by Pippa Grant
Working for the Thrusters is the dream.
Not the specific degrees.
I haven’t had as much passion in all five of my chosen fields of study combined as what Ares has in his passion for playing hockey.
And as much as I love the Thrusters, playing for them is the one thing I’ve never actually wanted to do.
Mom shifts a blue-eyed wince toward me. “Felicity’s independent and smart. And very talented with talking out the side of her mouth.”
That was a compliment.
It really was.
“Do you like boy bands, Mrs. Murphy?” Sia asks after an awkward pause.
My mom shudders.
“She loves them,” I say. “You know the guys from Bro Code are from here in Copper Valley, right? I knew all their songs, and I used to sing them all the time. I work just a couple miles from the house where the Wilson brothers grew up, and my friend Maren works for Ryder Consulting. You know. Beck Ryder’s family.”
“Shut up,” Sia says.
“We met Levi Wilson a few months ago,” Chase tells me.
Sia slugs him in the chest. “Shut up. I’m still mad at you for that. He was gone by the time I got there.”
Ares, I notice, isn’t doing much more than scowling. Loki’s petting his hair.
“How’s your ankle?” I ask him.
“Cashew,” he replies.
With a scowl. Naturally. Scowling is practically all he’s doing tonight.
At least he’s not breaking out in a sweat and going pale like he was last night after shoveling my cookies.
Which is a phrase I hope to never utter again in my life, because who has to shovel cookies?
Sia jumps off the couch. “Time to sing,” she says.
Ares crosses his arms, and I think he might’ve just told her she can’t make him.
“You know he needs to stay off his ankle and not go running out of here,” I say in my Lucy voice. Because Lucy can walk that line of possibly insulting people by stating the uber-obvious since she’s so damn cheerful all the time, whereas I would come off as a complete and total bossy smartass.
Chase laughs. “Ares loves to sing. Don’t you, big guy?”
More scowls and glowers. Loki grabs one of Gammy’s knitting needles and tosses it at him.
Mom and I both wince and glance at the ceiling.
I probably need to have that talk with Ares—and Manning? Loki’s technically from Manning’s country, isn’t he?—pretty soon.
Sia pulls an Xbox from a large tote and gets to work hooking it up to Gammy’s television. The television is relatively new. My parents used to get her one every two or three years, because she always broke them.
Sorry, Gammy’s ghost, but it’s true.
And no, we don’t know how she did it, but I swear she did. Abuse of the remote controls or plugging them in backwards or something.
“We brought all the good songs,” Chase says. “Backstreet Boys, N*SYNC, NKOTB…”
Ares’s scowl is wavering. “Right stuff?”
“As if we’d leave that one at home.” Sia points at Chase. “Get the drums set up, hot stuff. And don’t be such a slowpoke about it like you were at home last night.”
Step by Step. Ares woke up in the car saying Step by Step yesterday.
They’re serious.
These might be the coolest strangers I’ve ever hosted.
“Gammy isn’t going to like this,” Mom warns me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “I think Gammy would’ve liked knowing there was music in the house.”
Ares shifts a glance at me. Ghost? that scowl seems to say.
“I’m sure she likes you,” I tell him. “She always had a thing for hockey players.”
“Everyone likes Ares,” Sia says. “Don’t let his name fool you. God of War, my ass. He’s the biggest sweetheart on the planet. When he’s not being a pain in my ass.”
Spoken like a true devoted sister.
I look back at Ares.
Despite the glowing embers in his angry eyeballs, I can actually believe he could be sweet.
It would explain the cake smell. The bunny dreams. And why Loki likes him so much.
Shoveling Soggy Dick Cookie Mountain.
“You’re really going to sing?” my mom asks dubiously.
“I should call Alina,” I say. “I’ll bet she’d bring her cello by for this.”
Mom shudders. “So much talent. Wasted with boy band music.”
Loki screeches at her.
And Ares actually smiles.
