Smoke Signals

by Catherine Gayle

  “I told her she needed to stay away from team events,” Mrs. Jernigan shouted. She waved her cell phone around. “Look at this! Just look. The church is never going to recover from the scandal. My email is overflowing with concerned messages from our members, wondering how I could allow a porn star to be involved with the team in any way. And the phone calls! My phone’s been ringing off the hook. It’s bad enough all these players can’t seem to watch their mouths, but—”

  “You’d think they’d have something better to do with their time,” Tallie cut in before Mrs. J could build up a head of steam. “And it’s not like Tori’s getting naked and doing the deed on top of the Zamboni during intermission while everyone watches.”

  “Why, I never!”

  “It’s not such a big deal,” Tallie said. “It’s over. It’s in the past. She’s not doing anything wrong. She and Razor are a perfectly respectable couple. Besides, Hunter and I recovered from far worse. Actually, you were one of the people who helped us get past what people were saying about us. How about you try doing something like that again? Or better yet, get your nose out of other people’s business. I’m sure there are plenty of other things you could be spending your time doing, other than getting involved with the team members’ private lives.”

  The preacher’s wife recovered enough to cross her arms in front of her, snapping her head to look at Hunter before turning back to Tallie. “Honey child, I wouldn’t say you two recovered from it. You should hear what the ladies’ group is saying about you when you’re not there.”

  Tallie snorted. “Well, I’m not worried about what they think of me, but maybe you and Mr. J shouldn’t have bought a hockey team. Because I can promise you, Jesus couldn’t care less how many goals these boys score. He just wants you to preach the gospel to the people who need to hear it. I don’t know how owning a hockey team is helping you do that. Besides, all the guys want to do is play hockey, not make your church look good. They didn’t sign contracts stating they’d spread the good news. They signed contracts to play hockey.”

  “They’re representatives of our church now, whether they want to be or not.”

  “I think maybe you should’ve thought of that before. It’s too late now. And you know what? They’re just men. They’re regular, everyday, ordinary men, and they have real lives. They cuss, and they say stupid things in front of reporters when they shouldn’t, and every now and then one of them marries a porn star.”

  I struggled not to laugh over that part. She made it sound like it was something that was likely to happen again. And who knew? Maybe it would. Maybe I wouldn’t be the only one.

  Tallie looked like she was just getting started. “You’re just going to have to deal with it. And it could always be worse. Tori and Razor could be showing up at your church and passing out videos or something.” Tallie paused for a moment, bouncing up on her heels. She turned and winked at me before facing Mrs. J again. “Actually, that’s a great idea. I’m going to see if I can help them out with that.”

  Mrs. Jernigan’s eyes went wide. I doubted anyone had ever given her an earful like that before, and certainly not someone who had grown up in their church like Tallie had. And she might even be taking Tallie’s suggestion about the video seriously. But then she pinched her lips together and made another grab for my wife’s arm.

  Even though I still had the baby in my arms, I stepped forward to put an end to that. Mom beat me to it. She stepped in, making sure no one laid another finger on Tori. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that my mother was there until I saw her physically move between Tori and the preacher’s wife, right beside Tallie.

  Tori backed away, but she bumped into Dima. He steadied her and gave me a nod, a silent means of letting me know he wasn’t going to let a fucking thing happen to her. Which was good, since I had a baby in my arms, who was currently drooling all over my jacket, and I wasn’t in any position to do more than I already was. At least the baby wasn’t crying anymore, and Tori felt safe enough with Dima.

  “Now you listen to me,” Mom said, pushing a finger toward Mrs. J like she was going to stab her with it. “I don’t know you. I don’t care to know you. I don’t give a flying fuck who you are, but you’ve got to get one thing straight.”

  Mrs. J’s eyes nearly bulged out of her head with that last bit from my mother. I silently cheered Mom on.

  “Here’s what you need to get your brain wrapped around. You might own this team, but you do not own the men who play for you. They are contracted to do a job, and as long as they do those jobs and comport themselves in a professional manner, that’s the end of it. You don’t get to tell them who they can and can’t marry. You can’t tell them how to spend their free time. You definitely don’t get to tell their wives and girlfriends what to do, because those women aren’t bound to you in any way. You’re not God, and thank God for that because if you were, I’d worry for us all. Because holy fucking shit, lady, you’re a judgmental piece of work. So you just step back from my daughter-in-law, and you keep your damn hands to yourself before I take matters into my own hands or get the cops involved. I’m sure that would go over really well with all your uppity church members who think they’re better than her just because they’ve never had to make a choice out of desperation.”

  This just proved, yet again, that my mom was the best mom in the world. Hands down. There wasn’t even any competition.

  But then Mr. Jernigan stepped into the room, and things got really quiet. He pushed his way to the center and put an arm around his wife’s back. “Sharon? Is there a problem?” he asked her.

  Mom answered him first, before his wife could get a word in. “There is a problem. Your wife seems to think she can manhandle my daughter-in-law and kick her out because of things in her past.”

  “That’s not—” Mrs. J clammed up after one intense look from my mother.

