Felicity

You know what’s hard?

Besides that.

Seriously. We’re not thinking about Ares’s monkey.

Which means the answer to “What’s hard, Felicity?” is “Sleeping.”

Sleeping is hard.

I should be sleeping just fine. I had a good dinner. A long day. Harold’s back home. Loki’s locked in Ares’s room. Rain rolled in not long after we got back to Gammy’s house after that disaster of a dinner, Ares and I didn’t talk again after he got off the phone with Nick, and it’s nice and dark, with the soothing sound of raindrops drowning out the creaks of Gammy’s ghost wandering the house tonight.

But I’m not sleeping.

Because I’m wondering if Ares is sleeping. And if he sleeps naked. Where his tattoo is, and what’s on it.

If he gets hard anytime a woman sits in his lap, or if that was just me.

He doesn’t give me the I’m into you vibes. Which is good. Because on paper, he really does check all my boxes.

Strong and athletic? Check.

Bullheaded? Yep.

Capable of making a grown man cry at thirty paces? Double check.

Financially stable? He’s not playing hockey for free.

Despite what it looked like at the bar, and despite Ares calling me a bunny—not entirely incorrectly—I am picky about who I sleep with. And I gave up hockey players almost entirely even before Nick moved back to town.

Mostly because I know there’s no way I’m getting a job with the Thrusters if I’ve slept with any of the players.

Which is why this growing obsession with Ares is a bad, bad idea.

I roll out of bed around one, because I need a drink. Preferably a strong one, but a little nip of wine will do.

The carpet is rough and chilly under my bare feet, but I can’t stand to sleep in socks, so I tiptoe quickly across the room.

I’m almost to the hall when someone smacks me in the face with a two-by-four.

“Ow!” Pain explodes in my nose and eye. “Fuck!”

Not someone.

Something.

The door.

The fucking door is half-open, and I just barreled head-first into it.

“Dammit, Gammy!”

Limping footsteps pound down the hall. Light floods the room. Tears are leaking out the eye I used to locate the door, my nose is swelling like a rabid hornet flew up my nostril and stung my sinuses, and I suddenly realize I’m wearing nothing but a short white tank and white lace panties.

“What? Who? Where?” Ares says.

“Door.” I blink at him with my good eye, and—

Holy fuck.

He clamps a hand over the goods, which is really too bad, because I might be vegan, but I appreciate a good sausage.

With a side of beefcake.

I know, I know. Don’t objectify your brother’s friends, Felicity. But when you’re staring at 350 pounds of completely naked chiseled hockey granite, it’s hard—yeah, it’s totally hard—not to notice.

He grunts and turns, giving me a view of his bare ass cheeks.

His chiseled, round ass cheeks. With dimples at the base of his spine. Muscles rippling as he limps out the door, turning sideways to fit, his hand covering—barely—the goods.

He has very large hands.

And I have very wet panties.

Also?

I finally have a view of that tattoo.

And holy fuck.

He has the Milky Way tattooed over his left cheek and around to his hip. Swirling stars and planets roped around in blues and purples, like a deep mountain sunset, with one large planet standing out in the middle of the universe.

Mars. The red planet. The Roman equivalent of the Greek god Ares.

It’s magnificent.

Even through one blurry eye.

The steps creak. And I find my voice. “Stay off your ankle!”

He grunts in response.

“Dammit,” I mutter.

I pull a dirty pair of jeans out of my laundry basket and hop into them. My nose is dripping just as bad as my eye is leaking, though thankfully nothing’s bleeding. Just tears and snot.

By the time I get to the stairs, Ares is already on the main floor. I find him digging into the ice, Gammy’s knit blanket wrapped around his hips, some of her last stitches coming out while Loki plays with the ball of yarn attached.

I suck in a breath.

She’s either going to love having her creation molded to naked hockey god granite, or she’s going to be so pissed that he’s rubbing his junk on her artwork and letting a monkey play with the last ball of yarn she ever touched.

Probably both, knowing Gammy. She was always a little two-faced. Sorry, Gammy’s ghost, but it’s true.

His cheeks are pink when he shoves an ice bag at me. “Sit.”

“Sure, now you can use words that make sense,” I vent as Harold.

Ares’s eyelid twitches.

I take the bag. “Thank you,” I say as me. “Now get the fuck off your ankle.”

He mutters something that sounds suspiciously like door knocker—whatever that’s supposed to mean—and limps into the living room, where he settles on the couch.

I follow, ice bag pressed to my nose.

You know what’s weird?

He doesn’t ask how I managed to clock myself sideways with a stationary door so that I caught my eye socket and nose, but I swear I hear the question lingering in the space between us.

“I tilted my head wrong,” I say.

