Backhand (Gold Hockey)

by Elise Faber

  Sara had stepped out the door and was turning in the direction of her apartment, awkwardly shrugging into her jacket, when Mitch’s voice stopped her. “And while you’re at it, maybe respond to that text you’ve been staring at.”

  Her hand came up, starting as a perfect princess wave before transforming into a very particular one-fingered salute.

  He just laughed.

  “You know I won’t let you fire me, right?” she called.

  “I know,” he called back. “Just like I know you’ll bring me something fabulous come Monday.”

  Her stomach was in knots at the thought because she suspected he was right. Shaking her head, she turned and started walking.

  “And Sara?” She paused, middle of the sidewalk, wind blowing, people pushing past her, as Mitch yelled, “Forget texting back. I know it’s shocking in this day and age but just call him!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THERE WASN’T A text waiting for Mike when he turned his phone back on.

  Acute disappointment swept through him, even as he tried to convince himself that it was for the best. Sara didn’t need his drama in her life.

  “All good, Stewie?”

  He glanced up into the pale blue eyes of Brit Plantain, star goalie, kickass chick, and general all-around woman-with-a-heart-of-gold, no pun intended.

  She wore only a black sports bra and the bottom half of her equipment and looked as though she were a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Don’t get him wrong, she was gorgeous and strong and super fit, but Brit was also very lean.

  Pairing that with blocky leg pads and baggy goalie pants meant the funhouse mirror-effect was in all its glory.

  Her blond brows pulled together, and Brit frowned. “Mike? You okay?”

  He blinked and forced his eyes away. “Yup. I’m good.”

  “Then why are you staring at me like I’m a bug?”

  Mike bent to tug one skate off. “Not staring so much as thinking.”

  That made her pause, made her glance at him like he was the bug.

  He snorted. “I know. It’s uncommon for me, but it does occasionally happen.”

  One toned arm came up to perch on her hip and, good God, did the girl have guns. She’d always hit the weight room just as hard as the guys, but, just saying, Michelle Obama would be jealous.

  “It’s a girl,” she said.

  A groan built up in his throat, but he shoved it down. Now wasn’t the time to show weakness, to let on how close Brit was to the truth.

  Because the amount of razzing he’d take for it—

  He almost thought, it wouldn’t be worth it, but the words couldn’t even cross his mind. Not when he knew that he’d endure any amount of teasing for Sara.

  She’d always been that way, always able to invoke his protective instincts. His wants. Desires.

  His phone buzzed at his thigh, and immediately Mike’s pulse picked up, heart jumping around his chest like a teenager going crazy at a ZAYN concert.

  Heaven help him, that he actually knew who that was, but between the rookies liking One Direction and Brit having a turn with the weight room stereo, his music knowledge had become a little more… diverse.

  Which was so not the point—

  Buzz.

  “Idiot,” he muttered, and snatched at his phone, almost dropping it in his efforts to both answer it and conceal the caller I.D. as Brit leaned over his shoulder.

  He swiped across the screen and put it to his ear.

  One-half of Brit’s mouth quirked up. “Sara, huh?”

  “Shut up,” he snapped.

  “Um.” Sara paused, asked hesitantly, “Is this a bad time?”

  “No!” he said, way too loudly, given the way the entire locker room shifted its attention to him. Shit. “No,” he said, softer. “This is a perfect time.”

  Her breath hitched. “Oh, o-kay.”

  Mike stood and walked out the locker room door. Well, he more tiptoe-stomped, tiptoe-stomped since he still wore one skate and his other foot was bare. Once in the hall, he leaned back against the wall, careful to keep his skate’s blade on the black protective mat.

  Not that his edges mattered much considering the game was over, but dull skates were the bane of any professional hockey player, and old habits died hard.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she replied.

  Silence.

  “I—”

  “I—”

  “You go,” he said.

  “No, you.”

  And more silence.

  He finally got his shit together and broke it. “So, what did you do today?”

  “I got fired.”

  “What?”

  Sara gave a little chuckle. “Okay, not fired so much as threatened to be fired, but it’s a good thing, I think—”

  “Wait. What the heck are you talking about, Jumping Bean?”

  She laughed, and it tinkled across the airwaves, slid down his spine like warm rays of sunshine on his back.

  What in the what?

  Now he was writing mental poetry?

  But hearing Sara’s laugh brought him back. It reminded him of the girl she’d been, the boy he’d thought he would always be.

  It pulled him into the past. To a time when things had been so much simpler.

  “I’m going to sell my work in Mitch’s shop,” she said. “Well, at least a couple of pieces and…”

  “That’s amazing,” he said after she’d told him about the drawings she was working on.

  “Yes.” She paused, and he could almost picture her giddy smile, her white teeth biting into the blush pink of her bottom lip. “But that’s why I’m calling actually. I wanted — um… I wanted to see-if-I-could-use-the-one-of-you,” she finished in a hurry.

  It took Mike a few moments to decipher what that rush of words meant.

  But she continued before he could respond. “The one of your hand. Not the one of your face. I wouldn’t do — I mean, I couldn’t use that—”

  For some reason, he was grinning. “You drew me? More than my hand?”

