22. Afterglow
AFTERGLOW
brETT
Orgasms are the fucking best, I decide, tugging the flushed, naked woman in my bed closer so I can press a kiss against her temple. They fix everything.
Anxiety about my less than stellar play on the road trip?
Gone.
That trickle of Lainey + Cooper = True Love jealousy that had wound through my chest earlier?
Evaporated.
The general unease of how I was going to spend my first night alone in my new place without badgering Nik into hanging out, even though the guy’s probably sick of me by now?
Dissolved.
Chelsea smiles up at me, continuing her game of tell me about your tattoos by moving her finger to the first set of Roman numerals marching up the outside of my forearm. “How about this one?”
“That’s the year I won my first Stanley Cup.”
Her lips part, and I like that I’ve impressed her.
Or at the very least, that she’s heard of hockey’s highest honor.
I don’t have a lot of achievements to my name if you take hockey out of the equation.
Impressing a non-puck bunny isn’t easy for a guy like me.
And despite her dad’s career path and her job proximity, Chelsea isn’t very into hockey.
She inches her finger up a little higher, before cocking an eyebrow at me. “So that would make this one…”
“The year I won my second Stanley Cup,” I confirm.
“And this one?”
I glance down at the tattoo she’s pointing at, the one I’d added to my sleeve to celebrate my liberation. A heart wrapped in barbed wire. The artist had done a stellar job erasing Janelle’s name from my arm, and it helps. A bit. Most of the time.
“That one’s to remind me not to be a dumbass.”
She glances up at me, eyebrows raised, a thousand questions swirling in her stare. “Does it work?”
I stare at her—so goddamn beautiful. The boss’ daughter. The last woman in the world I should be messing around with right now. “Not so far.”
“Why a heart with barbed wire?”
No sense delaying the inevitable. “Because that’s what the guy doing my tattoo said would cover up her name best.”
“Your ex-wife?”
I nod.
“How’d you meet her?”
Oh. So we’re having that talk. I steel myself for the flash of pain that usually accompanies talking about the biggest mistake of my life, but it doesn’t come.
Huh. Score another one for the magic of orgasms.
“My ex used to have a thing for another guy on my team. My brother-in-law, actually. Before he married my sister, obviously.”
Chelsea’s eyes widen at the revelation. “You mean they…?”
“What? No! He was totally into Lainey. Janelle was just rebounding with her Cooper crush anyway. She’d been after our center, Eric Jacobs, but he started dating someone, and—”
“Your ex-wife’s a puck bunny? Didn’t that bother you?”
I flush at the astute question, remembering what an insufferable punk I was back in the day.
“Actually…” I drop my head, rubbing a hand over the back of my neck. “I kind of liked it,” I confess.
At her deer-in-headlights look, I drop my hand and sigh.
“I was nineteen, and I thought guys like Eric Jacobs and Cooper Mead hung the moon.” My chuckle is self-deprecating.
“They didn’t feel the same way about me.
I was just this punk-ass rookie, trying to show off, prove that I could hang with the big dogs—these great hockey players with millions of dollars and beautiful ladies throwing themselves at them.
And suddenly, here was this gorgeous woman who wanted Eric, who wanted Coop, but now she wanted me.
I guess that made me feel like maybe I was in their league, you know? ”
I see the thing I don’t want to see—that look that says her heart aches for me—and I realize that maybe I let those damn orgasms relax me a little more than is wise. I didn’t mean to tell her quite that much. Best wrap this up before I say anything else stupid.
“Anyway, Janelle and I were a mistake right from the beginning. But I couldn’t see it. I thought I was the shit, and when people tried to warn me away, I figured they were just jealous. By the time I realized they had my best interests at heart, Janelle already had a divorce lawyer on retainer.”
“I’m so sorry, Brett.”
I shrug. “It’s okay. I mean, I know better now. I never felt like myself around her. I was always trying to be what she wanted, you know?”
She tucks in closer, resting her head on my shoulder as she points to another tattoo. “Tell me about this one. Why a big number 42?”
I appreciate the change of subject, so I press a thank-you kiss against her hair. “Well, that one is actually my first tattoo. 42 was my dad’s number. He used to be in the NHL, too. One of the greats. An enforcer, and a total badass.”
Chelsea lifts her head. “Really? That’s amazing! I didn’t know that your dad played hockey.”
“You’ve never even Googled me? Guess I know where I stand,” I joke, but the truth is, it makes me absurdly happy. I can’t remember the last time I needed to tell anyone anything about me. That’s life in the public eye.
“And your mom? Don’t even tell me she was a figure skater or something. How did they meet? I’ll bet it was romantic, right? Their eyes connected across the skating rink at Rockefeller Center one Christmas and the rest is history?”
I like the way she snuggles back in so I can finish the story, even if it’s destined to disappoint.
“Close. My mom seduced him in a bar one night, even though he was already married. She ended up knocked up with me, the son he always wanted but never had time for, and he divorced Lainey’s mom and married her instead.”
There’s a long beat of silence.
“Jesus,” she breathes.
The distinct lack of pep in that response makes me chuckle. “Yep. Pretty romantic, right?”
She places a hand on my chest, drawing lazy circles on my sternum. “Where are your parents now?”
“My dad died of cancer a few years back. My mom’s off somewhere tropical, searching for the next in her long line of sugar daddies.”
Her hand stills over my heart, applying pressure to the wound. I cover it with my palm.
“Maybe she’s in Cabo, having daiquiris with my mom.”
I still at her confession.
“She told my dad she wanted a divorce and took off.” She shrugs. “Haven’t heard from her since.”
“How old were you? When she left?”
“Fourteen.”
Ouch. That lands hard. I think of the family picture she keeps on the shelf in her living room.
Chelsea bites her lip. She looks a little lost in her head, and I do my best to pull her back.
“If it makes you feel better, I think I’d prefer the silence to sneak-attack phone calls. My mom makes random contact when she’s broke enough that she wants to bum some money or she’s drunk enough that she wants to remind me that I ruined her life and I’m cursed.”
“Cursed?”
Now it’s my turn to get lost in my head.
“The first time she said it, I was seven. Lainey’s mom had just died in a car accident, so she was spending the summer with us, and I was trying to cheer her up, because I was a kid, and I thought I could.
Anyway, I asked my mom why it wasn’t working, why Lainey was so mad at me, and she told me it was because I was cursed.
That Lainey would never forgive me because I was the reason my dad had left her mom, and there was nothing I could do to fix that, so I should just give up. ”
My mom said it again that fall when my parents sat me down to deliver the divorce bomb.
And again during the implosion of my own marriage.
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah. Yours, too.” I shrug. “On the upside, at least we’re completely fucked up together, right?”
“Well,” she counters, getting onto her knees and straddling my lap. My body likes where she’s headed as she hooks her arms around my neck and leans close. “Maybe not completely fucked up. But we’ve got a box of condoms and the rest of the night to try to get there.”
“I’m game if you are,” I murmur, closing the distance and catching her lips in a slow, dirty kiss.