He grunts. Gammy’s afghan is stretching over his thighs, and I can see patches of his skin beneath the holes, though I can’t see any portion of the tattoo. If he didn’t have a death grip on the front, blocking his stick and pucks, I could probably see his winking willy too.

Which I should not be thinking about.

“I was thirsty,” I add.

Not because he asked what I was doing up in the middle of the night, but because he wouldn’t be up in the middle of the night if I hadn’t walked into the side of a door. And if I hadn’t walked into the side of the door, he wouldn’t have felt the need to walk down here, on his bad ankle, without the boot, to get me ice.

I shove the ice at him, because I can see from here how swollen his ankle is. “Here. You need this more than I do.”

Flat Ares Stare answers me.

Like his gentlemanly side is offended that I’d sacrifice my nose and eye ice for his ankle.

Oh, shit. I’m going to look awful for open mic night tonight.

Should be fun for Harold anyway. He does love to pick on me for my little bloopers.

“Please take the ice. I’ll go get myself another bag.”

After a long pause, he relents. Which most likely means he’s hurting, so I grab a bottle of over the counter pain meds too.

But he stares me down until I go back to the kitchen for an ice pack for myself. I return to Gammy’s living room and sit in the chair, cross-legged, facing the bobble heads so they don’t try anything freaky.

When I was little, I swear they came alive at night. And when I confided my fears in Gammy, she told me we mustn’t ever speak of their secret powers, or all would be lost.

I sometimes think she could’ve been really cool, if we’d been the same kind of weird.

“Why won’t you stay off your ankle?” I ask Ares.

For a long minute, he doesn’t look at me, which briefly makes me wonder if he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open. Which would be one more tally mark in the things that sort of freak me out about Ares Berger column.

Except I’ve taken most of the things off the things that freak me out column.

I’ve kinda gotten used to him not talking.

And I spotted him with a tiny shampoo bottle adorned with a gingerbread man this morning, which explains the cake smell. My favorite body shop had this amazing cupcake gift box last Christmas, and—okay, yeah, it’s a little unusual that we’d shop at the same place for soap, but maybe he got it as a gift. And I’m starting to wonder if he’s the kind of guy who’d rather use girly soap than waste things. Like maybe he has the heart of an environmentalist too.

His car’s really clean. Not just dusted-vacuumed-washed clean, but remarkably empty of trash, or even just normal things people keep in their cars, like, oh, I don’t know, their spare puppets or biology books from four years ago that they haven’t gotten around to selling back to a bookstore.

My point is, if he’s toting around a lot of personal belongings every time he moves, he must’ve put them in storage, because they’re not in his car.

Maybe Ares Berger is secretly a frugal environmental minimalist.

“Mind over matter,” he says quietly.

A chill washes down my arms.

There’s a lot that I don’t know about Ares. And listening to him have an entire conversation with Nick—without talking, but with my brother understanding every grunt—reinforces the idea that maybe I’m not as good with people as I need to be in order to work in physical therapy.

“If you’re building muscle, yes, to a point,” I agree. “But you can’t mind-over-matter your ligaments into being untorn. You have to rest them.”

He snorts like I’m an idiot.

Okay, yes, I’m the one who walked into a door five minutes ago, and I’m the one who’s been rejected five times for that job driving the Zamboni at Mink Arena, and I’m the one who has four degrees, two patents, and one really lucrative copyright for code that puts a button on a smartphone to make everything swipe the opposite direction for left-handed people, but no idea what I want to do with my life, and I’m the one with horrible taste in men, but I’m not an idiot.

And neither is he.

He’s just…stubborn.

And he probably hasn’t met many physical challenges he couldn’t beat. I heard he once mud-wrestled a water buffalo. And won.

I shift the ice pack on my face, because it’s starting to freeze my eyeball. “You using your ankle and expecting it to heal would be like me using my face to bang open doors every day and expecting the bruising to go away.

He nods. “Make it tough.”

“Are you kidding?”

Flat Ares stare again. He’s not kidding.

“That wouldn’t make my face tough. It would eventually dent my bones and break my skin and I’d walk around with purple welts where my nose and eyes are supposed to be and I’d have to wear a paper bag over my face to do my shows on open mic night.”

He frowns like he has an opinion about that.

“What?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Would you tell Lucy?” I vent in my Lucy voice.

No answer.

“How about Tim? I’m a stubborn goat too. I can out-stubborn you ten to one. I’m so stubborn I’m arguing without even being in the room. I’m so stubborn I’m arguing without even waking up. How about you, big guy? Can you beat that?”

Still no answer.

I drop my ice and grab the one puppet I have downstairs. I left Harold sitting with Gammy’s bobble heads, because even if Doug was the type to break into the house and steal my puppet for vengeance, he’s equally freaked by the bobble heads, and I had this feeling they’d protect him. “You’d tell Harold. Even though I don’t want to know. I don’t care about your business. I’m a grumpapotamus. Grumpy grumpy grumpy grumpapotamus.”

