Chapter 9
CHAPTER
NINE
WILDER
It’s not enough that I’m back at OU, coaching a bunch of entitled fucks instead of playing professional hockey.
Not enough that I’m back in a city I fucking hate with every fiber of my being. That holds a lifetime of memories that are threatening to pull me under.
Nah.
Life just wants to fuck me with every opportunity presented.
If it didn’t, then I wouldn’t run into Maisie Delacroix in every damn place imaginable.
Like a fool, I thought it would be easy, avoiding her except when absolutely necessary, but everywhere I turn, she’s there.
In the stands during practice, reading on a blanket beneath an oak tree in the quad when I’m walking to the parking lot. Giggling with my players. Sneaking into the damn arena and watching me skate, wearing a tiny little nearly see-through T-shirt and leggings like it isn’t freezing.
Every. Goddamn. Where.
And it’s driving me fucking nuts.
She’s a constant reminder of what I can never have. Of what I shouldn’t want but am struggling to stop wanting.
What’s worse than seeing her everywhere I shouldn’t is the fact that I can’t get her out of my head. Not since that night.
Which makes it impossible to stop thinking about her when I see her every place I turn.
Imagine my surprise when I turned down the canned goods aisle at the grocery store near my apartment after a stressful-as-shit day at the arena, and here she is.
A pair of old wired headphones in her ears, like the ones from ten years ago, humming along to something upbeat, completely oblivious to the world.
She doesn’t even need to turn around for me to know that it’s her. I’ve memorized every curve on her body with all of the secret staring I’ve been doing.
Un-fucking-fortunately for me.
I would ask what the odds are of us running into each other yet again, but with us both living near campus, I guess they’re not as slim as I’d hoped for.
It’s eight o’clock on a Friday night, and this is when she chooses to do her grocery shopping?
I’m surprised she’s not out partying or going to a bar with her friends.
What most college kids are doing with their weekends.
What she was doing when we first met.
I watch as an older woman at the end of the aisle drops a plastic bag, and a dozen green apples roll in ten different directions. And there Maisie goes… rushing over.
Her smile is radiant, transforming her expression as she tells the little old lady she’ll get it and bends over, quickly gathering the apples and replacing them in a new bag for her.
I fight the urge to groan out loud at the sight of her ass in those damn blue jean shorts she’s wearing. Are they the same ones from the night at the bar?
I can’t tell from this far away, but the frayed hem stops just beneath the curve of her ass, making her legs look endless, smooth and soft. Always on display every time I see her in short, frilly dresses and skirts.
Always fucking tempting me.
I grab a random can off the shelf and put it into the basket I’m carrying, not even bothering to look at what I’m grabbing because I’m staring at her like an idiot.
Tonight, she’s got her hair twisted into some type of braid that hangs down her back, wearing a loose yellow tank top with thin straps that’s flowy around her chest and formfitting around her narrow waist.
She’s stunning. I’ve never denied that.
If anything, it only makes staying away from her that much harder.
It would be easy if I weren’t attracted to her, if I didn’t want to touch her, to taste her, run my lips over every inch of exposed skin.
It would make it easy as fuck to resist temptation if she weren’t so fucking tempting.
She lifts on the tips of her toes to grab something off the highest shelf, and of course, since she’s all of five feet tall, she can’t reach.
I sigh.
A deep, ragged one that does nothing to help the unease unfurling in my chest.
Walk the fuck away. Stay the fuck away.
Turn around and walk back down the aisle and pretend that you never saw her here tonight.
You’re not a knight in shining armor. She can get someone else to get it down for her.
That’s what I’m telling myself, but yet, my legs are carrying me over, clearly not caught up with my brain.
I stop behind her and reach above her, plucking the jar of pickles off the shelf.
She whips around, that blinding, too-pretty smile already curving her lips as she turns to thank me, but then it falls upon realizing it’s me that did it.
Her eyes widen, confusion furrowing the space between her brows. “W-wilder?” She yanks a headphone out of her ear, blinking up at me.
“Coach Hawthorne,” I correct her.
It seems so damn stupid, continuing to force her into calling me that, but it’s a way to keep the wall up between us. To keep things professional, where they need to be and where they’re going to stay.
“Coach,” she says, dropping the jar into her already overflowing basket. “What are you doing here?”
My brow arches.
Her gaze flicks down to the basket on my arm, and her cheeks burn red. “Grocery shopping. Obviously. Duh. Sorry, that was a stupid question.”
Jesus, she’s so fucking cute.
In a strangely endearing, slightly awkward kind of way.
I can’t remember the last time I referred to anything as cute. Maybe Lily, and I’m not sure even then.
Certainly not a woman I’ve fucked.
Yet another reason to stay away from her.
“Yep.”
Maisie rocks on her heels, and a thick silence hangs between us.
I have no clue what else to say because we’re standing here, just staring at each other in the middle of an aisle in a grocery store on a Friday night, so I just mutter, “Have a good night.”
“Uh, yeah. You too. Bye.”
And then I walk away, further down the aisle, with no fucking idea about what I even came here for in the first place.
Thirty minutes later, I’ve managed to throw a bunch of random shit in the basket with zero rhyme or reason and check out, my head still occupied by Maisie. My entire night has been thrown off-kilter because she’s the last person I expected to see, and I hate that I liked it.
Seeing her doing something normal, like grocery shopping. It makes me wonder about things that I shouldn’t… like what her favorite food is or if she can even cook.
