“How long has it been?” I asked. She’d said that they’d been together for a long time, but I had no idea how long it had been since he’d cheated on her and hurt her so badly.
“Almost a year.”
“And you haven’t dated anyone since? You haven’t had anyone tell you how beautiful you are in all that time?”
“I don’t—” She cut herself off and thought for a moment before continuing, taking her time as though she was weighing each word. “It’s hard to believe I could be beautiful these days because my body has changed so much, and he told me how fat I was for so long that it’s all I can see.”
“Well, it’s a fucking lie.”
Allison stared at me for a long minute, and then she shook her head. “I wish it were easier to believe that.”
“That’s why you’re here, though. So I can help you start to believe it again.”
“Yes.” She took a deep breath, and I watched her chest rise and fall with it. “Can I… Do you mind if I kiss you?”
“I’d mind if you didn’t.”
She nodded and bit down on her lower lip like she was trying to build up the courage to do it.
“Come here.” I stood up and closed some of the distance between us, trying to make it easier on her. She didn’t have to be the one to initiate everything. It had to have taken a ton of courage to post the ad in the first place. I held out my hand, waiting for her to take it.
After a moment, she got to her feet and took my hand, and I gently eased her closer to me. She stopped when we were inches apart, bracing her hands on my biceps. I rested mine on her waist. She was soft and warm, and the gentle slope of her hips made me almost desperate to get my hands on her ass. But that had to wait. If I rushed her, she’d probably leave.
“This is nice,” she murmured. Even this small amount of contact already had her breathing a little heavier, and I knew her pulse had to be hammering through her veins—just like mine was.
I nodded. Nice wasn’t quite right, but I didn’t want to think too much about trivial things like that. The heat between us seemed to intensify her perfume, but maybe it was only that we were so close together now. It was sweet and powdery, and it made me want to bury my nose against her neck so it could fill me.
Allison laughed, a nervous sort of laughter, and she licked her lips. Luscious lips. Full and pink, and they looked amazingly soft. “Should we just go for it?”
Instead of answering her, I went for it.
She sucked in a breath right before my mouth met hers. Her lips were even softer than they looked, and I sucked the lower one between both of mine. It took a few moments, but she relaxed into me and hummed against my lips, moving hers apart far enough that I could slip my tongue in her mouth.
I teased her for a minute, my tongue brushing lightly alongside hers and flicking every now and then, until she started to mimic my actions. She angled her head, taking the kiss deeper, and she slid her hands up my arms to settle on my shoulders.
Or I thought she would settle them there. Instead, she started to glide them everywhere, her palms and fingers seeking out the ridges of every muscle. The flats of her palms came down my chest, exploring my pecs before traveling lower, to my abs. I felt my muscles ripple beneath her touch, and she sucked in another breath in response.
I kissed her cheeks, her neck, settling my lips on her collarbone even though the soft fabric of her blouse was still in the way. “Allison?” I hadn’t moved my hands from her waist, even though it was killing me to keep them still. I wanted to cup her ass and draw her to me. I wanted to delve under her shirt and mold her breasts to my hands. I wanted—God, how I wanted—to slide that skirt down her hips and explore her slick core with my tongue.
“Yes?” Her voice hitched on the word, and she slipped her hands around to my sides so they tickled my ribs. Then she tugged me closer to her, until her nose hit the dip of my clavicle and my cock pressed into her belly.
“Do you want me to touch you?” I needed to hear her say it. I couldn’t assume and take what I wanted. It wasn’t enough for me that she had come to my hotel room with sex being the intention. Because with how little I knew about her, I needed her to give me explicit consent.
She nodded, and I hoped she wouldn’t stop there. She didn’t. “I want to feel your hands on me,” she said.
An inch at a time, I dropped my hands back and down until I had a cheek in each palm. Her ass was as soft and sweet and curvy as the rest of her. I squeezed her, drawing her closer still, and she let out an almost inaudible moan.
