Hard Knocks

by Ruby Lang

  “Come here often?”

  “A friend owns it. A lot of the food comes from surrounding farms or fisheries. The wine and beer are all from Oregon, too.”

  She was glad to be talking about something innocuous and impersonal, especially because of the way he was glancing at her. Still, the whole thing seemed to be escalating between them almost without provocation. During the small talk, there were quick glances, a brush of her thigh against his. Maybe later, a touch of hands, lips, tongues.

  Still later—she could almost smell its heady scent—sex.

  She was going to put that on the table, and he looked like he would take the offer. Now that she’d defined her desire in her mind, she felt a little more in control of the situation. She could tell herself that he’d somehow managed to maneuver her into this, that he’d dazzled her somehow, that he’d worked some sort of athletic jock magic on her: dazzled her with his thigh muscles and forearms and the diamond cut of his cheekbones. He had. And yet, she had not objected, and would not, although she had many opportunities. She had not ordered him to go home when they reached the bar or shaken off his hand when he put it on her back. She had not refused his help with her coat or told him not to sit down. She was flirting. She let her eyes roam openly over his lips, shoulders, and chest. In fact, now that they were sitting down next to each other, she wished that he’d touch her.

  The server came back with wine and a plate of warm, spicy smelling potatoes. “Patatas bravas,” Juliet said. She indicated a bespectacled man behind the bar. “Ian sent it over. He says he’ll come by later.”

  They chorused their thank-yous, gave their orders, and Adam waited for her to take a piece. She set it on her plate and looked up. He was staring at her. They were staring at each other. Still looking at him, she took a small sip of wine. He followed suit.

  This was so a date.

  No, it wasn’t, she reminded herself. If anything, he was trying to get lucky and so was she. They had nothing in common except a dark vein of attraction.

  It was enough.

  Luckily, or unluckily, Ian came up and dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

  “Hey Ian, don’t you have a manager who covers this place?” Helen said brightly. “And where’s Petra?”

  “Lilah’s out sick, so I’m covering tonight. Petra said she’d be in later, but she’s trying to learn about her Indian heritage by making paneer.”

  “And you left her alone?”

  “I kept offering suggestions. The cat’s less opinionated, apparently. She’s gotten pretty good at a lot of dishes, but making cheese is a whole other level.”

  She introduced the men and allowed Ian to relax Adam with chatter. Adam was good natured, and Ian affably extracted all relevant information. Ian was probably memorizing Adam’s details for a full report to Petra—how tall he was, what his voice sounded like, what he ate, what he drank, how he looked at Helen. And Adam was looking at her. He chatted easily with Ian, but she felt his eyes flit over her profile, her hair, her forest green sweater. Ian noticed Adam’s gaze, too, and he seemed amused.

  Finally, Ian clapped Adam on the back and promised them some new dishes that the chef was trying out. Ian gave Helen a wry grin and dove back into the room.

  A plate of salmon arrived, followed by some sort of root vegetable hash. There was also a plate of bruschetta with a green spread on it and a dish of halibut fritters. Helen wasn’t hungry. Although she was interested in watching Adam Magnus as he peered at the food. He looked almost like a little boy as he took a tentative bite of the salmon and chewed thoughtfully. “That’s good,” he rumbled approvingly. “Although, I could probably eat three or four plates of this.”

  “They are small. I don’t think it’s against the rules to order more.”

  He grinned, then looked over at her. “Aren’t you having any?”

  “I ate a lot of popcorn at home,” she said. “And cereal. Maybe there were some Pop-Tarts.”

  “I didn’t see you as a Pop-Tart kind of girl.”

  “What does that mean? You don’t find me sweet and delicious?”

  “I figured you for something more complicated and harder to pronounce.”

  “Something hard to get my mouth around?”

  She heard his light intake of breath even as he narrowed his eyes at her heavy-handed innuendo. When he spoke again, his voice was even.

  “I thought of you,” he said, pausing very deliberately, “as a more complicated flavor.”

