Chapter 29
CHAPTER 29
GABE
I pause at the bedroom door, two freshly brewed cups of coffee in my hands, one with a teaspoon of honey stirred into it, and take in the sight before me.
The cool morning light sneaking around the edges of the blinds lands on the top of Natalie’s head, making her hair look almost silver against my dark blue pillows.
My heart swells to see her lying there, fast asleep in my bed, curled up with one bare shoulder peeking out from under the covers.
After the mind-blowing episode on the rug, all I wanted to do was spoon her all night. So I persuaded her to text her aunt and say we’d come back here and I’d drunk too much for me to drive her home.
And I did spoon her all night. I’d lain there with her wrapped in my arms, holding her back against my chest and inhaling the sweet scent of her hair. I woke up in the exact same position about twenty minutes ago .
That’s when the clenching in the pit of my stomach started.
That’s when the what-have-you-dones started.
That’s when I told myself I’m a total fucking fool.
Who do I think I am, imagining this is possible. I can’t have this.
Telling her all the things I told her last night, feeling the way I felt when we were lying on the rug, the way my chest feels now watching her sleep in my bed—none of that is okay.
All of this is dangerous.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all my years on the ice, it’s keep your vulnerabilities hidden. Never show your weak spot. Because that’s when you get knocked down and stomped on.
And in the space of a week, this woman has become my weak spot.
I roll my left shoulder in sympathy with that thought, and it twinges. Something I did yesterday must have set it off—probably something on the floor in front of my fireplace.
If nothing else, wanting to bang Natalie into the middle of next week isn’t good for my shoulder. My shoulder is vital to my livelihood, and it needs to heal pretty damn quick. I can’t go hot-sexing it out of place.
But Natalie’s more than hot sex—according to these feelings in my chest and my stomach and the tips of my fingers and toes. And there is no time for any of those feelings.
I’ve seen it too often—a player loses his mind to love and either the love kills his game or the game kills the love.
Once I’ve retired in five or however many years, that’s when I can have feelings for someone. Not now. The timing of this is all wrong.
Natalie sighs softly and rolls onto her back.
Fuck. All I want to do is rip my clothes off and climb back under the covers with her. But that’s exactly why I got dressed in the first place—to stop myself from doing exactly that.
I move toward the truest embodiment of a sleeping beauty I have ever seen and sit on the edge of the bed, gently, so as not to wake her with a start.
I put my coffee on the nightstand, then turn and brush my hand across her silky soft forehead, pushing back her hair.
She shifts slightly under my touch, her head rolling to face me, and the sexy hmmm she makes gives me an instant semi.
Her eyelids open slowly, as if they weigh a thousand tons and she doesn’t have the strength to lift them.
“Hi,” she says in a low, cracked morning voice that is the greatest sound on earth—next to the sound of her coming—and it ratchets up my semi to a full hard-on.
Her blue eyes move up my body, starting at my knee that’s closest to her. And when they reach my face, they finally focus and her mouth curls up a little at both sides.
“I brought you this.” I offer the coffee to the picture of beauty pushing herself up to sitting.
She lifts the pillows behind her and pulls up the sheets, tucking them under her arms to cover her naked breasts.
Just look at her. My chest thumps at the mere sight of her sitting up in my bed, taking the coffee from me and stretching her legs out under the covers, blond hair falling forward over one shoulder.
The thought of waking up to this vision every morning is a whole new kind of thrilling.
It’s also a thought I can’t allow myself to have right now.
She hovers her nose over the drink and inhales it. “Mmm.”
It’s a soft low hum of satisfaction, like the sound of a cat stretching out in a ray of sunshine on the carpet.
“The honey.” She raises the cup to her lips. “You remembered.”
“Of course.” I shift so my back is against the pillows on my side and stretch my legs out beside hers. But mine are on top of the covers. I am most definitely staying on top of the covers. If one inch of me gets under them, I would never want to get out and never want to let Natalie leave.
“You got dressed.” She pouts out her bottom lip and runs a finger down the sweatpants over my thigh.
“Yeah, I’m video-calling into the team meeting in an hour. Then I have to work out and have another remote session with our head of PT. So I thought I’d better drive you home.”
