Not the Girl You Marry

by ANDIE J. CHRISTOPHER

  “I trust that you’re not going to make this more difficult, Noah.” Hannah thought it was best to put a professional boundary between them. He wouldn’t mess up his job just to screw with hers, of that Hannah was certain.

  Yet his mouth flattened at her cold declaration of armistice. “I won’t.”

  “This is important to me, and I won’t stand for you making it more difficult,” she said, wanting to make herself perfectly clear.

  “I’m not going to do anything to hurt you.” The anymore remained unspoken.

  They looked at each other for a long beat. And now that she wasn’t shocked at seeing him again, she realized that she didn’t really feel anything for him anymore. She used to have to catch her breath whenever he walked into a room. Now there was only an echo. When the surprise washed away, just the memories remained. And they didn’t move her the way she would expect them to.

  Hannah turned around to see the happy couple walking back into the sanctuary, but not soon enough to miss the look of pure longing fall over Noah’s face like a veil when he set his gaze on Madison.

  Noah had never looked at her that way, and she wasn’t sure how to feel about it. She didn’t want him to look at her that way, but she couldn’t help but worry that Noah wasn’t going to be able to keep his promise not to interfere with this wedding, even if he had no intention of muddying up her life.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AS HANNAH SMILED AT Jack’s doorman, she recalled the words of a song by Meat Loaf that was nebulously about what the long-haired singer would do for love. Her mom had liked to play it as they drove up the interstate to the family lake cabin. And then they used to talk about what they would individually be willing to do for love.

  I would do anything for you, sweetie.

  What about for Dad?

  For him, I might slow down if he ran in front of the car right now.

  Her parents had had a seriously acrimonious divorce, after which Hannah hadn’t seen much of her father. He’d decided that he would rather avoid his child support obligations than spend time with her. The last time she’d seen him had been at her college graduation, where he’d lectured her about her choice in career. He thought she should have gone to law school instead of going straight to work.

  When he’d died three years ago, he still thought her career was just a little break from school. And the last e-mail exchange they’d had was all about how she wasn’t living up to the family name but how Noah sounded like her first good choice in years.

  Two of the most important men in her life had been just alike, and they’d been equally disappointed in her.

  Anyhow, that song was on her mind while she was trying to sweet-talk Jack’s doorman into letting her up. She really should have called in Sasha for this. Sasha was great at flirting, and she would have been upstairs and back down—mission accomplished—by now. Hannah, on the other hand, had never been adept at flirting to get what she wanted. In fact, during college she’d had one grocery store clerk ask her if she was having a seizure when she’d batted her lashes in hopes of getting him to take an expired coupon—without which she wouldn’t have been able to afford an additional bag of cheese puffs.

  This was going better than that, but not by much.

  “You’re not on the list.” The older, stocky man crossed his arms resolutely.

  “Listen.” She looked down at the name tag on his chest. “Earl, I know I’m not on the list, but I’ve been here before, and I promise that Mr. Nolan won’t be mad about what I’m doing in his apartment.”

  Her strategy was to delight and surprise Jack with something she knew he would like. He was a hockey fan, and she had a client whom she would call a friend in the front office of the local hockey team—the unlikely one that had won the championship the previous year. It was early in the season, but the tickets were at center ice.

  If Jack wasn’t already halfway into falling in love with her—introducing her to his mother and attempting to make her jealous— he would be all the way there once he saw the tickets, or the ticket, since she wasn’t above forcing him to attend the game with her.

  “Please.” Her flirting might not be very good, but her begging had always been on point. She’d never been too proud to beg—another one of her mother’s favorite tunes.

  She could see him softening. “You’re not going to do something freaky, like pee on the bed?”

  “Has that actually happened?” she said, trying to contain her laughter. “To Jack?”

  “Nah, Jack hangs around nice girls.” He looked her up and down, the implication being that Hannah didn’t look like a nice girl and wasn’t Jack’s usual type. This should not have come as news to her, as she didn’t seem to be anyone’s usual type. But, by some miracle, the paragon of manliness sans toxic masculinity that was Jack seemed to be into her right when she needed a guy to be seriously into her. And she desperately needed to clinch it.

  “I just need to leave something for him.” Earl softened further. One corner of his mouth tipped up, and he actually smiled at her. Though his arms stayed crossed. “Something he’ll really like.”

  “Your panties.” Gross. She didn’t even want to know if that had happened before.

  Of course he would think that, and Hannah barely—barely—kept herself from rolling her eyes. Maybe she wasn’t so terrible at flirting to get her way after all. Earl was thinking about her panties. That was something. “Unfortunately, no. But I think he’ll like these even more than my panties.”

  Earl gave her an incredulous look. “You can leave whatever it is with me.”

  That wasn’t a terrible idea. Now that she thought about it, it was even better than sneaking into his apartment to leave the ticket. That might make her seem like a crazy stalker type. Leaving the ticket with Earl had the benefit of showing that she was willing to go out of her way for him but that she didn’t want to sneak into his apartment and rifle through his stuff.

