16. Ace
SIXTEEN
ACE
It was the longest three minutes of my life. Longer than the ‘ five for fighting’ penalty I got in game seven when I played for Chicago. Every few seconds I found my eyes being drawn to the far side of the room, waiting for Goldie to return.
Mel shimmied past Ethan and Evgeny, one of the new defensemen, and plopped down beside me. “Where’s Goldie?” She put on her coat and stretched her leather gloves over her hands.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.
“Something has come up.”
I hated evasive answers. “Are you leaving?” I repeated the question.
She crossed her arms. “Yes, but I need to find Goldie and put her in a cab.” I haven’t seen her tipsy like this since our freshman year.”
I finished my drink. “She went to the bathroom. She should be back any minute now.” It already felt like it had been hours, but I glanced at my watch and realized Goldie had only been gone for five minutes. “I can make sure she gets home okay,” I offered.
Mel stood and seemed a little unsteady on her feet. I couldn’t in good conscience let her stumble out onto the street alone. “I can make sure both of you get home safely.” My mom raised me to be a gentleman, and even though Goldie and Mel were full-grown women, they brought out the protector in me.
“No.” Her response was almost sharp. “I mean, I’m fine. I’m meeting someone, but I want to make sure Goldie gets home in one piece.” Mel checked her phone and her lips turned into a smile. I recognized the look—she was on her way to meet someone, someone that had the power to make her blush, someone you did the kind of things that you do after midnight when you’ve had one too many shots of tequila. A booty call.
Mel checked her phone again. “What the hell is she doing in there?” She gathered Goldie’s mittens and hat and shoved them into my arms. “Here, hold these. I’m going to make sure she’s not in there hugging a toilet bowl.”
Goldie was drunk and so was I. It wasn’t the way I wanted things to start with her. I’d been so confident about my decision to quit the study, but with every second Goldie was gone, alone with my rambling voice messages, I started to regret sending them. What was I thinking? Maybe she was offended. The study was important to her and one of her subjects, me, was willing to walk way from it, just to have a date with her.
Jostling her coat in my arms, I typed a message.
Delete the voicemails.
I slipped the phone in my back pocket of my jeans and once again, looked to the back of the room. Mel’s white hat glowed under the blue lights as she wove through the crowd. I hadn’t expected to see her back so soon. “Did you find her?”
She grinned and winked. “Goldie is out front and needs her coat.”
How had I missed Goldie leaving the restroom? “Oh.” I held out the coat and mitts. “Here you go.”
Mel gave a slight shake of her head and laughed. “You idiot. She’s waiting outside—for you.”
I gulped. “Really?”
“Get out there, Romeo.” I lurched forward as the tiny woman’s hand pressed in between my shoulder blades, shoving me off the VIP platform.
“What about you?”
“Don’t you worry about me. I have someone coming to get me. Worry about the woman standing outside in the freezing cold without a coat.”
A few of the guys had already left, some were on the dance floor, and who knows where the hell Ethan had gone. Goldie’s coat felt like a giant stuffed bear in my arms and I squeezed it tightly as I deked and wove through the crowd. The temperatures were well below zero and I didn’t want Goldie out there for one second longer than necessary. I broke into a run, my eyes trained on the door.
I burst onto the street. Steam billowed from the grates, and my breath puffed out in clouds. To my left, the line for the bar wound down the street and around the corner. Hushed voices whispered my name as I scanned the area. I couldn’t see her. Panic rose inside me. Was this some kind of cruel joke?
The street to my right was empty.
The electric streetcar whined and pulled away. There. Across the street. Goldie’s dark hair shone in the neon lights from Asada Taco. Her eyes met mine and she raised her hand in a tiny wave, then quickly tucked it back into her armpits.
A horn blared as I stepped onto the icy pavement. Tires screeched as a Mini Cooper skidded to a stop. Snowflakes swirled as I hopped out of the path of the car.
“Watch where you’re going, asshole.” The woman in the driver’s seat rolled down her window to flip me off. On the ice, I could sense a defenseman looking in my peripheral vision, but had missed an entire car bearing down on me on the street.
A camera flashed behind me. Ace Bailey getting run over would be front page news. I didn’t care about that. There was only one thing on my mind, and she was only three lanes of traffic away from me. Her eyes were wide, her hands clasped over her mouth. This time I looked both ways before sprinting across the Queen Street traffic.
“You almost got run over.” Her voice trembled as I reached the sidewalk.
“That?” I turned and waved it off. “A hit from Plushenko would do more damage than that little thing.” My adrenaline was pumping and I was slightly out of breath from the short sprint.
“I listened to your messages.” She stomped her feet on the icy sidewalk.
“Yeah, about that. I should have—”
Goldie flung her arms around my neck and the crowd across the street erupted into screams and cheers.
Her quivering lips were on mine. Professor Goldie was fucking kissing me. It took my hockey player brain a few seconds to catch up with what was happening in real time and pull away. “Your study,” I whispered.
“You’re fired.”
