34. Ivy #2
“What’s the matter, Ivy?” he taunts, his head tilting slowly to the side as his gaze lingers on my flushed skin, his voice dripping with dark satisfaction. “Cat got your tongue? Or did you finally run out of clever things to say to your Captain?”
I can’t answer. I can only sob his name as he dives back in, his mouth devouring me with a ferocity that finally breaks the last of my silence.
His teeth graze me lightly, just enough to sharpen the pleasure into something bordering on pain, until I’m sobbing his name and my hips are bucking frantically against his mouth.
I’m unraveling, my hands clutching at the pillows as he drinks me in, refusing to let me go until I’m shaking with a violent, messy release.
He pulls back just enough to see the aftermath, his face slick and set in a look of raw hunger. Then he’s over me, crawling up the bed until he’s pinning my hands to the pillows with an easy, bruising strength.
“I want to hear you break,” he whispers, his lips hovering an inch from mine. “I want to hear that voice you use to command the world turn into nothing but my name.”
He shifts, the broad, pulsing head of his dick probing at my entrance, teasing the opening until I am whimpering for him.
He pauses, his breath hitching as he reaches blindly for the nightstand. His fingers fumble with a small square packet, the foil snapping open with a sharp, clinical sound that feels incredibly loud in the heavy silence of the room.
I watch, my chest heaving, as he rolls the latex down with a trembling urgency. The sight of him—so focused, so protective even in his desperation—makes a fresh ache bloom deep in my belly.
When he finally moves into me, it is a slow, agonizing slide as he forces his way in, stretching me so wide I have to gasp just to keep air in my lungs.
I watch his face, the way his jaw tightens and his veins cord in his neck as he pushes past my resistance, burying himself inch by painstaking inch.
My breath hitches, then breaks into a stifled cry that echoes off the walls, my body stretching to take all of him. He fills me so completely that there is no room left for thought.
He doesn’t move at first, simply staying buried deep within me, his forehead pressed against mine as he waits for my muscles to stop their twitching.
“That’s it, Ivy,” he pants, his chest heaving against my breasts. “Just like that. You’re being so fucking good for me.”
He begins to withdraw, pulling back slowly until he is almost entirely gone, the absence of his weight a cold, sharp ache that makes me whimper. I instinctively tilt my hips up, my heels digging into the mattress in a desperate search for his return.
“You want it that bad, Ivy?” he rasps, his eyes dark with a lethal kind of satisfaction.
A raw breath shudders out of him, pulled from somewhere deep. His pace shifts into a rhythmic, heavy slamming that makes the bed creak and groan in protest. He drives into me with a primal force, each thrust bottoming out with a jarring intensity that rattles my teeth.
The friction builds into a searing, white-hot ball of pleasure. I can feel the exact moment my body begins to fray at the edges. I can feel myself squeezing him.
“Cal!” I scream his name, the sound torn from my lungs as the first wave of the climax hits.
My fingers dig into the hard, knotted muscles of his back, my nails leaving red crescents in his skin as I try to anchor myself to him while the world dissolves into pure, vibrating sensation. My vision goes white, my entire body locking up in a prolonged, agonizingly beautiful spasm.
“I know, I’ve got you,” he says, his voice thick and strained.
He doesn’t stop.
He drives through my climax, his movements turning into a blurred, desperate friction that pushes me higher and higher until I am sobbing for breath. He follows me over the edge with a violent shudder, his body tensing into a cord of pure, vibrating energy.
He thrusts one last time, buried to the hilt, holding himself there as he pours himself into the condom. He buries his face in the crook of my neck, breathing in the scent of our shared exertion as we both sink into the mattress, finally anchored, finally still.
We lie there in the golden dimness, the silence a weighted blanket. He keeps his weight on me, his face buried in my hair, his hands still clutching mine as if he’s afraid I’ll vanish if he lets go.
It is a terrifying thing to realize that your armor was actually just a cage.
