Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Erika
It’s past midnight, and I’m still awake.
After dinner, I thought talking to Ash would help settle my restlessness, but it didn’t work. Instead, with every minute that passes, I get more annoyed because I can’t sleep, overthinking the conversation with Leon from earlier.
I want to unpick everything he said.
I can’t wait until tomorrow.
Had it not been for Valerie making herself comfortable in my room, chatting nonsense before she went to bed, I would have slipped into Leon’s room hours ago. But now it’s too late, and I missed my opportunity to ask him all the dozens of questions that are spinning around my brain.
Staring at the ceiling, I watch the ripples from Leon’s pool outside cast shimmering reflections that dance across the walls, making the whole room feel as if it’s alive and moving.
Ash messaged me just before I came to bed to let me know Huck had contacted him directly, saying he would be moving out tomorrow.
I don’t blame him for wanting to leave quickly and not talk to me.
I humiliated him and was dishonest, not only to him but to myself as well, for not voicing the doubts I had.
Thinking back, I don’t know where my head was when I said yes to marrying Huck because, for weeks afterward, I questioned my decision.
Maybe it was the sixty hours I worked on barely any sleep that week, which made me lose all sense of myself.
Whatever it was, it was a mistake on my part because at some point I stopped loving or even liking him, or maybe I never truly did.
I roll onto my side and punch my pillow for the hundredth time, unable to get comfortable. My head has gone into overdrive, thinking about everything that’s happened since Saturday.
This emotional carousel I can’t get off is driving me loopy.
Lifting my phone off the nightstand, I recheck the time: half past midnight. I slap it back down in frustration and take a huffy breath, knowing my overactive brain is too busy to consider sleep. I then flip the comforter back, leap out of bed, and leave my room.
Without knowing where I am headed, I suddenly find myself standing outside Leon’s open bedroom door because he always sleeps with it open.
Nervously leaning against the doorjamb, considering my next move, I opt to watch him for a while and enjoy losing myself in the sound of his mesmerizing, deep breathing and bare chest as it moves up and down in a hypnotic motion.
Lying on his back, the scant light highlights the deep divots in his toned stomach, chest, and arm muscles.
Even though he no longer plays hockey, the athlete in him still endures, and he still looks as sexy as when I first met him, actually, even sexier.
As if my feet have a life of their own, I make my way to the side of the bed he’s not sleeping on.
I want him to wake up because I need to talk to him.
Plus, he always knows how to calm my mind.
“Leon,” I whisper, pushing the comforter back a little, then I place a knee on the mattress to climb in beside him. “Leon,” I say again, a little louder this time, making him jump.
“Jesus, fuck,” he bellows, fighting with the sheets in a sleep-filled daze.
“Shh, you’ll wake your mom and dad. It’s me,” I whisper, trying to hold back my laughter.
“You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry.”
“Erika the creeper.” He yawns, covering his mouth to stifle it, clutching his chest with his other hand.
His words make me laugh out loud. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Left light on,” he commands the light hanging from the ceiling by his bed, causing his sleep-filled eyes to squint while adjusting to the brightness. Eventually, they focus on me. “What’s up? What time is it? You, okay?” he asks in quick succession, sounding worried and looking around frantically.
“I can’t sleep,” I admit. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
He takes a little longer than I’d like to reply. “Get in,” he says, finally calming me, but I can see the doubt in his eyes since we’ve never shared a bed before.
“Okay.” My inner eighteen-year-old squeals. I’m about to get into bed with Leon Hill. Something those hockey forum girls would boast about all those years ago. Only if he were mine, I wouldn’t share him with anyone. Everything about him would be kept sacred just for me and between us.
I flip the comforter back with too much enthusiasm, revealing Leon’s pierced dick. “Oh my god, you’re naked,” I shriek, squeezing my eyes shut, but what I really want to do is get a good look at his Prince Albert piercing.
“I live alone,” he counters.
“Your mom and dad are here, and so am I.” My voice sounds strained, and nothing like my own.
Full of humor, he chuckles, then commands the light to turn off, plunging the room into darkness again. “Better?” he asks as I open my eyes again.
“Much.” Not really, I wanted to see that piercing up close. Frozen in place because I can’t move, my mind races with a dozen questions, and the only one that escapes involuntarily is, “Are you going to sleep naked next to me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He moves onto his side, rearranging the comforter around him, then pats it in the middle as if making a boundary to divide us.
