45. Calvin
CALVIN
Fuck. I missed her.
It’s ridiculous—I saw her yesterday morning before she went to work, but sleeping without her last night felt wrong.
My hand slides from her waist and down her thigh, hiking her leg up around my hip, allowing me to grind against her.
This isn’t what I came for. I genuinely came to have breakfast. But one look at her and fuck, I need her.
“Calvin,” she gasps when I drag my lips away from hers, kissing across her jaw and then down her throat.
“Missed you,” I mumble as her fingers twist in my T-shirt.
“I-I’ve got work.”
“I know,” I murmur, forcing my lips from her sweet skin and resting my forehead against her shoulder as I suck in some much-needed air.
It does very little to cool the inferno raging inside me.
“Calvin?” She chuckles when it becomes obvious that I’m in no hurry to move.
“I’m good. I just need a minute.”
She laughs again, and it’s like music to my ears.
“Okay,” I say, finally pushing myself back and putting some space between us. “You hungry?” I ask as I move toward her kitchen without looking at her. I can’t. I know that the second I do, I’m going to want to kiss her all over again.
“It seems like you are,” she teases as she follows me through her apartment.
“Darlin’, you have no idea. I didn’t get coffee, wasn’t sure if you’d have already made some,” I explain.
“I haven’t yet. But I can do that now. What are we eating?”
“Omelets,” I say as I open the containers, letting the cheesy scent fill the apartment.
“Yum,” she says as the coffee machine begins to gurgle. “I didn’t think I was seeing you until later.”
“I wasn’t meant to come down, but then I realized that I couldn’t leave without seeing you.”
I feel her attention burn down my back as I transfer our omelets onto plates.
Glancing over my shoulder, I discover I’m right.
“What?” I ask with a smirk.
“Nothing. Just…”
“Just?”
“You. You’re really sweet, you know that?”
“I’m not trying to be. I’m just being me.”
“Have you really never had a girlfriend before?” she blurts, as she replaces a full mug with an empty one.
“No, never. Well, that’s a lie, I’m pretty sure I once got married on the playground when I was in kindergarten. But I’m not entirely sure how official those are, so …”
“Ah, yes. I’ve heard those marriages are the worst to get out of. Good job you have enough money to pay for a good lawyer.”
Laughter erupts. It’s the kind of laughter that threatens to bend you in half as you lose yourself to it. The kind I haven’t experienced in so, so long.
“I’ll make sure I look into that. I’d hate for it to cause me issues with my future wife.”
Sienna’s giggles cease for a few seconds, leaving nothing but silence in their wake.
“Wife, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say, trying not to let images of what she might look like in a beautiful white gown, walking toward me with all our friends and family watching take over. “I always figured I’d get married someday.” And I’ve only ever thought about it being you.
Suddenly, all I can think about is tonight. Not the date I have planned, but her potential reaction to it.
Tonight, there is every possibility that she’s going to figure everything out, and as much as I keep reassuring myself that it’s going to be okay, I know it’s probably a lie. I can keep telling myself that it isn’t going to be a disaster. She’ll understand. She’ll…
She’s not going to understand.
I’ve been lying to her for months. Sure, it’s not a bold-faced lie, more of a lie of omission, but I’m not sure she’s going to see the positives in the situation.
“Are you okay?” Sienna asks, sensing the sudden change in me.
“Y-yeah, of course,” I lie. Again.
Picking up our plates, I walk toward her small dining table and set them down. Only a few seconds later, she’s following me with our coffees in hand.
I don’t say anything as she takes her seat opposite me, and I keep my eyes locked on my breakfast.
I hate myself for it, but the guilt of what I’ve done is eating me whole.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
Just tell her.
“I’m nervous,” I confess. It’s the best I can do right now.
Telling her now would be wrong. She’s got to leave for work in the next thirty minutes. It wouldn’t be fair to do that to her.
But tonight is fair game? She still has work in the morning.
Maybe Saturday night would have been better.
“About what?”
Finally, I look up, and the second my eyes land on hers, I relax a little.
“Tonight,” I admit. “I’ve never taken anyone on a proper date.”
“You have,” she argues.
“It’s…it’s not the same. Tonight is…you’ll see,” I say cryptically.
“You’re still not going to tell me what we’re doing, are you?”
“What the fuck is with you today?” Darcy asks a few hours later.
Sweat trickles down my face, and my shirt is stuck to my skin as I push harder than I have since starting rehab with him.
Progress might be slower than I’d like, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that I’m making some. Movement is getting easier, and I’m able to put more weight on my leg now. I’m a way off from going full speed on a bike, or pulling my skates on, but every day, it’s getting closer.
I grunt at him as my arms tremble above my head.
“We should probably take a break,” he says, taking the weight and racking it.
“I’m fine,” I argue.
