Chapter 5 – Brianna
Seth Tremblay.
The second he opened his mouth at that dessert table, I knew exactly who he was.
That voice. So deep, rough around the edges, the kind that rewires something in your brain stem before you've had a chance to think about it. I heard it in a hotel elevator ten months ago right before his fake teeth fell into my mouth and I laughed so hard I forgot to be nervous about my first ever one-night stand. I’ve heard it in my dreams since then. I'd know it anywhere.
I should have handed him the cake and walked away.
I knew that the moment I turned and saw the scowl aimed at the plate in my hand.
I knew it the moment his eyes lifted to my face, and I felt the recognition travel through my entire body like a current while his expression stayed completely, infuriatingly blank.
He doesn't remember me.
Which is fine. It's completely fine. It was one night, ten months ago, and he was wearing a prosthetic face for half of it and my hair was dyed the color of a strawberry field.
I'm not the same girl who showed up to that bar in smeared lipstick and pigtails looking for a little reckless chaos and a hot fuck.
I've got different hair now, something tamer, glasses, a dress that doesn't have the words Daddy's Little Monster printed across the chest. Of course he doesn't recognize me.
It's fine.
Except that I gave him the cake competition instead of walking away, which means it is maybe not entirely fine, and I am perhaps not handling this as smoothly as I'd like to believe and romanticizing yet another random encounter with this adonis of a man.
And here's the thing about serendipity: I believe in it the way some people believe in gravity.
Not because someone told me to, but because I've felt it.
The way certain moments arrive exactly when they're supposed to, wrapped in the wrong packaging, asking you to pay attention.
My mother believed in it too. She used to say that the universe doesn't do accidents, only introductions you're not ready for yet.
So, when Seth Tremblay, my one-night stand, a player on the team I now work for, and a guy I have every reason to avoid given the fact that my dad signs his paychecks, turned around and yelled at me about angel food cake, I didn't walk away.
Because this doesn't feel like an accident.
It feels like an introduction I'm totally not ready for.
He's even better looking than I remembered.
In the dim, slightly grimy light of this hotel gym he looks like something carved rather than born.
Dark blond hair that's just long enough to be careless about, hazel eyes with that quality of looking like they're assessing everything and finding most of it wanting, and muscles so precisely defined I fully understand how he spent a decade as San Diego's star goalkeeper.
The Suns never won the Stanley Cup in all that time, but they came close, and a significant part of that was him.
He's stretched out on the bench now, arms loose at his sides, watching me with an expression that suggests he finds this entire situation faintly ridiculous and is only here because he doesn't have anything better to do and is entirely here for his love of angel food cake. His default seems to be somewhere between bored and mildly annoyed, which isn’t normally attractive to me except I also know how he sounds, and looks, when he’s neither of those things. I know how he acts when he’s turned on.
The angel food cake sits on the bench across from him like a little trophy.
I'm winning that cake. I'm also deeply aware that I engineered this entire situation because I wanted to stay near him a little longer, and that is a problem.
Should I tell him who I am? That we've met before, that I've seen the tattoos under his jersey and he's traced the one on my shoulder with his thumb in a dark hotel room while I held my breath and felt his cock move inside me?
The thought alone makes heat crawl up the back of my neck.
I’m not a prude, but I can assure you I haven’t had any nights like that since Seth.
No. Absolutely not. Not here, not now. Not when I've known him for approximately fifteen minutes in this version of our acquaintance and he’s looking at me like I’m an inconvenience.
If he doesn't remember me, bringing it up makes me look like a puck bunny who's spent ten months engineering another run-in just to flirt with him. Which I haven't. I’ve been interning. I’ve been finishing school.
This is pure, universe-orchestrated serendipity and I will not have it reframed as stalking after the fact.
Besides, what would I even say? Hey, funny story, you fucked me in a hotel room last Halloween, and I found out afterward that you were traded to my dad's team and I've been hoping we'd either never cross paths or that when we did it would go better than this.
Hard pass.
“Come on over,” he says, amusement laced in his voice.
I step forward and cross my arms over my chest the way he instructed, tucking my hands onto opposite shoulders.
Then I cross my legs too, tightening every muscle as I prepare for lift-off.
I can smell his cologne from where he’s reclined on the bench.
It’s a masculine scent that instantly takes me back to the night that we met.
“You sure you want to do this?” he asks, his voice dropping into that deeper register.
I nod. “Yes.”
His hands are rough when they find my bare thigh below the hem of dress, worn from years inside a pair of trappers blocking pucks, and even that brief, incidental contact sends a shiver up my spine.
This man has already seen every naked inch of my body. I need to get a grip.
"Is this okay?" he asks, and I nod again. His voice is careful when he adds, "You can trust me. I won't drop you."
I know. I already trusted you once before.
"Lean forward," he says, steadying me as I shift my weight. "Keep your body tight. The weight's gonna be uneven but I’ll balance it."
I want to make a joke—something about how my ass is significantly heavier than my head and he should plan accordingly—but I'm hovering three feet off the ground in the grip of a man I slept with who currently thinks I'm a stranger, and discretion and silence feel like the right call.
He lifts me. Which, empirically, I do not understand. I'm approximately one hundred and fifty pounds of mostly muscle and whimsical magic, but Seth handles it with the same controlled ease he probably brings to stopping a hundred-mile-an-hour puck, and for a moment I feel completely weightless.
