by Nicole Helm
But about half an hour into it, the boys were laughing on the ice, and the dads seemed winded but happy.
And Dan, well, he shone, and he was grinning from ear to ear. He’d raced some of the kids from one end of the ice to the other, looked to be coaching them on their technique, and so far the only thing he’d turned down was an offer to go get some sticks and pucks and goals to pretend to play a game.
He’d declined nicely. In fact, she didn’t think the group had even had a chance to be disappointed before they were bringing out all and sundry to have Dan sign, the whole group still in their skates, apparently not wobbly even when they were just standing still.
When Dan finally disentangled himself from the group and headed for where he’d left his shoes, the remaining men stood on the ice oohing and aahing over everything Dan had signed.
She met him at the bench, her skates long discarded. He didn’t look up even when she moved to stand in front of him.
“You signed a lot of stuff,” she offered into the awkward silence, the weird energy pouring off him.
He still didn’t look up. “Yeah, Kevin’s dad owns the place, so he wanted to put some stuff up on the walls.”
“So, Dan Sharpe, you’re kind of a big deal.”
His lips quirked, but his gaze remained on his shoes as he laced them. “I kind of am.”
“Though I did not get to see your stick skills.”
Finally, finally he glanced at her, but that cocky, “no emotion behind the grin” smile was on his face. “I’ll show you plenty of stick skills later, honey.”
“All jokes aside, why’d you say no to the…” It dawned on her in that second why he wouldn’t want to actually play hockey. She’d been blinded by his joy at skating, forgetting the whole reason he was here in the first place was, well, he’d messed things up with stick and puck.
He got to his feet. “Let’s head home, huh?”
Head home. Now she was the one tightening up, feeling weird. They did not have a home together. Her home was Shaw. And she was currently shirking all her responsibilities in that department.
It is long past time you had a shirk. This will get you ready to face the next twenty-eight years of no shirking allowed.
She wanted to believe that, believe in it strongly enough the guilt settling in her gut would disappear completely. As it was, she just managed to ignore it now and again.
Dan stood, his skates in one hand, his other hand running through his hair. He looked lost for a second, before the easy, fake veneer clicked back into place. “So, what did you think of your first skating experience?”
“I think I’ll leave the skating to you.”
“Finally better at something than you, then?”
“Not a contest. Certainly not a fair one.”
“A man has his pride. At least there’s one thing.”
The night had been fun. Even though she really hated that he was better than her at something, even if that was silly. Still, his constant this is the only thing I’m good at was getting old. Trying to soothe over men’s delicate egos was getting old.
“Do you really, honestly think hockey is all you have? Because it was a pretty stupid move to come here and try to build something if you’re going to mope about hockey being the only thing you were ever good at when it’s over.”
He was silent as they walked to his car—not as if he was angry, but as if he was pondering.
“Do you think I’m going to stay?”
The question, asked in the quiet summer night held a million implications she didn’t know what to do with. But not knowing what to do had never stopped her before, and there had been an honesty in this evening. One she would remember anytime she got that stupid, hopeful feeling in her chest.
“I saw the smile on your face when you were on the ice. It would be stupid to stay, Dan. It would be robbing yourself of joy.”
He opened the door to the backseat of the truck, carefully placed the skates inside, and then he leaned against the door. He tilted his head back, his eyes on the stars.
She might have looked up too, except she knew exactly what she’d see up there. What was new, what was fascinating, were the hard lines of this man’s face, the pensive wrinkle in his forehead, the way his lips pressed together.
He was famous and rich. People had just fawned all over him. He was in magazines and on sports shows, and everything about his life made no sense to her, except that he seemed to be stuck in a very similar space she found herself in.
What do I do next? How do I keep going?
“A guy can’t play hockey forever, Mel,” he finally said, his gaze dropping to his feet. “No matter how much joy it gives him.”
A familiar pain wound its way around her heart, a familiar helplessness. This was not anything she could fix. Luckily, it wasn’t her business to fix it.
Unluckily, she found the words spilling out anyway.
“My dad used to ride his horse every day. No matter what. Whether he needed to or not. Boiling heat, freezing cold. At least for a little part of every day he was on that horse. It was a thing he did. He did it because he loved it, and it made him less sad when he was…upset about things. It was everything he had, and when he couldn’t have that anymore… Well, you saw. Without it, he has nothing. So, if skating makes you that happy, you can’t just…hang it up. Even if you can’t be a professional hockey player forever, the thing that brings you so much joy is the thing you should be focusing on.” Because he was one of the lucky few who had the money and the means to focus on their joy no matter what.
She was one of the unlucky few who had neither of those things, and an unwillingness to go after them at the expense of the people she loved.
“It’s not the same,” Dan said, shaking his head. For the first time since they walked out of the rink, he looked at her. “Firstly and most importantly because your father doesn’t have nothing. He has you. He has Caleb.”
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. Not in, not out. It was as if her lungs were paralyzed—everything seized up inside her with a blinding pain she quite simply could not push away or bury or ignore.