  A muffled word that sounded very much like “shit,” then Sara sighed.

  “Yes.”

  “Was I clothed?”

  “Mike!”

  He laughed; he couldn’t help it.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” she snapped. “Yes, you were clothed. I— Grr…never mind.”

  Billy, one of the equipment managers, came around the corner and started walking down the hall toward him. “Use whatever part of me you want, sweetheart,” he murmured, pausing to nod at Billy as he moved past.

  Her breath hitched. “Mike.”

  His voice dropped an octave lower. “I mean that, Sara. Anything of mine is yours. Always has been, always will.”

  “Mike!” she said, slightly shrill. “You can’t say things like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s not how normal people talk. We haven’t seen each other for a decade. You can’t just—”

  “Sweetheart, I’ve never cared much for rules.”

  Sara snorted. “That much I remember.”

  “And I always say what I mean.” Or he did with Sara. “You feel me?”

  The slightest hesitation before she whispered, “Yeah.”

  “Good. Now I’m going to finish changing out of my gear and when I get back to the hotel I’ll call you, ‘kay?”

  He could hear her smile through the phone. “Okay.”

  “Good,” he said again. “And Sara?” he asked before hanging up.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m glad you called.”

  “Me too, Hot Shot,” she said. “Me too.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  SARA TOSSED DOWN her pencil, abandoning her sketch of the city’s rooflines for the moment.

  The work was a lost cause anyway, since instead of the jagged peaks of the Gothic building, she kept drawing the chiseled line of Mike’s jaw, the hash marks of scars he had on his knuckles.

&nbs
p; Groaning, she flopped back onto the carpet.

  She’d been dumped into a parallel universe; that had to be it.

  A universe where men actually cared, where old friends had faith.

  Where she actually kind of liked the alpha-act that Mike was putting on.

  Not that she thought Mike’s alpha-ness was an act, per se. He’d always been the type of guy who was confident in his own skin, wholly comfortable with the man he was inside, the kind of person who just lived unapologetically.

  The difference was more because she actually liked it when Mike got a little bossy with her.

  And now she needed to tear up her feminist card.

  Pathetic.

  Except — and this was the big one — Sara was so damn tired of doing everything on her own. Of being so locked up inside that she felt nothing. Of having no one able to wield an axe large enough to smash through the ice surrounding her heart and…

  She was lonely.

  Her eyes flicked to her cell. It sat, screen darkened, on the floor next to her sketch.

  The sketch of Mike’s face, eyes laughing as he stared out from the paper, hand extended, waiting.

  Waiting for her to take hold and—

  Ugh. She was ridiculous.

  And yet she couldn’t get him out of her head.

  With a sigh, she picked up the pencil and gave in. She sketched the lock of hair that seemed to always fall across Mike’s right eyebrow, the tiny scar at the corner of his eye, the scruff he’d been sporting in the game earlier.

  Because of course she’d been watching. She’d held her breath each time he’d made contact with another player. Cheered when he’d made a particularly good pass up to the rookie, Blue, who was on a hot streak and had taken it up the ice to score the game-winning goal. Winced when he’d blocked a shot.

  Her phone buzzed, pulling her out of her revelry. Groaning, she stretched her aching neck. She was getting way too old to be lying on the hard floor for — her eyes flicked to her clock as she snatched up her cell — over an hour, drawing.

  Her phone buzzed again, and she slid her finger across the screen, heart pounding at the sight of Mike’s name there, before putting it up to her ear. “Hi,” she breathed.

  And mentally groaned. Good God, she sounded like a nervous little schoolgirl.

  Pathetic.

  “What were you doing?” Mike asked.

  “What?” Her eyes flicked to the sketchbook, to her ridiculous collection — yes, it was now growing into a freaking collection — of drawings. “Nothing.”

  Oh. Em. Gee. Sara flopped onto the rug, tapping the back of her head to the floor a few times, just for good measure.

  Or rather, to knock some good sense into her idiotic brain.

  “Hmm.” His voice had an edge of rasp, as though that scruff she’d seen on his face earlier was scraping against the inside of her thighs, sliding up, up—

  Her breath caught.

  “Something to share with the class, Sara girl?”

  Oh for God’s sake. She needed to get it together.

  She cleared her throat — and clenched her thighs. PG, woman. Keep it PG. “I was just working.”

  “Oh.” His tone went serious. “Did I interrupt? You can just hang up on me—”

  And there her heart went filling with helium, floating in her chest, somehow resuscitating the piece of her she’d thought long dead.

  “No,” she said. “If I’d been engrossed, I wouldn’t have answered the phone. I probably wouldn’t have even heard it.”

  “I’m glad you did,” he said. “And that you picked up.”

  She smiled and rolled onto her stomach, stretching out the kinks in her neck. “I’ve missed you.”

  Mike inhaled rapidly. Well, she heard a burst of noise that her brain identified as Mike sucking in a gasp of air. But before she could ask what was the matter, he spoke, and his words froze the breath in her lungs.

  “Sure do like you saying that, honey.”

  Sweetheart. Jumping Bean. Honey.

