Felicity

Monday morning, while Ares and his monkey are sleeping—yes, the monkey moved in, and no, I don’t want to talk about it—I’m venting to myself like I always do. Not fuming venting, but ventriloquist venting. I can talk without moving my lips. And I do at every available opportunity—like when I made the monkey talk a while back—because it’s freaking fun.

What’s not fun?

My phone dinging this early. I abandon my search for Gammy’s sugar spoon, which I swear I put back in the utensil drawer when I unloaded the dishwasher fifteen minutes ago, and check my phone.

One word.

From Doug.

No.

“Goats go to heaven, dickheads go to hell,” I vent in my Lucy the Cat voice. And yeah, I’m forcing the Lucy cheer—she’s my hockey-loving, see-the-bright-side-of-everything cat puppet—because now I’m fuming and practicing talking without moving my lips.

Yes. I’ll be there at six, I text back.

Because his no was in answer to my very polite request that he let me into his apartment to finish packing my clothes, books, pictures, and my old Thrusters trading cards that I was organizing when I finally told him two weeks ago that things between us weren’t going to work.

He still has one other thing too.

My grumpapotamus puppet.

I can’t believe I left Harold there.

My phone dings, and—“Real mature, asshole,” I vent in my Harold the Grumpapotamus voice.

Who sends dick pics to their ex-girlfriend?

A shadow suddenly descends through the kitchen as Ares steps into the room.

Though steps isn’t the right word. He’s limping with the aid of a crutch, but somehow managing to make the movement look as graceful as a dance.

And he’s quiet too. No thump of the crutch—probably helped by the brown patterned velvet carpet in here—nor is there a clomp from his boot.

Conspicuously absent?

His monkey.

Not that monkey. The monkey-monkey. Loki. The monkey’s name is Loki, and he charmed Kami—who’s a vet—last night with monkey puppy dog eyes, and while Nick was helping Ares get settled in the guest room upstairs, Loki threw a bobble head at me.

Little booger smiled when I caught it too.

Like he knew Gammy’s ghost would flip this house inside out if her Wayne Gretzky bobble head got broken.

And now her sugar spoon is missing.

Coincidence?

Probably not.

I swallow and shove my phone in my back pocket. I’ll deal with Doug later. “Morning,” I say.

Ares grunts, nods, and stares longingly at my French press on the counter.

Which I bought last week, since getting my old one back is one less thing to fight Doug about.

“You want coffee?” I ask.

He looks at me not as though I’ve broken the unspoken rule of not attempting conversation before coffee, but rather as though I’m speaking Klingon to an overgrown Oompa-Loompa.

I’ve been around hockey players my entire life. There are the hornballs, the egomaniacs, the romantics, the quiet ones, the loud ones, the big ones, the smaller ones—relatively speaking, of course—the cute ones, the ones missing half their teeth, the secret geeks, and the ones who leave practice to go home and play hockey video games. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to these guys, and usually none of them faze me.

I’ve slept with more than one and enjoyed myself immensely, thank you very much.

But Ares Berger is in a class by himself.

He has to duck to get through the doorway, and his shoulders are so broad they barely fit. His dark hair is just long enough to hint at some curl. Thick dark scruff covers his face from his cheeks down his neck. The grayish-purplish T-shirt stretched over his pecs announces Goats are Spoons, with a sunflower as the P in spoons and a smiley face in one of the O’s. Movement under his navy sweatpants suggests he’s freeballing it, or possibly that he’s storing that emotional support monkey in his pants.

That’s…not big enough to be the monkey.

Except it…might be.

I blink and force myself to look away from his monkey pocket, because no matter how many hockey players I’ve slept with, Ares Berger will never be among them.

It’s not just his size that makes him different and more than a little intimidating.

It’s…well, him.

The biggest brutes on the ice usually smell like sweat and dirty gym socks and sometimes like stale sex. Testosterone pours off them in waves, and even when they’re in their suits and ties arriving for the game—okay, yes, especially then—they have this look of total power.

I can deal with power and meatheads and chauvinism. Hell, I like manly men. I’ve dated more than my fair share. I work with goons-in-training during clinicals every day right now, and I’ve had three previous careers where I’ve also dealt with goonballs on a regular basis, though sometimes more of the vocal variety than the muscular variety.

I’m well-prepared for this.

Except Ares Berger, known as the Force on the ice, capable of glowering at opponents in a way that makes you wonder how many children he ate for breakfast, who once challenged a monster truck to see who could push a concrete barrier farther, and who out-machos half the men in Copper Valley combined merely by breathing, smells like cake.

I simply cannot reconcile a man this big, muscled, and intimidating with cake.

Or with the whole friend-of-the-monkeys thing either.

It honestly freaks me out a little.

“Sleep okay?” I ask.

“Corn,” he answers.

And then there’s that.

I’ve never met a hockey player I couldn’t talk to. I’ve never met a person I couldn’t talk to. I don’t always say the right thing—ask me sometime about getting fired from my first job—and I frequently introduce myself without moving my lips, because I’m just a little bit of a freak, but I’m not as socially awkward as my IQ says I should be.

Still, what the fuck are you supposed to do with corn being the answer to sleep okay?

“Um, is that what Loki eats?” Mental note: research monkeys.

