Chapter 42
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
WYATT
Upstairs, I flopped back on the bed. I could hear car doors slamming, and the house was quiet. “Is that what it’s like to have kids?”
“Fuck if I know.” Julian flopped down next to me. “Have you ever been married?”
“No.” I rolled over to face him. “My job isn’t really conducive to marriage proposals.”
“Funny, mine wasn’t either.”
I studied his profile in the low light, running a finger over the bridge of his nose and down over his lips. Studying him. His jawline, the scars. The color of his eyes in the gray light of the room. The way he watched me. I felt a shift between us. We were more than just sex now.
“Do you want kids?” he asked.
“No.”
“Like, ever, or right now?”
“Never.” It was more than this job. It was that I didn’t know how to be a parent. How to not fuck up my kids.
“She said that. That she didn’t want them.
That’s what we fought about that night in February.
A bunch of us were here in Reno for the All-Star break.
She and I weren’t in a good place. I knew she was cheating on me.
Hannah caught them leaving a hotel together.
I found the pregnancy test. It was positive. ”
“I thought you—”
“I can’t. I confronted her, and we fought.
I said some horrible things to her. She got drunk and told an entire room full of my teammates that…
” He rolled over. “That I was bad at everything. Being a husband. A friend. Fucking. Hockey. She said that the reason she was fucking Payton was because he was better at everything. I don’t know why I let her fuck with me. Why I cared what she said.”
I watched the muscles in his jaw flex, his breathing slow.
“The other night she waited for me after the game. She told me it was mine.”
“Did you believe her?” I asked softly.
“No. I know I can’t. It’s confirmed every year.”
I couldn’t tell if it was longing or regret I heard in his voice. “Do you want kids?” I couldn’t give them to him if he wanted them. When I turned thirty, I had a scare with Maverick. The condom busted. The next day I scheduled a tubal.
“I never really thought much about it until Emily started hinting that she wanted one. I thought about my mother and how selfless she was. Emily wasn’t.
Then I thought about my father. How selfish he was.
Driven to be the best. How nothing, not even the birth of Beckett, stopped him from playing.
And I am so much like him. I don’t want to turn my son into this. ”
“What is this? Because all I see is a man who helped arrange for his best friend to get engaged. Who kept a silly promise he made to some woman he had just met.”
“It wasn’t silly.” He sat up, tracing my jaw, then my brow. “Sometimes the fear of losing you is too much for me to handle. I fear one day you’ll be gone, and I don’t know how to do this without you.”
He ran his finger along my collarbone. This was what it looked like to fall in love with someone. Loving someone meant you wanted to take their fear, their sadness, all the bad, and swallow it down. To take the burden from them.
“I love you,” I whispered to him. I didn’t have to think about it. The confession slipped from my lips.
I watched my words settle upon him. “Are you sure?”
I nodded. His first kiss was soft, barely a kiss, more of a breath. His hands moved down my ribs and to my hips. His mouth dragged down my neck and across my shoulder.
I slid from the bed, then out of my clothing, Julian watching me. He reached for me, pulling me closer, and pressed a kiss on my stomach, then on my hips. He stood and pulled his shirt off. Then his pants.
He pulled me onto the bed. I slowly lowered myself onto him. Julian’s hands slipped up my back. I leaned back, rolling my hips forward. His mouth was hot on my ribs. I sat back up and pushed him back onto the bed.
His hands gripped my thighs; the tendons stretched over bone and muscle. I watched in fascination as each of his muscles flexed with each of my movements. The way his chest expanded with each breath he took.
I never watched as I fucked a man. It was normally over before it started. But I watched him. I slowed my pace, taking my time with him. It was something to watch a man like Julian slowly unravel.
I realized what was different in being with Julian.
The desire I saw in his eyes was true desire.
Not the cheap one that was bought and paid for.
Not the one I had grown used to seeing. That was lust. A greedy emotion that burned hot and fast. But desire was slow burning, and that made it dangerous.
It slowly consumed everything until there was nothing left but the taste of ash in your mouth. And that scared me.
“I’m scared of the same thing. Of losing you,” I confessed.
Julian pulled me closer, burying his face in my neck. “I’ll never leave. I love you too much.”
I clung to him, riding this wave of fear and something else. I hoped this seed that he planted could survive the tidal wave that was my life.
* * *
“Merry Christmas.” I handed him a small box. The bedroom was bathed in the glow of the moon. “It’s not a sunset or anything life-changing.”
He sat up and took the box, opening it. He said nothing.
“You hate it?”
“No.” He took the silver chain out of the box. At the end was a platinum bar, and on that were the words “all that glitters isn’t gold.”
“Sometimes it’s silver.” I bit my bottom lip, knowing how silly it sounded. “Sometimes you forget. You don’t have to—”
“No.” He ran his thumb over the tiny words. “This is life-changing. And I forget.” He put it on and kissed me softly.
“I won’t let you forget. Ever.”