  It was actually quite brilliant.

  “Deal.” Then she winked at Earl for good measure, much more confident in her ability to flirt for persuasion than she had been before. At least he didn’t ask her if she needed medical attention.

  * * *

  —

  HANNAH STRUGGLED NOT TO roll her eyes when she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass doors of the hockey arena. She wore painted-on jeans and a jersey so tight her nipples were likely to bust through at the first hint of a breeze off the ice.

  “The same reasoning from the seminal film Clueless stands today,” Sasha had said. “You want to make him think as much of sex as possible, but not give him the sex, so that he has to keep calling you if he thinks he can get to the sex. And to get him to think of sex, you need to be as close to naked as possible.”

  “Why wouldn’t he just get on an app and swipe?” Hannah had asked.

  “You have to give yourself more credit.” Her best friend appeared to get a little bit exasperated with her. “He has a taste—like, literally—for you. But he hasn’t dipped his wick yet. As long as you make him wait, he’s not going to be on the hunt for anyone but you.”

  Hannah thought the whole thing was entirely too complicated, which was one of the main reasons she’d opted out of dating after Noah and the subsequent false starts. One of the things she’d liked about Jack was that he seemed unpretentious, and he wore his emotions on his face. All of this overthinking about him, the fact that she’d raised the stakes by trying to manipulate him into sticking around, was making her think that maybe Jack’s unguarded emotions and the easy way he had about him were all part of his game. And that perhaps he was an especially adept liar and manipulator.

  But she had to set all that aside and implement the strategy she and Sasha had devised after the whole oral-sex-on-the-first-date thing. Because Jack hadn’t actually gotten off, the damage was probably minimal. The smiley face and multiple thumb
s-up emoticons that Jack had sent her along with a picture of his ticket to the game conveyed that he wasn’t going to be weird about the fact that she’d come all over his face after one—admittedly very nice—dinner and then skipped out after meeting his mother.

  This time, she’d come prepared. She was wearing super-uncomfortable clothes to the game, which would make her so self-conscious that even Jack’s annoying habit of being sort of perfect would not get her in the mood. And she’d rubbed one—well several ones—out in the days since their first date, including a couple of times after the very weird second date. She wasn’t going to trip up again and end up riding his five-o’clock shadow like a pony at the state fair.

  She felt fairly confident as she walked through the turnstile and had her ticket scanned and her purse searched. Her plan seemed foolproof when the guy checking her purse for weapons or contraband snacks called her boobs “ma’am.” She was positively jaunty, and her body thrilled with power as she walked to the spot where she’d told Jack to meet her.

  And then she saw him standing next to the concession stand with two beers and a giant tray of nachos. He wore a T-shirt with a thermal underneath, and jeans that had a dick print that she’d need to scrub out of her memory methodically, over years, from this day forward.

  That wasn’t even the worst part. The way he looked at her, under his lashes, with a smirk on his face that said he knew where all the buttons to drive her wild were located, made her have to lock out her knees and stop a few feet away from him.

  Even from three feet away, with people rushing past and a couple of them bumping into her—seeing as she was standing in a busy spot and the game was going to start any minute—she could smell that he was freshly showered. And then she couldn’t stop thinking about him in the shower. Not getting into the shower with him. Couples showers were awkward and never sexy, but she would pay good money to watch that man shower. Although she hadn’t borne witness to his abs, he must be going by the same wardrobe edicts she was, because he was definitely operating by a similar rule—tighter is better.

  And she was here for it.

  Like an idiot, she raised a hand and might have danced around on her feet like a little girl. “Hi.”

  “’S’up?” His smirk grew into a full-on grin. He totally had her number.

  She didn’t even care as she approached him and the din of their surroundings disappeared around them. When she got near him, something clicked into place and gave her the kind of calm she’d been looking for her whole life. A voice inside her, the small, soft one she endeavored not to listen to because it was her heart—and her heart had only ever gotten her in trouble—was telling her that he was special and different and wouldn’t break her.

  “I hope beer and nachos is okay.”

  Her stomach rumbled at the smell of processed cheese and hops, although she probably had about three gulps of beer and one chip before her jeans popped. “Better than okay. Beer and nachos are fantastic.”

  She was glad he found it in him to break the moment, because she would have been content to stand on the concourse of the arena looking at him, smelling him, and grinning at him like an idiot the whole night. They made their way to their seats shortly before the puck dropped.

  There was this way that couples sat together that Hannah had always craved. As though they could just barely tolerate being out of contact, but still had their minds on propriety. She’d never had that. But the way Jack was sitting, as close to her as he could get without her sitting in his lap, was that kind of sitting. The whole side of her body was warm, and she took a sip of beer to cool off and marshal the wherewithal not to look at him and giggle. His nearness made her giddy.

  The only thing that burst her bubble of smittenness was when he started talking. “So, that guy is the center—” He pointed at the guy poised for the face-off.