  “I think we should go,” Mr. J said. When his wife didn’t immediately start moving with him, he tugged on her arm until she complied. He caught my eye as they went, but I couldn’t decide what sort of look he was giving me. Did he blame me for all of this? Or maybe he thought I should have stepped in and done something.

  Maybe I should have. If I were really the good man Tori was always claiming I was, shouldn’t I have acted and done something—anything—to protect her from that crazy woman’s antics? I needed to step up and figure it out.

  I waited until they were fully out of the room before going over to plant a kiss on Mom’s cheek. “You’re awesome. You know that, right?”

  She gave me a thorough once-over, focusing on the baby in my arms. “Mm-hmm,” she murmured, but there was a gleam in her eyes that I couldn’t miss.

  “Weren’t you just lecturing me about condoms a week ago?” I said, laughing. She’d better not be starting in on me about giving her a grandbaby. At the moment, I was way more concerned with making sure I could keep my wife.

  Tallie grabbed my mom’s arm and dragged her into a hug, and I took that moment to escape. I made my way to Tori and Dima. He still had both hands on her upper arms, holding her steady. I passed the baby over to him. Harper immediately jerked on his beard and made happy, gurgling sounds. He held the baby out well away from him—once he’d pried her fingers free from his facial hair, at least—looking at me like I’d lost my mind.

  “What I do with fucking baby?” he asked.

  I ignored him and wrapped Tori up in my arms. She melted into me. I could practically feel the tension draining out of her.

  “You okay?” I asked, my mouth right by her ear so she could hear me through all the commotion in the room.

  “Fine,” she said. She didn’t sound fine, though. I was learning to interpret the differences in her tones, learning to pick up on the tightness in her posture. She was as far from fine as she could be.

  I took her hand and caught Mom’s eye so she’d know we were ready to go. We headed out of the room, with Dima calling out after us, “What I do with baby? Mudak.”
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  He could call me an asshole all he wanted. In any language, for that matter. I didn’t care, because I needed to get Tori out of there and do damage control, stat.

  WITH EACH DAY that passed, Tori retreated further into herself, particularly after the most recent confrontation with Mrs. Jernigan.

  “I shouldn’t go to games,” Tori kept telling me. “Better for everyone.”

  “It’s not better for me,” I pointed out. “And it’s not better for us, either. We need to be able to show the immigration officials that we’re living a normal life together.”

  “But we aren’t normal. I’m not normal. I’m porn star.”

  Every time she said something like that, I reminded her that she wasn’t doing porn anymore, and that every single person in the room that night other than Mrs. Jernigan had been on her side. Tallie more than anyone.

  Tori didn’t want to hear it, though, which left me nervous about what would come of the interview. She wouldn’t intentionally try to throw the interview even though that would lead to the worst possible outcome for her, would she?

  I wasn’t sure anymore, because of how emotionally withdrawn she’d become. We were almost right back at square one, with her trying to make our relationship nothing more than physical.

  Mom took it upon herself to spend every moment she could with Tori, which I appreciated since I was getting busier with the team now that the season was fully underway.

  One day, they spent hours hanging out with Tallie and the baby. When they came home, Mom made sure to send me the dozens of new pictures of Tori hanging out with her friend—something to prove she was integrating into this part of my life—not to mention countless shots with both of them taking turns holding the baby.

  I didn’t miss the excitement in Mom’s eyes in those images. Nor did I miss the softness that came over Tori when she had a baby in her arms.

  Maybe someday… It was a nice thought.

  Other times, the pair of them spent hours together in the kitchen, with Mom teaching Tori how she makes spaghetti and meatballs, and Tori teaching Mom how to make traditional stroganoff. Dima conveniently invited himself over for dinner whenever Tori was making Russian dishes, so he was around more and more often. It was odd that he was choosing to hang out with us instead of whatever blonde or brunette was his latest conquest, but I figured I might as well go with it. He and Tori had a bond, and that was something she didn’t have with many people. He kept acting big-brotherly toward Tori, and he’d dragged me into being his right-hand man in planning for his sledge game, so I didn’t mind too much, even if he was still a sulky bastard around me.

  “What do you mean, you don’t put noodles in stroganoff?” Mom demanded.

  Tori shook her head. “No noodles. Nyet. That’s American, not Russian.” The look of disgust on her face left me grinning and wishing I could drag her off to the bedroom so we could have more practice time with her dilators. The last time we’d practiced, she’d easily handled one that was almost twice as big around as one of my fingers.

  Dima snorted, which seemed to be his way of agreeing with Tori’s comment.

  She looked up and winked at him. That was definitely progress, too, although of a different sort than what she’d managed with her dilators.

  Progress of any sort was excellent, but I wasn’t sure how much more patience I possessed.

  Every morning, Mom went with Tori to the studio for ballet rehearsals with this choreographer while I was busy with team functions. Dima and I stopped by there one afternoon in the middle of the week, following a grueling practice and a tedious film session. The studio owner allowed us to sneak in and sit with Mom to watch.

