Hard Knocks

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Hard Knocks Page 5

by Ruby Lang


  As he moved her toward the bed, she turned and breathed deeply. “You smell like Icy Hot,” she said, her head in his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I ...”

  But she smiled up at him, almost shyly, and he let the small moment bloom around him. When had he ever felt like this before? Never. Yes, he was excited and eager. But he felt much more, and he wanted to examine it. But it was over too soon. Her eyes turned mischievous, then steely. She gave a too-gentle stroke from the base of his prick to the tip. He let out a strangled sound and slid his fingers down her ass and sunk his fingers in. She rubbed her greedy body against him hard, harder. “Why aren’t you inside me?” she hissed.

  He barely had the strength to leave her to go to the bedside table and take a condom out. By then, she was bent over the bed, legs spread, waiting for him, moaning for him. He rolled the condom on quickly and turned her around. “We haven’t even kissed,” he said.

  “Just shut up and screw me,” she said, spreading herself on the bed.

  She was really quite flexible.

  But that wasn’t going to do. He brought her up so that she was sitting against the headboard and kneeled between her legs. He sat her on his thighs, cupped her ass, and brought her up. And as he kissed her, he finally, finally drove into her, bringing himself up on his knees, bringing her on her heels, her rump against the headboard, feeling the muscles in her ass squeeze and release and squeeze and release in rhythm with him as he drove into her strong little body.

  He was dimly aware of her hands, sliding across his sweat-slicked back, urging him on. Her hair was flying wildly forward and back, her tongue and teeth working against his frantically.

  She pulled her mouth away from his and moaned. Her head rolled down like a rag doll’s and then sprang up again fiercely. She was on her toes, he thought dazedly. He just about lost it right there. Her legs must have been trembling, she should have been tired, but her eyes were level with his and she looked right into him, challenging him, never giving him any quarter. Let’s see what else you can throw at me, she seemed to say.

  She was going to kill him.

  He took a deep breath and pulled her into him to sit. They were still for a moment, looking at each other, assessing. Then she tapped him on the shoulder. “On your back,” she said, running her hands through her hair. She lifted herself to help him. He felt her every small movement on his cock and it nearly caused him to yowl. Finally, excruciatingly, he managed to shift slowly down and backward. There still wasn’t enough room for him to stretch out his legs. She shook her head and removed herself from him, so that he could resettle himself.

  “Satisfied?” he grumbled.

  “We’re getting to that part,” she said sweetly.

  He gritted his teeth as she settled herself onto him again. Still, she didn’t start the rhythm again.

  She ran a finger down his chest and back up to his lips. “I could do with some kissing, now,” she said, managing to sound almost normal. Only the squeeze of her pelvic muscles gave her away.

  “I could do with some fucking, now,” he said, tightly.

  She threw her head back and laughed, and he wondered how he’d been able to live without that sound for the last twenty-nine years. But her movement was enough to launch her into rhythm again. And he pulled her head down again with one hand, and kissed her wildly, and pushed his palm against her with the other hand, until she let herself go, with a cry, and he let himself crash around her until there was no more he could do.

  *

  She wasn’t sneaking out, per se, but their deal had been that they should be courteous and mature. It would have been infinitely more rude if she woke him. It would be even ruder if she refused to leave his bed—and that’s just what she’d been tempted to do.

  Still, she felt guilty. After all, it was hardly adult of her to be leaving a note in eyeliner—the letters huge and smudged—but he had been a lot more than she expected. Oh sure, there was the blind pleasure from the man, the sort of wild fuck that involved sensitized nerve endings and bruises in odd places the next morning. But he had been much too engaging in other ways.

  Helen rolled her eyes at herself.

  She told herself she was reading too much into him. In the light that filtered into the bedroom, Adam was still lethal looking, a gleaming, powerful man. The tendons of his neck and the firm parcels of muscle across his chest and abdomen were gilded with light blond hair, and they seemed poised to ripple at the slightest sound. She pulled the sheet over him, trying not to lick his honey-gold skin. He was just a man, a man with the faint remnants of a farmer tan, golden freckles over his nose and cheeks.

  He was beautiful and human, and she didn’t want to admit that to herself.

  At least she had the excuse of morning rounds to propel her out of his apartment. Although, had he awakened, she would have stayed and gone to work in her grubby clothing. Good thing he was asleep, then. Good thing those light eyes couldn’t read her. She couldn’t afford to drift into something now. Especially with him, she thought, even though she wasn’t sure why he warranted extra caution.

  She pursed her lips and strode out into the early morning.

  A hit of morning air would make her sensible.

  He didn’t know anything about her. Well, except for what made her thrash like a woman possessed. Then again, he was an athlete. Lucky women all over the country, all over Canada—in every city that had a hockey franchise—had probably experienced that look and that knowledge of anatomy. And, after all, human physiology was fairly predictable. She had managed to make him groan and yell and strain every muscle of his beautiful body, just as he had hers.

  The morning air wasn’t doing her any good. She unzipped her jacket and closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, her message alert pinged and she panicked for a moment, wondering if it was Adam. But as she fumbled in her bag, she reminded herself that he didn’t even have her number.

