Chapter Fourteen
Remy
Sometime later, I jolt awake with Owen’s arms wrapped around me. After the incident in the kitchen, we watched a movie together. We’re still on his couch so we must have dozed off. What did we just do?
Mechanically, the answer is obvious: I had a mind-blowing orgasm while riding my client’s face.
The afterglow settled hours ago, and my head is comfortably resting on Owen’s shoulder.
Like we’re any normal couple. And that’s part of the problem.
If this had only been physical, maybe I could have compartmentalized it.
Instead, I feel soft in places I normally keep locked down tight.
I ache all over, but in that slow, sweet way that follows coming that hard.
And it truly was fantastic. It was also a terrible idea that can never, ever happen again.
Owen’s chest rises and falls. One of his hands is tucked under his head. The other is tangled in my hair, in what would be a sweet gesture if the circumstances were different. Right now, the contact feels damning. Not because it feels wrong. Because it feels dangerously right.
I ease my head off his shoulder. At first, Owen’s brows furrow, and I worry that I’m going to wake him. To my relief, he shifts against the cushion and falls into a deeper sleep. He looks younger like this. Softer. Nothing like the version of him the internet thinks it knows.
I check my phone. It’s past midnight. Sliding off Owen, I tiptoe around the room to collect my panties and shoes.
My hands shake as I put myself back together.
Every movement keeps dragging me backward into flashes of last night.
His mouth. His voice. The way he looked at me like pleasing me mattered more than anything else in the room.
This is bad. What the hell was I thinking?
Owen’s hot, but he’s not hot enough to risk my career and reputation over.
That’s not the real issue, and I know it.
A little voice in my head, which sounds a bit like Cara, whispers, The problem isn’t that he’s attractive. The problem is that you actually like him as a person.
True enough. But it’s not like I can actually imagine myself dating Owen. Unless…
Unless this wasn’t just… whatever this was. Unless the reason I’m panicking this hard is that I already know that.
Nope, nope, I can have a personal crisis later. Now, I need to focus on getting out of here as fast as possible.
I tiptoe past the kitchen toward the powder room as if I’m fleeing the scene of a crime. I’ve already summoned an Uber by the time I reach the front door. Shutout gets up from the floor and comes over to whine at me and nudge my hand with his nose.
“Sorry, buddy, you have to stay here.”
The guilt that hits me is wildly disproportionate for disappointing a dog, which probably says something unfortunate about my current emotional state.
Shutout whines, even when I slip through the door and close it firmly behind me.
I feel guilty, but that’s nothing compared to the emotional firestorm that is my walk of shame.
What am I going to do if Dante finds out about this?
What if Ezra finds out? My firm’s reputation.
My career. Every code of ethics on the books.
Oh, God, the power dynamics. Owen may have every physical advantage over me, but the power imbalance here is a mess.
And somehow, last night, I still felt completely safe with him. Everything about this is a nightmare.
When the Uber finally arrives, I haul myself into the rear seat and press the heels of my palms against my eyes.
“Everything okay, miss?” the driver asks.
“Huh?” I raise my head and meet my driver’s gaze in the rearview mirror. She offers a sad smile in return.
“Rough night?” she asks.
Emotionally catastrophic, sexually life-altering. Hard to summarize cleanly.
It’s just after one in the morning, and I’ve asked her to drive me to the otherwise abandoned ramp of the arena. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that my night could be going better, but I appreciate her concern. “Could have been worse. Just, you know. Not my best decision.”
“Mm.” She gives the knowing nod of a gig worker who’s seen some shit. “Loverboy wasn’t as good in bed as you’d hoped?”
“What?” I nearly choke on my own tongue. “No, he was—” Gentle. Careful. Completely devastating. I shut my mouth so fast my teeth snap, but I can’t stop the heat rising in my cheeks. My damned Irish complexion gives me away every time.
“Oh.” She raised her eyebrows. “He lived up to the hype.”
I let out a groan and hide my face in my hands.
I would have said that I was perfectly satisfied, but at the memory of Owen’s touch, I clench around empty air.
I should not have let him do that to me last night, all while asking for nothing in return.
My clit doesn’t get the message as it demands a repeat performance, throbbing with a mixture of overstimulation and lingering desire.
