.
George pointed to the bead of melted chocolate ice cream hovering at the rim of my cone. “Your ice cream is about to drip.”
“Oh.”
Instead of bringing the cone to my mouth so I could lick it, I watched as the ice cream slid down the outside of the cone toward my fingers.
George’s hand moved into my field of vision and one of those impossibly large fingers traced the drip’s path up the cone in the opposite direction. He swiped the ice cream with the pad of his finger, then brought it to his mouth and sucked it off.
I looked up at him in awe. If anyone else had touched my food, I would have been unable to continue eating. I had a very strictno touching my foodpolicy. But watching George Thompson lick my ice cream drip off his finger did not have the immediate effect of making me want to dump the rest in the garbage.
In fact, I had the oddest experience of briefly imagining it had beenmymouth sucking that drip of ice cream off George Thompson’s finger.
“Sorry,” he said and gave his fingertip another quick suck. “It was going to drip on your hand.”
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. Seeing this man’s naked private parts had not rendered me speechless, but watching him lick ice cream off his finger had.
None of this interaction made sense.
“That’s okay,” I managed to say. I forced my gaze back to my ice cream so I’d stop staring at George Thompson’s mouth. And his huge hands.
“Nice to see you again, June.”
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I said, still not looking at him. “Dressed, this time.”
“That I am,” he said. “Although it’s too cold not to be. Still, freezing temperatures aren’t enough to keep me from enjoying some ice cream. I see we have that in common.”