I sure as shit didn’t when I was her age. I survived college off five-dollar rotisserie chicken from the gas station near my apartment, canned tuna fish, and whatever vegetable wasn’t moldy as fuck in my fridge at the time.
Any extra money I had went to supplements, protein powders, anything I could to pack on the weight and muscle that I needed to play hockey.
Fucking hell.
I look up to find Maisie struggling to juggle more shopping bags than her hands can carry, and before I can even give myself yet another talk about why the fuck I should not, I’m jogging over to her.
Her head whips up at the same time one of the handles on the plastic bag tears from the weight, bursting open, and a can of beans falls to the ground, narrowly missing her foot, and rolls to a stop at my toe. “Shit.”
“Give me the bags, Maisie,” I murmur as I reach over to take them, but she shakes her head, her blue eyes flaring.
“No, it’s okay, I’ve got it.”
My mouth tightens. “Yeah, it looks like it,” I retort, taking the damn bags anyway.
How the hell she thought she was going to carry all of this is beyond me because all of this shit is not light. She should’ve gotten a cart.
“Show me where your car is, and I’ll put them in the trunk for you.”
After a pause, a moment of hesitation where I see the stubbornness written on her face, knowing that she wants to argue but ultimately decides not to, she simply nods and turns toward the parking lot.
I trail behind her like a good little puppy.
Not looking at her ass as she walks.
I keep my gaze fixated on the back of her golden hair, on the braid she’s wound the silky strands together in.
Until she slows down slightly, falling into step beside me.
“You didn’t have to do this, you know.”
I grind my teeth together, the muscle in my jaw aching from the weight of it. Of course I don’t have to do it, but for some odd reason, I want to.
And I can’t tell her that.
I won’t.
Instead, I ask what’s been on my mind since I saw her struggling with the bags. “You feeding an army?” I lift my arm, gesturing to all the bags. “At eight o’clock on a Friday night?”
Fuck, I shouldn’t have asked her that.
Am I curious about why the hell she needs this much food? Yeah.
But the real question that I want to know the answer to is what she’s doing tonight after she leaves here. Is she going to hang out with her friends? Go to a bar, meet someone like she did that night?
A pang of jealousy tears somewhere deep in my gut, and I want to fucking rage like an idiot, like someone who should not be thinking shit like this about a girl I can’t have.
For fuck’s sake.
Maisie laughs softly, shaking her head. “No. Uh, actually, they’re for… someone else.”
I look over as she tips her head up to stare at me. “Why are you buying other people groceries?”
“There’s a small used bookstore near the quarter…
Second Line Stories. It’s been around since before I was born.
The owner, Mrs. Sharon, and I are very close.
I’ve been going to that store since I was a little girl with my parents.
Her husband, Mr. Gentry, recently passed away, and she’s been running the bookstore by herself.
” Maisie pauses and slides her tongue along her bottom lip, a shadow of sadness moving over her face.
“But she’s getting older, almost in her eighties, and her children are all grown and live out of state.
She refuses to shut the store down. She says it’s too important not only to her but to the community.
I just want to help her and do whatever I can.
So, every other Friday, I go to the grocery store and pick her up a few groceries, things that I know she’ll like, and then I bring them to her when I visit on Saturday mornings. ”
I’m trying to reconcile the girl standing in front of me with the one I have constructed in my head.
The all-smiles, ditzy college girl who loves to party and hook up with people in bars. The one that I… Fuck, I don’t even know if they’re the same person anymore.
I’m beginning to wonder if they ever were, and it confuses the shit out of me.
I don’t understand her.
And I don’t fucking understand why I can’t just walk away.
Why I can’t stop letting her control my thoughts.
Why I can’t stop wanting her.
Why I feel this… pull to her when she’s the very last thing that I need to get caught up in.
“Mm,” I hum, unsure of what even to say to the revelation.
Thankfully, Maisie comes to a stop in front of the most ridiculous car I’ve ever seen in my life.
And I am completely unsurprised.
“This is me,” she says, hitting the Unlock button on her keys, her trunk next. It pops open, and all I can do is shake my head. “What?” Her brow furrows as she glances from me to the car, then back to me. “Why are you making that face?”
Apparently, I need to work on controlling my expressions better because I had no idea she could even see it on my face.
“Why am I not surprised that you drive a bright yellow fucking Beetle?”
Pink creeps up her neck, staining her cheeks, but despite that, she lifts her chin and arches a brow. “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
I shrug. “Take it however you want.”
“I like yellow. It’s my favorite color. It’s… happy.” Her hand moves to her hip as she cocks it. “Wildly insane concept for you, I know.”
My lip twitches.
I shouldn’t like her bratty little response, but fuck if I do.
“Oh, plenty of things make me happy, Maisie. I’m sure you’re familiar with a few of them, yeah?” Her breath stutters, her eyes bouncing between mine as I step closer and reach around her, depositing a handful of the bags in her trunk.
Being this close to her, feeling the heat rolling off her body, her scent, so fucking sweet, surrounding me, has me thinking about all of the ways I could get more of those sassy, mouthy responses from her.
Ways I could push that would bring that fire I just witnessed out of her again.
Against better judgment, my gaze drops to her full lips, and I recall every moment of that sensual mouth moving against mine, pressing against my skin tentatively like she was exploring.
The memory is burned into my brain.
But that’s just it. It’s a memory, something of the past, something that’s going to remain there.
Because in the present?
Maisie is a student, and I’m the man who is going to stay the fuck away from her.
For both of our sakes.