“Damn, girl.” At a red light, my driver reaches into the front passenger seat to retrieve a bottle of water for me. “I’m a little jealous. He dicked you down that good?”
The bottle nearly slips from my fingers. “Um, what?”
“I mean.” The driver widens her eyes in the rearview mirror. “You definitely, you know…”
I clear my throat and sit back. Since when did this old Honda become a confessional? Still, it’s not like I’ll be able to talk about this with anyone else. “Yeah,” I croak, before chugging half my water in one long gulp.
“Hm. Was it not good, or…?” She sounds like she’s trying to diagnose the problem.
“Oh, my God, it was so good.” I slouch down in the seat and watch the city roll by.
“Too good. Fuck. The man was so… unselfish.” That’s the part nobody warns you about.
Bad decisions would be so much easier if they weren’t attached to people who make you feel seen.
I sink even lower. I don’t want to regret what happened, but I don’t have any intention of losing my job over it, either.
This was one mistake. I can come back from this.
Unless Owen starts bragging to his friends. Or, worse, what if he uses this as leverage against me? Should I tell Ezra now, or should I talk to Owen first? If Owen goes to Dante, then…
“Ah.” The driver nods. “Wrong guy, huh?”
That would be easier too. If he were just some arrogant asshole with nice abs and a decent mouth.
“Yeah.” I close my eyes.
She whistles. “That’s the worst.”
I get the feeling that she wants me to ask about the dirty details of whatever she’s been through, but I just don’t have it in me.
I try to make up for my indifference by leaving a sizeable tip when she drops me off by my car.
I need to go home and shower. Maybe when the evidence of my terrible choices is washed down the drain, I’ll feel clean again.
* * *
The first shower doesn’t help. Because the problem isn’t physical. It’s that every inch of me remembers him. The second just leaves my skin pruney. I dump my clothes in the hamper, then the washing machine. As they cycle through the initial rinse, I consider burning them.
Every time I close my eyes, I imagine Owen’s hands. Owen’s mouth. Owen’s hiss of relief when I came all over him.
“Thank God we didn’t go all the way,” I mutter to myself. We may be irresponsible, but at least we’re not complete idiots. Emotionally? Jury’s still out.
At last, around five o’clock, I decide to take a melatonin and crash. I wake up three hours later to the sound of my phone ringing in the next room. My first disoriented thought is that Ezra has somehow found out and is calling to tell me that I’m fired.
The reality is worse. It’s my father. And I must surely be in hell, because he’s FaceTiming.
“Dad?” I ask in a voice that sounds like death warmed over.
Absolutely not. I do not have the emotional stability for this conversation right now.
I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for me to look any worse than I feel, but I would generously call my appearance this morning ghoul-adjacent. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Dad grins. He looks like he just stepped out of a skincare commercial. It’s very rude of him to be so fresh-faced on today of all days.
“I missed you, Remster. Hadn’t heard from you lately, and my Dad Senses told me something was up.”
I somehow manage to keep my eye from twitching. “Yeah? That’s weird.” I sound like I inhaled an entire helium balloon. I’m much too tired to be acting normal right now.
“You sure you’re okay? I know you, kiddo, you work too much. You need to get out. Make some friends.” He takes a big gulp of his coffee from the chipped Number One Dad mug I gave him in the seventh grade.
“I have friends, Dad.”
“Friends, plural?” He raises an eyebrow. “You only ever mention Cara.”
“I made new friends. There’s—” Oh, hell. “There’s Knova, and Violet, and… and Adler…” I barely manage to stop myself from saying Owen’s name, but that might actually be worse.
“Adler?” Dad repeats. “As in, a male friend? As in—”
“Nope. Absolutely not.” I don’t have to fake my grimace. “He’s not my type. Please never suggest that.”
Hips engaged, thrust, recalibrate, thrust thrust.
“Okay, okay, kid. I don’t want you to be lonely, that’s all.” His expression softens. “Just, you know. Take care of your heart, okay? You deserve to do more than work.”
Poor timing, Dad.
My dad has never pushed me to date, or to have kids, or any of that. I’m grateful for it, though I think a large part of his reluctance to do so comes from avoiding the topic of my mother. After all, if we talked about capital-L Love, we’d have to acknowledge what we’ve lost.
