20. Mackie
MACKIE
My phone has been in my hand since I got back to the room.
I held my breath for what felt like the entire second and third period. And now I’m sitting on the edge of my hotel bed still in my game day outfit staring at my phone waiting for his room number.
My mom comes out of the bathroom with her earrings in and her coat over her arm and looks at me. “Your dad’s on his way back from the arena. We’re going to go grab a late dinner.”
I jump about six inches off the bed.
She looks at my phone. Then at me. Then at my phone again.
“Okay,” I say. “Perfect. I’m going to stay here actually, I’m not feeling great.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I figured.” She picks up her purse from the desk and pauses at the door. “I’ll be back by midnight.”
She looks at me with eyes that have never missed anything in my entire life.
“Make sure you’re back by midnight.”
The door closes behind her.
So that’s confirmation. My mother knows I’m about to go somewhere in this hotel that isn’t this room and she just gave me a curfew for it.
I’m choosing not to think about that right now because if I think about how much my mom knows I will have to think about how much she’s been choosing not to say and that’s a conversation for a day when my boyfriend isn’t sitting somewhere in this building taking himself apart.
Zach
812
He opens the door before I knock.
He’s fresh out of the shower with only joggers slung low on his hips and I can see everything he had locked down in that arena sitting right there on his face now that there’s nobody left to perform for.
His eyes are red-rimmed and his jaw is doing that clenching thing and his shoulders are up around his ears the way they get when he’s trying to make himself smaller.
“Oh, Zach.”
He steps back and lets me in.
“How did you get away from your mom?”
“She and my dad are going to dinner. Said they’d be back by midnight. She told me to make sure I was back by midnight.”
His eyebrows go up. “Your mom definitely knows about us.”
“Oh, a hundred percent she does.”
“And she doesn’t care?”
“Not even a little bit.” I turn to look at him. He’s got his hands at his sides and I can see him replaying the game behind his eyes, frame by frame, the way he always does. “Do you care?”
He looks at me and gives half a smile. “Not even a little bit.”
I cross the room and his arms come around me before I reach him and then his mouth is on mine and I can feel his shoulders start to drop, like holding me is the first thing that’s made sense to him since the second period.
I press my hands against his chest and walk him backward until his knees hit the bed and he sits.
I’m about to follow him down when he catches both my wrists in one hand and flips us, suddenly I’m on my back and my hands are above my head with his weight pressing me into the mattress and there it is.
The quiet. The thing that only happens when he’s the one in control.
Like every spiraling thought I’ve had in the last four hours just got wiped clean and the only thing left is his hand around my wrists and the fact that I can’t move and I don’t want to move and something about that is lighting me up from the inside.
I pull against his grip. Not to get free. To feel him hold tighter.
He does, and everything inside me goes molten, the sound I make is halfway between a whine and a moan.
He lets go immediately. “Sorry, I don’t know why I—”
“Do it again.”
He stares at me.
“Zach. Put your hands back.”
He takes my wrists again and presses them into the mattress above my head and this time he’s watching my face while he does it.
I can feel my back arch up off the bed before I can control it and his hips press me down and I am so turned on I can barely see, which is so weird because this is just his hand on my wrists, this is nothing, this should not be making me feel like this but it IS and holy shit I think I might have a thing for being held down.
His mouth finds my neck and I stop thinking. His other hand is shoving my jeans down my hips and we’re both breathing hard, looking at each other, and I remember something important.
“You have condoms right?”
The look on his face is hilarious. He’s been with me exactly once and he’s already forgotten the only logistical requirement. I can see him doing the math in real time, running through options, coming up empty.
“I—” He stops. “Fuck.”
“Well.” I look up at the ceiling. “I guess we’re starting on baby number one tonight. Can’t disappoint your teammates.”
The panic that flashes across his face makes me lose it completely. I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe, lying on his hotel bed in my underwear, and he’s sitting there looking between me and the door like he’s genuinely considering making a run for the lobby.
“Mackie—”
“The team is going to be so excited. Rodriguez already picked out names—”
“MACKIE.”
“I’m kidding.” I jerk my chin toward my purse. “I brought condoms.”
He stares across the room. “You brought condoms.”
“Of course I did.” I pull him back down to me. “Now stop panicking and do what you did with your mouth the other week.”
He blinks. “Which part.”
“ALL of it, Zach, keep up.” I put both hands on his shoulders and shove him down. “Go.”
He goes.
The first touch of his mouth against me catches me off guard. My whole body jerks and the same flash of self-consciousness hits me the way it did the first time—what is he tasting, what is he smelling, what is he actually THINKING down there—and then he murmurs against me.
“You have no idea how good you taste.”
Zach Almardon, who turned the color of a tomato asking for my phone number, who couldn’t say the word come out loud for the first three weeks we were together, just said that into my skin like it was nothing.