Not even a lip twitch.

I stare.

He stares back.

I barely make it three seconds.

“Quit it,” I vent as Harold. “You’re making me get curious, and I hate curiosity. It killed the cat. Although, now that I think about it, if curiosity would get that perky Lucy the Cat out of my way so I could have more room to stretch out in the trunk, I wouldn’t mind. Why don’t you make Lucy curious? Oh, right. Because she doesn’t have a brain.”

“Harold,” I chide, “that’s not nice. Lucy does too have a brain. And a heart, which is more than I can say for you.”

“Fuck the heart. It gets you in trouble. Look what yours does for you.”

“That’s a hormone deficiency. My heart works just fine. I cried over you, you know.”

“Only because you know I’m the star of your shows. Without me, you’d bomb.”

“With you, I bomb.”

“Yeah, and who’s got her hand up my ass, lady? Not me. If I had my hand up your ass, you’d actually be funny.”

“Or in need of psychiatric help.”

Ares leans forward—holy shit, he’s flexible—and snags Harold by the head. “Bad dummy.” Before I can move, he shoves my puppet behind Gammy’s couch.

Not that there’s enough room for Harold’s snout.

Ares gives him another shove.

“Don’t hurt him!”

He cuts a look at me. “Be nice to you.”

“I can’t make him be nice to me. It’s not in his personality.” Yes, I know. I sound like a crazy person. But Harold’s my—well, my grumpapotamus. He doesn’t work so well as the straight guy to my funny woman if he’s nice to me.

“No. You be nice to you.”

“Oh.” Right. Because I make him talk. “It’s all just a joke.”

“Not funny.”

“Says the man who has a monkey that likes to throw egg rolls.”

He glances down at his crotch.

My face flames. Who knew Ares had a dirty joke in him? “Loki.”

Loki gallops into the room from the kitchen laden with two apples, a fridge magnet in the shape of Virginia, and Gammy’s antique china sugar bowl.

I whimper.

Ares rescues the sugar bowl. Loki pouts. Ares hands him something he pulls from under a couch cushion—a piece of dried mango? Why is there dried mango in Gammy’s couch cushions?—and the monkey dashes up the stairs.

“Gammy’s going to kill me,” I mutter.

“Gammy likes monkeys,” Ares says. With a smirk.

Now my face is boiling, because I’m almost positive he’s implying Gammy likes the sausage kind of monkey, not just the primate kind of monkey. “How do you know?”

“Told me.”

There go the shivers.

“Her ghost,” he adds.

I don’t know if I’m more freaked out that Ares is talking and making sense, or that he’s claiming to have talked to Gammy’s ghost. Either way, my shivers are getting the shivers.

“You saw Gammy’s ghost.” There. A little sarcasm. I’ll play it off like he’s making things up.

He nods to the bobble heads. “Talks to me.”

I gasp.

He cracks a grin.

A broad, no-shame, gotcha grin. I grab the throw pillow behind me and fling it at him, and something clatters on the coffee table while he easily catches the lumpy, 70’s shag orange pillow.

“You are so—” I stop myself with a gasp.

Gammy’s antique sugar spoon. That’s what clattered to the table.

I know I didn’t bring it in here.

Did I say shivers?

I meant full-body skin spasm. “Did you put that spoon in my chair?” I whisper.

Even a blind man could read the no, dumbass in his expression.

Loki did it, I tell myself.

Gammy’s ghost can’t move physical objects. It had to be the monkey.

But if anyone’s ghost could move physical objects, Gammy’s ghost could.

“Ice,” he says with a point at my face.

“I took that spoon out of the dishwasher and put it in the drawer Monday morning. So how did it get in here? Loki wasn’t in the kitchen when it went missing. I know he wasn’t.”

He watches me for a minute like he’s trying to decide if I’m serious. “Cows,” he finally says.

Now I know he’s fucking with me. “Very funny, smartass.” I flick one of his toes on his good foot. Quicker than I can blink, he snags my hand. Electricity buzzes up my arm, and I suck in a surprised gasp.

Not that I’m surprised anymore at how my body reacts to Ares.

No, that gasp is all courtesy of the current that snaps through the air when I meet his gaze.

His blue eyes are clear and steady, radiating with intensity, watching, studying, learning.

Leaning closer.

Testing the boundaries.

My heart’s drumming in my chest. I’m leaning in too.

How could I not?

He saved Harold. He shoveled away Soggy Dick Cookie Mountain. He came running when Gammy’s ghost moved the door and I walked into it.

He’s a big, burly beefcake. With a heart.

And I’ve already gone and imagined myself having sex with him more than once.