For years, I’ve equated being untouchable with being successful. I thought that if nobody could get close, nobody could see the parts of me that aren’t perfect.
But as Callahan’s hands move over me with a reverence that makes my heart ache, I know I don’t want to be in that cage anymore.
I realize then that I’m crying—not out of sadness, but out of the sheer, exhausting relief of being known. Being cherished.
He pulls back just enough to look at me, his thumb catching a tear.
“Hey,” he whispers, his voice cracking. “Don’t cry, Ivy. I’ve got you.”
I laugh weakly, trying to turn my face away in the dark. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what, Ivy?”
“Like I matter.”
His expression shifts, softening in a way that steals the air from my lungs. He leans down and presses a soft, lingering kiss to my forehead.
“You do,” he says firmly. “You’ve always mattered. I just had to wait for you to see it.”
The words settle deep within me, more permanent than any contract. The city noise fades, and all I can hear is the heartbeat that finally made mine remember how to feel.
***
We eventually find our clothes, or at least enough of them to be decent, and end up on the floor because the bed feels too small for the energy still humming between us.
Our backs are against the couch with takeout containers scattered between us.
He nudges my knee with his. “Favorite city?”
“Zurich,” I answer without hesitation. “Yours?”
“Boston,” he says, smirking as he opens a carton of noodles. “The parts that don’t smell like spilled beer.”
I laugh. “That’s none of it, then.”
“Then I guess I like the smell.”
We talk for hours about things that have nothing to do with hockey. We talk about childhoods, irrational fears, bad decisions, and secrets we’ve never said out loud to another soul.
We trade stories of our scars—his from a stray skate blade in Toronto, mine from a car door in Helsinki when I was seven. We laugh at the absurdity of Cash’s pre-game rituals and the way Rick always eats the same brand of mints when he’s nervous.
Somewhere between the confessions and the quiet, the walls we built for survival start to feel unnecessary.
They feel heavy and outdated, like armor we’ve finally outgrown.
He sits on the floor, his hair messy and his shirt half-buttoned, looking more real than I’ve ever seen him. I curl beside him with a blanket around my shoulders, feeling more like myself than I have in years.
He exhales, the kind of breath that sounds like it’s been trapped in his chest all day.
“I didn’t pass the clearance,” he says, his voice low, almost embarrassed. “The trainers said I’m close, but not close enough. Still too much swelling. They want me out for the first two games.”
“I know,” I say quietly. “The report came to me right after they filed it.”
His eyes flick to mine, sharp and wounded. “So I just… watch? I sit in a suit while the Cup starts without me?”
“You recover,” I correct gently. “You give yourself a chance to be ready for Game 3. Maybe Game 4. If you push now, you risk the whole series. You risk next season.”
He lets out a humorless breath. “Feels like hell.”
“I know,” I say again, softer this time. “But you’re still the captain. Even from the bench.”
For a while, neither of us speaks.
I shift slightly, my knee brushing his.
His eyes flick down, then back up to mine, and something in his expression softens—not weakness, but surrender. The kind that only happens when the adrenaline drains and the truth has nowhere left to hide.
“You’re quiet.”
“Thinking,” I admit, tracing the hard line of his forearm. “About how I’m supposed to stand behind that bench tomorrow and give you orders when I know exactly what you sound like when you lose your mind.”
He lets out a short, dark huff of a laugh and tilts my chin up with his thumb, forcing me to meet his gaze.
“You’ll do it because you’re the best at what you do. Out there, you’re the boss. In here?” He leans down, his lips ghosting over mine. “In here, you don’t have to carry the world. I’ve got you.”
He nudges my knee again, softer this time, as if he’s checking to make sure I’m still really here.
I am.
Fully.
Finally.
And I know, in the quiet weight of this moment, that nothing can undo what we’ve built here. Not the ice, not the upcoming games, and not the expectations of the rest of the world.
We have each other, and that is enough to face whatever comes when the sun rises.