16. Scott
CHAPTER 16
Scott
NOVEMBER 2022
I fucking hate myself.
I’d almost capitulated, almost allowed myself to believe that the man I felt like with Athena de la Pena curled against my body was the man she deserved to be with.
A call to Mom shortly thereafter telling me another of my cousins have been thrown in jail for possession with intent to distribute brought me crashing down to earth.
Even the most common of women wouldn’t want to be with someone who has a family full of felons. I know my cousins aren’t me anymore than I am them, but there’s a pattern. It’s a blemish on our family name.
As we warm up for the game it feels like everyone’s eyes are on me, like they all know, they’re all judging me or whispering about my family of felons behind my back.
My blood simmers beneath my skin, hot with shame and bubbling with embarrassment.
Part of me thinks that if that’s my destiny, if that’s all my family has to offer the world, then it’s just a matter of time before I end up in a fucking orange jumpsuit and behind bars. Right?
Do they even wear orange jumpsuits in prison? Who knows? Maybe they’re gray and dull and boring, and not at all as striking as the orange we see on TV.
I keep my head down during the first period or at least try to. A two-minute boarding penalty for a gentle shove was a bit of embellishment to say the least. If you ask me, the ref is sending the wrong player to the box. Give that fucking Snow Pirate an Oscar for his performance.
While I’m sitting in the box, that asshole Finn O’Brien skates past and blows me a kiss. Under normal circumstances I’d flip him off and let it go, but today’s not a normal day, is it? Today, I’m Scott Raine, nephew of a criminal, cousin of criminals, fuck, I bet my absent father’s even rotting away in a jail cell.
A growl rattles in the back of my throat as I punch the glass in the penalty box, O’Brien chuckling to himself as he skates away.
Bastard.
My two minutes in the box becomes four, then eight. And after O’Brien and I drop the gloves and beat seven shades of shit out of each other, I get a ten for misconduct, and my ass is riding the pine.
After each penalty I try to rein it in, try to calm the indignant rage charging through my body. If I stop being an asset to the team, my ass will be on the line. Coach will bench me if I’m a liability. I can’t lose my spot. If I do, I’ll lose everything. My scholarship, my housing, my ability to buy myself new socks.
Gone.
Sitting with my head in my hands in the box, I ignore the son of a bitch in the box next to me who busted my lip making the blood trickle down my chin and drip onto my shirt.
A small piece of me is puffing out my chest that he’s sporting a similar cut above his eye and had to get some Vaseline on it to stop it getting into his eye. He’s a good fighter, we went toe-to- toe and gave the crowd something to cheer for, but Coach’s glare scorches my face through the clear plexiglass of the sin bin.
After the game, I don’t talk to anyone, don’t look anyone in the eye, and am summoned to Coach’s office tomorrow morning where I’ll face my penalty for daring to have an off night. The de la Penas can fuck around all they want because they have the wallets to buy their way out of trouble, but us mere mortals need to be above reproach at all times.
Athena’s waiting outside the rink as I exit. The flutter in my heart tells me I want her to be here for me. I’m on my way to my car, and she’s leaning against the wall of the building looking beautiful with her hair tossed casually on top of her head. Or at least, that’s how it looks. I’ve seen her put her hair into a ponytail. And often, what looks like it took thirty seconds to do tends to take an hour.
She’s sporting jeans and a hoodie, a rare but glorious sight. There isn’t a pair of pants this woman can’t wear the fuck out of. The curve of her ass looks spectacular in denim.
Stop staring.
Stop.
Staring.
I give myself another couple of seconds imagining skimming my hand over that perfectly peach shaped ass before she seems to sense my presence—wishful fucking thinking—and turns my direction.
She gestures to my face. “We’re almost matching.” Her tone lacks any humor. “Want to talk about…” She opens her palm and circles it in my direction. “That?”
“You watched the game?” Part of me hopes I look half as fly in my game night suit as she does in her jeans and hoodie.
She waves her phone at me. “Kept up with it online. I was hanging with Savannah.”
“Came to scold me for dropping my gloves?”
She snorts. “Would that keep you out of the box?” She arches her brow. She knows me so well.
“Probably not. He deserved it.”
“I believe you.”
I take a step toward her, not for any reason other than I want to be closer to her. “You going to tell Ares about Mathias hurting you?”
“Ares, God of war?” She laughs. “Not likely, Gizmo. He’ll be the last person I tell. With his hot head and this.” She points at her cheek. “He wouldn’t give Mathias the benefit of the doubt. He’d beat him into a coma for daring to bruise his big sister.”
I grunt my agreement, because part of me still wants to beat the guy for being too rough with my girl.
My girl.
I almost burst out laughing because as much as I want her to be my girl, for now and forever, it’s never been clearer to me that that can’t happen. She deserves more than a low life from Keystone, Iowa.
She deserves a big city billionaire with a loving family, an immaculate reputation, and annual family Christmas pictures where everyone’s wearing matching pjs. I almost laugh out loud, Ares threatened to get us all matching pajamas for Christmas this year. Now that he’s got himself a sensible woman by his side, he’s gone from taking his clothes off, to wanting us all to wear matching Christmas sleepwear.
It's kind of adorable, and while I’d love Athena to be matchy matchy with me, I just can’t see how she’d ever want to tie herself to my shitty life, shitty family, and likely shitty future.
I swallow the sour lump of bitterness at the back of my throat.
“That tracks.” I haven’t answered her, and she’s staring at me like I’ve taken too long to answer.
