Capture the Moment (Moments #1)

35. Blake

thirty-five

Blake

“Would you sit the frick down?” Braxton groans from my bedroom floor where he’s sat with Jace and Alec building an Eiffel Tower LEGO set. Derek and Deli sit on the bed, watching cartoons on her iPad.

I chew on my thumbnail, pacing the room as I think about Cleo and I’s talk from two days ago. “How can I sit when I have a date with our coach’s daughter?!” I shriek.

The sound of my voice cracking startles me for a moment pulling me to an abrupt halt as each of the guys stare at me.

Since when the hell do I shriek?

“That wasn’t…”

“You’re p-u-s-s-y whipped.” Alec chuckles, eyes focused on the miniature set in front of him.

“Am not!” I shout back but let’s face it… I totally am. All I had was one taste of her. Just one taste, two months ago, and she’s been all I can think about ever since.

“Are too…” Braxton sighs loudly before groaning at his phone, more than likely losing at one of the cooking games Derek got him to play.

“So, what if I am?! Have you three seen Cleo? She’s fucking gorgeous. Sorry, Deli. As a matter of fact, don’t tell me she’s gorgeous, I might punch you idiots.”

Jace scoffs, pausing his tinkering. He looks up at me annoyed, but I can see the amusement laced in his eyes. “Cleo has been busting your balls since you two met… It’s honestly funny— ”

“HELP ME!”

Jace cocks his head at my abrupt yell before a sly smile takes over his face.

“I would give you advice but my first relationship ended with a baby, so…” Derek trails off as he gathers Delilah and her things.

“Help you?” Jace asks, looking between Alec and Braxton.

Now, I know that this may be a bad idea since Jace likes to troll people for fun, but this can also be just what I need to get Cleo on my good side, for her to truly come out of her shell. So, without much thought, I slide onto the floor beside my best friend and give him my best puppy dog eyes.

“Dude…” He scrunches his face in disgust.

“Please!” I cry out reminding myself of my four-year-old cousin, Jordyn. She has the meanest puppy dog’s eyes I’ve ever encountered.

Jace gives me a long stare before sighing, giving in to my whims, and I guess the guys take this as their sign to leave because almost immediately the four of them file out of the room.

“What do you need help with? If she agreed to go anywhere with you, nine times out of ten, it means that she likes you… I think. She can be a bit reclusive at times.” He shrugs as if what he just told me was any news.

“Tell me something I don’t know, Heart!” I groan, throwing up my arms in the air like a petulant child because that’s exactly how I feel right now.

“You spent fourteen years getting to know her, I’ve only had sixty days. Tell me about her, who is Cleo Jones? You gotta give me something, dude.”

Is this what begging is like? I’ve never been on the giving end of it, and I don’t think I like it all too much. I’m usually the one being begged not doing it.

I sigh as Jace takes forever to find his words, he just sits in front of me staring like he’s trying to crack the code on a million-dollar safe. I sink back into myself, watching him watch me.

I knew I should’ve just asked Georgia or Denver, those two would give me the time of day if it pertained to Cleo. I wouldn’t ask the pink-haired one though, she doesn’t even know my name. I mean seriously who the hell is Jake?

What if Cleo does mess with a guy named Jake and she just called me him instead? Oh my goodness, was I the misnamed side-piece ?

I run a hand over my face and groan as it does nothing to calm my nerves, especially with this beady-eyed motherfucker staring at me like he’s figured me out.

“You like her?”

Congratulations, captain fucking obvious! You’ve finally cracked the code.

“No… I just want to risk my spot as captain for a girl that I had a halfway one-night stand with two months ago just because ”. I give him a sardonic smile and immediately the small one forming on Jace’s face falls.

“Okay, don’t be rude, you asked me for help.” Jace frowns, moving his body in a way to where he’s comfortably sitting crisscrossed in front of me.

I stare blankly at him causing him to chuckle lightly. This prick.

“Cleo is like a breath of fresh air, whereas Georgia is like smog and the reason you need to wear masks in countries like China and shit. Cleo is like a fresh spring morning with the light morning dew, whereas Georgia is like the moment after it rains—cold, semi-pretty, and dark. Cleo doesn’t open as easily to others but when she does it’s like you’re in on this wonderful secret to the joys of life. She’s beautiful and clumsy and very very fucking nerdy about cameras—please keep her away from cameras unless you want to spend four hours looking at them in Best Buy.” He pauses, looking up at the ceiling as if to think about what to say next and it is then that I see it on his face. The way his green eyes twinkle and his ears redden while talking about her has my stomach roiling.

What.