“Killer, you are not fine,” he says as I force myself to sit up.
After throwing me a bottle of water, he lowers his ass to the bench beside mine, leveling me with a look I know I’m not going to be able to get away from.
“What’s going on with you today?”
I drain the bottle, just so I don’t have to speak, but eventually, there’s nothing left and I drop it on the floor, letting my hands hang between my knees as my elbows rest on my thighs.
“It’s…”
“Sienna?” Darcy asks. “What have you done?”
A laugh spills out of me.
Of course he suspects I’ve done something wrong. I mean, I have. But it annoys me that he assumes I’m the one to fuck up.
“Yeah,” I confess, my eyes locked on the shiny tiled floor beneath my feet.
“I-I’ve…” I let my words trail off. They’re desperate to spill free; I need to confess what I’ve done.
But is Darcy the one I should be confessing to?
No one else is here. The guys are all halfway across the country, getting ready for tomorrow night’s game.
A game I want to watch while hanging out with Sienna. A game I may be forced to watch alone.
Pain slices through me. If that’s how it goes, I’ll only have myself to blame.
“I’ve…I’ve not been entirely honest with her.”
Fuck. The words taste like acid on my tongue.
“Are we talking you’re secretly married and forgot to tell her, or you stole her panties and didn’t tell her?”
“Neither,” I mutter, although I really fucking wish I’d had the opportunity to do the latter. That sounds hot as hell.
“Okay, so…”
“It’s…” Darcy’s eyes bore into mine as he patiently waits for me to summon some courage.
If I can’t tell him, how am I going to cope tonight when it comes to confessing to Sienna?
“This isn’t the first time we’ve met. When we were kids, we…we had a bit of a summer thing. I recognized her the moment I saw her. But she—”
“She has no idea, and you conveniently forgot to tell her?” Darcy finishes for me.
“That pretty much sums it up, yeah.”
“Okay, I’m going to need more details. But before that happens, I think we need coffee.”
“Or vodka?”
He laughs as if I’m joking.
I’m not.
In an almost deserted restaurant, I tell him everything.
He listens as I talk about that summer, about finding her again despite all the odds, and my reasons for not saying anything that first night.
Looking back now, I know I should have. Who’s to say we wouldn’t have reconnected?
I spent so much time worrying that it would have ruined everything, but what if it made everything better?
What we’ve got now is incredible, but it could have been more.
Would she have trusted me faster if she knew?
Or is the boy from all those years ago too much of a distant memory?
“She’s going to hate me, isn’t she?” I ask reluctantly.
“She’ll understand.” It’s meant to reassure me, but all it does is scare me more, because what if he’s wrong? What if tonight is the end?
I’m not ready.
Not even close.
Darcy forced me to take it a little easier when we got back to the weight room, but as much as I wanted to continue punishing myself, I knew it wasn’t going to help.
Tonight has the potential to be painful enough; I don’t need every movement to feel like agony.
Once we’re done, I have an appointment at the hospital to check on my progress, and then I finally head home.
I’ve still got two hours until I told Sienna I’d pick her up, and that’s two hours too long.
There are a million and one things I could do to distract myself. The most pressing are the unopened emails sitting in my inbox. There are more than a couple from my agent; he’s also left voicemails demanding I call him back, too.
Before my injury, I never used to ghost him, was never nervous about what he might want to talk to me about. But the fear of hearing news about my career I don’t want stops me from opening those emails or answering his calls.
So instead, I do something that has the potential to hurt even more. I begin scrolling through hockey content online.
While a lot of it is bullshit, there are a few bloggers and journalists who write interesting stuff. But every time I see anything even close to trade gossip, like a moth to a flame, I allow myself to get closer.
I’ve found myself doing it less and less recently—Sienna has been the perfect distraction. But with our time together on the brink, I can’t help falling back into old habits.
Thankfully, once again, my name seems to be kept out of the rumors. I guess people have forgotten about me as the season continues, and I’m not sure if that hurts more or less than fans questioning my position with the Vipers.
With the time slowly edging closer to when I said I’d be at Sienna’s front door, I take a shower, pull on some slacks, a shirt, and grab a sweater and a coat.
Just in case a miracle happens, I make a point of tidying up my apartment as I make my way toward the front door, because if my worst fears don’t play out tonight, I have every intention of bringing her up here for the first time.
I love hanging out at her apartment, and maybe it’s selfish of me to take her away from somewhere she’s comfortable. But I want to see her in my space. I want to know what she looks like lounging on my couch, moving around my kitchen, and, more than anything, I want to see her in my bed.
With one final look around my apartment to make sure everything is in place, I grab the flowers I picked up on the way home from the arena and finally head out with my heart in my throat and dread sitting heavy in my stomach.
She’ll understand. Won’t she?