  It was from Petra. How was his stick handling?

  She shook her head and punched in Petra’s number. “How did you do that? Did you make Ian slap a listening device on my shoulder? Do you and Ian have some sort of ESP connection that lets you see the world through his eyes and solve crime? Because it explains so much about you two.”

  “I didn’t know for sure,” Petra said. “But Ian told me that he saw a certain something between you two.”

  “A certain something? Those were his exact words?”

  “I don’t remember exactly what he said. Maybe something about chemistry, biology, physics,” Petra said. “Clearly it enabled me to make an educated guess. Plus, this was Adam Magnus, that hockey player guy, right? The one you were watching so closely on the screen the other evening? Did you score?”

  Helen looked around for her car. And for Petra. She still wasn’t convinced that her friend wasn’t following her.

  “You know, we can use something other than hockey metaphors,” Helen said.

  The phrase made her blush furiously as she remembered Adam telling her the same thing just before they began shedding their clothes.

  “Good, because I don’t know many more,” Petra said. “So ... it’s been a while since the last time, hasn’t it?”

  There was a slight hesitation in her friend’s voice. Probably because the last time had been when Helen cheated on Mike. She’d managed to put that completely out of her mind last night. She was not sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “Helen, all teasing aside, are you okay? I just want to make sure.”

  “I’m fine. I’m just ... muddled. It’s been a strange week for me, and then last night happened, so I didn’t get much sleep.”

  Helen looked around desperately and let out a breath. Where was her damn car? She was sure she had parked it on NW 9th.

  “Are you going to see him again?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “We agreed it was a one-time thing. It just doesn’t make any sens
e. We come from different worlds.”

  “Well, you and your ex-boyfriend came from the same background. Look how that turned out.”

  “Petey,” Helen snapped, “I know there’s a long tradition of girlfriends talking about the morning after, but I’m pretty sure that the postmortem isn’t supposed to leave me feeling dead inside.”

  She found her car.

  “I’ll leave it alone, then,” said Petra.

  “Do that.”

  A pause.

  “But just know that I know that you’ve got a lot going on. And I’m always here for you.”

  Helen slid into her car and put her head on the steering wheel. “Yes, I know,” she whispered.

  She didn’t have time for self-recrimination or self-congratulation. She drove home and showered, biked to the hospital, and did rounds. Her work was absorbing, and she didn’t have time—need time—to process her night with Adam Magnus. When she returned from her shift, she looked at the wreckage of her living room. She picked up the cereal bowls, pried the spoons out of them, and washed them in the sink. She threw out the popcorn scraps, stacked textbooks and journals, and ferried them to the shelves of her never-used study. She vacuumed under the couch cushions and dusted the window sills. She wiped down her coffee table. For good measure, she watered her already-dead plants.

  The cheating had been a one-time thing, too, or so she hoped. She had broken up with Mike the next day. Well, she had tried. Dr. Mike, being Dr. Mike, had refused to accept the tepid reasons she’d given him in an attempt to spare his feelings. He’d tried to argue for days that they were still together. He even went and bought tickets for both of them for the ballet and told her to make time in her schedule for it.

  As for the guy she slept with, she hadn’t felt the urge to carry on with him. He had been a warm body. She had used him, yes, and he had used her. If anything, afterward, she felt numb.

  She had made her terms clear, just as she had with Adam Magnus. In fact, the Adam Magnus thing was exactly the same, she decided. She felt absolutely no urge to ever see him again. None.

  Okay, so they had been very good together.

  That didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Despite her efforts, her condo looked neglected. She had never bothered to change the bland office carpeting, the beige walls, or the cheap fixtures. It was clear that the place had been furnished in the spirit of absentmindedness. She had brick and board shelves, and the battered Mission-style couch was a discard from her parents’ house. She remembered after her father’s car accident, she’d rushed up to see him and he’d protested that he was fine. He seemed fine, but he’d wanted her to take the old piano back to Portland with her, even though she didn’t play and there wasn’t room for the instrument in her old Honda. He had been upset with her, insisting that she bring it with her, trying to push it out of the living room with his shoulder. He hadn’t even unplugged the lamp or removed the metronome. At first she laughed, thinking he was joking. But he had begun to shake. At the time, she had just been preoccupied with calming him down. She should have noticed, at that point, how quick to anger he was, how much his hands trembled, how shadowed his eyes were. How, for a few moments, it was as if he was paralyzed. Had symptoms been there for her to read? Or was her guilt making her misremember?

  And what good would it have done to find out earlier?

  She hadn’t bothered furnishing the place with much else. Even her bedroom was sad and neglected. A part of her had thought that she would be moving in with Dr. Mike. Although, now that she considered it, she wondered why she had bothered to buy a condominium if that had been her plan.

  It seemed she was very good at ignoring the obvious.

  Adam Magnus had art. Okay, so it was kitschy tribute art to a hockey movie, but still, it looked good in his apartment. He had books. He didn’t seem to need her approval even though he had it. He was an adult. He wore scarves.

  All the more reason to avoid the man.

