So I acted quickly when the opportunity presented itself that morning. Cam went out to grab coffee with some girl and Sean yelled that he was going to the grocery store. I put on some low music before hopping into the shower. My body was tense and had been for days. Each new interaction with Charlie only added to that. The heat of the water worked through my muscles, and I sighed as I leaned against the wall bracing with my shoulders against the cold tile.
I chose to ignore the knocking on the front door the first time I heard it. Whoever it was wasn’t welcome. The second round of knocking was met with a grumble, but I kept my eyes closed and allowed the soothing water to continue to work its way over my body. By the third round of knocking, I was rolling my eyes and turning off the water to my shower. We never got visitors, so of course we would have a persistent one while I was the only one home. I grabbed my towel and wrapped it around my waist. Whatever it was, it had better be good.
I grumbled my way through the empty apartment, cursing every few feet for good measure. I hoped whoever it was could handle the sight of me soaking wet with a halfer because I wasn’t putting on clothes for them.
It was tough to tell whose eyes widened the most when I jerked the door open to see Charlie standing on the other side. For fuck’s sake, I thought when her mouth gaped open slightly. I tried to focus on the sight of my jersey in her slackened fist rather than her eyes that were roaming my still-wet body slowly.
She took a shuddering breath. She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth before averting her gaze from my slick chest. I gulped and wished my body wouldn’t respond to her the way it always seemed to. I already had a halfer—there was no need to scare her away by going full mast. I cleared my throat, and her eyes jerked upward. A light blush colored her cheeks, and I couldn’t help but find her embarrassment kind of adorable.
“Uh,” she spluttered as the pink in her cheeks darkened to a deeper rouge, “I wanted to come by to drop your jersey off and talk to Sean. Is he home?”
My stomach dropped, and I caught myself to keep from glaring at the woman. Of course she was there to see Sean. The golden boy could do no wrong in her eyes. I thought for sure that her keeping a distance from him for nearly two weeks was an indication that she was cooling toward him. Sean: 1. Devon: 3.
I barely tempered the contempt in my tone when I responded, “No, he’s not.”
“I’m so sorry; I don’t know why I just assumed that he would be. I should have texted first to ask,” she said, the pink in her cheeks flaring with a different kind of embarrassment. She held the jersey out while looking at anything that wasn’t me or my dripping body. DAMN. IT.
I reached forward to pull the jersey from her hand with a sigh of defeat. My stomach jumped at the small jolt of electricity that passed between us when our fingers touched. She met my eyes with a quick intake of breath, and her head cocked to the side slightly. The breath rushed from my body as I jerked the jersey away from her. I stepped away, holding the door further open for her to pass.
“He went to the grocery store; he shouldn’t be gone too long if you want to wait.”
Charlie nodded, her loose hair bobbing around her shoulders. She gripped her hands in front of her body and gave me a wide berth as she passed. It was a small mercy that she seemed to be entirely unaware of the fact that I was in a state of half-arousal as she shimmied past my body.
She walked further into the apartment, and I followed behind her mutely. She studied the dark living room before gingerly picking up a t-shirt out of the armchair and sitting down. If she was shocked to find it a disaster compared to the first night she visited, she hid it well.
The idea of being in a dimly lit room with the woman was heady and exactly the kind of thing I didn’t need to think about. I rushed to pull the shade to the balcony open, bathing the living room in the natural light of the day. I scurried through the room, picking up random articles of clothing and gathering trash. We seriously needed a better cleaning routine because this one just wasn’t fucking cutting it. The pizza boxes on the table may have been the ones from Charlie’s first visit to the apartment, and the clothes were fucking rank.
My frantic cleaning stopped a few moments later when Charlie cleared her throat. I turned my head to face her, not bothering to stand from the squatting position I assumed to grab a shoe from under the coffee table. She was still looking everywhere but directly at me. The same pretty blush from before was coloring her neck and cheeks.