A nice smile. Warm. Happy. Hot, actually. The smile’s doing something to his blue eyes. Making them ripple like the ocean. Hinting at hidden depths.
And I suddenly want to know just how deep his ocean goes.
Shut up. That sounded way more poetic in my head.
“And we’re up.” Sia takes a microphone out of the bag. “Felicity, do you want to sing or play guitar?”
“Ask her to sing like Lucy. She’s very talented.” Mom rises, taking my baby book with her. “You’re not going to save your mother from this?”
“You showed them naked baby pictures. I’m going to sing until your ears bleed.”
She sighs as only a mother hell-bent on delivering a guilt trip can sigh. “We’re having family dinner Sunday. Your brother has the day off.” She eyes Ares. “Bring a friend.”
“Are you going to talk about how many of your friends have normal children-in-laws and grandbabies?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll bring Alina.”
“I’m never going to be a grandmother.”
“Me neither,” I agree.
The door’s barely shut behind Mom when Ares selects a New Kids on the Block song and orders us all ready.
I text Alina—she’s coming over later anyway—and let her know we’re getting musical. Because Alina doing boy band music on her cello would undoubtedly be epic.
She texts back that she’s forty minutes out and to keep singing until she gets here.
I haven’t practiced singing as Lucy in a while, so I miss all the right notes, but it’s okay, because Chase sucks on the guitar. Though I realize halfway in exactly what’s going on.
Every time he hits a wrong note, Sia glares hotly at him, he grins hotly back, and I check to make sure my clothes haven’t melted off because of proximity.
And every time I think about my clothes melting off, my eyes wander to Ares. Like maybe he can see through my clothes because they’ve been incinerated. Which is ridiculous, except every time, I swear I catch him looking away like he was just looking at me.
In any case, Chase and Sia better not be planning on sleeping on Gammy’s couch tonight, because I absolutely cannot handle the idea of Gammy’s ghost witnessing whatever it is these two undoubtedly do to each other.
Gammy would probably burn her own house down.
After the fourth song, we take a break. I pull up one of Alina’s YouTube videos, Sia freaks—apparently she’s a fan—and Chase raids the kitchen.
Ares taps his drumstick on the Rock Band drums. He didn’t miss a beat or a word, which is odd, since he talks so little, but he was smiling, like the music was pulling him out of thinking about his ankle.
I tap him on the knee of his good leg. “You sing really well,” I tell him.
He holds my gaze for that endless minute. He’s good at that.
At watching.
Reading.
Not the words, but the vibes. The emotions. The thoughts under the surface.
He must be fucking amazing in bed.
Can you imagine that kind of intensity staring into your eyes, into your soul, while he’s sliding that thick, hard cock deep inside your pussy, knowing when to go harder, when to go faster, when to grind and adjust, exactly how to touch your skin with his big hands, how hard to put the pressure on your clit, how you like to be pinned beneath his rock-hard body and the bed, without a word, just knowing because he knows what your breath means,
what the pitch of your moans means, because he can detect the smallest shift in your gasp, understands exactly how badly you need him to grip your ass, to push your legs farther apart, to pin your arms over your head, to bite your nipples, to slam home, to find that secret spot deep inside, and hit it over and over and over again until he draws out an orgasm so deep, so hard, so exquisite that an entire supernova explodes in your ovaries and an intense pleasure you’ve never known makes your very aura leave your entire body?
Holy fuck, I need a drink.
And he’s still watching me. His gaze going darker.
Like he knows.
He knows I’m picturing myself naked. Picturing him naked. Bending me over the kitchen table. Eating me in the guest bedroom. Fucking me against the shower wall while hot, steamy water sluices over both of us as we come again and again and again…
I really need to not have mental sex with Ares Berger.
Because I’m not going to have real sex with him, but having mental sex with him makes me think of having real sex with him, and he is a hockey player, and he does have those bulgy, ripply muscles, and he is protective and mysterious and funny in his own way, and that gaze—
He would definitely be fucking amazing at sex.
