Beauty and the Beefcake

by Pippa Grant

  And then I have a silent stare-down with Ares.

  Do you know how long three minutes of silence is?

  It’s an eternity. An eternity and a half. And there’s no such thing as an eternity and a half, because eternity, by definition, is eternity.

  It’s really too bad I didn’t like physics and chemistry more. I get them. I just don’t get thrilled by them.

  Not that accounting was thrilling. Or computer programming. Or bowling management or marketing. But they were easy, so they were fast, and they were supposed to get me closer to a job with the Thrusters.

  They didn’t.

  “You’re a bunny,” he finally says.

  My shoulders hitch, and my stomach sours. “Unless you’re planning on telling me you’ve never slept with a puck bunny, you can shove your judgments up your ass. No. You know what? Even if you’ve never slept with anyone, you can still shove your judgments up your ass. I like big, brave, beefy athletes. And it’s none of your business.”

  His lips tip at the edges, that wide mouth showing the barest hint of teeth, and his eyes crinkle.

  Not much.

  But enough.

  He’s amused.

  I once politely asked a boyfriend to pass me a fork, he told me to get it my own damn self, I told him he was being rude, and in response I got a lecture about overstepping my bounds and not understanding who wore the pants in that relationship.

  If I’d told Doug anything was none of his business, he probably would’ve told me everything about me was his business.

  And I can’t decide if Ares being amused is more or less patronizing.

  I cock a brow and fold my arms.

  At least, I try. I really haven’t mastered that single-brow cock, even though I pretend I have, which means I’m giving him a double-browed glare that probably looks more like I’m a deer facing the headlights but I’m too stupid to do anything more than cross my arms and stand there in the middle of the road and wait for a semi truck to run over me.

  He doesn’t break eye contact.

  I’m having a stare-down with a blue-eyed beast who could remove me from his Escalade with one hand. There’s a part of me—the brain part—that knows this isn’t my smartest move.

  Except there’s another part of me—the heart part—that knows I’m completely, one hundred percent safe with Ares.

  The only time I’ve seen him pick a fight on the ice, it was with Zeus. When he picked up Bockman and carried him out of the bar, he took a few slugs in the chest, but he didn’t fight back.

  His best friend is an emotional support monkey.

  He can scowl like he might bite your arm off, but he’s all talk.

  Metaphorically speaking. Obviously.

  And he’s staring into me again like he can read my soul.

  I swallow. Hard. Because once again, I’m fighting the urge to wonder how he’d be in the bedroom.

  Would he be passive? Let me call all the shots? I picture myself ordering him to eat my pussy, and him dropping between my legs, shackles on his wrists, at my complete mercy while he leans in and licks his long tongue up the seam of my womanhood, sucking my clit, flicking at it with his tongue, grazing it with his teeth, and fuck, I’m getting wet.

  My mind drifts to fantasies of him walking out of the bathroom, naked and wet, just out of a shower, and I wonder again what kind of tattoo he has. But I don’t wonder for long, because instead, I’m picturing his hard chest, sculpted abs, his hand gripping a long, thick, beefy cock, and—

  And I need to stop.

  Because he’s not watching me like he’s amused anymore.

  No, this is a different growly face.

  An intense, in-the-game, flat-lipped, dark-eyed, I’m picturing you naked too face.

  He’s not meeting my gaze.

  Nope.

  His eyes are focused squarely on my lips.

  Which I know, because they’re tingling. I dart my tongue out and lick them. It’s instinctive. I can’t help myself.

  His eyes go darker, the car shrinks, electricity crackles, and he’s going to kiss me.

  Ares Berger is going to kiss me.

  And I’m going to let him.

  Not just let him. I’m going to kiss him back.

  A song erupts from the cup holder between us, and we both leap back.

  Nick’s calling.

  My brother.

  The overprotective ass whose secondary purpose in life is to avenge every last one of my failed relationships.

  The bigger problem, though?

  I have terrible taste in men. I know this. I have thirteen failed relationships to prove it. I might be book smart, but I’m not people smart.

