Page 82
OCTOBER
Sienna
His Girl
It’s still early in the season but the Dragons are going strong. The game was scrappy and a few players, including Jax, uncommonly, didn’t play their best, but the team showed that they can not only play with flair, they can scrap their way back from going three goals down in the first period, too. They won the game in overtime from a stunning Jax assist and a winner from Zach.
Jax seemed distracted for a lot of his twenty-two minutes of ice time but you can never rule him out to pull off a great play. What impressed me most, though, was watching from the comms box as he skated away from the unofficial enforcer for Columbus. He was goading Jax, even dropped his gloves, looking to set the tone or vent frustration as the Dragons came back strong in the second and third periods after two smooth power plays. Every other season, Jax would have given as good as he got with his fists. Tonight, though, he showed up the opposition with his skill on the ice.
As I overheard a broadcaster say, “I’d have put money on Jax Harris landing himself in the penalty box tonight but he’s displayed a level of maturity we haven’t often seen from him.”
And another say, “If he can get a lid on his temper, Harris has got it all.”
Another declared, “He’s proving that he’ll be captain material one day.”
I was bursting with pride. Erroneously thinking that’s my guy. Because I am not his girl, no matter how mind-bendingly incredible it felt to be his on Wednesday night, all three times. It was everything I imagined. No, way more. It was the best sex of my life, physically, sure, but the way my head and my heart felt like they were experiencing nuclear freakin’ fission, was… scary as hell. Because I don’t know what the night means or meant and until I can decide that for myself, I’m not ready to have a grown-up conversation about it either.
I’m running afraid. Terrified of my own overpowering feelings. That I could get so lost in a moment with someone the way I did, out of my mind and control, defying logic and reason, breaking sensible rules that we put in place for damn good reasons. Scared shitless that if I accept what I felt, that there’s no coming back from that for me, Jax might not feel the same. He’ll break my heart more than my cheating ex ever could have.
The proof that neither of us were and we aren’t ready for what happened has been the awkwardness between us since. At first, I thought it was solely sexual tension. Every time my eyes fluttered open, he was there, naked, holding me, and I wanted him again. I was, am, insatiable for him.
But as soon as we left the bubble of my bed, we slipped back in time six weeks, to first moving in together with no clue how to function as a fake couple. Only, without the spite and irritation and with a heap of sexual tension, at least on my part.
So, I’ve handled it how I do most things: I’ve buried myself in work meetings and exercise. Even if one of those appointments was a chat with Dominic at the New Jersey Vipers – a late one, by the time I took the train back into New York and out to Long Island. It gave me a lot to think about, including how far from ideal it would be to work in New Jersey and commute to Long Island. Then I remembered I was assuming that I’d be living on Long Island, with Jax.
Another temporary job at the Vipers is not what I want long term. It doesn’t solve my problem of how on earth I start again with my PR business on a temporary employment visa – all the while breaching the terms of it by even trying.
But it would mean I’d be working in the next state from Jax. It would buy me, us, time, to figure this out, whatever this is.
As I sit on the one double bed in our hotel room now, though, Jax showering in the en suite to go out with the guys and celebrate their win and, naturally, goad their friends on the Columbus team, I’m asking myself if time will make any difference at all.
Mitch is starting to come back to work from Monday. In five weeks, Jax and I will be filing for divorce and this whole blip in my life will be over, erased, as if it never happened.
Even while I already know that a part of me has been forever changed by Jax Harris.
I jump, startled when he opens the bathroom door and steps into the room through a billow of steam, all tight torso dripping with a white hotel towel around his waist. I’m immediately cast back to how much I craved him on Wednesday night.
If I didn’t already believe the one day of rest was a myth, I do now, because I firmly believe that God spent his seventh day carving this man with painstaking precision.
How can he make the mundanity of cleaning his teeth seem sexy as sin?
“Are you sure you won’t come out with us?” he asks around his toothbrush. It’s a sign of how much time we’ve spent in each other’s company doing things like speaking, often griping, at each other while cleaning teeth or chewing on food, because I understand him perfectly.
“I’ve got work to do,” I tell him. “But thanks.”
He should be out with the guys. Having fun. Meeting… urgh, new people. Girls who want to tear off his clothes.
Yikes, I’m jealous.
Who have I become?
I pretend to be typing as he dresses, all the while wishing I had packed my little vibrating friend because watching his muscles move as he pulls on a T-shirt, gawping at the V that draws lines into the top of his jeans as he buttons them, has me clenching my thighs together.
“I won’t be late,” he says, standing by the door.
“Be as late as you like,” I tell him, not daring to move as my nipples pucker against my button-down shirt.
He gives me a barely-there smile, then nods and leaves.