He shifts his gaze away, pulls a bag of dried apricots out of his pants—oh my god—and hands them to Loki.
“Wine?” Chase asks from the doorway.
“Yes,” I gasp.
Everyone looks at me weird.
“She’s such a drunkard,” I vent as Harold.
“You’re one to talk,” I vent back as Lucy.
My cheeks are on fire, my nipples are hard enough to cut glass, and if I can smell how aroused I am, I wonder if everyone else can too.
Chase and Sia both tilt oddly identical is she doing what I think she’s doing? looks at me.
And it takes me a minute to realize they’re reacting to the venting.
Not to the seventeen mental orgasms and one near miss I just gave myself.
“Talks too much,” Ares grunts.
“They all do, man,” Chase says.
Sia gets him with an affectionate backhand to the gut.
Ares looks at me again, and his expression has gone blank.
Like he’s doing it on purpose. Hiding behind a small vocabulary and goofball pranks, like the wheelchair on the treadmill yesterday and the crayons on the wall today.
Is he really just an overgrown kid on hockey skates?
Or is that just what he wants the world to see?
I could tell you I don’t need more complications in my life right now. Or that I’m not interested in hockey players. Anymore. Or even that I’m just vulnerable from breaking up with Doug.
But none of that would be the truth.
And the only truth I know for sure is that my pulse is racing, I can’t quite catch my breath, and I’m getting all the tingles in the lady cave area.
With some overheating involved.
It’s official.
I am so turned on and intrigued by Ares Berger.
I don’t know how this happened, but it’s not good.
I leap up and make a dart for the kitchen. “Wine,” I call over my shoulder. “Yep. Wine.”
But I step into Gammy’s kitchen, and I realize what I missed before.
The window over the sink is fixed.
New glass.
No more cardboard.
I slowly turn.
Ares is watching me. Still.
“Did you—” I start.
I don’t finish.
Partly because I don’t have to.
I might not have known Ares long, but I’m positive that look he’s giving me now means of course I got the window fixed, dummy.
So now, not only does Ares give good mental sex, he fixes things that are broken.
He sees things that need to be fixed, and he takes care of it.
There’s way more to Ares than the world gives him credit for.
And I don’t know if I’m proud to have figured that out, or slightly terrified as to what it might mean.
10
Ares
I don’t want to watch.
Sucks balls to be on this side.
Thrusters better win.
Game starts in two minutes.
Chase and my sister are basically making out in the chair in the corner. I keep throwing Cheetos at them. Loki helps. Sniffer, a forward who’s out for most of the season while he recovers from a knee injury, and The Bear, our hairy, big-ass spare D-man who didn’t make the cut for traveling and suiting up for this west coast trip, showed up and are making me an Ares sandwich on the couch. Felicity’s friends are here too—the smart one and the one who can play boy band music on her cello, though she got here too late to do more than two songs—scattered on the floor to watch the game.
Felicity’s acting weird.
Has been since we were singing, which should’ve been more fun, but wasn’t, because Z isn’t here with us.
And now her phone’s blowing up.
“Is he still texting you?” the smart friend—Maren—whispers.
“I’m blocking him, okay?” she whispers back.
“You need to do something more than block him,” cello-girl—Alina—replies.
I glance at Chase.
Fucker’s got his hand up my sister’s shirt. Fuck the Cheetos.
I fling a can of beer at him. Loki screeches in my ear.
“Ouch. Dammit, Ares.”
Since I can’t glower at anyone on the ice tonight, I settle for aiming my I will kill you glare at my best friend. “No touchie.”
“Ares, we talked about this,” Ambrosia says. “I can kick him in the balls myself when I don’t want him to touch me anymore.”
“Your sister’s scary,” The Bear mutters.
“Yeah, she is,” Chase agrees.
And they’re happy, Chase and Ambrosia.
I should be happy for them. Their crazy works together.
But I’m pissed.