Like he’s been thinking it and decided I should know.
And I don’t have a single word in my brain to answer him with.
I scrape my fingers through his hair instead. The way it feels against my palm, thick where it curls at the ends—I’m thinking about that when he sucks hard on my clit and the thought evaporates.
My hips roll up against his mouth before I can stop them.
And again.
And then I realize with a full-body flush of mortification that I am grinding against his face and I have completely lost control of my own hips and he has both hands locked around my thighs and he is LETTING me and the sound he makes against me tells me he is more than okay with this.
“Zach, please—” I’m begging and I don’t even care.
He does something with his tongue that makes me forget my own name. I’ve got both hands fisted in his hair and zero control over anything and then—
Three knocks at the door.
We both freeze.
My hands are still in his hair. His mouth is still on me. Neither of us breathes.
“Almardon.” It’s the calm voice of a man who’s been checking on younger players in hotel rooms for twenty years. “You in there? Just want to check in.”
I look down and Zach is staring up at me from between my thighs.
“OH. MY. GOD.” Is all I manage before his hand comes up and covers my mouth. “That’s my dad. THAT’S MY DAD. THAT’S MY DAD!” I’m whisper-screaming it from behind his palm and his eyes are telling me to shut the hell up.
The closet is four feet away.
I’m across the room in approximately one second, grabbing my purse off the chair, scooping my jeans off the floor, my shirt from wherever it landed, and I’m moving so fast I’m not even processing, just collecting evidence on the way, and Zach is up off the bed pulling his joggers on with one hand and looking at the door and looking at me and we are moving in complete panicked silence.
I get to the closet, squeeze inside, pulling the door shut behind me into the darkness as Zach’s moving toward the door and I realize I’m missing something.
My bra.
Zach realizes it at the same time.
The bra comes flying through the two-inch gap of the closet door and hits me square in the face.
I stand naked in the dark, holding it against my nose with my purse and my jeans and my shirt all clutched to my chest and I hear Zach take one breath, then another, and then the door opens.
“Anderson.” His voice comes out completely normal. “Hey.”
“Hey kid.” My dad’s voice, the one he uses after losses, the one that means he’s already moved on and wants everyone else to do the same.
I hear him come in, hear the door close, hear him sit down on something.
The bed. He’s sitting on the bed. “Guess you’re not out with your secret Vancouver family tonight. ”
“No sir.”
“Shame. It’s always better to have someone you love to go to after a game, win or lose. You played well tonight.”
“We lost.”
“We lost. You played well. Those are two different things.” Another pause. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, you know that? I mean it. Not like some of these other guys.” A short laugh. “I’m glad you’re on this team, son.”
I hear my dad’s hand land on Zach’s bare shoulder.
And my heart is hammering so hard I’m sure they can both hear it but there’s something else happening in my body that I don’t want to look at directly.
Because my hands are shaking and my pulse is in my ears and some of that is terror, obviously, most of it is terror, but there’s a thread underneath it that isn’t fear at all and it scares me more than my dad being ten feet away.
I shove it down. Not now. Not EVER maybe.
I am not going to examine why the danger is doing something to me that danger should not be doing.
“Get some sleep. Wheels up at nine.”
“Yes sir.”
I stand in the dark for another second after he leaves, then push the closet door open.
Zach is standing in the middle of the room exactly where my dad left him. His hand is on the back of his neck and his eyes are fixed on the door and he hasn’t moved and he looks like he’s going to need about six months to recover from the last three minutes.
We stare at each other.
“That was so close,” he says. His voice comes out slightly too high.
“So close,” I agree. “That killed the mood right?” I say.
“Yeah.” He exhales. “Pretty much.”
I start getting dressed and he drops onto the bed and puts his arm over his eyes. I put on my shirt and stretch out next to him, tucking myself against his side, and he lifts his arm and wraps it around me without moving anything else.
“He called you son,” I say.
Zach doesn’t move his arm. “I know.”
I press my face into his shoulder and we lie there in the quiet. I must fall asleep because the next thing I know he’s pushing my hair back from my face.
“Mackie, wake up baby,” His voice is quiet. “It’s almost midnight.”
I sit up. My hair is a disaster and he’s looking at me with that expression he gets when he thinks I can’t see him doing it. The one that makes me want to stay in this bed forever and also makes me want to cry.
I kiss him once before turning to find my shoes.
At the door I turn back. “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“He meant it. All of it.” I hold his gaze. “You know that right?”
He doesn’t say anything. I slip out into the hallway and pull the door shut behind me and make it back to my room with four minutes to spare.
My mom is already in bed with the light off.
“Cutting it close,” she says into the dark.
“Goodnight Mom.”
She laughs softly and rolls over and I lie in the dark staring at the ceiling thinking about how my dad spoke to Zach and how he has never once in his life said anything he didn’t mean.