Her face, which has been the picture of softness, hardens a little, the bright blue of her eyes darkening.
My stomach lurches. Christ, I don’t want her to think I’m a total dick who’s just banging her and running. Though, if you look at the facts, I can see that on face value it would be an easy assumption to make.
But that’s not what’s going on inside of me. That’s not what’s in my heart.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I tell her. “No rush.”
“No rush, as long as it’s in the next twenty minutes so you have time to take me home and get back here again. ”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
She clunks her coffee down on her nightstand, next to the pink pig she won last night, and swings her legs out from under the covers.
With her back to me she bends over and picks up her clothes from the floor and dumps them on the bed next to her.
“I’ll be out of your hair just as quickly as I can,” she says, picking the socks out of the pile and yanking them on.
“Natalie, look, it’s not like that.”
But what is it like? What’s the truth here? I don’t want a long-distance relationship.
Not that New York City and New Orleans are a whole continent apart.
And right at this moment, as it looks like she might walk out of here and I’ll never see her again, the clenching in my stomach says that taking the three-hour flight back and forth is maybe totally doable.
Knowing I can’t let myself have her is one thing. Executing it when it feels like my guts are being ripped from my body, is entirely another.
She stands and hitches up her jeans, giving me a glimpse of her panty-clad ass before it’s covered by the denim.
My eyes rove over the smooth, fair skin of her back. Skin that my hands were all over yesterday and itch to be all over again.
She snaps her bra closed over it and pulls her T-shirt and sweatshirt on at the same time—they’re still exactly as I took them off her last night, one inside the other.
“Okay.” She spins to face me, pulling her hair out of the shirts and flicking it over her shoulder. “Get me out of here.”
The hurt in her expression kills me. The way it tears at my heart is unbearable.
I’m being ripped in two—the practical side knows I need to focus on my career to set myself up for a good future after the game, while the emotional side just wants to curl up naked with Natalie for forever.
And I simply can’t stand it.
In this moment, the emotional side wins a minor victory. I put down my coffee and walk across the mattress toward her on my knees.
“Look.” I take her disheartened face in both hands and can now truly see what my clumsy way of handling this has done. Her eyes glisten in the half-light. I’ve just made her feel exactly the way she tells herself she should feel—not good enough, not worthy of anyone’s love or affection unless she’s done something to earn it.
She deserves better than being treated like this. I am better than treating her like this. I don’t even want to treat her like this.
“I’m sorry. That came out all wrong. I just have to do this meeting in an hour, and I figured you wouldn’t be able to wait here until after that for me to take you home. And it’s too far to walk. And it’s cold. So I thought I should take you now.”
She studies my face, her eyes skimming over every muscle in my expression before halting on my lips.
Then she turns her head away just enough to be able to look back at me from the corner of her eyes. “Really?”
Her unconsciously flirtatious expression tugs my mouth up at the corners. “Yes. Really.”
She shifts her body toward me and rests her hands on my forearms. “Okay. And I really need to go too, anyway. I have to get to the office at the theater and sort out everything so it’s ready for Divina to take over. I’ve kept putting it off. Maybe because it means I’m really leaving. And that the kids are really going to have Divina inflicted on them in the new year.”
Her expression softens again, and my conviction to back away from the edge of the dangerous Natalie precipice is washed away by her smile.
“You really don’t have to quit and move just to prove the Alaska asshole wrong, you know.” I might have criticized her before for planning this move for the wrong reasons, but this is different—this is about her hopes and dreams and what’s in her soul.
She shrugs. “It’ll be great.”
But her smile is forced. She clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and I’m not going to press her.
“Right. And you must have a lot to do to get ready.” Am I just trying to convince myself she’s as busy as I am and neither of us has space in our lives for each other? “Do you have to hunt for somewhere to live in New Orleans too?”
“No, the city has a furnished apartment I can stay in for a month or two until I find my own place. So that makes it easier.” But her voice is still downbeat, not permanently perky like it’s been since I first met her.
My phone pings with a text in my back pocket.
“You should get that.” She seems grateful for the change of subject. “It might be something important.”
“Doubt it.” I inch closer to her on my knees and loop my arms around her waist. “Probably my mom telling me they were robbed of a win in the onboard mini-golf tournament or something.”