The.

Fuck?!

“You motherfucker…” I sigh, looking up at the white painted ceiling cursing the heaven’s above. It would be just my luck that the girl that I want has a guy best friend that’s fucking in love with her. Double points for that guy to also be my best friend.

FUCK ME.

FUCK.

FUCK YOU. (WAIT…no, not fuck you? Sorry, you didn’t do anything.)

FUCK HIM, THOUGH.

FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK FUCK.

“What? You wanted me to tell you about her?” His tone is questioning as he furrows his eyebrows in confusion but what the hell is he confused about? He just practically confessed his love for her to me!

“Are you in love with her? I’m not saying I’ll back off, it’s every man for himself but… are you? ” I ask, chewing on my bottom lip as I await the news that’ll spin my world off its axis.

“Ew! Are you crazy? I’ve seen her go through puberty and her awkward stages…” He twists his face in disgust as I tilt my head at him.

“Have you ever loved her?” a softer, more sincere voice asks, and I don’t recognize that it’s my own until Jace responds with a sigh.

“Cleo and I will never be a thing like how you’re thinking. We’ve shared baths as toddler’s and beds for sleepovers, we even kissed but God no—”

“You kissed her?!” I shout, jumping to my feet. I think I’m going to faint. I’m seeing red and stars… but mostly fucking red.

Right now, I’m an angry bodacious bull and Jace Heart is my matador dressed in bright crimson running away from me as I charge at him.

“How the fuck did you skip over me seeing her naked?” He asks as he sprints around my bedroom, trying to get away from me but that just makes me see a brighter red as he runs out of the room.

“YOU SAW HER NAKED?!”

I take another long sip of my lemon water for the seventh time since we’ve been seated at Supérieure Nourriture, the latest fine dining French restaurant just twenty minutes from campus. The restaurant is the style of a candlelit dinner with basic golden candelabras at the center of each table.

My palms grow clammy as I look back up at Cleo, rubbing them against my thighs. I don’t know what the hell my problem is. She and I have shared a bed together and now I can barely form the proper words to speak to her .

Cleo’s wearing a red satin thigh length dress that clasps in a halter formation around her neck. Her long brown hair is in its signature style with half of it up and the other half down with two tendrils of hair to frame her round face.

Today, her bow of choice is on her shoes. The tiny cream bows were the first thing I’d noticed when she’d walked in front of me into the restaurant.

She shifts awkwardly as the waiter approaches us once again, asking if we’re ready to order, to which Cleo asks for another five minutes to decide.

I twist the tie around my neck and frown at its tightness. Why did I even wear a tie? It’s not like we’re at the Met or something. I exhale deeply, a feeling of bottomless dread rumbles my stomach as realization dawns on me.

I’m completely bombing our first date.

“Do you feel stuffy too or is it just me?” a soft voice asks, catching my attention. Cleo’s leaning across the table, her red painted lips formed in a small frown as I nod.

“You want to get out of here?”

The question causes me to wrinkle my nose but then an idea hits me, and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before.

I give the woman in front of me a small smile before nodding, happy with my forming plan. “I think I know a place, let’s get out of here.” I grin, standing up from the stuffy table to hold out a hand for her.

Cleo’s eyes brighten as she looks up at me from her spot before she clutches my hand and jumps out of her seat.

That’s exactly how I found myself standing inside of the local Summerfield pizza shop, Pizzeria Pizza (Cliché, I know), smiling from ear to ear looking back and forth between my Jeep where Cleo sits in the front seat and to the guy making the pies I’d ordered.

I watch as Cleo films me through the windshield with her vlog camera and give it a small wave before turning back to the pizza guy.

“Hot date?” He asks, watching the exchange as I let out a low chuckle.

“The hottest.”

Once I secure the pizza, I work fast to get Cleo and myself situated in the car and to our destination. She’s grinning from ear to ear as she takes a bite from a slice of cheese pizza in one hand and another from her strawberry donut in the other.

During the car ride over, we laugh and talk about the semester. We even sing a few One Direction songs until we reach the final stoplight before our destination.

“Put this on your eyes for me,” I say, keeping my eyes trained solely on the road as I hand her my tie.

I can hear her breath hitch as she takes the tie into her hands but Cleo, the confident girl that she is, would never let me see her off-kilter.

“You kinky bastard, I didn’t know you had a thing for blindfolds.” She giggles.

I smirk at her implication and place my hand on her exposed thigh.