He grunts and pulls out one of Gammy’s spindle chairs from beneath her prized Amish breakfast table—she won it in a high-stakes bingo game when my dad was a baby and god help anyone brave enough to risk breathing on it wrong—sits, and lifts his bad foot halfway to resting on another chair.

The wood beneath him creaks, and he freezes. Like solid freezes.

The man’s holding his breath because a chair creaked.

Also filed under the irreconcilable contradictions of Ares Berger is the idea that he would probably also be terrified at the idea of Gammy’s ghost.

Who seems to have moved the cinnamon shaker too. Is cinnamon toast too much to ask for on a Monday morning?

“The chair won’t eat you,” I vent in my Tim-the-goat voice. Tim’s one of my three main puppets, and he’s quite logical as only a goat puppet can be. “It already had breakfast.”

Ares’s eyes land squarely on mine, an unexpectedly brilliant and intense blue hiding beneath the solid ridge of his brow, and heat creeps over my chest and makes my mammary glands swell.

He’s intense.

“Sorry,” I mutter. “I practice in the mornings. Seriously, you drink coffee or not?”

I’m not asking if the monkey drinks coffee.

He grunts and slowly finishes lifting his booted foot to rest it on another chair, which is also good, because I didn’t want to fight him about his ankle before breakfast.

I take his grunt as a yes and assume he’d add an And I’d love a cup please if it didn’t look like he was concentrating so hard on getting his foot up and not falling out of the chair. I also peek into the living room.

Where is the monkey?

“Hazelnut, vanilla, butter toffee, or French roast?” I ask.

His brow twitches, but he doesn’t answer.

I grab the French roast bag—I have no idea if that’s what he wants, but it’s what he’s getting unless he says otherwise—and measure beans into the hand grinder. “Half and half, Felicity,” I vent in my Harold the Grumpapotamus voice while I crank away. Fucking Doug better not do anything to Harold, because if he hurts my puppet—I refuse to call them dummies—I’ll…I’ll… Fuck. I’ll do something. And I’m related to Nick Fucking Murphy, king of horrible revenge. I can come up with something.

And if I can’t, the internet can.

“Half caff, half soy, half vanilla, half chocolate, half caramel, half macchiato,” I vent. I make quick work of cleaning out the press and prepping Ares’s coffee, my venting rapidly turning into a conversation between my puppets even though all of them—except Harold—are tucked away upstairs in a trunk, which probably makes me look mentally unstable.

But I have to practice sometime. I started talking to myself while hanging out waiting for Nick’s practices to be over when I was little, and then as I was reading calculus books in fifth grade—which I did when I was seven—and ventriloquism just sort of morphed into this hobby that I love. I do open mic night at a club downtown some weeks, and I’m always working on new material while I keep my skills sharp.

It’s unsettling to have an audience over breakfast. Or possibly it’s unsettling to have this audience. Venting on the light-rail downtown isn’t the same, because that’s not for an audience.

That’s for entertainment while everyone looks around trying to figure out who’s singing to themselves.

I press Ares’s coffee probably two minutes too soon and spill some onto the counter when I try to pour it into a mug.

“Hungry?” I ask him as I put his mug within reach. Swear on my Gammy’s ghost, he smells like her lemon pound cake this morning. “I have avocados for toast, or I could put some oatmeal on.”

I’m not fluent in Ares-ese, but I’m pretty sure the look he’s giving me is a request for raw meat. Do monkeys eat meat? I assume not. Loki might like throwing hockey bobble heads and eggrolls, but I can’t picture him hunting down a gazelle and tearing its flesh from its body.

Plus, if Loki could do that, Kami would’ve warned me last night.

Nice to have a friend who’s a vet when a monkey moves in.

Yes, yes, I did just think that.

There’s something wrong with my life.

“Tofu?” I offer.

Ares holds me captive with his gaze long enough for butterflies to sprout in my stomach. Reminding myself he’s just an injured athlete and I don’t need to apologize for eating vegan doesn’t help. Also not helping? The weird creaky noise from upstairs. Though it does distract him enough for his eyes to leave mine and drift toward the ceiling, where Gammy’s ancient teardrop chandelier is swaying.

“Wind,” I say.

He doesn’t answer, but when the chair squeaks again, he grabs the crutch and rises to his feet, extending his body to its full six-feet, nine-inch height.

I could also tell you how many goals, assists, and penalties he has, and pretty much any other stat you’d like to know.

The crutch—which is about three inches too short, even fully extended—groans under his weight.

He scowls.

Ares has a truly terrifying scowl. He could probably scowl Gammy’s ghost out of her own house.

“Or we can hit a drive-thru on the way to work?” I say, and I try to act like it’s natural for my voice to come out high and tight.

He grunts once more and nods, which I assume means yes, please, and thank you.

I let my Lucy voice answer while I spin away. “Great. I’ll finish up my breakfast, and we can go.”

One more long stare. I’m hiding in the fridge, pretending I’m looking for food, but I can feel him watching me. The heat from his gaze touches the back of my head, then my neck. My shoulders twitch, and a shiver races down my spine.

When goosebumps sprout on my ass, I look back at him.

He shoves off the wall, grabs the coffee cup from the table, and turns to angle through the doorway once more. He wasn’t staring at my ass…but he wasn’t not staring at it either.

Having a quiet housemate who might be the ticket to my dream job should be a good thing.

But seriously—does the man ever do anything other than grunt?