“They seem lovely.” Natalie rests her hands on my shoulders.
“Lucky for me. Because they’re the only ones I have.”
“Not all of us are that lucky.” The heaviness of her heart is evident in her voice.
Yeah, she didn’t exactly win the parent lottery. I’m not sure I’d be able to hold my tongue about that if I ever met them. But what the fuck am I doing thinking about meeting Natalie’s parents? That way madness lies.
“You turned out okay though.” I give her a peck on the end of her nose. “And you have Aunt Lou. And she seems really awesome. I mean a psychiatrist who now runs a retirement home and is mayor—that’s definitely someone to look up to.”
“Oh yes,” Natalie says. “I totally lucked out on the aunt front. My relationship with her is definitely the good thing that came out of my parents having to travel all the time.”
She slides her fingers around my neck and pushes them into the back of my hair, sending a thrilling shiver down my spine.
“I know I never told my parents how hurt I was when they’d keep going away and leaving me behind,” she says. “But I did get the Aunt Lou thing out of it. Whereas you are getting nothing good out of leaving things unsaid.” She lets her eyebrows complete the rest of her meaning.
“Are you saying I should tell my parents about the whole Christmas thing? And confess that I’ve lied to them about where I am?”
“Just a thought.” She says it like I imagine she’d sow a seed in the mind of a six-year-old about whether they were making a good life decision to eat a family-sized bag of M&M’s for dinner .
“God, no.” I almost recoil at the thought. “They’d be heartbroken.”
Natalie drops her gaze to the space between us, where her chest almost meets mine. “It just seems like it’s kind of”—she pulls one hand out of my hair and strokes the fingers over my beard—“churning around inside you constantly.”
Churning . That’s exactly how it feels. How does she have this way of knowing exactly what’s going on inside me when I haven’t even pinned it down myself?
Her eyes lift to meet mine, full of empathy. “Maybe it’s time to stop the churn. I mean, you at least have to tell them you bought this house at some point.”
“I’ll think about it.” I will not be thinking about it.
To end that topic and also because I can’t help myself, I brush my thumbs over her cheeks and drop my mouth to those delicious, gorgeous pink lips.
She presses her mouth back against mine and tickles my lips with her tongue before easing back just slightly.
“You know, just now was the first time I’d thought about how awful Divina is since just before you showed up at the pig lighting yesterday,” she says. “You’ve taken my mind right off it.”
She has that effect on me too. Making me slip out of my reality. And that’s exactly what I can’t let happen. My reality has to be one hundred percent commitment to the game with no distractions until I’m out of it.
But my body does the opposite of what my mind knows is sensible—my fingers lock together at the small of her back, like I never want to let her go. This endless push and pull just might kill me.
“I’m happy I distracted you.” I rest my chin at the top of her forehead, close my eyes and sigh.
Is that all we are to each other? Just a distraction?
My phone pings in my pocket and saves me from trying to figure out what the hell the answer is to that question.
“You should check that,” she says, sliding her hands off me and taking a slow step back, breaking the lock of my fingers.
I pull it out and my heart immediately sinks to my stomach, leaving a gaping hollow in my chest.
COACH PETE
This afternoon’s remote PT session will be in-person instead. I’m sending Kristin up there to check your shoulder. Shoot me your address.
“Has something happened?” Natalie’s hand is on my shoulder.
“No, why?”
“Your whole body just went tense. Is it bad news?”
That depends entirely upon how the line between good news and bad news has shifted over the last seven days.
“It’s nothing. Coach just wants to send the head physical therapist to check on my shoulder.”
I leave out the part where I know that means they want me for the game against the Ironmen on the twenty-third. And if I’m anywhere close to the right side of being healed they’ll tell me to play.
And that would mean returning to New York and getting back on the schedule, with no time to come here to see Natalie before she leaves.
But despite the tearing sensation in my chest, my brain says that getting called back to New York sooner than I’d thought probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing .
It’s definitely a way out of these increasingly complicated feelings.
Because if I stay here, I’m only going to get deeper into Natalie, and I can’t let that happen. She might fit with my mind and my body and, oh Jesus Christ, my heart, but she does not fit with my life.