“Oh, Princess, there’s so much about me that you don’t know,” I tease, pulling into our destination, the smell of sea salt permeates the air as I exit the car first, leaving all of our belongings inside. I prop my phone up on a wooden plank near the car, hoping to get everything on film as I let Cleo out of the passenger side. She’s definitely going to want footage of whatever happens here and I’m more than happy to do this for her.

I unbuckle her seatbelt for her, her warm fruity scent is intoxicating as I lean over her, but I suppress myself. This is about Cleo, not my horniness. Lifting her out of the car in a bridal carry, Cleo gasps from excitement as I set her down in the sand.

Her jaw drops at the sound of waves crashing in the distance and the smell of saltwater crowding our senses. I’m about to tell her to take off the blindfold but she eagerly does it before I can.

“Oh my… Blake, you didn’t!” She jumps excitedly, looking back and forth between the ocean and me. Her eyes sparkle like small stars as she smiles, I can almost see her inner child smiling up at me as she throws her arms around my neck pulling me into a bone-crushing hug.

“Do you like it?” I ask as she pulls back from my neck, resting my interlocked hands on the small of her back .

“I fucking love it. You brought me to the beach!” She squeals, undoing us as she kicks off her heels running towards the shoreline.

As the waves come barreling back in, Cleo runs back up toward where I’ve wandered with the camera, smiling like a little kid in a candy store. My heart clogs in my throat, I did that for her.

She loosens her hair from its ponytail, ruffling it as she runs, and fuck… She looks like something out of a movie as she approaches. Her smooth brown skin glows under the natural light of the golden hour sun and is absolutely captivating.

“Well, what did you have planned? I know the cogs are spinning in that pretty little head of yours,” She teases, placing her hands on her hips as she looks up at me like the little princess she is. Instead of responding to her, I held out a hand to signal for her to wait and trudge back to the Jeep, opening up the trunk where I kept a spare blanket, a cooler filled with water and Gatorade, and a small speaker.

“Welcome to our date, Princess. Follow me.” I prompt her, stalking further into the beach to find a spot to set up.

She runs back to the car, grabbing our food before following me to where I set up camp. I give myself a mental pat on the back for coming up with this idea on such short notice as she plops down onto the Spiderman blanket next to me.

We sit in a comfortable silence, listening to the crashing of the ocean waves and seagulls chirping away as we eat our dinner of cheese pizza and donuts. Cleo’s an iPad kid, believe it or not, so she turns on Love in Cancun about five minutes into our peaceful silence and insists on watching the finale with me and I’m not complaining one bit. I’ve grown to love the cheesy reality show since becoming friends with her and I'm dying to find out what happens next with America’s sweetheart.

We’re in the middle of a heated friendly discussion on whether or not Rosetta would pick Cooper or Judd when Cleo’s phone buzzes rapidly and just as I’m about to turn away from her screen to give her privacy, I catch sight of the messages.

Unknown

don’t get too comfortable little Cleo.

you know what they say about snitches, bitch.

I reel back at the last one, eyeing the woman beside me, her skin blanched of all color as she gulps.

“Who is that? Why the fuck are they talking to you like that?” I ask, blood boiling as her bottom lip wobbles slightly. If I hadn’t been watching her so intently, I don’t think I would have noticed it. But I am, and I did.

“It’s nothing.” She sighs, her voice watery as she deletes the messages from her lock screen.

“C’mon, Cleo, don’t lie to me.” I sigh, running a hand down my face before casting my vision back to her. “I know we’re just casually dating but I want us to be friends before anything. Friends help each other and I want to help you. You don’t deserve to be spoken to like that, regardless of whether you’re in the wrong or not,” I say, and mean every single word as her lower lip trembles. If I could only take it between my own and transfer all of her pain to myself, I would in a heartbeat.

Cleo seems to fight with herself for a moment, weighing the pros and cons of talking about her past life before letting out a deep and exhausted breath. And I think that’s all she’ll do until her porcelain mask cracks and the floodgates burst open. Cleo lets out the most heart-wrenching sob that I’ve ever heard and it startles me, but I instantly snap out of it when she tries and fails to calm herself.

She needs me and I want to be the one that she needs, so I reach for her, pulling her small body into my lap and hug her tight against my chest. She trembles under my touch, body heaving as she continues to cry. I massage circles into her arm with one hand and her scalp with the other, the same way I used to calm Jules down whenever she would have a panic attack.

“It’s okay, baby. I got you.” I soothe, rubbing small circles over her forearms as she begins to calm down.

“I… I need to… To tell you about why I left Brighton.” She hiccups, snuggling deeper into my chest.

My hackles rise at the mention of her old school in New York. Is she going to tell me about Marcelo? Did he hurt her? Who are those texts from?