“Yes?” I asked.
Her voice was almost impossibly small when she asked, “Would you care terribly to go put some clothes on?”
Fire boiled through my veins as I stood from my crouching position. Maybe I should’ve been embarrassed. I definitely shouldn’t have gone even harder than I was. Her face was impossibly red, and I wasn’t sure how to read into the look in her eyes. All I knew was I needed to get out of the room fast or I was gonna go full mast, and Charlie was going to see even more of me than she bargained for.
— C —
When I arrived at the guys’ apartment, the very last thing I expected was for Devon to answer the door in a towel with rivulets of water dripping down the muscled planes of his stomach. I knew the man was built, but I couldn’t have imagined just how goddamn delectable he looked without a shirt. When he cleared his throat, I was reminded of two things: one) I wasn’t naturally a pervert, so I needed to stop acting like one, and two) I came over to talk to Sean.
Keeping my eyes off of Devon’s body was way more difficult than I anticipated. He raced around the living room, cleaning as much as he could, his lithe muscles bunching and pulling and working through his body in a symphony of movement that I couldn’t ignore. My eyes got a just little more than they bargained for when he crouched to pull a shoe out from under their coffee table. His towel gaped, and I immediately thought back to Lindsey’s texts from the morning. Check yes to that box, ma’am.
I heard the sounds of a door closing and feet shuffling down the hallway before Devon appeared again. The pervy side of me was more than disappointed at the sight of him in a hoodie and sweats—he couldn’t throw a girl a bone? I shook the thought from my head before indicating toward the Ohio State logo emblazoned on his sweatshirt.
“Are you from Ohio?”
“Nah,” he said easily as he plopped down into the armchair, “I’m from Minnesota, but I went to Ohio State.”
Okay, normal conversation. We didn’t have to talk about his dick. I could do this. “Oh, nice. I’m from Ohio.”
“Which part?” He asked as he sat, placing his elbows on his knees and leaning forward.
“Oxford,” I said simply, and he nodded along. “Which part of Minnesota are you from?”
“Real small place called Montevideo.”
“Ah, you’re a long way from home.”
He cocked his head slightly, and I ran a hand through my hair. “Yeah, I guess, but I wasn’t home a lot as a kid anyway. I stayed with a sponsor family in Minneapolis so I could play hockey.”
“That had to be tough on your family, though,” I offered, not sure of what to say to the man that I’d really just started to get to know the night before.
“Sometimes it was, I guess,” he offered, and I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and my hands clutched before me. “Hockey was never really dad’s thing—he’s from Mississippi, so he didn't get it. But Grandpa Willie—mom’s dad—got me hooked on it young, and I fell in love. Grandpa died when I was ten, and all I wanted was to keep playing. I think Mom would’ve done anything to keep me happy, so she found a way.”
I clenched my hands as I worked through his words in my head. Devon’s explanation felt strangely intimate and raw, but he was so absolutely nonchalant about it—like living away from your parents throughout your childhood isn’t an altogether strange and gut-wrenching experience. I closed my eyes tightly for just a moment, attempting and failing, to quell the onslaught of memories of my own odd childhood.
I cleared my thro
at and tried to steer the conversation to safer territory. “How’d your dad end up in Minnesota if he’s from Mississippi?”
Devon leaned back with a chuckle, his posture relaxing entirely. I gave myself a mental pat on the back. “He was in love,” he said shortly, and I cocked an eyebrow. “He met mom in Gulf Shores, Alabama, and the rest is history.”
“Okay, there’s obviously way more to that story than that. I’m a girl, Devon, you can’t just tell me your dad was in love and the rest is history!”
He shook his head with a laugh. “It’s a long story.”
I leaned back and crossed my arms over my chest. I stared at him with a teasing glare before saying, “And I expect you to tell it to me! Seriously, they met in Alabama and neither of them are from there? And then your dad followed your mom to Minnesota?”