She would very much love for her father to see it that way, but he’d lost his ability to walk, and in that he’d lost whatever pieces in him he’d manage to salvage after her mother left. The pieces she’d clung to so hard, coaxed out of him, begged for. All swept away by one accident…and she’d learned to stop begging.
“Mel?”
His voice sounded thin and cottony. Her vision was wavering with the pain…the memories of all the times she’d begged and succeeded. Begged and failed. Wanting a hug. Never getting it. Until Dan.
“Let’s go home, huh?” she said, echoing his words from earlier in a scratchy voice. It wasn’t her home, but she didn’t care. There were too many other cares clogging up in her chest. She just wanted to be somewhere she didn’t have to beg or work or try.
And so far, that was only with Dan.
* * *
Dan pulled the truck onto the gravel drive in front of his place. His place. And yet, he felt more comfortable back on that ice than he did in the pitch black of night surrounding the cabin, a slight drizzle starting to fall on the windshield.
He glanced at Mel, curled away from him, head resting on the glass of the window, though he didn’t think she was asleep.
He almost wished she was. Or that she’d want to go home, because he couldn’t get over or erase the image of her face twisted in a kind of horrified pain when he’d said her father had her.
Those kinds of hurts he couldn’t fix, couldn’t smooth away. The kind he could see, but she wouldn’t really trust him to ease—not that she should. They were things that would always be painful for her, and he didn’t know how to make them easier. Distract, that he could do, but actually fix?
He’d never learned how to fix
. She needed someone stronger, someone who had any clue what it was to stitch together all the emotional hurts into some kind of healing. How to ask what was wrong and get an answer. He already knew he couldn’t do that.
It had been stupid to think otherwise.
“Do you ever get tired of feeling like life keeps beating you over the head?” she asked into the silence of the car.
“Lately, yes.”
“Do you want to go have sex and pretend it’s not hard?”
God, he wanted to do that. So he went with a joke. “Well, something will be hard.”
She snorted. “You’re a classy guy, Sharpe.”
He grabbed her braid, and while he usually just gave it a tug, this time he didn’t let it go. He pulled until she had to look at him, and he was not surprised in the least to be met with a scowl.
“No more Sharpe.”
“It’s a pet name.”
“It’s bullshit. I’m not a last name to you.” He gave her braid his normal tug, but still didn’t let go, keeping it wrapped around his hand. Because he didn’t want her to look away or bullshit him again.
Something in her expression changed. Not just a softening, though there was that. The way her lips parted, her gaze drifted to his mouth.
Okay, yeah, something was definitely hard, and he’d kind of forgotten about that whole “wanting her to go home” thing as he leaned across the console and tugged her mouth to his. Pretend life’s not hard? Yeah, he liked when they did that.
Because as sharp as her words could be, her mouth was soft, sweet. As much as every cell of her screamed capable and strong, she melted into him, and it made him feel capable and strong.
Her hand curled around his bicep, but the other one clutched the front of his shirt. He never knew what to do when she did that. When she held on to him for dear life. He wanted to tell her to run at the same time he wanted to not let her go for a second. He wanted to assure her he could be whatever it was she wanted or needed.
You will disappoint her. But she didn’t believe he’d stay. She believed so little about him—what could he possibly disappoint?
“D-don’t let go.”
He didn’t know if she was talking about her hair or in general, and he didn’t really care. Because he had no intention of letting go. This thing she filled him with, this feeling she gave him, nothing, not hockey, not being here, nothing else made him feel that way.
Luckily, her hand moved from his arm to his abdomen, and then trailed over his erection, and he didn’t have to linger on the discomfort that realization caused.
He kept one hand curled in her hair and used his other to slide up her shirt, pull one of the bra cups far enough down that he could touch her nipple, circle it until it was hard, until she groaned, her grip on his cock going tight.
“We have to go inside to get condoms,” she said against his mouth, against his lips, not letting him go, not putting any space between them. Those seemed like foreign words. All he could think about was the heated air around them, her grip on him, her breath shallow against his neck.
His eyes met hers, and he refused to get lost in that overwhelming feeling. This was about sex, which was its own kind of escape and distraction. “Well, then let’s go.”
It took her a minute to release him, and only then did he realize the drizzle had turned to a full-on downpour. He glanced at her, and she flashed him a grin, a grin he’d never seen. Dark, dangerous, like she could light the world on fire. Him on fire. And nothing would survive.
“Better run,” was all she said before she pushed her door open and stepped into the night.
He stepped out too, the lash of a cool rain immediately hitting him, soaking him. He thought it might ease the incessant heat in his veins, the tight ache in his groin, but it did nothing. He was all set to jog, but Mel was just standing there in the dimmest of porch lights, head up, eyes closed, the rain surely drenching her.
For a moment, he just watched. The shadow of her in the middle of a storm. Lightning sizzled across the sky, thunder boomed, and he needed to get inside. He needed to be inside her.