His palm rests flat against my sternum. He adjusts his grip, and I stare at the water-stained ceiling of the gym and think very hard about literally anything else than how this feels very much like some sort of reverse Dirty Dancing scene, which, for the record, is one of the most romantic movies ever made.
The tips of his fingers graze the curve of my breast as I balance on top of him, and—yeah.
This is way too sensual for a bet over cake, but it was all I could think of in the moment when I realized it was him and panicked.
The cake. Think about the cake.
"You okay up there?" he asks, his breath warm against my cheek from this impossible proximity, and I register that we are approximately four inches apart and I can see the small scar at the edge of his jaw that I don't remember from before and his eyelashes are unfairly long and dark blond for someone who scowls this much.
God always gives the best lashes to children and men, I swear.
"Yeah," I manage. "Fine." Don’t think about the way he talked you through it ten months ago.
"Good." He exhales. "Stay still. I'd like to get my cake before midnight."
There it is. The grumpiness delivered so flatly it takes me a second to process it's a joke. Or half a joke. The half that's also a genuine complaint.
I laugh anyway, which makes me jiggle in his grip, and he makes a sound low in his throat that might be exasperation or might be something else, and his hands tighten fractionally to compensate against my chest, and I stop laughing completely.
This right here is exactly the kind of moment I live for.
The random, ridiculous, beautiful collision of things that have no business happening together.
A stupid bet in a hotel gym. A shared weakness for angel food cake.
The absurdity of being bench-pressed by the man you spent a Halloween night with who is now looking at you like you’re an obstacle he must remove so he can get his dessert.
It's kismet.
It's also, if I'm being honest with myself, a little romantic.
"Okay," I say. “Let’s do this.”
He doesn't say anything back. Just goes for it.
Ten clean reps that are controlled and unhurried, like this is simply a thing that is happening, and he has decided to do it with the same grim competence he applies to everything else.
No commentary. A few heavy breaths against my cheek.
Mostly just those big goaltender hands steady against me the entire time while I stare at the ceiling and try not to think about the last time his hands were all over my body and he was whispering things like this pussy is fucking unreal.
I fail, for the record. At the not thinking about it part.
When he finally lowers me and I'm back on solid ground, my legs feel slightly unreliable. He's not even breathing hard. Meanwhile I'm gripping the bench with the angel food cake on it with both hands like it's the only fixed point in the room.
We're both quiet for a second. Then I start laughing. It echoes off the ceiling and after a moment's resistance, something in his expression cracks and a low, reluctant chuckle escapes him too.
It looks good on him. Better than the scowl, though I suspect he'd disagree.
And that's when I notice it for the first time. Something that I’d missed in the dark of that hotel room ten months ago or maybe couldn't see past the Sloth mask and the chaos of that night.
A missing tooth, subtle, tucked toward the back right side of his mouth.
I remember reading about it somewhere after that Halloween night when I'd gone home and done the deeply uncool thing of searching his name at two in the morning.
A puck, a shattered helmet, a hit that made highlight reels for the wrong reasons.
It should have ended his season. He played through it.
He never got the tooth replaced.
Something about knowing that detail and the casual disregard for the gap, the absence of vanity in a man whose face and body are his professional currency, fills me with warmth.
It makes him more real. More human. More like the guy who wore a Sloth costume to a mandatory team event because his daughter used to nap to The Goonies. It adds to his attractiveness.
I drag my eyes away before he catches me staring and I can spiral any deeper into my apparently catastrophic taste in unavailable men.
"You really wanted that cake," I say, finally unwinding from the bench.
"Mm." He sits up, rolling his shoulders, expression already sliding back toward neutral. "You have no idea how much I like cake."
"I'm starting to get the picture." I tilt my chin toward the floor and shake out my legs. "Alright, big boy. My turn."
He looks at me. Then at the space by the bench. Then back at me with an expression that could be described as skeptical and unconvinced.
I drop onto the floor in front of the bench, planting my feet shoulder-width apart and leaning back against it. I tuck my shoulder blades under the edge of the rubber, wiggle into the perfect position for a flawless hip thrust, then pat my thighs.
"You know," he says slowly, like he's buying himself time, "I never caught your name."
I blink. My stomach flips because I know what comes next and I'm not ready for it even though I've had the entire bench press to prepare. Plus, I doubt he even remembers me. I’m sure he’s slept with plenty of other women since Halloween night.
"Bri," I say.
He repeats it slowly, like he's weighing it, and I watch his face for any flicker of recognition and find nothing. Just those assessing hazel eyes moving over me with that same mild scrutiny he's been applying to this whole situation tonight.
"I'm Seth," he says.
Already knew that. Learned it when he was fisting my hair and telling me I had a pretty asshole. I don’t say that, of course. It’d be a lie if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed that our one-night stand wasn’t memorable for him.
"Nice to meet you, Seth."
The corner of his mouth twists a little into a smile. "You know, I really don't want to hurt you. I'm a big guy and you're wearing a dress."
"And you're underestimating my glutes." I pat my thighs again and meet his gaze steadily. "Hop on. Let me win my cake."
He looks at me for one more long, considering moment like he's running calculations, like he's deciding whether this is worth it, like he's fighting the fact that some part of him, beneath all that careful grumpiness, is actually enjoying this.
Then slowly he moves toward me before sinking down onto my lap.