Chapter 26
CHAPTER 26
GABE
I pull my spoon out of the ice cream, scooping up a large strawberry, and rest it against Natalie’s mouth.
Her glossy blue eyes lock with mine as her lips part to welcome the sweet treat.
My dick was already straining at my zipper from the throaty groan on her first taste, never mind the kiss that followed. But the sight of the cream-covered fruit disappearing into her mouth has it throbbing so hard the fly might not be able to contain it a whole lot longer.
Natalie’s eyelids grow heavy and she emits a softer, lower sigh as she rolls the fruit around in her mouth. I can only imagine it succumbing to the warmth of her tongue, melting, and slipping down her throat.
Ordering this gift now ranks as the best day’s work I’ve ever done. And it took a lot more than a couple of phone calls. Not that I would ever admit to her how much effort it was to persuade the owner of the store to even try to make it happen. It was only when I got the interpreter for our team’s Italian player to talk to the Amoroso Gelati guy that he finally agreed.
But the look on Natalie’s face when she realized what was in the box, along with her current expression as she swallows the strawberry, make every second worth it.
When she opens her eyes, it’s like she’s coming around from the most shattering orgasm.
“Look at that smile,” she says, reaching up to run her finger along my lower lip.
“I was smiling?” I make a dramatic sad face. “Must have been an accident.”
“Nope,” she says. “That’s how giving someone the perfect gift feels. How can you hate Christmas when giving gifts makes even you all smiley?”
Her fingers play on my lips again and my shifting dick tries to claw its way out of my jeans.
“Oh, you know.” It’s not the time to get into any of that, so I shrug it off. “It’s just commercial bullshit.”
I take her hand, kiss the back of it, and redirect the conversation. “Tell me why you love it so much?”
“Because I like making people happy,” she answers without even a millisecond’s hesitation. “Christmas doesn’t have to be commercial bullshit. It’s whatever you make of it. And I like making it fun and meaningful.”
She takes her spoon out of the tub and licks the residue from the back of it and, Jesus, if the sight of that creamy substance on her tongue doesn’t make me want to have her right here on the kitchen counter.
“Like this,” she says, tapping the luckiest spoon in the world on the side of the container. “You got this for me, and it made me happy. And it made you smile, so that means it made you happy too, doesn’t it? ”
I brush my fingers lightly up her outer thigh. “Yes, it makes me happy.”
And it instantly crosses my mind that I don’t think I’ve ever uttered that phrase before. About anything. Or anyone. Is that weird? Or wrong?
“Did I make you happy in the theater on Monday night too?” I ask, as my fingers arrive at her hips.
She stops with her spoon plunged into the ice cream and gives me the sassiest, most adorable side-eye. “I don’t make a habit of things like that, you know?”
She pulls out a spoonful and draws it into her mouth achingly slowly.
“Really? You mean you’ve never worked late painting scenery in a theater and then banged your devastatingly handsome hockey player assistant in the front row before?”
She puts her hand over her mouth as she cough-laughs.
After regaining her composure, finishing her mouthful and clearing her throat, she looks at me dead seriously. “Maybe.”
Now it’s my turn to snort. “Uh-huh. When was the last time you banged anyone anywhere?”
“Hah. That’s rich coming from Mr. Two-Year-Old Condom.”
Can’t argue with that. “Yeah. Probably should have checked the expiration date.” I draw a circle around her knee with my finger. “You don’t have a boyfriend though, right?”
The words are out of my dumb mouth before I’ve processed what I’m asking— are you available?
Do I want her to be available? Do I want her for more than just this short time that we’re both in the same place?
Dumb mouth.
“It’s very gracious of you to assume I wouldn’t cheat on someone.” She points her spoon at me. “Your opinion of me is obviously higher than I thought.”
My opinion is indeed incredibly high. She’s smart, hilarious, cares more about doing a good job for the kids than anything in the world, and is smokin’ enough to melt an Olympic rink. And my opinions have only climbed higher by the second after what was undoubtedly the orgasm of my life.
Has her opinion of me changed? Has me helping with the kids and jetting in a top-notch European dessert made up for her undoubtedly poor first impression of me?
“Anyway, the answer to your question is no,” she says, digging around for the perfect ratio of strawberry to ice cream. “I broke up with my long-term boyfriend last Christmas. He got a job in Alaska.”
“And he wasn’t worth putting up with the freezing temperatures and twenty hours a day of darkness for?” I ask.
She pauses and sucks her lips in for a moment, as if trying to stop herself from talking.
Then she takes a deep breath. “I didn’t want to be with him enough to move. But I only realized that recently. Like, in the last couple of months. At the time…” She sighs and settles on a spoonful. “At the time, I thought I was just too scared to move away. Or live somewhere new. Or try something different.”
“But obviously you’re not afraid to move somewhere new. There are few places more different from Warm Springs than New Orleans.”
She looks up to meet my eyes, and those baby blues pierce something deep inside me.
“I’m moving there because of that,” she says. “Because I thought I was too scared to leave the coziness and familiarity of Warm Springs.”