“Same to you, Dad. I love you.” I’m suddenly weepy for no reason at all. What he went through with Mom is so much worse than the stupid situation I’ve stumbled into.
“Love you, too, squirt.” He hangs up in time to miss the moment when my tears spill over. Maybe because I already know mine is in trouble.
I’m still groggy from the melatonin I took earlier. After lying in a sodden heap on the couch for a little while, I get up to make tea. I’ve no sooner filled my electric kettle when my phone goes off again. It’s another FaceTime request, this one from Cara.
“Thanks, I hate this,” I grumble, but I accept the call anyway. I could use a friend.
Cara’s face pops up on the screen. As soon as she sees me, her eyes bulge. “Oh my God, you had sex!” she screeches.
Traitorous face. Absolute narc of a face.
“W-what? No. What are you talking about?” I reach up to grab the handle of my cabinet and miss it twice.
“You did it! You slept with him!” She pumps her arm in the air. “Was it good? No, don’t tell me, let me guess.”
“There’s nothing to guess about,” I grumble. I finally manage to open the cabinet drawer and nearly fumble a mug.
“No, no, I’m good at this. One sec.” Cara props her phone up so that both her hands are free. She holds her palms in front of her, about six inches apart.
“What are you…?”
She wiggles her eyebrows and moves her palms apart by half an inch.
“No. I’m not playing this game.” I scrounge up a teabag from the depths of the drawer.
She moves her hands apart in tiny increments. “Warmer?”
“Oh, my God, Cara, I’m not…”
“Now?”
“No!”
“Now?”
“Cara…”
“I must be getting close.”
I glare at her as her smile widens.
“You’re beet red, Remy. I know I’m right.”
I sigh. “You’re the worst.”
“But am I right?”
“...a little farther.”
“Holy shit!” Cara bursts out laughing and topples out of the frame. I hate that she’s enjoying this so much. Her manic cackling echoes through the speakers. “Girl, that man has you on the hook. You’re DONE.”
That lands somewhere uncomfortably close to the truth.
“It was a mistake,” I offer, somewhat halfheartedly. “A one-time thing.”
Cara’s head pops back into view. “Sure, sure.”
“I’m serious!”
“What does this mean for your job?”
Ah, yes, the million-dollar question. The one I would pay a million dollars to avoid forever. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I say don’t tell them. You like him, right?”
“I…” I brace myself against the edge of the counter.
“Obviously you like his huuuuuge dick, but I mean as a person. I can’t imagine you doing something like this unless you caught feelings.”
Heat crawls instantly up my neck. “Technically, I haven’t even had his huge dick.”
Cara blinks. “Excuse me?”
“I just…” I gesture vaguely. “Felt it through his jeans.”
“Remy.”
“He went down on me and didn’t ask for anything in return. It was kind of mind-blowing, truth be told.”
Her entire expression changes. “Okay, now I’m alarmed.”
I laugh despite myself. “Why is that alarming?”
“Because hockey players are usually selfish nightmares with abs.”
“That feels unfair.”
“Is it?”
I open my mouth.
Close it again.
“Exactly,” Cara says smugly.
“People hook up all the time and do… things,” I argue. As long as I can keep thinking of this as a mistake, I can stay sane.
“People, sure. Not Remy Callahan. Not when it means putting your job and your credibility on the line. You’re not the most impulsive person out there, you know?”
“I choose to take that as a compliment.”
Cara, who has been laughing her ass off at my plight until now, suddenly gets serious. “Do you regret it? Like really? In your heart of hearts?”
The answer should be immediate. Clean. Professional.
It isn’t.
I don’t really have an answer. Even after Cara hangs up, and I’m cradling my mug of tea between my hands while wrapped in blankets on the sofa, I keep returning to her question. Regret? Yes. No. It was stupid. But if I were given a do-over, I’m not sure that I’d change my mind.
I draft an email to Ezra. Delete it.
I draft an email to Dante. Delete that, too.
I type out a message to Owen. Delete that harder.
Every option feels wrong for a different reason.
We made a mistake. A mistake I can still feel between my thighs. I won’t make it again.
And still, I’m hurt when the start of morning skate comes and goes, and Owen doesn’t call. I tell myself I want the distance. The professionalism. The clean reset.
So why does the silence hurt?