My shoulders drop.
My spine isn’t so rigid.
I want to hug her so tight.
“No?” I want to hear it again.
She shakes her head once. “No,” she confirms.
“Please don’t,” I whisper, and she doesn’t recoil, her eyes searching mine. “Please. Not yet.”
“Sylvan.” The way she says my name, it makes my dick hard all over again, and I can’t wait to have her begging for it. “What happened to your parents?”
Fuck.
I feel dizzy. Like she did, when I caught her before she hit the ground. How does she know what to ask? What does she know of me?
No one knows I came from Deliverance.
No one knows why my parents don’t come to games. Hockey may be sanctioned, but leaving the country is frowned upon. Preacher Tim wouldn’t want anyone to escape now, would he?
Some people assume I don’t have any parents.
I let them think it.
But her… maybe she knows me just as well as I know her.
“What parents?”
She frowns. Then she says, “I have to go.”
FORTY-THREE
FAUST
“What did you fucking do to her?”
Sylvan is mid-lunge, his back to me, but even in this position, I can see his head tilt and I know he’s got that stupid cocky grin on his face.
The locker room is chaos. “Soldier” by Eminem is playing way too loud and usually I’d have headphones on but not right now. Not less than an hour before we’re on the ice and all I want to do is hit my own teammate.
Sylvan picked a corner of the room away from everyone else, only a concrete wall at my back, but I can feel the team’s eyes flickering over to us.
For once, I don’t give a fuck.
I take a breath in through my nose, out through my mouth.
I think of Neve on top of me last night. How close we were in my car. The way she was so wet for me, her breathy moans, her perfect lips saying my name.
Then that smack against the back window.
I convinced myself it was ice hitting the car; plausible, but I had a feeling that wasn’t it. Neve is already on edge though and Ididn’t want to shoot up her anxiety, especially after I’d just given her an orgasm.
Her first from me.
And last night it took all I had in me not to fuck her in my bed, her warm body curled up against mine. But after I got used to all the blood in my body rushing to my dick, it was shockingly easy to fall asleep.
She’s too much of a comfort, and I know I should stay away. I won’t be here long, and who knows where the hell I’ll end up. And what about her? She won’t tell me exactly what it is she wants to do, and there’s no way in hell she’d follow me across the continent. It’s beyond mad to even think about it; we barely know one another. But even as much as I keep repeating it to myself, I’m not entirely sure it’s true.