I’d never been this turned on before while still fully clothed. My cock was hard enough to jackhammer through a fucking concrete wall. Allison stretched up on her tiptoes, putting her arms around my neck and holding on tight. That pushed her breasts right up against my chest, twin cushioned pillows with rock-hard little nubs poking into me. I let out a groan at the sensation.
“I want to take your clothes off,” I said. Allison was nodding and reaching down to tug the hem of her shirt up almost before I got the words out. I put one hand on hers to stop her. “No. I want to do it slowly, using my hands. My teeth. Every time I uncover an inch of your skin, I want to kiss you there, to see you and taste you and soak you in. And then when I’ve got you naked, when I’ve kissed and licked and sucked every hot, trembling, silky-soft inch of your amazingly beautiful body, I want to lick your pussy until you’re writhing and moaning and coming all over me with the best fucking orgasm of your life.”
With every word out of my mouth, the pounding of her heart grew more frantic, her breathing more agitated, and her eyes—those gorgeous midnight-blue eyes—got bigger and darker and more intense.
“Oh,” she said, breathy and soft.
“And while you’re still coming, while your pussy is still clenching and quivering, and it’s all hot and slick and wet, that’s when I want to lift your legs up, rest your feet on my shoulders, and fuck you like you’ve never been fucked before until you come again.”
“Yes,” she said finally, a strangled sound coming from her throat. “Yes, Jacob.”
Jacob? Oh right. That was me. “You’re sure?” I needed for her to want every bit of that as much as I did.
“Positive.”
“You brought condoms?” I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. I wanted them ready and waiting when I was—when I had her ready for me.
Allison nodded. She backed away and bent to her bag, pulling out a brand-new box that was still sealed. She set it on the nightstand closest to her.
Before she could turn around, I picked her up and tossed her into the middle of the bed. I kissed her again, covering her with my body while she moaned with pleasure.
Then I followed through with each and every one of the promises I’d just made her.
“BURNZIE! COLESY!” THE Storm’s head coach, Mattias Bergstrom, called out to me and one of the new defensemen on the team, Cole Paxton, as the rest of the boys started heading off the ice after a hard practice. “Jens and Ny—you too,” he added, indicating two of our other defensemen, Andrew Jensen and Peter Nylund. “I need a minute before you boys hit the showers.”
We were a few months into the season now, and the guys were finally starting to settle in to the new system Bergy had instituted for us when he took over the team. We’d been playing a similar style under Scotty Thomas the last couple of seasons, but the tweaks Bergy had insisted on had taken a few of us a while to adjust to. Old habits die hard, or whatever the saying was. Anyway, even though we were starting to really click with Bergy’s changes now, he still hadn’t settled on the defensive pairings he wanted. The forwards had been going through almost as many changes as we were. I was starting to wonder if Bergy was ever going to settle on a combination he liked. Every few games he tried out new partnerships, seeing who clicked with whom and what arrangement seemed to be the most effective for the team as a whole.
He was always looking at charts and graphs and other data on the computer, too—something Scotty would have never
dreamed of doing. Scotty had trusted his eyes and gut feelings and things like a guy’s plus-minus rating. Bergy, though? He was far more interested in some of the newer stats that bloggers kept putting up posts about—Fenwick and Corsi and all sorts of other things that went right over my head. I didn’t have a clue what any of that shit meant, and I wasn’t entirely sure I cared.
Anyway, he’d been using these new stats to help him and his assistant coaches make decisions about which defensemen he ought to pair together and which forwards worked better on a particular line. I had a strong suspicion that some random stat was behind him calling me and the boys over right now—either that or maybe he wanted each of us to write down some new goals or something. He’d instituted that practice back at the beginning of training camp. If you write your goals down, it’ll keep you accountable, he’d said. He’d insisted on each of us making out goal cards for the entire season on the first day of training camp, and every week since then we’d had a team meeting where we would make up new goal cards for the upcoming week. Maybe he thought we needed to update ours right now.
