Philly sat across from me on the stool behind the bar, a full pitcher left on the corner in case refills were needed. “That’s a great segue into what I was talking about with hockey players. Or, at least, the ones here at Bribury.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Philly took a sip from a can of Diet Coke that she’d kept behind the bar. “Let Ches be your cautionary tale. These guys like to play hockey first, party second, get laid third—okay, maybe that’s second; it’s a toss-up—go to school, and then, really distantly, isentertainingthethoughtof a girlfriend.”
“Why no girlfriends? Like a team rule or something?”
“Nothing like that. They just don’t prioritize it. They don’t need to.” She swept her arm to the room. “All these girls are here to sleep with a hockey player. They know the score. It’s fun for a night, but that’s all it’s going to be.”
“But that’s like all of college these days. Hanging out, hooking up…” We’d made that a mission of ours tonight too, Chloe, Abby, and me. “It’s not a hockey thing. Or a Bribury thing, for that matter.” Lots of my girlfriends from high school were enjoying the freedom of college and not looking for anything more than a fun night or two with a good partner.
“Yeah, I know. But there’s just something about a Puck. It makes girls forget they only want a hookup.”
“Like Ches,” I said.
“Like Ches,” Philly agreed.
“But you and Dex? It looked like a relationship to me.”
“Exceptions to every rule, of course. And some of the girls here are actual girlfriends. None of them are with guys who live in this house, except me.” She pointed to the adjoining room, which in a normal house would have been the dining room, but here was cleared out, except for some coffee tables pushed against the wall. There were four couples dancing, in various stages of making out, to some old Phil Collins song that my mom used to play all the time.
Don’t think about Mom. Don’t think about Mom.
“So, you’re telling me that hockey players are so good in bed that even if you just want a hookup, you’re going to fall into the Ches territory of stalking a guy who wouldn’t even notice you if you did?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
I laughed and twirled on my stool to face the room. “You’re crazy,” I said.
And then I saw him.
Chapter4
He had just enteredthe living room and thrown his keys on the table by the door. So, he lived here. Or was giving up his keys for the night?
GoodLord,he was hot.
And in this room, that was saying something.
He was dressed similarly to all the other hockey players—Pucks, Philly had called them—in grey joggers, sneakers, and a three-quarter zip in Bribury maroon. His brown hair was worn a little longer than the rest of the guys’, and I guessed it was because the natural wave that bounced around his face wouldn’t be tamed into one of the “high on the sides, longer on top” fade cuts that were the rage for guys this fall.
It would have been a sin to cut off those waves.
And he was big. Not Nebraska offensive line big, but bigger than most of the other guys in the room. The two players who hadn’t left Chloe and Abby’s side in the past hour were smaller in both height and build. Still big compared to the regular guys in our dorm, and of course Blake.
Was I already separating the world into Pucks and regular guys?
Dang, maybe Philly knew what she was talking about.
Yeah. No. Maybe for poor Ches, but I was not about to trade in my pride like she was leaning toward. If I wanted a hookup with a hot hockey player (and to me, he was the hottest one in the room), there was no way I would be spending the next weekend stalking him in his own house.
One and done would be my motto this year. It had to be. I was much too raw emotionally to walk out on the wire without a good, sturdy net beneath me.
And this guy did not look like he’d waste a moment of time trying to catch me.
As if he could hear my thoughts about him (or perhaps actually see my mental lip-licking?) his scanning of the room stopped when he got to me.
And stayed on me.