I cocked my head to the side and looked at him expectantly. Devon rolled his eyes and sighed but launched into the story regardless. His dad was from Jackson originally, and his mom from Montevideo. The pair met one summer in Gulf Shores, Alabama when Quentin traveled down with some of his buddied and Terrie was vacationing with an elderly aunt and uncle. When they met, they clicked, despite the age difference, despite the distance between their two homes, despite the color of their skin. I found my heart beating just a little faster when he talked about his Quentin quitting his job in Jackson and moving to Montevideo to pursue his relationship with Terrie after a year of wistful phone calls and exchanged letters.
“Holy shit,” I breathed out as I rubbed my temples. Devon’s loud laugh startled me, and I looked up to see him getting up from the armchair. “What?” I asked indignantly.
“Nothing, you just seem so surprised by what Dad did.”
“I just—I don’t know…” I trailed off as he stretched and padded toward the kitchen.
“Do you want a water?” He asked, and I shook my head. I listened to him rifling through the refrigerator as I contemplated what he’d shared with me. I couldn’t begin to fathom the kind of love that existed between two people to cause them to sacrifice so much to be together. How could he not want to be raised in a home with that kind of love in it?
I was still reeling over the story when Devon walked back into the room. He turned toward the chair before changing his mind and dropping onto the couch next to me. He studied me for a short moment before saying, “Listen, I know Dad moving to Minnesota to be with my mom seems really romantic and all, but don’t let that fool you. The man’s a total asshole.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head tersely. “He hasn’t spoken to me since I dropped out of college to play hockey.”
“Jesus,” I breathed out slowly before reaching out a tentative hand and placing it on his knee. He reached down to cover his hand over mine, and my stomach jumped. I ignored the jumbled mess that was my stomach. “That’s gotta be so tough.”
He pulled his hand away to run it over the back of his head. He shrugged slightly as he groaned. “I’ve had four years to come to terms with it. He wasn’t able to go to college—he worked from the time he was 12. And it’s not like he ever understood why I loved hockey so much anyway—remember, I got that from Grandpa. It really bugged him when I dropped out to play, especially since it was to play in a minor league.”
“But still, to not talk to you for four years?”
“Charlie, my dad was a complete asshole about it. He told me to stop throwing my life away for something I was only mediocre at. And, let’s be fair here, I was an asshole back to him. I told him I could damn well do what I wanted with my life since it wasn’t his to dictate. Sometimes things break in families. I mean, how did your parents take it when you moved to Charleston? Surely they didn’t just take that lying down.”
“My parents died in a drunk driving accident when I was really young.”
The look of panic that crossed over his face at my nonchalant response might’ve been comical in another situation. I could feel how hard my heart was beating in my chest as he gripped my hand and said, “Oh shit, I’m so sorry.”
Turning my hand over and lacing our fingers together felt like the most natural thing in the world. I squeezed his hand gently, wishing the action could lessen the sting of the words I was saying. “Don’t be. My mom was the drunk driver.”
He spluttered, and I tightened my grip, relaying that he didn’t need to try to think of something to say to try to make the situation less awkward. It couldn’t be, so he didn’t need to try. He smiled at me, a comforting, genuine type of smile, and I smiled back.
“My mom’s parents were both already dead, and my dad’s parents didn’t want anything to do with me. They didn’t see me as the last thing tying them to their only child. I was just a reminder of the woman that took him away from them. I stayed with my great aunt until I graduated high school, and then I got the fuck out as quickly as I could. I haven’t been back.”
Silence stretched between us as I stared at the dingy carpet. Sad wasn’t quite the right word to describe how I felt. Years had passed since I felt that particular emotion over the situation, but I couldn’t say that I didn’t feel raw. The extent of the outright shittiness of my upbringing wasn’t something that many were privy to, and only Lindsey knew how toxic my relationship was with my great aunt, Enid. We may have only recently become friends, but sharing the memories with him felt oddly cathartic.
