29. Ryan #2
Eli sat at the end of the table with a club soda he’d been nursing for most of an hour and said almost nothing and seemed entirely content. That was Eli. He didn’t need to fill space, never had. He was one of the few people I’d met in my career who understood presence didn’t require noise.
“Eli.” Maren leaned forward past me. “How’s Iris?”
The whole careful economy of Eli’s face shifted. Just slightly, just enough to resemble a smile. “Good,” he said. “Getting big. Starting to ask a lot of questions these days.”
“Like what?”
“Why Daddy goes away so much. Why other kids’ dads are home more.
” He turned his beer in his hands. “Hard to explain a hockey season to a four-year-old. Hard to explain why this is the life, why it has to be this way. She had a whole thing at drop-off last week. Wouldn’t let me put her down. Twenty minutes.”
The table had gone slightly quieter. Eli didn’t talk about Iris often.
“What are you doing for childcare on road trips?” Maren asked. No weight to it, just a question.
“I had a sitter, but she didn’t work out.
For this trip? My neighbor. She’s good, Iris trusts her.
It’s a lot to ask for ten days straight.
I’ve been thinking about a nanny. Someone Iris knows or might be able to know fast. Someone who gets what this schedule looks like—the road trips, the late games, the whole thing.
” He stared at his beer. “Someone who makes Iris feel like the center of things even when I can’t be there.
But it’s hard to trust someone with your kid when their own mother is flaky. ”
“I can see that,” Maren said. “She needs that consistency more than most kids would.”
Eli nodded slowly.
“You’ll find the right person,” Maren said.
Something in Eli’s jaw moved. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the part I’m working on.”
Cole, who had been listening despite all appearances, caught my eye across the table. I gave him a small nod. Neither of us said anything about it. That was the locker room. A group of men who had learned each other’s frequencies and knew when to push and when to sit with something.
Later, back at the hotel, Maren was cross-legged on the bed with her laptop when I came out of the bathroom.
She set the laptop aside and stood. "I want something.” She was wearing nothing but a tank top and tiny little sleep shorts.
"Okay."
"You're going to have to let me have it." Her voice was low, almost husky.
Every part of me came online at once as she took her shirt off, revealing her perfect round breasts. "You can have anything you want, baby." Saliva pooled in my mouth.
“Okay good,” she grinned as she slid her shorts down.
I walked to her, raising my hands to touch what was mine. She kissed me. Slow, thorough, and then she moved down.
My hand went to her shoulder. Instinct. The same reach I made every time, to turn her, to take control back, to run this.
She caught my wrist.
"No," she said, against my bare chest.
I let go.
"Good," she said, quiet, and she pushed me to lay back. The heat in her stare was mesmerizing and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but I would give her anything she wanted.
She moved slow.
Her mouth moved down my throat. My collarbone. My sternum, my ribs, the line of muscle at my hip that made my breathing come apart when she found it. She pulled on the waistband of my joggers, and I grabbed her wrist, my dick hard as stone.
“Solsken…” I breathed out the word.
“Yes?” She looked up at me from under her dark lashes, her pouty lips forming a wicked grin.
“Do you want to suck my cock?” I asked her, almost surprised, and yet delighted and intrigued at this unexpected turn of events.
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “Mmhmm.”
Jesus Christ. She is the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen in my fucking life.
I let go of her wrist, and she pulled the waistband down and I lifted for her without being asked and her hand closed around me and I brought my forearm across my mouth. Holy fuck.
"Okay?" she said.
"Yes." Wrecked, I swallowed. "Do it. Wrap those beautiful lips around my cock."
She stroked once, slow, watching my face in the low light. My mouth was half open, watching this beautiful woman crawl over me with a predatory, hungry gaze.
Then she lowered her head and took me into her mouth.
The sound I made was not one I chose. “Ohh, fuck.”
Maren hummed, and the sensation pricked all over my skin. She was on her knees between mine on a hotel room bed with two floors of my own team asleep down the hall and I would have set the building on fire for her.
Her mouth. The flat of her tongue. The heat, the wet, the maddening unhurried patience of a woman who had all night and no plan to be rushed.
My hand found her hair before I could stop it and as I gripped it tighter, I made myself keep my eyes open, because I was not going to miss this, not one second of it.
