Felicity

After big home game victories, Maren, Kami, Alina, and I will often follow the crowds to Chester Green’s. Nick and a bunch of the single guys on the team are usually there too, celebrating and soaking up the love.

Tonight, though, while Ares clears a path for us to get through the reporters and staff crowding the hallway outside the dressing room, I don’t even want to be here, swept up with the the thrill of winning.

I want to go home.

Alone.

And probably drink half a bottle of wine and eat my way through the four vegan chocolate bars I have stashed in the cabinet over Gammy’s fridge.

Nick’s talking to three reporters, all with cameras and their phones thrust in his face. His dark blond hair’s damp, sticking up at all angles, and he’s fisting the ends of the white towel slung around his neck. Lavoie’s laughing with another pack of reporters, also clearly just out of the shower. Jaeger—the rookie—is nodding stiffly in another conversation with a few reporters and a couple defensemen.

Ares heads straight for Jaeger, pauses on his crutches to rub the kid’s head and lean down to say something I don’t catch.

Loki’s clinging to him practically by the ears. Shrieking some too.

Manning steps out of the dressing room, already in a button-up shirt and suit pants, looks past me, and breaks into a broad grin.

“You won for me!” Gracie says as she sweeps by and barrels into his arms.

“Told you I would, love.”

Cameras flash, the swell of voices gets louder, I’m jostled from all sides, and a hand clasps my elbow. “Hey, baby. You lost?”

“No. Thank you.”

He moves closer. “Be happy to show you around.” His eyes trespass all over my body, and they get darker when I visibly shiver.

“Fuck off.” I shake loose and turn away. He has a reporter badge and probably calls every woman down here baby, but I’m not his baby.

I turn and shoulder through the crowd.

Or try to. I’m not going anywhere fast.

“Hey! Did you just grab my sister?”

Dread slices through my gut.

“Felicity! Did this asshole grab you?”

One day.

I’d like to go just one day without my love life being the prime suspect in a murder.

I turn back around. “Let him go,” I tell my brother, but there are so many people around us, he can’t hear. I catch Ares’s eye, but he’s sixteen reporters away, and they’re all asking him how he feels about being replaced by a rookie and how his socks are doing today and if his doctor prescribed him the monkey.

Nick growls at the reporter.

The Bear and Sniffer move in.

Another reporter shoves Nick.

Most of the brawls I see happen on the ice.

I don’t usually smell the tension. Feel the testosterone getting thick and electric. Go hyperaware of every jostle and shift, every twitch of an eye, every tightening of a muscle.

But here?

Now?

It’s going down.

It’s going down, and I can feel the crackle of the fight humming through the air as the first punch flies.

It doesn’t start with a shout. It starts with a grunt. A low, feral grunt that slowly builds to shouting. Then the crunching of fist against bone. More voices. More testosterone. More sweat. More blood.

I huddle into myself and discover fight and flight are basically the same thing right now. I’m swimming upstream against a sea of angry whale sharks surging forward to get the best picture, the best video, the best quotes coming out of the brawl in the hallway outside the Thrusters’ dressing room.

“Miss! With the black eye! Is this about you? Are you Murphy’s sister?”

I keep my head down and push through.

Loki screeches somewhere. I’m gripping Lucy to my chest.

I can’t see where the crowd ends.

Can’t be small enough.

Can’t get out.

Can’t breathe.

The walls are shrinking. The voices are louder, firmer, morphing from sound into slime, leeching all the oxygen out of the hallways. The floor’s wobbling. Or maybe that’s my knees.

Can.

Not.

Breathe.

A solid arm grips my waist from behind and lifts, the sweet scent of chocolate cake tickles my nose, and I’m suddenly a foot taller.

Ares is using his sheer size to clear a path. My legs dangle, my body jolts every time he shifts our weight to his crutch, but there’s air. And space. And suddenly we’re outside the crowd.

People are running at us, but fewer and fewer with every step.

I should tell him to put me down. Ask where his other crutch went. Check and make sure we haven’t lost Loki.

But I don’t want him to let me go.

And if I open my mouth—or even if I don’t—I don’t know that I could hide the moisture leaking out of my eyeballs.

He carries me like that all the way to his car.

I don’t argue about him driving.

I don’t answer the seven thousand dings on my phone.

And I don’t talk.

Not as me. Not as Lucy, or Harold, or Tim, or Loki, who’s sitting on the console between us, hugging my arm and patting my hand.

He’s a sweet monkey.

I hate to think Kami’s right, that once he hits puberty, he’ll become a crazed hormone machine.

Like my idiot brother.

At Gammy’s house, I head straight for her bedroom and shut myself inside.

She’d be horrified. Judging by the new crack in the ceiling, her ghost is already having a conniption fit that I got Nick in trouble.

Again.

I shouldn’t have gone down to the tunnel outside the dressing room. Shouldn’t have been there.

My phone buzzes for the trillionth time. I don’t even look at the screen.