My heart stuttered slightly when Devon unlaced our fingers before wrapping his arms around me and pulling me into a tight hug. “Thanks for sharing that with me. I’m sure it wasn’t easy,” he said as he squeezed me tightly against his warm body.
I hummed in the back of my throat but didn’t respond. What was there to say? Thanks for listening to bullshit that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things? Thanks for being a pal about things that I shouldn’t still be sad about 17 years later? Neither had quite the appeal I was going for, so I said nothing and opted for resting my head on his shoulder.
The sound of a key turning in the lock of the apartment door was like a shock back to reality. We pulled apart and moved to opposite ends of the couch. My heart thudded in my chest, and my head pounded as Sean walked through the door carrying an obscene amount of grocery bags.
Chapter 11
— D —
It was Friday, four short days after my intense conversation with Charlie, and I was watching—angry as hell—as she leaned drunkenly against Sean and laughed. They sat across from me on the other side of our coffee table, legs crossed, with drinks in their hands. Several others sat between us including Nate, a couple other guys from the team, and Sean’s ex Cassandra, who’d brought a friend. I wasn’t sure who invited those women, but I would gladly let that person sit next to Cassandra’s aggressively flirtatious friend that was sitting next to me.
Cassandra and her friend both wore tanks tops and short skirts, with little to nothing protecting them from the cool air that blew in from the half-opened sliding doors. Cam and Lindsey were on the balcony; and even without looking over my shoulder, I knew they were making out. I rolled my eyes. Thank fucking Christ; I was tired of listening to Cam go on and on about her.
“Wait,” Charlie said while trying to compose herself. She sat straighter and took a deep breath before focusing on the man next to her. “So you’re telling me that when someone lands on the Asshole spot, they have to do whatever anyone tells them?”
“Yes,” Sean said with a chuckle. He pointed to where the spinner was resting on the beaten up old board game. “And now you’re Asshole. And since you’re Asshole, I’m going to need you to finish the King Cup in the middle of the board.”
I blanched. The game we were playing was called Wheel of Intoxication, a game Cam’s older brother gave him when he finally settled down and got married. Based on our game so far, the two rules that made the game fun—and just a little bit of a shit show—were the ones pertaining to the Master and the Asshole. If someone landed on the Master space, they could make any player do whate
ver they wanted them to (within reason, we were assured), and they stayed Master until someone landed on that space. If someone landed on the Asshole space, they were at the mercy of every other player in the game.
The King Cup was an invention of Cam and Sean. They lost the cards that correlated to the Rules spaces on the board and improvised a 64oz cup for people to pour into when they happened to land on one. There were four spaces, and the cup tended to fill up quickly. After thirty minutes, the cup was about half full of a noxious mixture of beer, hard cider, various liquors and a little Cholula thanks to Nate.
“Fuck,” Charlie said simply, and we all laughed. I didn’t envy her in the slightest. She climbed onto her knees to reach the cup in the middle of the table, and my eyes immediately honed in on Sean’s hand on her ass.
As she chugged, I seethed. Something changed between us when she came by our apartment on Monday. We had our first legitimate conversation; she shared things with me about her past that I was certain she hadn’t shared with Sean. I held her close and comforted her. She leaned her head on my shoulder, and we sat in the quiet. I probably could’ve kissed her if Sean hadn’t chosen the exact wrong fucking moment to barge in.
And here we were, four short days later. She was back by Sean’s side. I couldn’t wrap my head around just what the fuck he said to her to get her to forgive him so quickly. Their relationship continued to confuse me. I didn’t anticipate him making it past week one with her, but we were five weeks in, and she kept running back to him. I glanced at Cassandra and wondered what exactly Tremblay was playing at having her at the party that night. My stomach churned, and I wanted to kick myself. If Charlie got hurt, it would be my fault entirely.
Breakaway: A Hockey Romance Page 12