“Scottie?” She hardly ever calls me that. She pushes off the wall to face me. “You okay?”
She reaches her thumb out like she might be thinking about touching my busted-up lip. “Do you need stitches?”
Probably, but I wasn’t waiting for the medical team to do them. I hauled ass out of the rink like my ass was on fire. I shrug.
“Want me to butterfly Band-Aid it back at the hockey house?”
I don’t want to go back there, not yet. And she narrows her eyes like she can feel that.
“I can patch you up and kick you out.” She grins at me, lit up by the streetlight, her thumb still poised to brush against the gash on my lip.
“Except I live there.”
She gives me a one shoulder shrug, but I swear the edges of her lips curl into a smile.
The door opens behind me and a couple of the guys trickle out onto the street. Athena retracts her hand but doesn’t move. Every part of me tingles, like if I just reach out and pull her to me, she’d make everything better, she’d make me better.
It’s like some cosmic punishment, being put in her orbit but never being good enough to even stare directly at her sunlight without fear of getting caught watching her.
Ares steps around me into view. He glances over his shoulder at me. “You good?”
Athena nods, pointing at my face. “I need to patch him up.”
Ares grabs my cheek and squeezes. “Such a pretty face.” He doesn’t ask why Athena’s taking care of me, why I didn’t let the medical team do their job, or why I won’t go to Urgent Care if I need my shit fixed. Instead, he slings his suit jacket in the back seat of Athena’s car and climbs in after it, waits for us to get in, and starts singing along to the music on the radio. “We can go to my place.” He pauses, and I swear I can hear a smile in his voice. “It’s quieter.”
It feels right, normal, easy. It’s as though walking out into the street didn’t loosen the tightness in my chest making it hard to breathe, hard to calm down but seeing Athena, my Bright Eyes, made the heaviness dissipate, made it easier to breathe, easier to think… She makes everything so much easier just by existing.
We get to Ares’s apartment; it’s a couple floors down from Artemis and Apollo’s penthouses on the top floor in the same building. The de la Pena’s should just buy the whole building at this point.
He tosses a small medical kit our direction with a bottle of something that’s absolutely going to sting like fuck, then kicks off his shoes and strips off his shirt. “Snacks? Drinks?”
Athena looks at me, a puzzled frown wrinkling her forehead then back at her brother. “You’ve stocked this place? I figured you just stored your shit here but spent your time at the hockey house.”
Ares laughs from the kitchen. “True. I sleep here, keep all my shit here, but I like the vibe of the hockey house. I like having somewhere quiet for Eloise and me to hang though.”
Athena’s eyes widen like she realizes he’s talking about banging his girlfriend, and she shakes her head as though ridding her brain of the images contained within. I don’t know how she does it, having three brothers who are all sexually active… Ares’s personal life has been blasted all over the internet for years, it’s not like she can just block her ears, close her eyes, and sing ‘la la la la la.’
“Here, have a drink.” Ares tosses me a can of zero percent beer and gives Athena something that looks like Sprite in a glass.
She gestures her glass in my direction before taking a long drink. “I just need to butterfly his face with a Band-Aid, or three, then we’ll be out of your way, hermano.”
Athena pulls out two Band-Aids and a small pair of scissors before she sets to work. She glides the scissors across the fabric Band-Aids cutting them into a kind of butterfly. When she’s done, she jerks her chin at me to sit or kneel in front of her. I’m instantly fighting a hard on.
On my knees, between her legs, staring up at her as she purses her lips, focusing on my face with a furrowed brow. “You’re bleeding again.” Her scowl deepens as she puts down her makeshift stitches and picks up the bottle of liquid and a cotton pad to clean up the split lip.
“You’re a menace, Scott Raine, you know that?”
I can’t help chuckling at the dismay in her voice. She sounds like a mother hen scolding a child. “You know your brothers are way worse than I am. You rarely ever have to patch me up, Bright Eyes.”
She rolls her eyes. “You know better.”
Ares snorts from a few feet away without looking up from his screen. He’s leaning on a fancy black leather armchair that matches the couch Athena is perched on.
When the cold liquid meets my open wound, I hiss out a slow breath not breaking eye contact with her. There’s something combustible, a spark, shared heat. Something almost erotic about the way she’s cleaning me up. The air around us is charged, thick with lust pulsing through my veins as she wipes the blood from my chin, has me hold the wound together, and places the Band-Aids.
She purses her lips again as she assesses her work. “I think that bottom one will hold but considering you’ll never shut your mouth, that top one may be problematic and require a real-life suture.” She bops me on the nose. “If it doesn’t hold closed and keeps bleeding overnight into tomorrow, you should go get it done by a professional.”
Ares lifts his head. “Last time you used paper stitches on Arte, Doc said it would leave more of a scar if they did it. You do good work, hermana.”
“We’re out of paper stitches, or at least you are. I did what I could with what I have. But I know how stubborn you all are.”
And broke.
She holds my gaze for a beat longer before Ares clears his throat again and steps into our space. “Want me to order food?”
I don’t know why he brought us both here, but the idea of sharing a meal with Athena and then driving her home, being in the car alone together makes me suddenly starving. As though he’s reading my every thought, Ares stares at me with a twinkle in his eye, waiting for my answer.
I nod. “I could definitely eat.”
“When couldn’t you two eat?” Athena snorts. She takes a long, slow breath, casts her brother a skeptical glance and then nods. “Sure. Let’s eat.”