  He bit into the bruschetta almost delicately, showing her his white teeth. Then he dabbed carefully at the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

  His eyes gleamed.

  Helen laughed, but her stomach felt tight and fluttery. She took a sip of wine. “This from a man who accessorizes with scarves.”

  “It’s warm, not just jazzy.

  “You’re never going to let me live that word down.”

  He ignored her. “To sum up, I’m a sophisticated gentleman with urbane and practical tastes and you’re a Pop-Tart.”

  Helen sat back and marveled. “You know, the problem with you is that you’re smarter than I’d like you to be.”

  “I think that might be your problem, not mine.”

  She looked at her glass. She was not getting tipsy. Still, she felt the warm pulses of excitement spreading across her body. She was going to do something reckless tonight. She deserved it.

  As if in response, he touched his knee against hers and didn’t withdraw it this time. She put her hand on his elbow. His bicep looked temptingly hard. It tightened as she traced it with her index finger.

  He watched the progress of her hand.

  “How did you know that you wanted to be a doctor?” he asked.

  Hmm. Not the question she’d been expecting. She withdrew her hand.

  “Well, I didn’t, at first. I trained for years and years to become a dancer. Ballet.”

  “Oh, that explains it,” Adam said.

  “Explains what?”

  “It explains how you move. You talk with your body a lot. Your movement has a lot of power. When your arm waves, your head sometimes follows, but your torso remains absolutely controlled.”

  She cocked her head. “Most people tell me I’m graceful when they hear I danced.”

  “You’re not really—or at least that’s not the first thing that comes to mind. Anyway, I interrupted you. You wanted to be a ballerina.”

  She grabbed a piece of bruschetta and took a thoughtful bite.

  “Well, no, I don’t know that I wanted to be a dancer,” she said. “But I was reasonably good at it, and I won a spot at the San Francisco Ballet’s school—”

  “That sounds more than reasonably good.”

  “Just reasonably good. Believe me, there’s always someone better. But at the time, I didn’t think about it much or even really understand what I was doing until I was eighteen.”

  “What happened when you were eighteen?”

  “When I was eighteen, I got into an accident. I was supposed to—well, instead I ended up in the hospital. In retrospect, it was the best thing to ever happen to me. I mean, in the dance movies, I guess I’m the girl who just doesn’t make it, like the great tragic figure whose failure makes the main dancer take a good hard look at who she has become. But it wasn’t a tragedy, especially by that time. I realize now that I wasn’t happy. I just didn’t know what else I could do until the accident forced me to think about my future another way.”

  He was listening to her like no one else had ever listened before. And she was blabbing things to him that she hadn’t really shared with anyone else. For a big, active man, he could be surprisingly still.

  “How did you become a hockey player?” she asked.

  He frowned and pushed some vegetables around his plate. Did he think of them as pucks? “I played when I was a kid. In fact, it sounds a lot like your life. I wasn’t that great. But I never got in the accident, and I just kept on, through college. I was drafted after I finished m
y degree, and now here I am, still doing the same things. And maybe now taking a good hard look at what I’ve become.”

  “Except you were probably a lot more talented than I was.”

  “Just reasonably good.”

  She laughed, and that made him smile that half smile that set her skin prickling again.

  “So why doctoring?” he asked.

  “I didn’t love ballet, but I did love what the body could do, how the body healed itself, how people could help it along. Plus, my dad was a doctor. Not a neurologist. He was a small-town general practitioner. He saw everyone from age zero to one hundred and did everything from extracting dimes from noses, to emergency deliveries.”

  “He’s passed away?”

  Her lips tightened. “No.”

  She looked down, aware of the concern that touched his face. She took a few minutes to gather herself, then flicked her eyes up again. She held his steady gaze. “Maybe we should get out of here,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  If someone had told Adam that at the end of the night, he would come home with Helen Frobisher, he would have laughed. But here she was, in her slim jeans and that soft green sweater that made him want to rub his cheeks against her, catch his stubble on the smooth knit. He let his fingers brush it as he helped her with her jacket.