  She knew that, but another part of her strategy was not being a bitch to Jack for the next few weeks. And correcting his misconception that he might know even a scintilla of what she knew about hockey would be off-putting.

  If playing dumb so Jack could feel good about himself kept him asking her out until her company Halloween party, she’d do it. She gritted her teeth and said, “You’re so smart, Jack.”

  “What they’re doing right now is called the face-off.”

  “Where did you learn so much about hockey, Jack?” Oh dear Lord give me strength. She bit her lip to keep from telling him that she’d learned everything there was to know about hockey and most of the things she knew about blow jobs from the captain of the high school hockey team. They’d been study buddies and then friends with benefits—as long as it had stayed secret that he was having his sexual needs met by the weird smart girl in his AP European history class.

  When she’d gotten a five on the exam, and he’d gotten a three, he’d called things off. He hadn’t been able to deal with hard evidence that she was smarter than him. Jack and his condescension about hockey were doing a good job of reminding her that—however much she liked him and his naughty mouth—he was just another dude.

  And it might even be a good thing that a little bit of his perfect, woke-bae façade was slipping. That way, every time the way he smirked at her in a tight T-shirt crept into her mind, she could simply think about him mansplaining a game she’d been watching since she was four years old.

  “So, the point of the game is for them to get that flat black disk into the other team’s net, which is called a goal.”

  “Mmmm-hmmmm.” She tried to remember Sasha’s admonishment that guys like to be the expert on things and tend to gravitate toward women who make them feel smart, but she was so close to turning the corner into Bitchville that she didn’t have it in her to gush about his frankly elementary hockey tutorial.

  “And hockey is played in three periods, not four quarters, like football.”

  At that point, she was either going to kill him or find a way to make him shut up. But doing so in a way that wouldn’t make him dump her immediately would require some finesse. Which she didn’t have because she’d never found a use for it until now.

  If only he had an off switch of some sort.

  An idea so inappropriate and diabolical popped into her head that she couldn’t resist giving it a shot. It would abide by the theme of the night—offering sex without delivering it—and it would either confuse or turn him on so much that it would break the cycle of mansplaining.

  Thinking about it any more would probably yield a reason why she shouldn’t do it, so she went ahead and rested her hand gently over Jack’s cock. She didn’t even take her eyes off the ice because the puck had dropped, and she wanted to pay attention to the game.

  During the first break, she looked over at him. His mouth was open, and he stared straight at her, then glanced down to her hand and back to her face. He opened his mouth to say something, but then she squeezed a little bit. She smiled at him, diverted her eyes back to the ice, and went back to her gentle cupping.

  * * *

  —

  JACK HATED HIMSELF. HE was a slimeball and a creep. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to resort to mansplaining. He’d certainly been aware of the astonishingly effective technique for alienating the fairer sex, but he’d never partaken before tonight. One of the only totally awesome gifts of his radical feminist mother and whip-smart little sister. Oh, and the nuns who’d taught him in grade school. Sister Antoninus would have boxed his ears had he tried to explain a face-off to her; she’d been all-American in women’s hockey before entering the convent.

  But he’d been desperate. Not only was she drop-dead gorgeous and honey-sweet to the taste, but she left him center-ice hockey tickets? Fuck him, it was going to be hard to take a dive on this one, regardless of strategy. And he’d had no idea how to mess up this date enough that she’d still keep him around for a few more days. Even though she’d left him with blue balls after he’d int
roduced her to his mom and flirted with another woman in front of her.

  But then she’d totally surprised him with her frankly genius method for getting him to shut his trap. The method that had her hand over his Johnson—Sister Antoninus forgive him—and royal blue balls. He couldn’t think with her hand that close, and he definitely wasn’t about to move because then there would be friction. And he couldn’t be subjecting himself to friction in public.

  Jesus Christ, they were in public. Granted, she was turned toward him and they were kind of in a corner, so no one could see where her hand was. But the fact that she was just staring at him calmly while her hand was where he’d wanted her hand to be since the night they first met—as though she wasn’t affected by it at all—was disconcerting. To say the least.

  The move had been effective, because he couldn’t speak. It didn’t help that every time he opened his mouth, she put gentle pressure on his sack. He was too mixed up with his conflicting shame and desperate horniness to say anything.

  “I’ve been watching hockey since I was a kid.” Her voice was the kind of dead quiet that women got when they were about to commit bloody murder. “You don’t need to explain what a puck is. Understand?”

  He nodded when she gave his cock another slight squeeze.

  “If I take my hand off of your dick, are you going to keep acting like one?”

  Although he shook his head, that wasn’t a promise he could be making. He felt as though he was a walking dick—what with all the blood that ought to be going to his brain flowing straight toward her palm.

  “Okay.” She smirked and pulled her hand away. He had to bite his lip to stop himself from making a distinctly unmanly noise. “Now I’m going to need you to flag down one of the concessions folks for more beers so that we can enjoy the game.”