  She resisted the urge to turn on the television. She could not get sucked into the black hole of Wolves hockey or spend the evening ogling Adam’s cheekbones. She should look into more clinical trials. She’d research medication combinations and attempt to find a cure for parkinsonism using the power of her brain, her tablet, and Google.

  She decided to make popcorn when the phone rang. She tackled it.

  “Helen, you have to come up,” May Yin Frobisher said. “It’s your father.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The results of the career aptitude test Adam had taken online said that he should be a writer or a mechanical engineer. Not what he’d call helpful, he thought, settling back on the slightly plastic pillows of another hotel room in another city. They deflated slowly under him as he stared at his iPad.

  Writer of what? Advice? Technical manuals? The last thing he’d actually sat down to write was an essay on cognitive behavioral therapy for a class he’d taken, oh, seven years ago in college. And how could he be a mechanical engineer if it had taken him more than fifteen minutes to figure out how to use the shower in this hotel room?

  He had been on the road for months, it seemed, although it was probably only a day or two. He was paying little attention to his teammates and had no idea where they all were. Colorado? Arizona? Utah? Did Utah even have an NHL team?

  The traveling used to be the easiest part. For a Minnesota farm boy, those days on the road had been heady stuff. Getting on a plane! A different city every week! He was surprised he hadn’t strolled through every town with a straw hat and a piece of hay clamped in his jaw.

  The novelty wore off sometime around the third year, though, just as his career began to tank. It was too bad. He had gotten good at travel. He’d started wearing suits because they were practical—almost a uniform. He didn’t have to think too much about what went with what: The jacket always matched the pants. Plus, someone else cleaned them. But looking across the room at his garment bag hanging in the open closet, the constant grind of packing and unpacking, sealing aftershave and toothpaste in little Ziploc bags, trying to sleep at strange times, thumps from adjoining rooms, the squeals of the mattress ... he felt the weariness down in the marrow. Playing hockey was physically bruising, but the long game of planes and travel and time zones was what would really kill him. The one good thing about being on the road was that it gave him an excuse to read Harry Potter, again.

  He made an appointment with a career counselor for when he got back to Portland. No sense in putting the decisions off any longer. The team had been slowly but steadily extending its losing streak. The Finnish center, Pekka Aro, had been replaced yesterday or the day before by a grunting Swede whose name Adam couldn’t remember. Somewhere along the line, they’d lost another right wing, an assistant coach, and their entire PR team. At least Adam was underpaid enough to escape the gun. For now.

  Serge, his roommate for the road trip, lumbered out of the bathroom, smoothing his hair. Adam rose, wincing at the sore tendons in his knee, and found some ice.

  “You never come out anymore,” Serge said.

  “I haven’t come out all year,” Adam said, shrugging.

  Serge sat down heavily in one of the chrome and leather chairs and looked around the room.

  “How are you going to meet a nice girl if you sit in our hotel room, watching the porn?” he asked, rolling the final r in his light French Canadian accent.

  He did it on purpose. Adam could never decide whether Serge sounded classy or creepy. A little of both, probably.

  “How am I ever going to find a nice girl if I go out with you?” Adam asked. Most women liked Serge. He was tall enough, but not intimidatingly so, and those French Canadian vowels and consonants made him seem European.

  Adam dropped into a chair opposite and settled the ice pack on his knee.

  Serge took a sip and put his feet on the coffee table. “Tell me the truth, Adam, why have you been hiding?”

  Adam rubbed his face. Serge wouldn’t blab to Bobby, but he was
n’t sure that the goalie would be sympathetic. But Serge knew him well. He probably already sensed that Adam was on the brink of some kind of major decision. Serge must have been thinking about it himself. He had been in the game as long as Adam had—longer. He hadn’t bothered with college, going straight to the draft when he was eighteen. Then again, he hadn’t gone down to the minors—yet. Serge was a happy-go-lucky guy.

  The only thing that had made Adam happy in recent times was Helen Frobisher, memories of Helen Frobisher, the timbre of her voice, the grip of her hands, the clutch of her bare thighs, the lingering scent of her on his pillows. He hadn’t changed his pillowcases. He hoped that the essence of her wouldn’t disappear by the time he returned. It was ... pretty pathetic. The woman wouldn’t ordinarily give a guy like him the time of day. She’d made that clear enough. The night had started more as a curiosity for her, a technical competition, but by the end of the night, he had found out that she pointed her toes when she came.

  Those feet. Scarred, tough. Her hands and her feet told him more about her than she did herself. She had endured. Probably worn a smile on her face. She had done something that stretched and pained her body, and she had done it willingly.

  Who knows how much better they could be if they had agreed to more than one night? But the echo of her perfume and an ever-worn loop of their encounter, that was all he was going to have of her, he told himself grimly. It was what he had agreed to, and he had taken it dumbly and without thinking, just like he had made every decision in his life before and now.

  He really should have stolen her underwear.

  Maybe he needed to apply this ice pack to his groin.

  “I don’t know how much longer this is going to last,” Adam finally said. “The team’s bad, the press is indifferent, the public’s hostile, and I’m not getting better.”

 

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