  Now, she stood in front of his shelves, holding a highball glass full of water and tilting her head to scrutinize his pictures, his houseplants, his old Black Sabbath CDs, and a small collection of paperbacks. Most of his music and books were digital now, and he had an irrational wish to open his electronic devices up for her approval. But then, there wasn’t more to this, was there?

  Everything about her made him want to touch. She wanted it, too, it seemed. On the way back, there had been small bumps of thigh and knee, heavily clothed elbow against elbow, a hand splayed on a back, a brush of the shoulder. She had been so close to him at one point that her chin gilded the sleeve of his upper arm. Almost a kiss. Her long, straight hair gave off the luster of polished wood, but he knew when he slipped his fingers in it, it would be a living thing, whispering seductively on his skin. But his superstitions held him back. He didn’t want her to disappear like a dream as soon as she was in his arms.

  His pulse was thrumming wildly. Just having her in his apartment, running her fingers over his books, leaning on his couch, her lips on the rim of a glass that he drank from, it was making him wild. Because, after all, he had imagined her here on his furniture, settled against the railing of his terrace, or in his bed, and some of it was coming true already. Sharp, elegant Helen Frobisher.

  He was going to be cool about this. He was very cool.

  Then she turned and asked to see his bedroom.

  He was not going to swallow his tongue.

  It wasn’t a huge or lavish apartment, but he had glorious floor-to-ceiling windows, and, on clear days, a view of Mount Hood, which he loved. It was probably the nicest place he’d ever lived in. He had bought it in a fit of optimism when he first signed with Portland. He thought the team would go places. It seemed a long time ago. He would probably have to give the space up if he went back to school. Not that he was sure that was where he was headed.

  He looked around the place to see what she saw. It was clean, at least. His mother had insisted that all her children be neat, and learn to wash their clothes, and dust and put things away. Not that he had a lot of things. He had big, boxy furniture, chosen to suit his large frame, and a huge television, which he considered a professional expense.

  He let her precede him through the hallway. She peered in the bathroom. It seemed to meet with her approval. She looked at the guest room, which he used as an office. The desk was piled with college pamphlets and a copy of What Color is Your Parachute? But she didn’t seem to pay much attention to that either. At least, she didn’t comment on it.

  Then she stepped into the last doorway.

  She frowned.

  “Those are maple leafs,” she said, heading for the picture that was conveniently located right above his bed. “Stylized Canadian maple leafs.”

  “Yeah, like in Slap Shot.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “In the movie Slap Shot, Paul Newman’s a hockey player. He has a Canadian flag over his bed. You’ve never seen it? It’s pretty much the greatest hockey movie ever made.”

  “This is a crowded genre?”

  “Oh fine, Doc, what’s the masterwork depicting your profession? Awakenings? Patch Adams?”

  “Ouch. Why do you get to be played by Paul Newman while Robin Williams is me?”

  “Are you taking potshots at Robin Williams?”

  “No, I’m saying that although he could’ve done a mean impression of me, he doesn’t look anything like a half-Chinese, half-English thirty-two-year-old woman. Not plausible.”

  “Are you really surprised that Hollywood turned you into a white man at the first opportunity? Besides, they couldn’t find anyone pretty enough.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him and turned back to the maple leaf. “You had your flag Warholized,” she said, leaning over the bed for a better angle. Her head was twisted up into a completely uncomfortable position, and her butt stuck out tensely.

  All he needed to do was run his hand over her flanks and give her a little push. She’d be sprawling on the sheets, confused, angry, gorgeous.

  Art. Clearly, he needed more of it.

  “You’re very together,” she said, coming back to straight posture. “With the handsome, manly furniture, the maple leaf print, the suits and blazers, the jazzy scarf.”

  “Again with the jazzy?”

  He took a step toward her.

  Her eyes flared. Oh, this was going to be good. But she put her hands between them.