“Because that’s how I sleep, and all you need to do is stick to your side of the bed, and I’ll stick to mine.
That is, if it’s what you want. Or we can snuggle.
” The playfulness in his tone is evident.
“It’s fine,” I say in a notch below a whisper. I can do this; I’m an adult.
“Get in, Erika.” He senses my hesitancy.
“Okay.” I obey and slip between the sheets that smell like spicy amber and woodsy, just like Leon.
I lie on my side to face him in the dark, and the slight bit of light there highlights his strong features and the outline of his powerful, sculpted body.
“How are you feeling, beautiful?” He reaches up and tucks a lock of my hair behind my ear—a gesture I love him doing. “What’s going on in that busy head of yours?” Leon’s fingers brush against my cheek as he passes by to lay his hand between us.
“Your dick is pierced,” I blurt out, not meaning to, but it’s what I’m thinking, and he did ask.
The bed shakes when he laughs. “That’s not what was keeping you awake, Erika.”
“No, it wasn’t, but it’s what’ll keep me awake now.” I take my shot because I’m a Nosy Nancy, and I was never one hundred percent sure if the girls in the online forums were just making it up or not. “Is it a Prince Albert?”
“Yeah.”
I hesitate briefly before digging a little more. “Does it, you know, feel good?”
“Yeah.”
“How? In what way?” I need all the details, and this is something we’ve never talked about before. Yet another thing to add to the list of things we avoid.
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
He drags his hand down his face, then sighs. “Fuck it. Well, for me, it feels really fucking sensitive because it stimulates the nerves around the areas that are pierced.”
“Areas?”
“I have a few.”
“A few?” Color me curious. I’m almost salivating just thinking about them and how much I want to explore them with my tongue.
He lowers his voice. “I have a Prince Albert, a frenum, and a lorum.”
“You have three?” I know what they all are because sometimes we get infected pierced penises in the ER. When good dicks go bad.
“Yeah. Why does that surprise you?”
“Because the puck bunny blogs only ever mentioned one.” Shit, I just gave myself away.
“Puck bunny forums?” He sounds horrified. “What the fuck? Please tell me you only stumbled on them and didn’t read them all the time or pay attention to what was written about me.” I hear the worry in his voice.
“I can’t tell you that because it would be a lie.”
“Well, shit.” The brief silence feels endless, and I swear I can hear his brain working overtime. “What did they say about me?”
“Um.” I hesitate. Although I can recite the dictionary since I have a great memory, or I wouldn’t be able to do my job. I’m like a walking encyclopedia.
“Be honest,” he pushes, knowing I’m stalling.
“Well. They said you were, you know, great in bed or whatever.” But I hate it because all I’ve ever wanted was to experience what it would be like to be fucked into oblivion. Something all the girls said he was good at. “And pierced,” I tag on the end.
“What else?”
“And that, by their calculations, you’d slept with all the puck sluts who would follow you to every game, nightclub, and stand by the back doors at the arena by the time you had finished your fourth season with the Edmonton Eagles.”
“Shit. That sounds fucking terrible when you say it like that,” he replies shakily, sounding unhappy. Or maybe it’s disappointment. I can’t tell.
“Well, they didn’t call you ‘The Pierced Playboy’ for nothing, did they?” I try a bit of humor to lift his once-buoyant mood, but it disappears in an instant.
He stays quiet until he breaks the tension with, “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize to me for anything, and we all have a past, Leon.” I rest my hand on top of his where it lies between us. “And anyway, given that you haven’t dated anyone for a few years. I don’t think anyone can call you that anymore.”
Since he split up with Gigi, he’s been worryingly single.
Now I understand why. It’s all because of me. Even just knowing this now makes me feel giddy, my skin prickling, awakening flames within me. “So, circling back to the piercing, is it nice for the woman?”
He answers without hesitation. “Want to test it out for yourself?”
Hell, that didn’t go the way I thought it would.
Also, yes, please, because just the thought of him getting hard for me makes my nipples pucker against the fabric of my T-shirt.
“No.” I roll onto my back, suddenly a billion degrees hotter than the sun, and stare up into the darkness. “Yes. But not yet.”
Leon drops his voice when he leans in and whispers in my ear, “Well, you know where I am when the time is right.”