“Stop that, would you?” I asked.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Not the sweet, juicy apple it usually is.”
He reached around and slapped his backside a few times while continuing his seductive pendulum swing. And he made whooping noises, too, just to taunt me. My god.
“You can’t be serious,” he said. “You’re dying to stick your cock in this ass, and you know it.”
“You know your ass loses some of its appeal when you’re wearing hockey pants, right?”
Instead of shutting up and accepting defeat, he slapped his ass with both hands now, then clutched the cheeks and wiggled some more. A laugh sputtered from my mouth, and I clamped a hand over it before he could accuse me of finding anything funny.
“You know you want this,” he said, “and that’s why I’ve got you under my complete control.”
Thank god he’d done something to break the tension. But that wasn’t all. Our teammates poured onto the ice to see Erik with his ass in front of me while he slapped it with both hands.
I couldn’t help covering my face with my hands. This was too much.
Ryan Detenbeck skated up to me. “I’m not even going to ask what this is about.”
“That’s probably a good idea.”
So far, my desperate attempt at damage control hadn’t fixed anything. I would’ve expected a relationship with a guy to be different from what I was used to with girls, but I found myself backed into a familiar corner.
What if I couldn’t fight my way out? It’s not that I want to weasel out of anything. I just might have trouble acting the way he thought I should.
But if I couldn’t, would Erik stick around or would he become just another ex?
31
ERIK
“You’re gonna kill me with this stuff,” I said, peering down at my lasagna and savoring the aroma.
“Au contraire,” Kayden said. “This stuff’s good for you. It’ll keep you going when your energy levels are about to shit the bed.”
“Lovely imagery, Kayden. Well, god knows I definitely need to have everything in the tank that I can get. We won today, but we’ve still got more games before that championship trophy is ours.”
Man, just saying that lifted my heart. Okay, confession time: I’d dreamed about it constantly, forever imagining how being a national champion would look and feel. We’d worked a tough grind all season, but I still couldn’t believe it was now a legit part of the conversation. I wouldn’t jinx it, though, and act like our remaining playoff games would be a piece of cake. Talk about a surefire way to fail.
I had to hand it to Kayden. For all his flaws—and trust me, he had thousands—he knew how to make me feel special in his own way. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but Kayden’s lasagna dinner was about more than foodand effort. It afforded us the chance to celebrate our latest win privately as a couple without including all the guys.
It also gave my boyfriend a chance to rant about upcoming games, which I’d finally decided to find charming.
“You’ve got to think about it like this,” Kayden said. “The playoffs are a completely new season. All the regular season wins you’ve racked up don’t mean shit. We’ve got to prove ourselves all over again.”
“Right, but we’re nearly at the end of the playoffs.”
“Then think of it like a football team coming back to the field after halftime. Don’t matter how lopsided the score was at halftime, you’ve got to think of it as a zero-zero game.”
Of course, he was right—only I’d never admit it to him. I knew all these things, and yet it didn’t hurt to remind myself. The image of us hoisting the championship trophy sneaked into my mind, one of many sweet daydreams. Initially, the image showed me holding the trophy up for the crowd to see. Then Kayden slipped in front of me and grabbed it. I laughed a little because I couldn’t even fantasize without Kayden trying to one-up me.
Then I dashed that image from my mind. I couldn’t think like that, not with so much on the line. I didn’t dare share that with Kayden because he would flip.Take it one game at a time,he would say. That was one of the few areas in which I would never argue with him.
When I finally tasted the lasagna, I swore I’d gone to heaven. It even beat his chicken parmesan, which I considered a feat.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?” I asked.