  “Rules of the game,” she said. “Let’s agree on them before we drop the puck, so to speak.”

  “You know, you don’t have to use hockey metaphors. I can understand regular talk just fine, so long as you speak real slowly.”

  “Does it annoy you when I talk hockey? I’d just like things to be clear before we start the stick handling.”

  “Shall I call you Mr. Williams, or do you prefer Robin?”

  She reached out to give him a little shove, but his hand snapped out and caught her wrist.

  They stood looking at the way he held her, his thumb and forefinger circling around her delicate joint, his blunt fingers touching at the ends. Her skin was warm and the power running through her veins and sinews almost electric. She was a strange flower glowing under the lights of his bedroom. He turned her arm so that her wrist faced upward and stroked across the blue veins with his thumb. He could feel her pulse beating fatly, and when he looked up, he saw her eyelids flutter. She’s excited, he thought. She’s as excited as I am.

  “Rules of the game,” she repeated coolly. “This is a one-time thing. We are not involved emotionally. I will leave by morning. If you want me to exit at any time earlier, you will say so instead of being surly or distant in order to drive me away. When I leave, I will extend you the same courtesy.”

  “Your breath is coming faster.”

  “That’s because I know that we’re going to fuck each other’s brains out,” she said evenly.

  Well, that statement certainly contained its own inevitability. He was hard before the sound died on her prim little lips.

  She had poise and steel. He felt evenly matched. If a small part of his brain niggled at him that they shouldn’t do this and he didn’t much like this game or these rules, he ignored it. After all, he was still playing another sport that he didn’t particularly like anymore, and it was the best he could expect.

  “Okay,” he said, letting go of her wrist, “I agree to the terms. Take off your clothes. Please.”

  He quirked a smile.

  “Such good manners, farmer boy,” she murmured, reaching for the hem of her sweater.

  He shook his head. “Jeans first,” he said. “Please.”

 
He planned to touch the sweater on her before she took it off.

  She slipped off her shoes and socks and undid the top button and worked the jeans down her hips. Her underwear came down a little way, revealing a strip of brown hair between her legs.

  Adam swallowed hard and took a small step toward her. There wasn’t room for many more steps.

  She lifted one long leg out of the pants, and a lean blade of muscle flexed on the outside of her thigh. His eyes traveled down to the firm calf, down the ankle to her tortured dancer’s foot.

  God, she was beautiful.

  She pulled down the other leg quickly and tossed the jeans on a chair.

  “What next?” she asked.

  They were both trying to act controlled, both trying to act faintly amused, as if this happened all the time.

  “The boy shorts,” he said.

  If he spoke too much, his voice would betray him.

  “I’m impressed that you know the correct lingerie terminology,” she said, turning around.

  She peeped over her shoulder, then slung her fingers into her underwear.

  So did he.

  He tugged the band down and stopped just at the curve of her firm butt. “You know,” he murmured in her ear, “with an ass like this, you should never, ever wear pants.”

  He could hear the catch in her breath. Good. But she had her revenge as she bent over, taking far more time than she needed to slide the lace and silk down the rest of her legs.

  His jeans were much too confining. He started on his buttons and had his underwear, pants, socks, and shoes off before she could finish her slow slide back up.

  She uncurled her back, vertebra by vertebra. He could practically see each joint ticking smoothly into place. He slid his hands over the lush softness of that sweater, then beneath it to her warm skin while she unhooked her bra. He traced the underside of her breasts, watching her watching his hands as he rounded up to her nipples and brushed them with his thumbs. She gasped and pushed herself into his hands, causing her bottom to come up and slide against his thighs.

  He pulled her sweater off, deciding that he didn’t have the patience anymore to wait. He took off his shirt and tossed it behind him somewhere, and when her back finally touched him, she rubbed her shoulder blades into his chest hair and sighed. That sound, and the feeling of her budded nipples under his thumb and fingers, the smoothness of her back as she undulated against his cock, that was what did him in.