I should say something. Quit leaning closer. Stop looking at his full lips. His wide mouth. The dark stubble. His strong jaw.

I should definitely not touch him.

Except my fingers have somehow found their way to his sandpaper skin, and his lids are lowered, and he’s caressing my temple, right above my sore eye, so gentle despite the size of his fingers.

He could crush me with a single hand. Probably even with his pinky.

But I don’t believe he could hurt anything. Not a fly. Not an animal.

Not a soul.

This is when I should say something. Break the spell. I should not kiss Ares Berger.

But I kinda can’t help myself.

My lips part. My eyes drift shut. A moment of panic settles in.

I’m going to be that girl leaning in for a kiss, just to find out he’s not staring at my mouth, but rather investigating the bloody snot leaking out my nose. Or that he’s secretly fascinated with teeth and wants to know if I have all of mine.

Or maybe he’s looking for the second mouth I hide inside for making my puppets talk. Swear on Gammy’s grave, I went out once—once being the key word—with a guy who really believed I had a second mouth inside my mouth, and if Ares thinks the same, and all he wants is to see where the ventriloquist magic happens, I’ll—

Oh.

Oh, my.

His lips brush mine, smooth and firm, and a whole butterfly garden takes flight in my belly.

He’s naked.

Naked and kissing me.

No, not kissing. Caressing. Worshipping my mouth with his. Tender, as though I’m a treasure to be savored.

Even when he scrapes his teeth over my lower lip, it’s gentle. Slow. Luxurious.

I’m usually a jump-right-in kind of girl. Tear our clothes off, get right to the tonsil hockey, see how fast we can both get breathless.

But this—a slow, leisurely kiss—is making my nipples ache and my pussy clench.

I lick at his lips. He answers with a gruff moan and slides his tongue against mine.

Slow.

Sweet.

Torture.

I’m getting so wet.

And he’s barely touching me. Just one hand stroking my hair, his mouth seared to mine.

I slide my fingers down his neck, to the hard ridge of muscle where his neck and shoulders meet. His skin is hot satin over solid rock. I trail my hands lower, and goosebumps erupt under my touch.

He angles deeper into our kiss, his other hand cradles my neck, and I melt.

I just melt.

Into the kiss, into his touch, into his essence.

There’s no noise here.

It’s all sensation. The slide of his velvet tongue against mine. His smooth, intoxicating scent. The roughness of his stubble against the sensitive skin around my lips. The pulse of anticipation in my clit. The empty ache in my core. The desperate need for him to touch my breasts.

To suck on my nipples. Graze them with his teeth. Cup me in his big hands.

Worship my body the way he’s worshipping my mouth.

Put that tongue to my pussy—

Oh, god. I need him to touch me.

Touch me and lick me and fill me and—

And Nick’s going to kill us both.

Fuck.

I break free, panting hard. “Sorry,” I whisper. “I mean, I’m not sorry. You’re—that—wow. But Nick—the team—your ankle—we shouldn’t—”

He’s good, but not good enough.

I catch the flash of hurt before the placid mask of Ares Berger, silent enigma, returns.

“So, awkward,” I vent as Lucy. “You know what cures awkward? Ice cream! Except Felicity doesn’t have any because she’s dairy-free! How about a soy protein bar? Protein’s important for recovery!” I bolt to my feet and head to the kitchen.

Nick is going to kill me.

Or he’s going to kill Ares.

One of us.

Except it was just a kiss. Just a kiss is nothing. It’s not like we slept together and he went crazy and decided that I needed to always refer to him as The Green Lord when we went out in public and timed me to make sure I brushed my teeth for two whole minutes, no shaving seconds, every morning and evening.

Yes, yes, I’ve had some seriously screwed up boyfriends.

Maybe it’s not them.

Maybe my vagina is hexed. Yeah. Gammy hexed my vagina.

Clearly that’s the logical reason for my bad taste in men.

I thump my head against the refrigerator handle, forgetting about my eye and nose, and stifle a yelp when pain radiates through my face so Ares doesn’t come charging in here.

“Or I have eggs,” I call with a grimace.

I hate eggs. They’re half the reason I went vegan. I get why other people eat them, but they’re just so weird. I’d never eat the eggs out of my own ovaries, so why do people basically eat chicken placentas?

I’d complain about the texture too, except I’ve taught myself to eat tofu, so I kinda don’t have any right.

Ares doesn’t answer.

Of course he doesn’t.

I lean over and peek in the living room.

He’s gone.

Gammy’s blanket is still on the couch though. Missing half a row now. But the yarn ball is there.

Right next to a big old pile of guilt.

I shouldn’t have kissed him.

But I kinda want to do it again.

If I kiss him again, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to stop at kissing.

Ares Berger is under my skin.

And I don’t know how to get him out.

Or if I even want to.