“For realsies?” Goldie’s hands were still on my neck. Her pretty eyes stared intently right into my brain, or my soul, or whatever was in there. Her intensity fueled the butterflies in my stomach. This particular set of butterflies had stronger wings than the ones that had been in my gut before my first NHL game.
She smiled sweetly and raised her brows. “For realsies.”
This time I moved first, grabbing her hand to lead her around the corner and away from the Ultimate Sports spectators.
Pressing her against the bricks, I held her waist and let my lips linger lightly on hers. It was a tender kiss. The kind I’d seen in movies, the kind I thought were stupid—until it was Goldie’s lips on mine. I wanted it to last forever. Goldie arched her back, pressing her shoulders into the brick building, jutting her hips towards me—and the bulge in my pants.
“Are you sure?” I whispered, resting my forehead on hers.
“I can’t be turned on by one of my subjects. I would’ve had to kick you out anyway.” Her fingertips found the front of my jeans.
“Your hands are like ice cubes.” I winced and then realized I was still holding her coat in my arms. “Goldie. You need to put this on.”
I held up the coat and she slipped her arms into the sleeves. I took the mittens from the pocket and held each of them out so she could slide her frozen hands inside. “I’m so sorry, Goldie. I guess I got sidetracked.” The girl had been standing in the cold waiting for me and all I’d done was press her against a freezing cold building in an alley next to a dumpster. What kind of gentleman was I?
“I like your way of warming me up better.” Instead of frozen fingers, it was wool mittens on my neck this time. “I was actually hoping we could lose a few layers, not put some on.” She smiled, but then wavered. We were both drunk. As much as I wanted to pull out my dick right in that alley and have a drunken outdoor fuck, I wanted more with Goldie. So much more than acting like a couple of teenagers outside a house party. “I owe you a date. A real date.”
“We’ve been on a real date, remember? Pizza after you saved my dog.”
Holding her hands, I squeezed the mittens. “You said that wasn’t a date.”
“A girl can change her mind.” Her eyes sparkled and frost had clumped her eyelashes together. She looked like a snowy princess.
“We need to get out of the cold.” I shrugged out of my jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “What about the whole not-dating-a-hockey-player thing?” I grabbed her hand and led her to the busy street.
“I’ve met a lot of hockey players, Ace, but none quite like you. Are you sure this won’t be a distraction from the game?”
I regretted ever telling her that women were a distraction, and I had chosen focusing on the game over relationships. We had started walking, hand in hand, without a destination in mind. “Are you kidding?” I stopped and cupped her face in my hands. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to my game.”
“Ace, I want to do this with you, but I think we should keep it on the down-low until my study is over. Even if you’re not in it, I want to be taken seriously.”
If it wasn’t Goldie, I would’ve sworn I’d been being served a line. “That makes sense, I guess. Although, at least two hundred people saw that rom-com moment back there. I was basically Adam Sandler running across the street.”
She laughed. “It was like something from a movie.” There was a light skip in her step. “Ace, when the study is over, you can take me on a date.” The whole point of quitting her damn study was so we could hang out together in a not professor/student or scientist/lab rat capacity.
I wasn’t happy about it and tried to keep the disappointment from my voice. “I’ll wait as along as it takes.” My cock pulsed, reminding me of his existence—he wasn’t pleased about this development either. I shifted him to the side, trying to forget how Goldie’s lips tasted. “Let’s get you home. There’s probably a furry dude staring at the door waiting for you to walk through it.”
Her footsteps fell out of sync with mine as she patted the front of her coat. “He’s with my landlord tonight. He looks after Morty when I have long days.”
I took my phone from my pocket and clicked on an app, fighting a surge of jealousy at the fact that there was a man in Goldie’s life. “That’s handy.” I found myself hoping her landlord was eighty years old with white hair. “I’ll get us a black car.”
“Oh no.” Goldie’s patting had become frantic.
“What’s wrong?”
“My keys. They were in my pocket. They must have fallen out…” She turned and took a few steps back the way we’d just walked and then threw her hands into the air. “Anywhere. They could be anywhere.”
“Then it’s settled.”
She turned to face me, her brow knitted. “What’s settled?”
“We can wait until your study is over before dating—but tonight doesn’t count.”
The widest smile I’d seen all night spread across her face. “Tonight doesn’t count.” She reached for my hands.
“But we will take it slowly.” I said it for my benefit as much as hers.
“What does ‘slowly’ mean?” She stood on her tiptoes and in an automatic reflex, I kissed her softly.
“What does it mean to you?”
“We won’t get naked?” I couldn’t tell whether it was a question, or her response. She pressed her body into mine and I wished I could erase the word slowly from my vocabulary.
“No getting naked.” It was going to be tough, but I knew the value of delayed gratification. In hockey, sometimes waiting to take the shot made it ten times better. If that was the case with Goldie, by the time I slipped inside her, it would be better than winning the Cup.
She bit her lip. “Take me to your place before I turn into a popsicle.”