She screeched when he bent and managed to leverage her over his shoulder. “Dan!” She pounded a fist on his back, but then her laughter bubbled up, a sound he could not resist if he tried.
He carried her to the porch, water pouring over both of them as thunder rumbled again.
“Put me down.”
But there was nothing insistent about her voice in the least, so he carried her all the way inside, and didn’t put her on her feet until they were in his kitchen.
He flipped on the light, trying to catch his breath. But the look of her took it away again.
Water was dripping off the strands of hair that had fallen out of her braid. Her T-shirt was plastered to her breasts, her stomach, and she was smiling. Smiling. Yeah, that killed him.
It only took one step before she was stepping toward him too, meeting in the middle, and they were kissing each other as if it had been months instead of minutes since they’d had their hands on each other.
He could have sworn the water sizzled between them as their mouths found some kind of solace in each other. Every lick and nip was a desperate need to forget, to have, to take.
She unbuckled his belt, undid the snap on his jeans, which were now tight from the rain, but it didn’t stop her. Her hands were greedy and determined, and his body strained in response. She pulled him free, her hand cool and wet against his erection.
Without letting go, she leaned in and traced his bottom lip with her tongue before pulling it between her teeth, not gentle. Not in the least. As she let his lip scrape through her teeth, she fisted her hand up the length of his cock.
A mixture of pleasure and delicious pain arced through him. “Mel. Christ.” He pulled her shirt off, which sadly took her hand off him, but gave him access to that beautiful body of hers. So strong, so wet and soft. He scraped his palms over her stomach, leaned in to lick a trail of raindrops from her neck.
She sighed, her breath cooling the rain on his own skin, and if he were a man prone to shivering, he might never have stopped.
He pushed her bra down, groaning at the sight of her. Her nipples puckered from the wet and cold, goose bumps rising up across her chest as drops of water from her hair slid down the expanse of pale skin. “I could look at you all damn day,” he said, reverent.
He had to back her against the wall, just so he could have something to lean against. Something to keep him upright. She was killing him just by existing, killing him with every stroke of fingertip against skin, a tantalizing design from chest to stomach, stomach to…sweet Christ, finally she grasped him again.
But he wanted more than her hand, needed more. If he was going to be killed, it was damn well going to be inside of her.
He pushed at her pants, trying to get them off. He was so desperate for more, for her, for anything and everything that meant they were together. “Let me fuck you now. Right now. Please, I need to be inside you.”
The noise she made, like something between a moan and a sigh just about buckled his knees, but he used the wall as support while she tried to get her wet pants off. He watched, completely enthralled as more and more of her came into view—those long legs, the muscles in her arms working as she tried to free herself from clothes.
“Condom. Condom. Condom.” She chanted it, like she was trying to remind herself as much as tell him. Pushing her panties off, so all that was left on were socks and her bra at her waist.
“Don’t. Move.”
He didn’t pause to see if she would listen. He didn’t pause for anything. He got the condom, peeled off his pants and boxers, and was already tearing the packet open when he returned.
She was still standing against the wall, palms resting against it, chest rising and falling, her bra still askew, her hair even more askew, and her e
yes wide. There was something wild and desperate in them, matching exactly what he felt.
It pounded through him, some distant beat he didn’t recognize. There was a heaviness to the desperation inside of him. There was something more under all this. More than sex. More than sex with Mel.
That was the absolute last thing he wanted to think about right now. He rolled the condom on and she watched, her tongue touching the corner of her mouth. When he just stood there, her gaze finally met his.
“Come here,” she said, an order hidden underneath breathlessness.
He was helpless to ignore any order she might give, so he came closer. He reached around to unclasp her bra and let it fall to the ground, and then he trailed his hand down her back, her ass, grabbing her leg and pulling it around his waist.
He might not want to think about more, but it permeated the air between them. This thing. Heavy and real.
“Tell me…tell me you need this, Mel.”
“I do. I…” Her eyes were squeezed shut, but she braced herself against the wall so he could lift her other leg, slowly push inside of her.
He had to take a breath and a moment to absorb the way things seemed to click into place when they were together like this. It was more than pleasure; it was right.
She locked her legs around him, and he was able to grab her hips, hold her where he needed her to be. Against him, taking him, holding on to his shoulder like he was all there was to hold on to.
“Look at me when you say it.”
Her eyes fluttered open, and her mouth opened soundlessly for a moment. He held himself still, eyes locked on hers. He needed the words, the look in her eyes. He needed so much, and he didn’t know how to get it all. When she said it, she whispered it.
“I need you, Dan.”
Which wasn’t what he’d asked, and if he couldn’t see her regret at saying it, he might have been frightened enough by that. But she didn’t want her need any more than he’d be able to handle it.
“I need you to…” She looked panicked for a second, as if she was trying to take back all the words. As if she didn’t understand he wasn’t ready for them. “I need you to f-fuck me. Hard, please. Really. Just…rough. Make it…go away.”