"Helvete." Almost nothing. "Maren—"
"Vad gor du med mig." Ragged. Not to her. To the ceiling, to the dark, to whatever fraction of me was still trying to hold a shape that wasn’t melting into this bed under her touch.
She took me deeper. Her hand worked what her mouth didn't and she found a rhythm and stayed there.
"Look at me," I demanded.
She did. She looked up the length of my body with her mouth full of me and every remaining rational thought I had went out of the building.
"There she is." My voice came out rough and slow and completely steady, which was a lie the rest of me was not participating in. "Look at you. My girl on her knees in a hotel room with her mouth full of my cock. You have no idea what you look like right now. You are so fucking beautiful."
She hummed. It went through me like current.
"Do that again."
She did it again, deliberately, watching me, and my hips rose up off the mattress. She flattened her free hand against my stomach and held me down.
"That's it," I said. "Take it. Take all of it, I know you can—"
Her hand tightened at the base of me and she took me deeper and I lost the sentence entirely.
"Fuck. Fuck, Maren." I dragged in a breath and got hold of myself, barely, enough to keep talking, because I wanted her to hear all of it and I was dangerously close to blowing. But my girl liked when I said filthy things to her.
"You know what I'm going to do tomorrow? I'm going to sit in my normal, everyday meeting with Coach and the staff, and you're going to walk in with your clipboard and your reports and that sexy fucking voice you use when you're being professional."
She made a sound around me, sucking me in more, hollowing her cheeks out. Fuck.
"And I'm going to be sitting there thinking about exactly this.
Uh!" My hand tightened in her hair. "Your perfect mouth. This. The sound you just made. Every single day for the rest of my life, solsken, every time you walk into a room with a clipboard I’m going to think about you on your knees for me, my cock thrusting into your perfect mouth. "
She took me all the way down and I said something in Swedish that was not a word so much as a noise with grammar.
"S? bra." My grip in her hair had stopped being polite. "Precis s?. Just like that, don't stop, don't you fucking stop—" I groaned. “You’re so beautiful letting me fuck your pretty mouth.”
She didn't stop. She found the rhythm and stayed with it and worked what her mouth didn't reach, and the whole thing gathered low and hot and past anything I could have negotiated with.
I was going to come. Right there. In her mouth, down her throat in the dark, with her hand on my stomach holding me down.
And some animal part of me that had nothing to do with reason said no.
"Maren." I got her name out. Barely. "Maren, stop. Stop—"
She lifted her head immediately, mouth wet, breathing hard. "Did I—"
"No." I already had her under the arms. "Come here. Come here."
I pulled her up the length of me and she came, laughing low and startled against my throat, and I got both hands on her hips and put her exactly where I wanted her.
"Not like that," I said. My voice was not my voice. "I need to be inside you."
"Ryan—"
"I want to feel you." I was already lifting her. "I want you on me, I want to watch you come with me, I want—"
She sank down onto me and I lost the rest of the sentence.
Nothing between us. There hadn't been in a while and I noticed it every single time, the raw unbuffered heat of her, and tonight it landed like the first time and worse.
She took me all the way in one long slow motion and stopped there, seated, both of us stalled out, her hands flat on my chest and her hair falling around us and her breath shaking.
"Gud," I said. "Gud, Maren."
"I know."
"Move. Please move, baby."
She rode me in long strokes, up and down my cock, dragging the pleasure out of us.
And I lay there and let her, which was the second impossible thing I did that night.
Both hands on her hips, not guiding, just holding on, watching her take what she wanted out of me in the dark.
Her head went back. Her palms pressed down on my chest for leverage.
She found the angle she wanted and made a small sound when she got it and then chased it, over and over, and I had never in my life been so completely at the mercy of anything.
She was so wet I could hear it. She was biting her lip. My jaw ached from holding my own noise in and I was going to lose that too and I didn't care.
"Look at me," I said.
She did. Even in the dark, she did.
"Du ?r min." It came out of me without permission, the way it always did. "Min. Say it."
"I'm yours."
"Again."
"I'm yours." Breaking now, rhythm going ragged, thighs shaking on either side of me. "Ryan—I'm—"
"Come on my cock." I moved my hand between us and ran circles on her clit, and she made a sound that was going to bring the whole floor down and neither of us stopped. "Come on, solsken. Let me feel it."