  Even liking people, I’m not people smart.

  If I’m attracted to Ares, acting on the attraction is clearly a bad idea, because there’s something wrong with at least one of us.

  Considering he doesn’t talk and I have thirteen crazy ex-boyfriends, there’s probably something wrong with both of us.

  I fumble for the phone. “Felicity’s happy answering service, how may I direct your call?” I answer as Lucy.

  “Fuuuuck, Felicity, what did you do now?” Nick asks.

  I shove the phone at Ares. “You know what? You talk to him. I need to drive us to get your monkey.”

  I glance at his crotch.

  He glances at his crotch.

  I go red.

  He takes the phone, our fingers brush, and a sizzle burns its way from his touch all the way to my chest, where it makes my nipples sprout unicorn horns.

  He grunts into the phone like he doesn’t know my nipples just poked matching holes through my bra, and I wonder if his nipples just sprouted unicorn horns too.

  Or if that’s just all in his pants.

  “She doing okay, man?” I hear Nick ask while I put the Escalade back in gear and carefully steer us out of the parking lot.

  Probably a good thing I didn’t mention to Ares that I’ve had a couple accidents.

  Which wouldn’t have happened if statistics weren’t so fascinating. That was a rough semester.

  For my car, I mean.

  And for my chances of ever getting hired to drive the Zamboni.

  Ares grunts again.

  “Hey, listen, don’t let her go to Chester Green’s,” Nick says.

  Ares growls.

  “Aw, fuck, dude. Seriously?”

  Ares grunts.

  “Appreciate the help, man. Hey, how’s the monkey?”

  I wince and cut the corner leaving the parking lot too short, which makes the Escalade hop a curb.

  I don’t look at Ares, but I feel him watching me.

  And I’d bet half my degrees that he knows I’m once again thinking about his monkey.

  The figurative monkey. In his pants.

  Not the actual monkey we’re going to pick up.

  I definitely have a problem.

  And I don’t have any idea how I’m going to fix it.

  16

  Felicity

  You know what’s hard?

  Besides that.

  Seriously. We’re not thinking about Ares’s monkey.

  Which means the answer to “What’s hard, Felicity?” is “Sleeping.”

  Sleeping is hard.

  I should be sleeping just fine. I had a good dinner. A long day. Harold’s back home. Loki’s locked in Ares’s room. Rain rolled in not long after we got back to Gammy’s house after that disaster of a dinner, Ares and I didn’t talk again after he got off the phone with Nick, and it’s nice and dark, with the soothing sound of raindrops drowning out the creaks of Gammy’s ghost wandering the house tonight.

  But I’m not sleeping.

  Because I’m wondering if Ares is sleeping. And if he sleeps naked. Where his tattoo is, and what’s on it.

  If he gets hard anytime a woman sits in his lap, or if that was just me.

  He doesn’t give me the I’m into you vibes. Which is good. Because on paper, he really does check all my
boxes.

  Strong and athletic? Check.

  Bullheaded? Yep.

  Capable of making a grown man cry at thirty paces? Double check.

  Financially stable? He’s not playing hockey for free.

  Despite what it looked like at the bar, and despite Ares calling me a bunny—not entirely incorrectly—I am picky about who I sleep with. And I gave up hockey players almost entirely even before Nick moved back to town.

  Mostly because I know there’s no way I’m getting a job with the Thrusters if I’ve slept with any of the players.

  Which is why this growing obsession with Ares is a bad, bad idea.

  I roll out of bed around one, because I need a drink. Preferably a strong one, but a little nip of wine will do.

  The carpet is rough and chilly under my bare feet, but I can’t stand to sleep in socks, so I tiptoe quickly across the room.

  I’m almost to the hall when someone smacks me in the face with a two-by-four.

  “Ow!” Pain explodes in my nose and eye. “Fuck!”

  Not someone.

  Something.

  The door.

  The fucking door is half-open, and I just barreled head-first into it.

  “Dammit, Gammy!”