“I used to date this guy, Marcelo Rivers.” She sniffles.

I tense at the mention of the dickhead forward for the Brighton Eagles but I have to push aside my hatred, only for the woman wrapped in my arms. I nod softly instead of responding. Lord knows if I use my voice, my anger will come out uncontainable.

“He and I were each other’s everything, Blake, or at least I thought so then. I want to point out that I’d only ever been in one other relationship before that, so I had a really shitty idea of what love was…” She chuckles but I can tell that it takes a lot for her to say something like that about herself. “He didn’t do anything to hurt me, no… He never cheated—not that I know of—and he never put his hands on me or anything like that, but he did become distant.”

She chewed on her bottom lip, wiping a single tear from her cheek.

“I don’t even know why I’m crying right now, it’s not like I miss the asshole but fuck I hate that they won’t leave me alone,” She says with a long-frustrated sigh. “It was after a match with you guys last year, Brighton won against SFU for the first time in a long time, so the guys threw a major party… And I caught him doing steroids that night.” Like a weight has been lifted from her shoulders, Cleo relaxes just a bit under my touch.

But my shoulders? They bunch up so hard I think that all her tension truly did shift to me.

Steroids? I knew Marcelo was an asshole but not a fucking idiot. I’m not too mad about the fact that he cheated in the game, I couldn’t care less—we’ve been winning against Brighton since I started at SFU, and we’ll keep winning once I retire from the NHL—but to put Cleo in the predicament of finding out like that, is what has me shaking with anger.

“He got so mad at me for barging in on him and saying that if I go to the Dean… Anyway, it was bad , Blake. I’d never been scared of Marcelo, he’s a 6’0 hockey player, sure, but he’s nothing in comparison to Ry and Jace.”

She toys with the hem of my shirt before abruptly sitting up straight, looking me dead in the eyes .

“He said that if I ever told anyone about what I’d seen, he’d post our sex tape. I’d completely forgotten the tape existed and then he blackmailed me with it.” Her face darkened as if reliving the moment he'd threatened her.

I’d never seen her look so gloomy; she radiated sunshine with her bows and pink clothing but deep-down Cleo harbored such dark things from her past. It was at that moment that I knew that whoever made Cleo feel like that, regardless of whether it was in the past, present or future, they’d pay .

“And then I told my roommate about what happened, stupid… I know. And then immediately after, I was outcasted by everyone—professors, students, the fucking lunch ladies. And it was only after I paid four thousand fucking dollars for my mistake that the texts started. They’ve been texting me since January.”

January?! It’s October .

“Cleo…” I frown, wanting so badly to ease just a fraction of her pain. She twists back around in my hold, resting her head on my chest. “What can I do to make you feel better?” I ask.

“Just hold me…” she trails off softly—and so I do.

We sit in a still position, me holding her as she and I listen to the calming tunes of our environment for all of five minutes until she jumps up from my lap with a bright smile on her face. The setting sun casts a heavenly glow behind her as she stretches, smiling from ear to ear, pulling a full 360 with her mood.

Cleo slowly lifts the bottom hem of her dress and it isn't until the soft fabric puddles on the sand by my foot that I come to the clear realization that she’s stripping her clothes in front of me.

Fucking hell…

“What… What are you doing?” I cough as she turns on her heels, her matching red lace bra and underwear set does something to me as her ass jiggles slightly.

Have I ever told her that red was my favorite color?

She looks amazing in red. Fucking devilish.

“Washing the pain away… Want to join?” She cocks a raised brow at me, undoing the clasp of her bra. She turns her head to the side, eyeing me. “I mean… Why are we at the beach if not to swim?” Her voice is sultry and sweet as she rolls down her red lace panties and runs to the water, diving in .

“You coming?” she yells back to the shore, her head peeking over the water and I am enraptured by her.

I stand immediately, ripping off my shirt with eagerness. Cleo fucking Jones wants me to skinny dip with her. I hurry to take off my pants, tripping over them as I try to run before they’re fully off. But who the fuck cares? That girl is going to be the death of me and I can proudly say that I will die a happy man if it means that I can spend just a little more time with her. Donning my briefs, I run to water where Cleo treads carefully and dive in.

As the sun sets behind us and the moon takes over the sun’s rightful spot in the sky, I swim towards the girl of my dreams. Cleo in the light is gorgeous but in the moonlight? She is captivating . Her brown hair is curly from the saltwater and her skin shines a beautiful hue under the stars. I am in complete and utter awe of her, and she doesn’t even know it.

“Come on, Lover Boy. I don’t bite.”