  When was the last time someone had addressed her with an endearment? Besides Mitch, that was, for whom honey and sweetheart and a plethora of other sweet nothings were as common as the F-word was for hockey players.

  But the same words out of Mike’s mouth… Whew. Those words made goose bumps come to life on her arms, twisted her stomach into knots — in the best way — and caused her inner teenage girl to sit up and squeal.

  The last was what finally brought her to her senses.

  She pushed to sitting and rubbed her forehead. “What are we doing?”

  Silence. “What do you mean?”

  Sara snagged her sketchpad and flipped to a new page. Her pencil was on the paper in nearly the next instant, forming dark and angry squiggles across the blank white space.

  “I mean.” Scratch. “What are we doing?” More lines. “We haven’t talked in a decade.” Smudge. “Now, we’re just casually chatting on a Friday night?” Add shadow. “Running into each other on the streets?” Fill. Scratch. Smear. Erase. No. Darker.

  “Sara.” His tone held a note of warning, and the audacity of that pissed her off. He was warning her? Really? Yeah, not going to happen. “You’ve always been important to me,” he said.

  No. This was important. Finding out his ulterior motives for striking up a relationship with her here and now were even more so.

  Hell, if she was so important, then why hadn’t he even tried to keep in touch with her?

  After she’d left, she hadn’t received a single phone call. Not one email. Not even a friend request on Facebook.

  The worst was that she had called, she had emailed and… nothing.

  “Yes, Mike,” she bit out. “I asked what we’re doing.”

  “We’re talking.”

  Her pencil lead snapped, and she tossed the useless chunk of wood to the side. After reaching up to grab another out of the jar she kept on her desk, she continued drawing, her words almost as furious as the strokes of her pencil.

  Some distant part of her mind wondered why she was so angry, but it was easy to push that aside, easy to focus on the rage.

  Pissed off was safer than being vulnerable.

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. Why now? Why not then?”

  One more line and she’d finished the drawing. Almost with disgust, she dropped the pad and pencil.

  Why hadn’t she been good enough then?

  Charged silence stretched between them.

  Then Mike sighed. “Weren’t you the one who wanted to forget the past? Why can’t we just focus on the now and move forward with our friendship?”

  “No,” she said. Sara had to understand. If she was going to open herself up to Mike again, then she sure as fuck needed to know what had happened after she left. “If I was so important, why did you find it so easy to let me go?”

  His laugh was a horrible thing, brittle and broken, jagged and sharp. “Easy? Fuck, Sara. Nothing about you leaving was easy, but—”

  She waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t, she asked, “But what?”

  “Google goes both ways, sweetheart. I’d suggest you use it.” She could hear rustling on his end and just knew he was thrusting a hand through his hair.

  He only did that when he was really frustrated.

  And that made her anger fade, regret sneak forward to make her heart hurt. Why was she pushing this? Why was she pushing him away?

  For once in her life, why couldn’t she just leave things alone?

  But she didn’t get the chance to take the words back, to try and repair their easy rapport from a few minutes before.

  “I’ll call you when I get home from this road trip, okay?” He didn’t give her a chance to respond, just hung up the phone.

  That click, the sudden loss of Mike’s voice in her ear, sliced Sara clean through.

  With a pained breath, she put the phone down then picked up her pad again.

  “Well, you sure do know how to ruin things,” she
muttered, putting pencil to paper.

  She drew until the sun came up.

  She drew until she saw Mike’s face on television the next night.

  She drew until she passed out from exhaustion and his features were no longer on the paper but tattooed in her mind.

  She drew to forget.

  Except she didn’t.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MIKE WAS IN a hell of a mood. Three days had passed since he’d fought with Sara. Three days had gone by without her voice and smell and laugh and… dammit, she was right.

  How had he managed years without her but now missed her after only a few days?

  It made no sense.

  Except that it had been easier to forget the single good thing of his childhood after all the upheaval of his late teens, easy to be swept up into the life of a professional hockey player.

  And when his past had refused to be shoved away, he hadn’t wanted to bring anything good into contact with it.

  His family contaminated everything.

  They were a scene from a cheesy sci-fi movie, a cloud of black sweeping through the air, engulfing everything in its wake before tearing it all to shreds.

  His parents had almost destroyed him. He’d nearly let their bullshit destroy the one thing that made him happy.

  Hockey.

  So finally, he had his head straight. He’d thought karma had brought him Sara because he actually had his shit together for a change.

  Little did he know what she’d been through.

  Cheating.

  How could anyone believe that of her?

  Sara had been the best skater he’d ever seen. Effortless, graceful, beyond gorgeous on the ice. And her level of difficulty had rivaled the male skaters.

  But her coach had admitted in a tell-all interview that he’d paid off the judges, that he’d done it on Sara’s instruction, had even released video of Sara meeting privately with them.

  That had been bad enough, but deniable. There hadn’t been audio, the accusations were just that… accusations.

  Then the media had dredged up evidence of large cash deposits into sketchy off-shore accounts.

  And there was the evidence of her scores.

  Which were higher than any other skater in history. Clearly, it had been because of the money, not because she was exceptionally talented.