  Limping footsteps pound down the hall. Light floods the room. Tears are leaking out the eye I used to locate the door, my nose is swelling like a rabid hornet flew up my nostril and stung my sinuses, and I suddenly realize I’m wearing nothing but a short white tank and white lace panties.

  “What? Who? Where?” Ares says.

  “Door.” I blink at him with my good eye, and—

  Holy fuck.

  He clamps a hand over the goods, which is really too bad, because I might be vegan, but I appreciate a good sausage.

  With a side of beefcake.

  I know, I know. Don’t objectify your brother’s friends, Felicity. But when you’re staring at 350 pounds of completely naked chiseled hockey granite, it’s hard—yeah, it’s totally hard—not to notice.

  He grunts and turns, giving me a view of his bare ass cheeks.

  His chiseled, round ass cheeks. With dimples at the base of his spine. Muscles rippling as he limps out the door, turning sideways to fit, his hand covering—barely—the goods.

  He has very large hands.

  And I have very wet panties.

  Also?

  I finally have a view of that tattoo.

  And holy fuck.

  He has the Milky Way tattooed over his left cheek and around to his hip. Swirling stars and planets roped around in blues and purples, like a deep mountain sunset, with one large planet standing out in the middle of the universe.

  Mars. The red planet. The Roman equivalent of the Greek god Ares.

  It’s magnificent.

  Even through one blurry eye.

  The steps creak. And I find my voice. “Stay off your ankle!”

  He grunts in response.

  “Dammit,” I mutter.

  I pull a dirty pair of jeans out of my laundry basket and hop into them. My nose is dripping just as bad as my eye is leaking, though thankfully nothing’s bleeding. Just tears and snot.

  By the time I get to the stairs, Ares is already on the main floor. I find him digging into the ice, Gammy’s knit blanket wrapped around his hips, some of her last stitches coming out while Loki plays with the ball of yarn attached.

  I suck in a breath.

  She’s either going to love having her creation molded to naked hockey god granite, or she’s going to be so pissed that he’s rubbing his junk on her artwork and letting a monkey play with the last ball of yarn she ever touched.

  Probably both, knowing Gammy. She was always a little two-faced. Sorry, Gammy’s ghost, but it’s true.

  His cheeks are pink when he shoves an ice bag at me. “Sit.”

  “Sure, now you can use words that make sense,” I vent as Harold.

  Ares’s eyelid twitches.

  I take the bag. “Thank you,” I say as me. “Now get the fuck off your ankle.”

  He mutters something that sounds suspiciously like door knocker—whatever that’s supposed to mean—and limps into the living room, where he settles on the couch.

  I follow, ice bag pressed to my nose.

  You know what’s weird?

  He doesn’t ask how I managed to clock myself sideways with a stationary door so that I caught my eye socket and nose, but I swear I hear the question lingering in the space between us.

  “I tilted my head wrong,” I say.

  He grunts. Gammy’s afghan is stretching over his thighs, and I can see patches of his skin beneath the holes, though I can’t see any portion of the tattoo. If he didn’t have a death grip on the front, blocking his stick and pucks, I could probably see his winking willy too.

  Which I should not be thinking about.

  “I was thirsty,” I add.

  Not because he asked what I was doing up in the middle of the night, but because he wouldn’t be up in the middle of the night if I hadn’t walked into the side of a door. And if I hadn’t walked into the side of the door, he wouldn’t have felt the need to walk down here, on his bad ankle, without the boot, to get me ice.

  I shove the ice at him, because I can see from here how swollen his ankle is. “Here. You need this more than I do.”

  Flat Ares Stare answers me.

  Like his gentlemanly side is offended that I’d sacrifice my nose and eye ice for his ankle.

  Oh, shit. I’m going to look awful for open mic night tonight.

  Should be fun for Harold anyway. He does love to pick on me for my little bloopers.

  “Please take the ice. I’ll go get myself another bag.”

  After a long pause, he relents. Which most likely means he’s hurting, so I grab a bottle of over the counter pain meds too.