Instead, I turn, open the door, find Ares there, and shove the stupid device at him.

Before I can slam the door shut, he has my phone in his back pocket and the door gripped in one hand.

He’s not mad.

Not Ares.

He can growl and grunt and glower with the best of them, but I don’t know that he actually gets mad.

Disappointed, yes.

Unhappy, clearly.

But mad?

He’s named after the god of war, yet he just walked away from a fight.

And there’s nothing angry in the intense blue questions firing out of his eyes.

No, that’s all concern. Worry. Care.

Affection.

He brushes my cheek with his thumb. “Not your fault.”

Dammit.

That’s the other thing about Ares.

He doesn’t ask if I’m okay, if I want to talk, if I need some chocolate or cookies or a punching bag. He goes directly to the problem and uses three little words to dig straight into the heart of my guilt.

That there’s inherently something wrong with me.

Logically, I know I can’t control my brother. That it’s really not okay for men to randomly ask me if I can talk on their dicks without moving my lips. That it’s okay to not want strangers to call me baby and mentally undress me.

But I can’t help feeling like it’s somehow my fault.

Like I should wear a sign or something. Hi, you can talk to me, but that doesn’t mean I want to date you, show you my boobs, or suck your dick.

Or I should just quit going out altogether.

I drop my head to his chest, because he’s here, and he’s steady, and he listens. “I should quit talking too,” I whisper.

His big hand settles over my head, his fingers curling into my hair, and I wonder if he can feel the delicious lick of my nerve endings lapping up his touch.

“Why?” he asks.

“So they don’t notice me so much.”

He’s quiet for a long time. I don’t mind.

He’s warm.

He’s safe.

He’s here.

Stroking my hair. Smelling like dessert. Letting me lean on him.

“They’d still notice,” he finally says.

So quiet that if I didn’t feel his chest rumble, I probably wouldn’t believe he’d said it at all.

“I have a black eye and I talk to myself all the time and I’m twenty-seven years old and I’ve been fired from six jobs and three careers and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up because all I’ve ever wanted is to work for the Thrusters and since they won’t hire me to drive the Zamboni, and I was too young when I had my first degree, and too inexperienced with the marketing degree, I went back to school to get a PTA license so I’d have something I could do for them, but after tonight, they’re never going want me within a mile of the arena again.”

And that’s not even the worst part.

I don’t need to see the news. I don’t need to hear the reports. I don’t need to check my phone.

“And Nick’s going to be in big trouble, isn’t he?”

Ares grunts, which I take to mean maybe. Probably depends on how much footage there is of who threw the first punch.

“He can’t help himself,” I mutter into the safety of Ares’s arms. He’s massive. A solid rock of comfort, which shouldn’t be possible, but that’s exactly how I feel.

Protected by a force of nature that can only be worn down by a millennia’s worth of storms. Steady. Unyielding.

Right.

He strokes my back again, and I settle closer against him. My heart’s in my throat.

Or maybe my heart’s completely outside my body.

Offering itself to him for safekeeping.

“Not your fault,” he says again.

Every time I close my eyes, I’m back in the tunnel. Hearing the shouts.

The questions.

Ares, how’re your socks doing?

And suddenly I’m mad.

On his behalf.

It’s all a big circus. A ploy for ratings. And with Ares, it’s about who can make him look the most like an ape.

I lift my head.

He’s watching me.

He’s always watching.

This man sees so much more than anyone gives him credit for.

“It’s a game, isn’t it?” I whisper.

One brow twitches. His lips hint at a smile, but it’s subtle. Sneaky.

Hidden under that steady blue gaze that’s hard to look away from.

“Salt,” he says.

I dig a finger into his ribs. He flinches and leaps back.

“Oh, no, your ankle! Stop. I’m sorry. I won’t tickle anymore.”

Now I get a full brow raise. No? Too bad.

There go my nipples.

His gaze dips to my chest. Everything’s dim. The hall light is flickering, and only the bedside lamp is on in Gammy’s room. But I can see his eyes getting dark. Dark, hungry, and haunted.

Like he always wants what he can’t have either.

I shiver.

There’s a heady rush of power in being wanted.

But being wanted by Ares is something entirely different.

This isn’t about power. Strength. Ritual.

It’s about a magnetic force of connection. It’s about butterfly wings in my belly. It’s about craving, but also about fitting.

“Stay with me,” I whisper.

He visibly swallows. Doesn’t break eye contact. Asks a thousand questions in the span of a heartbeat.

For you? Or for me? For tonight? Or for forever? Because I play hockey? Because you want to get off? Because you’re lonely? Because you’re sad? Because you’re hurt?

Or because YOU want ME?

Can you truly want ME?

This man.

How many times has the world let him down?

And yet he stays and makes the world better for anyone willing to give him half a chance.

He’s right. He’s exactly my usual type.

But he’s more.

“You need to get off your foot.” I slip my hand in his, tug once, and he steps into the bedroom.