Colesy gave me a look, one that clearly indicated he thought he was in trouble. The guy was a good defenseman—really good, actually. But the coaches kept talking to him about needing to improve his core strength, saying it would help him in his transitions. That was what all his goals had been about lately—adding extra reps in the gym on core-strengthening exercises, demonstrating improvement in game situations, that sort of thing.
He’d had a great practice today, though. He hadn’t had any problems making the switch from offensive to defensive positioning, and the drills we’d run were seriously challenging on that front. I doubted they were going to bring up his core strength again right now. Besides, why would Bergy include me and these other guys in that discussion if it was really just about Cole Paxton?
I shrugged, as though that would help him shrug it off, too. “Don’t worry about it. He’s not going to rip you a new one.” Not today, at least, and not this guy. Bergy tended to reserve that special form of communication for Zee. Sometimes for me and Soupy, too, since we were Zee’s assistant captains this year. He only really slammed into the leadership group—those of us who had special weekly meetings with him and the other coaches where we got to write down other leadership-oriented goals. The rest of the guys tended to get the you-disappointed-me sort of speech more than anything else. That was another way he was different than Scotty. Our former head coach preferred to yell at everyone indiscriminately, and if he wasn’t yelling at you, then you were really in hot water.
We skated to the boards near center ice, where Bergy and his assistant coaches, David Weber and Adam Hancock, were waiting. Until last year, Webs had been one of the boys, but he’d retired in the off-season. Handy was a longtime coach in the league. He’d been the head coach of a few teams over the years—both at the AHL and the NHL level—and he’d been an assistant coach more than just a few times, too. I figured Jim Sutter, the Storm’s general manager, had brought him in to give Bergy and Webs an experienced voice to help them make the adjustments smoothly and successfully. Bergy had only been an assistant coach for a couple of years before getting promoted. It wasn’t all that long ago that I’d played against him.
“So here’s the deal,” Bergy said once the four of us came to a stop. “I’m going to change things up again with you four, starting with Thursday night’s game. I want to see Jens and Ny together, and Burnzie, I want you with Colesy.”
“That’ll give both pairs a bit of snarl and risk-taking, along with a bit of safety,” Handy said. He was the assistant coach that was supposed to be overseeing the defense, but Bergy seemed to have a hard time letting go of that particular responsibility. Bergy had been a defenseman himself, and he’d been in charge of us for the two years he’d been an assistant coach.
I had no doubt that I was supposed to be the snarl of my pair. Jens and I had been partnered together almost all last season and part of this season. We both played a pretty similar style, though—physical, hard-hitting, in-your-face hockey. My snarl might be a little nastier than Jens’s, but it really depended on the day of the week and what side of bed we had each rolled out of, and I liked to shoot the puck more than he did. Jens was more about making a good first pass and letting the forwards deal with the offensive side of things, at least most of the time.
Before Jens had come to the Storm and throughout quite a bit of this year, I’d played alongside Ny. He was your prototypical Swedish defenseman, right down to doing everything like a machine. He skated well, had a decent shot and a lot of skill, and he played a sound positional game. Coaches liked to put him out on a power play unit because his pass was as good as his shot from the point and he had excellent on-ice vision. He could be a power play quarterback.
I hadn’t been paired up with Colesy at all, though, other than a random shift or two. His style was closer to Ny’s, only he was less offensively skilled and more defensively minded than the other three of us. Most people in the hockey world would call him a stay-at-home defenseman, but that wasn’t really accurate. He tended to sit back and let the game come to him, so he rarely got caught out of position.
Now he was going to be my partner—at least for the next game or two. It was anyone’s guess how long we’d stay together. I’d spent time playing alongside every other defenseman on the team in the first two and a half months of the season. Changing things up that often didn’t make it easy to form good communication or chemistry—both of which were imperative.
