Page 41 of He Has Pluck

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After dinner and day one of our pre-playoff preparation is in the books, I go to my room in Chelsea—I can’t call it home—and pace around like a predator looking for some prey, full of banked energy, when I should be exhausted and ready for sleep. Instead, I’m wound tight with anticipation because, even though we made no plan, exchanged no words or nods or even a promising look, I know Juliette is coming here again tonight.

This time, she doesn’t knock, and a satisfied grin stretches my mouth as she flings the door open. My heart lurches into my throat, and my dick does a move that could win an Irish jig contest.

“You again,” I say, straightening my face out, commanding my body to chill.

“You were expecting me,” she says, the signature arch of her brow challenging me. “You left your door unlocked, which no one in their right mind would do in this building.”

I snort. “I have nothing to worry about. You’ve scared everyone off. You’re a legend. They’re calling you the crazy, ball-busting bitch.”

She laughs and comes to me, pulling my sweats down, her cool hands making me suck in a breath. She taunts me with a single stroke of my cock like she’s checking my state of readiness, then withdraws her hands. I take her face in my hands and back her against the door, pressing my lips against hers, my hips against hers, my thigh between hers and devour her mouth until I hear that tantalizing moan unleashing all the memories of last night like a highlight reel of orgasms and tender moments, of rising tension and the universe exploding and floating back to quiet conversation that never quite seems to lose its edge.

“I want more,” I growl into her mouth, spreading kisses over her face, and I know in my head I’m thinking I want more of what we had last night, but she must know what I mean even though I don’t say.

Except she stiffens and pushes me away. “More of what?”

I laugh because she’s back to her prickly self, and how could I forget this side of her? It’s never very far, is it? It’s what makes the edge between us always sharp, the bliss always with an element of excruciation.

“More of the same as last night.”

“Don’t be boring,” she says. “Let’s mix it up a little.”

Holy shit. My heart stutters like she’s pushed me one foot over the edge. I take a shuddering breath and drag her toward the bed by the front of her blouse, popping buttons along the way. She laughs as we fall onto bed.

“I swear this bed has its own gravitational field,” she says.

“What do you have in mind?” I ask.

“Use your imagination,” she says. “Surprise me.”

I surprise both of us as I give free reign to those sex fantasies that rise to the surface from where they’ve been hidden, dominating her, spanking, blindfolding her with a torn T-shirt and bending her over the flimsy table until it breaks from the force of my furious pumping into her as I empty. I hold onto her, breaking her fall as we crash to the floor, and she screams my name louder than the roaring of blood in my ears.

The result is the same. Sex, multiple orgasms, followed by exhaustion. One thing I don’t feel is bored. And neither does she. We crawl back into bed, and she curls into my side, playing her fingers along my abs down to the curling hair below my navel and back up again. My eyes are closed, and I could stay this way forever, just being, feeling her with me, both of us completely at ease with each other as if there’s no world at large. She moves, looking up at me.

“Tell me a deep dark secret about you,” she says. “There must be something about you, about your past, that gives you depth.”

I snort and pinch her, but something in me wants to give her whatever she asks—and something inside me needs to know more about her.

“I’ll share a secret if you do.”

“Deal.”

“How about a tragedy?” I say, and she perks up. I laugh, but it’s mirthless, not quite sad. Do I tell her about my father? But as we lie here naked together, having just had the wildest sex of my life with her, how can I hold back? Why should I bother?

“My father was a drunk. Ever since I can remember, but he got gradually worse over the years until when I was fourteen on Christmas day, I had to go find him in a bar and drag him home for dinner. That was his last Christmas.”

“Shit.” Her hand reaches up and caresses my cheek, and she turns my head to face her when I hadn’t even realized I wasn’t. Then she kisses me in a soft meeting of our lips and drops consoling small kisses all around my mouth and jaw.

Our eyes meet, and I see the empathy, the side she hardly ever shows, the caring she hides under the prickliness. My chest tightens impossibly, squeezing more truth from inside me and the kinds of things I don’t allow to see the light of day, spill out of me.

“A month later, the police found him in an alley behind the same bar, dead. When they called, they said he’d frozen to death, and I remember wondering how he could have possibly frozen with all that alcohol in him. My mother cried for the first time in a long time and for the last time over him. She told me to go the morgue to identify the body.”

“Did you cry?” She’s still, her constantly caressing hands, stopped.

“Not that day. But a few days later, at my next hockey game, when I automatically looked into the stands to find him and he wasn’t there, the tears came and there was no stopping them.”

“Did you have to come off the ice?”