Felicity’s got a problem. I’m a fucking gimp. And Chase is too busy sucking face with my sister to pick up on the signals.
Z wouldn’t be any better.
Not if Joey was around.
The three of us, we used to finish each other’s sentences. Now, they got their own lives. Their own girlfriends.
And I’m the leftovers. The leftovers who can’t even get his fucking foot in a skate and got read the riot act today about checking in and staying the fuck off my foot.
Talking about extending me on the IR if I don’t do what they say.
Need to heal, Ares, and you have to stay off it to heal.
Fuck that.
Dudes on the TV are talking about me while Lavoie, Frey, and the rookie who took my place line up on the ice.
Berger could be out for the season, Bob. Gotta wonder what’s going through his mind.
Probably socks, Gary.
Chuckle snort, chuckle snort.
Felicity mutes the TV. “Assholes,” a cheerful tone that sounds like one of her puppet voices mutters.
The cameras pan to the goaltenders, and we miss the face-off because of the talking heads.
Fuck, I need to be on the ice. See what’s happening. Not what one view can show. I’m leaning left and right and forward, but I can’t control the fucking camera.
I hate being here. Can’t see. Can’t play. Can’t help.
“And the Thrusters take the puck, with Manning Frey on the breakaway,” Felicity says with that fake cheery voice she does without moving her lips. “Prince on the ice and off. Wonder if he has his balls with him tonight, or if he left them behind in Alabama with that woman who’s gonna be his princess someday?”
“Quit talking about his balls, Lucy,” she replies to herself in a deeper, grumpier voice. “Hockey uses pucks, not balls.”
“I know, GrumpaHaroldamus. Oh, and lookie, Frey and Lavoie and Jaeger are digging it out of the corner! And—whoa, that looked like it hurt.
Take that, you LA bully dude.”
“What the fuck?” The Bear mutters next to me.
“Who is that?” Sniffer wants to know.
“That’s Lucy,” Felicity says in her deeper resigned voice, which is different from the grumpy voice. “She’s a fucking optimist. I’m an optimist too, and I’m fucking optimistic Lavoie’s gonna put that biscuit in the basket, because that’s why he’s paid the big—aw, fuck.”
Sniffer’s snickering until the aw, fuck.
LA took possession. They’re charging the defensive line.
Felicity’s adding commentary. She talks a lot.
A lot.
But it’s better than listening to the boneheads on the TV talk about me being out for the whole season.
I can tune out a lot—it’s my job on the ice—but I can’t tune out the voices saying I’m done.
LA takes a shot, Murphy blocks it, and the three women on the floor erupt in shouts and cheers.
“Fine, fine, nice save by Murphy,” Felicity says in her grumpy voice.
Maren shoves her. “Quit it. He rocked that save.”
“Holy fuck, she’s a ventriloquist,” Sniffer says.
“And a really bad one at that,” Felicity answers in her Lucy voice. “But we love her anyway.”
“You are not bad,” Alina says. She turns to look at all of us. “Felicity does open mic night at The Laugh Track, and she kills it every time. You should see her puppets. Lucy’s this adorable cat with a bent ear and a missing a tooth and always wears a hockey jersey. Tim’s a very proper and very resigned goat who lives with Lucy. He has a monocle. And Harold’s a grumpapotamus. We love Harold.”
“We need to get Harold back,” Maren mutters.
“High sticking called on that LA douchebag and it’s a Thrusters power play!” Felicity croons in her Lucy voice.
But Chase is catching on. He shoots me a look.
I ignore him, because the game’s on and Felicity’s phone has gone silent.
Except I can’t ignore him for long. Like not more than a few seconds. I give him a nod. Yeah. The ex.
Murphy’s mom talks as much as his sister. We all know about Doug the dick. So smart. Owns a little company. Hangs with the mayor. Handsome too. She just doesn’t understand why it didn’t work out. Felicity finally moved on from the sports jocks to the mature, responsible businessmen, and she still can’t find herself a good husband.