“Easy for me to say, because I could be sent almost anywhere at almost any time, but that sounds like a weird reason to move.”
“I need to prove to myself that I can do it.” The eyes looking at me are earnest. “That I’m not a small-town girl with a small-town mind and a small-town attitude.”
I recoil like her words are a punch on my nose. “Is that what the loser in Alaska called you? A small-town girl with a small-town mind and a small-town attitude?”
And is that what’s behind the obvious signs, obvious to me anyway, that her heart isn’t in this move?
“Yup.” She drags her lips over the spoonful of sweetness.
“Dick.”
“A dick who’s right though,” she says, sucking on the creamy treat.
“He’s not right.” He’s a total fucking loser is what he is.
“Well, I’ll give you that he’s not factually correct, because I’m actually from Queens. But it wasn’t like I was partying it up in Manhattan or Brooklyn when I was a teenager. I hung out with the local drama school nerds. Todd knows I barely left the neighborhood till I went to college, that I always preferred to be in familiar surroundings.”
“Okay, so you went away to college. That’s moving somewhere new and different.”
“Hardly far. I went to Brown,” she says. “And that makes Rhode Island the farthest I’ve ever been.”
As someone who’s traveled all over the place playing hockey since I was a teenager, that’s pretty shocking to hear from a twenty-eight-year-old. But it sure as hell doesn’t make her any less of a person. It doesn’t make her life wrong. It just makes it different from mine.
“Then that must have been an adventure.” I want her to know I’m not like that dick, that as far as I’m concerned her life choices are perfectly valid.
“It has a great theater program,” she says. “But I also picked it because there’s a direct train to Providence from Penn Station, so I wouldn’t have to rely on my parents being around to drive me back and forth for holidays. And because the school offered me a great scholarship if I took part in a program that engages with local communities. And thank God I took that offer, because that was where I found my soul.”
“Then that was a perfect decision for you,” I tell her.
“I did my education master’s online, though,” she says. “I’d met Todd in my last year of college, and he got a job on a research project into pine barren ecosystems in Hudson Highlands State Park. So it was either move here to be with him and study remotely, or do long distance. I had the pull of Aunt Lou being here too, so…” she shrugs. “Anyway, he’s now presumably thriving in his bigger and better pine barren opportunities in Alaska.”
“I don’t see a small-town vibe in you at all.” I slide my hands up her thighs until they rest on her hips.
“Oh, pray tell, what do you see?” she asks, gesturing to herself.
Christ, that’s a dangerous question. And a can of trouble-worms I am not prepared to open.
“I see someone who’s moving more than a thousand miles away because she thinks she should , not because she wants to. And no happiness comes from a move like that. Trust me. ”
“You’ve moved just because you should?”
“Hockey is all moves just because you should.”
“You mean you’re not happy in New York?”
“Oh, I fucking love New York. But I was as miserable as ass in St. Paul.”
“Well, God help the world if I’ve seen you at your most deliriously happy.”
“You literally just told me I look happy. And three nights ago, did I not seem extremely fucking happy?”
She raises her eyebrows and digs her teeth into her top lip in a way that makes me want to bite it with mine.
Then she rubs her arms and gives a little shiver.
“Has this made you chilly?” I nod at the ice cream.
“Maybe,” she says.
“Stick it back in the freezer, then come over here. I’ll start the fire.”
I head into the living area and take down the stockings Natalie hung from the mantle last week, in case they’re a fire hazard, before holding down the two buttons till the click-click-click turns into the whoosh of a catching flame.
“Thank God this is gas,” I call back to the kitchen. “If you had to wait for me to rub two sticks together, you’d die of hypothermia.”
She slides the freezer drawer shut and crosses the room to sit on the edge of the large raised hearth.
“Hmm, this is nice.” She nods at her socked feet wiggling into the deep pile of the thick cream rug.
“You need something for your top half too.” I grab the Christmas blanket with the overly cutesy village ice-skating scene on it that she draped on the back of the sofa last week.
Crouching down in front of her, I wrap it around her shoulders. “ There you go.”
“Thank you,” she says, pulling the edges together at her chest. “But you’ve only done that so you don’t have to look at it.”
“Don’t you think I’ll look at it more if it’s wrapped around you?” When did I become as cheesy as fuck? Is this what Christmas in a small town does to people?
But given the smile that lights up Natalie’s face and the way that it makes my heart beat faster, I can only be grateful for the cheese.
And while I want to remove every item of her clothing as soon as possible, my heartbeat isn’t that raging passionate one from the other night. This time the thuds are fast, but also somehow calm and steady.
Right this second, and for the first time in my life, every pore of my body, every cell in my brain, feels alive—not just with pure desire, but with a warmth and an affection for this quirky woman who’d do anything to make people happy. Even dress up in a bunny costume and jump on a stranger.
“I can’t imagine ever getting tired of looking at you.” I cup her face in my hands and tip it up so she has no choice but to look at me. “And when you grabbed me and kissed me that first time in the theater, I couldn’t believe how fucking lucky I’d gotten.”
I brush my lips over hers and her eyes drift shut.
“I want to make you feel lucky too,” she whispers.