  The song playing was one I’d never heard before, but I would know the band anywhere. It was The End of All Things, a rock group based out of Portland that was currently at the top of all the charts. When they toured these days, they sold out stadiums all around the world. This piece had a hard driving beat but a haunting saxophone melody playing over the top of it, full of anguish but still beautiful at the same time. The lyrics were evocative of a phoenix rising from the ashes, and it was clear that Tori was portraying the phoenix.

  All around her, the dancers moved low to the ground, their stomping, staccato movements reinforcing the beat of the bass and drums. But Tori’s long limbs seemed to go on forever. Her arms gracefully arced through the air. Her legs might as well go straight through the floor, her toe shoes only emphasizing their length. Every movement she made matched the aching cry of the sax.

  The other dancers converged on her at one point, and it appeared she would be dragged down beneath them in the middle. Instead, they lifted her up, high above them, like a weightless cloud floating through an otherwise clear sky.

  She was absolutely mesmerizing.

  Mom leaned over. “You need to help her see herself like this,” she whispered in my ear. “All she sees is the ugliness that’s been done to her.”

  Mom was right. The only problem was I didn’t know how.

  Tori’s eyes were still lit up when she joined us after changing into her street clothes. Her smile was as wide as the span of her arms during that lift, and she kissed my chin.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her the rest of the day. She seemed more alive than I’d ever witnessed. Instead of walking, she practically floated across the floor everywhere she went. Yes, this was who she was. This was who she was meant to be.

  I fell more in love with her than ever, because I finally had a glimpse of the woman she wanted to be, not the one she’d tried to squeeze herself into because of all the things that had happened to her over the years. It was as if she’d shed a constricting skin and now she was spreading her wings.

  I wanted to see her fly.

  When we went to bed that night, I picked up the drawstring bag of her dilators, but she shook her head. “Nyet.”

  “You don’t want to practice?” I had to fight off the disappointment from my tone, because I’d been thinking about helping her to climax for hours.

  “Not with dilators,” she said. She undid the fly of her jeans. They slipped down her hips along with her panties and pooled at her ankles. “Just you.”

  My dick hardened instantaneously just from the sight of her long legs and naked pussy. She still shaved it completely bare, not leaving even so much as a landing strip. But while she’d made progress with the dilators, she still wasn’t ready to accommodate me.

  I opened my mouth to tell her as much, but she stripped off her shirt and bra, and my brain stopped functioning.

  “I want your fingers in me,” she said, lying on her back and drawing her knees up. “Dilator is cold. You’re warm. Fingers feel more like cock.”

  “But you won’t have any control over my fingers.” How deep they went. The way I moved them. It would be too easy to go too far or too fast without knowing I was hurting her. And I wasn’t sure she’d be honest about the pain until it was too late.

  “You won’t hurt me,” she insisted. “Just fingers. One. Maybe two.”

  “You’ll tell me to stop if it hurts?”

  “Promise.”

  I wasn’t positive I believed that promise.

  In spite of my reservations, I took off my shirt and tossed it on the armchair near the door. Then I crossed to the bed and lowered my head toward her heat. She was already wet, the same as I was fully erect. I stopped when my face hovered only an inch or two above her, and I took in a deep breath, letting the scent of her desire fill me up. Without me touching her at all, her clit was already swollen and protruding.

  I blew a breath over it, watching it strain toward me.

  She let out a soft sound and spread her thighs wider, making room for me. I kneeled between them, but I didn’t start out where she wanted me. Instead, I placed one hand on her ankle, lifting her leg as I slid my fingers up the toned muscles of her calves. Once I had her foot pointing toward the ceiling, I made a point with my tongue and licked the sensitive underside of her knee, my focu
s never leaving her face.

  Her eyes turned stormy, and she took a shaking breath.

  “More?” I asked.

  “More. Please.” The opening to her pussy moved, like she was already trying to grasp my fingers and keep them where she wanted them even though they weren’t inside her yet.

  I groaned, thinking of how it would feel to bury my cock in her sex while she worked her muscles, squeezing me tight and not letting me go.

  “Please, Razor,” she said after I spent a moment staring at her glistening, pink lips.

  Painstakingly, I worked my way up first that leg and then the other, before finally feasting on her softness. I licked her slowly, starting at the bottom of her slit and not stopping until I could flick her nub with the pointed end of my tongue, then going back for more.

  Tori writhed her hips and rocked against me. And she whimpered, so quietly it was almost inaudible.

  I sucked her clit between my lips and eased a single digit inside her. She was working her muscles so hard it felt as if she were trying to swallow my finger.

  “More, Razor.”

  So I gave her more.

  She arched her back and fisted her hands in my hair, focusing my attention on her tiny bundle of nerve endings.

  I never got a second finger inside, because she came, long and hard, collapsing against the mattress with her limbs tangled around me.

  My name fell from her lips over and over again. “Razor. Oh God, Razor.” There was passion in her voice, but there were tears on her cheeks.

  I slid up the length of her body and lay beside her, smoothing her hair off her face. “Did I hurt you?”

  She shook her head. “No pain. Just hold me.”

  “I’m here,” I said. I kissed her forehead and cradled her face, holding her close to me, but she only cried harder.

  “Don’t let me go.”

  “Hey. I’ve got you. I’m not letting you go.”