Which Bergy knew. He’d played defense in the NHL for over two decades. That was what confused me about why he was switching up the pairings and forward lines so often. We’d barely be starting to figure our partners out when he’d throw another wrench in things and we’d have to start all over again.
Bergy cleared his throat. “Everyone good with that?”
It wasn’t like we had much say in the matter.
“Yeah,” I replied for the lot of us. “Whatever you want.”
“Good deal,” Webs said. “So starting with practice tomorrow, that’s how we want you paired up for five-on-five work. Jens and Ny will be the 1-A pairing; Burnzie and Colesy will be 1-B. Burnzie, you’ll be on the first power play unit with four forwards, just like you’ve been doing lately. Jens and Ny will handle the second unit.”
Handy scanned a page on his clipboard and squinted. “And for penalty kill situations, I want to try Burnzie and Colesy as the first pairing. Jens, you’ll work with Luka for that,” he added. Luka was Slava Lukashenko, another veteran defenseman who was apparently being moved down to the third pairing now since Colesy was going to work with me.
“Everyone clear?” Bergy asked.
“Yeah,” we said. “Got it.”
“Get out of here then.” Bergy picked his own clipboard up off the boards and started flipping pages, so we skated off in the other direction. “Colesy! I need one more minute,” he shouted before we got off the ice.
Colesy groaned and turned back the other direction.
Damn. I’d been hoping they’d leave the guy alone. I shot a glance over my shoulder, but it didn’t look like Bergy was pissed off or anything. They wouldn’t yell at him, as I’d said earlier, but I still worried about him.
He was a guy I’d taken under my wing, so to speak, when he’d signed here as a free agent over the summer. Out of all the guys involved in the team leadership, I had always been the one planning parties and making sure the new guys knew they were invited along to shit, making everyone feel welcome…until this year. I’d passed that responsibility on to Soupy. Mainly it was because Bergy seemed to think that Soupy needed to branch out and get to know all the guys on the team as a whole, while he thought the opposite was more true for me: I needed to get to know one or two on a really good individual level.
Colesy had been my primary focus on that score. He was different than most of the guys, so I’d been making an effort to include him, even if I left everyone el
se to Soupy. He was kind of standoffish in a way. Had been since he’d first shown up in Portland. He was a good player, took care of his shit, never caused any problems, but he tended to keep to himself. I had started making extra effort with him once I noticed he wasn’t always coming along to hang out off-ice with the boys. I sometimes took him out to lunch, one-on-one, to get to know him better. Was he just shy or introverted, or did he feel like he didn’t fit in for whatever reason? I knew all too well the harm that could cause—feeling like you didn’t belong—thanks to my brothers. At least once we’d gotten a little older.
Being on a team, though, there’s no room for a guy to feel left out or as if he doesn’t fit. I wasn’t going to let that happen to Colesy.
That was how I started to figure out that he was gay. It was little things, but I recognized them. I mean, he wasn’t wearing bright pink and getting manicures and talking like a girl or anything like that. He wasn’t obvious about it; by all appearances, he was trying to keep it a secret. What gave him away was more how he would smile at the bartender at Kells when we’d have lunch there sometimes, or how he would force his gaze away from a couple of the guys we would see around town when we were out, as though he didn’t want to get caught staring at a guy he thought was hot.
I never said anything to him about it because he never said anything to me about it. It was his secret—his to reveal or keep hidden. But at the same time, I wanted him to feel comfortable enough around me that he would know he could tell me if he wanted to.
There wasn’t a single out guy in the whole NHL. Not one. There no way Colesy was the only one keeping it hidden, though. There had to be at least 800 guys playing in the league. I didn’t get the feeling that he was ready to be the ambassador, to wear that mantle and hope others got the courage to follow him, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to do a fucking thing to make him feel ashamed of who he was.
I’d already done enough of that for one lifetime, and it had cost me more than I’d had to give.
In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) Page 2