  But he stares me down until I go back to the kitchen for an ice pack for myself. I return to Gammy’s living room and sit in the chair, cross-legged, facing the bobble heads so they don’t try anything freaky.

  When I was little, I swear they came alive at night. And when I confided my fears in Gammy, she told me we mustn’t ever speak of their secret powers, or all would be lost.

  I sometimes think she could’ve been really cool, if we’d been the same kind of weird.

  “Why won’t you stay off your ankle?” I ask Ares.

  For a long minute, he doesn’t look at me, which briefly makes me wonder if he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open. Which would be one more tally mark in the things that sort of freak me out about Ares Berger column.

  Except I’ve taken most of the things off the things that freak me out column.

  I’ve kinda gotten used to him not talking.

  And I spotted him with a tiny shampoo bottle adorned with a gingerbread man this morning, which explains the cake smell. My favorite body shop had this amazing cupcake gift box last Christmas, and—okay, yeah, it’s a little unusual that we’d shop at the same place for soap, but maybe he got it as a gift. And I’m starting to wonder if he’s the kind of guy who’d rather use girly soap than waste things. Like maybe he has the heart of an environmentalist too.

  His car’s really clean. Not just dusted-vacuumed-washed clean, but remarkably empty of trash, or even just normal things people keep in their cars, like, oh, I don’t know, their spare puppets or biology books from four years ago that they haven’t gotten around to selling back to a bookstore.

  My point is, if he’s toting around a lot of personal belongings every time he moves, he must’ve put them in storage, because they’re not in his car.

  Maybe Ares Berger is secretly a frugal environmental minimalist.

  “Mind over matter,” he says quietly.

  A chill washes down my arms.

  There’s a lot that I don’t know about Ares. And listening to him have an entire conversation with Nick—without talking, but with my brother understanding every grunt—reinforces the idea that maybe I’m not as good with people as I need to be i
n order to work in physical therapy.

  “If you’re building muscle, yes, to a point,” I agree. “But you can’t mind-over-matter your ligaments into being untorn. You have to rest them.”

  He snorts like I’m an idiot.

  Okay, yes, I’m the one who walked into a door five minutes ago, and I’m the one who’s been rejected five times for that job driving the Zamboni at Mink Arena, and I’m the one who has four degrees, two patents, and one really lucrative copyright for code that puts a button on a smartphone to make everything swipe the opposite direction for left-handed people, but no idea what I want to do with my life, and I’m the one with horrible taste in men, but I’m not an idiot.

  And neither is he.

  He’s just…stubborn.

  And he probably hasn’t met many physical challenges he couldn’t beat. I heard he once mud-wrestled a water buffalo. And won.

  I shift the ice pack on my face, because it’s starting to freeze my eyeball. “You using your ankle and expecting it to heal would be like me using my face to bang open doors every day and expecting the bruising to go away.

  He nods. “Make it tough.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Flat Ares stare again. He’s not kidding.

  “That wouldn’t make my face tough. It would eventually dent my bones and break my skin and I’d walk around with purple welts where my nose and eyes are supposed to be and I’d have to wear a paper bag over my face to do my shows on open mic night.”

  He frowns like he has an opinion about that.

  “What?” I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  “Would you tell Lucy?” I vent in my Lucy voice.

  No answer.

  “How about Tim? I’m a stubborn goat too. I can out-stubborn you ten to one. I’m so stubborn I’m arguing without even being in the room. I’m so stubborn I’m arguing without even waking up. How about you, big guy? Can you beat that?”

  Still no answer.

  I drop my ice and grab the one puppet I have downstairs. I left Harold sitting with Gammy’s bobble heads, because even if Doug was the type to break into the house and steal my puppet for vengeance, he’s equally freaked by the bobble heads, and I had this feeling they’d protect him. “You’d tell Harold. Even though I don’t want to know. I don’t care about your business. I’m a grumpapotamus. Grumpy grumpy grumpy grumpapotamus.”