Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
“I’m fine,” I said, pushing the drink back. “I have one.”
He glanced at my vodka cranberry. “You’re drinking a juice box with a splash of regret. That’s not a drink. That’s a cry for help.”
“Do you approach all women like this or am I just lucky?”
“Just the ones sitting alone on Valentine’s Day with mascara down their face.”
I touched my cheek. Fingers came back black. Great.
He still hadn’t smiled. He wasn’t being kind – this wasn’t some nice guy swooping in to comfort the crying girl. He was bored. The bar was dead. I was the most interesting thing in the room.
“Bad night?” Not gently.
“What gave it away?”
“The shoes. Nobody wears shoes like that unless they were trying to impress someone. Which means someone wasn’t impressed. Which means someone is an idiot.”
I laughed because it was blunt and rude and I was so sick of people being careful with me. Caleb was careful. Caleb patted me on the shoulder and called me Nomes and was so careful with my feelings that he humiliated me in front of forty people.
This guy wasn’t careful. He looked like he’d never been careful a day in his life.
“I told my best friend I loved him tonight,” I said. “Made him a scrapbook. Four years of everything. He opened it in front of his entire hockey team and said this is a lot.”
“A lot,” the stranger repeated. Flat.
“Then I sat outside and heard them reading my letter out loud. Laughing. And he-” My voice held steady. Barely. “He said I was suffocating. Too soft for real life. His teammate said something about my body and he said he’d break me.”
His expression didn’t change. But something behind it did – a shift in those grey eyes.
“Then he doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air as you.”
No softness. No warmth. Just fact.
“You don’t even know me,” I said.
“Don’t need to. Any man who calls that a lot has the emotional intelligence of a parking meter. And any woman who walks into a bar alone in those shoes instead of crying in her car has more spine than he deserves.” He set the whiskey directly in front of my hand. “Drink.”
I drank. It burned. My eyes watered. “Oh my God.”
“You’ll survive.”
He finally sat down. One stool away. Close enough that I could see the tattoos on his forearms properly now – a date inked in delicate script on the inside of his wrist, a constellation I didn’t recognize on his inner forearm, something that looked like a woman’s handwriting curling up toward his elbow. Stories written on skin. I wanted to read every single one.
We kept talking – I don’t know how long. He was abrasive in a way that should have been off-putting and wasn’t. When I told him about the pressed flower and the silver pen, he said, “You built a cathedral for a man who lives in a shed.” When I mentioned Jade, he said, “Your cousin sounds like a bad person who’s good at eyeliner.” When I said I felt stupid, he said, “You’re not stupid. You were loyal to someone who didn’t earn it. That’s different.”
Nobody had ever framed it that way.
“What about you?” I asked, two whiskeys in. “Why are you alone on Valentine’s Day?”
“I don’t have anyone to disappoint.” Just fact. “Played a game tonight. Came here because my face hurts and whiskey’s cheaper than Advil.”
“Is that how you got the-” I gestured at his cheekbone.
“Guy had an opinion about my stick handling. I had an opinion about his face.”
I laughed. He watched me like he was filing the sound away.
“You should stop looking at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re about to make a decision you can’t take back.”
“What if I want to?”
“Then finish your drink. And follow me.”
***
We didn’t make it to a bedroom.
We barely made it down the hallway.
His mouth found my neck before the bathroom door was even locked – teeth grazing, then biting, then sucking hard enough that I gasped and grabbed fistfuls of his shirt just to stay upright. The door slammed behind us and he pressed me against it, one hand already fisted in my hair, pulling my head back to expose my throat.
Dim light. Cheap hand soap and bleach. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except the heat of his mouth and the bruising grip of his fingers and the fact that for the first time in hours – maybe months, maybe years – I was violently, scorchingly alive.
He kissed the way he talked. No asking permission because he’d already read the answer on my body – in the way my hips pressed forward, the way my breath hitched when his thigh pushed between mine, the way my fingers were already pulling his shirt untucked because I needed skin.
My hands hit his stomach and I felt ink under my fingertips – more tattoos, disappearing below his waistband. I traced one blindly and he made a sound against my throat that vibrated through my entire body.
“Tell me to stop,” he said. Not because he thought I wanted him to. Because he wanted to hear me say I didn’t.
