“Nobody is coming up here.” I sink down until the water hits my chin. “Zach. You won Game 7 tonight. You made thirty-four saves. Get in the hot tub with your girlfriend and stop being a forty-year-old man about it.”
He drops the towel. He’s naked, and my mouth actually waters at the sight. When he steps into the water, I watch every muscle in his body unclench at the same time. He sinks down across from me. His head drops back against the edge, his eyes close, and he lets out a low exhale. I can see his shoulders drop three inches. He’s been carrying them around his ears since warmups.
“Good?” I ask.
“I’m not admitting you were right.”
“Your face is admitting it for you.”
I drift across to him and settle against his side. His arm comes around me automatically. We sit there with the city below us and the stars above us, which I know sounds like a romance novel. We would be the most ridiculous romance novel ever written: two idiots in a rooftop hot tub with steam rising around them, and a secret that could end everything.
“I can’t believe we won,” he says quietly.
“I can.”
“You can not. You were shaking in the parking garage.”
“I was shaking because of YOU, not because I doubted the outcome. There was never a scenario where you didn’t win tonight.”
“That’s not how hockey works.”
“That’s how believing in you works. The hockey is secondary.”
He turns his head and looks at me and—god. The way he looks at me. It makes me do stupid things. It’s why I sneak into his apartment and steal his jerseys and make him smoothies at 5 AM.
He pulls me in, his mouth hot and wet, and I'm practically climbing him to get closer. My legs lock around his waist under the water, sliding wet skin against wet skin until I’m straddling his lap. His hands are gripping my ass and I grind down on him, rolling my hips and gasping into his mouth.
"Fuck, Mackie, we can't do this here."
The jets are doing amazing things from this angle and I arch back slightly, reaching between us to grip him as I rise up on my knees to sink down on him.
"No one will know." I say, biting his lip, lowering myself a fraction more.
I shift again, taking him a little deeper as his hips buck up to meet me. His head drops back against the edge of the hot tub and I'm considering where to give him his next hickey when I hear the scrape of the door opening behind us.
Then footsteps, and a voice I would recognize in my sleep.
“Z! Bro, I went to your apartment and you didn’t answer so I tracked your phone and it said it was still in the building but since you weren’t at your place and you weren’t at mine I?—”
Rodriguez stops. He’s holding a beer and he takes in the scene: me straddling Zach in a hot tub, very obviously naked, very obviously in the middle of doing something we shouldn’t be doing on the roof of his apartment building.
Zach’s reaction is instantaneous and completely insane. Bothhands fly off my body and then fly back because he realizes that me turning around means Rodriguez gets a full show, so instead he pulls me against his chest and locks his arms around me, pulling me into him so tightly that I can’t breathe. His chin is on top of my head. I’m pinned against him.
“Rodriguez. This is—we were just—the hot tub was?—”
“Dude, relax.” Rodriguez drops into one of the deck chairs, cracks open his beer, and takes a sip with the energy of a man watching a sunset on a cruise. “I know.”
Zach goes completely still. “You know what.”
“I know about you two. Mackie and you. The whole thing.” He takes another sip. “Found out this morning.”
Zach’s hands are still clamped over my back. I can feel his heartbeat against my chest going about two hundred beats per minute. He’s holding me like I’m a grenade he’s trying to smother. A normal person would probably be mortified, but honestly I’m more focused on the fact that he looks like he might pass out and drown.
“This morning,” Zach repeats. “How did you?—”
“I ran into Mackie outside your door. She told me she was visiting Linda Smith.” Rodriguez looks at me. “Linda Smith, Mackie. The worst cover story in the history of cover stories.”
“I PANICKED!”
