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Willa
“Are you going to be obnoxiously obsessive over his neck tonight?” Kit, my best friend, asks.
“I mean, yeah, maybe,” I answer as we stride into the arena. “Probably.”
Tonight is the night that Alexander Fane plays his first professional hockey game. It’s an enormous night for him, and though he doesn’t see me as anything but his best friend’s little sister, I’m here brimming with excitement for him. Zander has been Isla’s friend since the day he showed up to play Junior hockey for the team my dad coached. Dad now coaches the NHL’s newest team, the Seattle Blades, and a couple of years back, they drafted Zan, but he’s been playing down on the farm team all this time.
Due to a player’s season-ending injury last game, they called up Zan. And his big neck. Kit and Isla always tease me about my odd infatuation with it, but I don’t care. The man has the thickest neck I’ve ever seen. I want to trail my fingers down it, lick it, taste it.
Pipe dreams, that’s what I call them. He doesn’t know I know this, but Zander is gay. When I’m not in class or studying, I work as a bartender at The Chapel, a popular gay bar. I take fewer shifts these days, as my schooling takes up so much more of my time. However, during one of my shifts, I saw him there and he wasn’t alone. Later, he’d come over to the condo I shared with Isla, and when it came up in conversation that I’d started working there, a strained look passed over his features. I never saw him there again.
His sexuality hasn’t dampened my feelings. I’ve been a little in love with him since the first night Isla dragged him home with her. He was young, only eighteen at the time, when he plopped down on the living room floor and tried teaching my toddler niece how to build a house of cards. The feelings only grew from there. My sister has excellent taste in best friends. He’s kind, generous with the little time he has, unimaginably sexy, and one of the scrappiest hockey players I’ve ever seen.
“You are so strange,” Kit says, laughing. “I want to grab one of those poke bowls before we head up to the seats.”
“Yeah, definitely. And a beer or two, I’m nervous.”
“Why? You aren’t the one playing.”
“Shut up,” I say, grimacing at her playfully. “I’m nervous for him.”
“Hockey is his whole life. He’ll be fine,” Kit reassures. I’m sure she’s right, but the NHL is different. All the players are bigger and faster. Besides, rookies get a lot of shit from other players.
Zan wasn’t the biggest guy when he showed up as a teenager to play for my dad. He worked hard to gain some bulk, but even when he was shipped off to California, he wasn’t big by NHL standards. Despite wanting to, I could only attend couple of his games these past few years. I thought it was weird to go without Isla and she’s been busy. I’m not trying to be a clingy stalker type or anything.
My sister works in fan development for the Blades. She’s also married to one of the team’s star players, Cillian Wylder. Plus, she’s a mom… finding time to go see her best friend play hockey in other states has been hard. She’s probably more excited than me to have him back in Seattle. Well, maybe not more than me. But it’s close.
Zan and I are friendly, but we’re not that close. Like, I can text him on holidays or congratulate him on big moments. Anything beyond that feels forced somehow. He keeps me at arm’s length, and I can only imagine it’s because he’s aware of my crush, which isn’t reciprocated. Because… vagina.
Sigh. If only we had interchangeable parts, and I could wake up in the morning and choose which I wanted to wear that day, penis or vag. It would make life much easier for a lot of people. Evolution failed us in that end.
There’s been plenty of times I wished I had a male’s appendage. Mostly when I’m drunk, need to pee, and can’t manage to get my panties off quick enough. But never more than when I daydream of a relationship with Alexander Fane.
“You have it bad, my friend,” Kit says when she notices me succumbing to thoughts of the unrequited. “We need to find you a good dick attached to an available man.”
“Yes, please,” I say with another solemn moan. It’s not as if I don’t date. I do on rare occasions, when a guy catches my attention either from good looks or a great personality. None holds up to the inevitable comparison. “You’re right. I need to get ahold of my schoolgirl crush and stomp into the dirt.”
“Atta girl,” Kit says, beaming. “You know Seattle is the top city in the United States for single people. And men are plentiful. They outnumber the single women by almost twenty percent. Finding you a dick to ride shouldn’t be a hardship.”
I laugh at how easily she spits out data. Kit is a statistician with a head full of these sorts of random numbers. Often, I’ve wondered what it must be like inside her head. She’s always happy and energetic, moving a mile a minute, I bet her brain is the same, constantly on the move from one subject to the next and the next. Unlike me, she doesn’t date. We became fast friends when we met on our first day on campus. I’d gotten through my lectures and stopped at Molly’s, a coffee shop on campus. When my order of an oat milk dirty spiced chai was called, someone else’s hand reached for the drink. It turned out to be my bubbly friend. It was love at first identical coffee order. Or chai, whatever. She’d moved from Maine to attend school. I found that so brave, as I only lived a five-minute walk from the university property and only a handful of miles from where I’d grown up.
We’re opposites in a lot of ways. Kit never had a great family life, while I have a close knit, although small, family. She’s always been on her own in so many ways. I, on the other hand, have been practically coddled in comparison. Mom and Dad don’t mean to do that, but growing up as the daughter of a former NHL player naturally comes with certain privileges.
Kit’s past with men hasn’t been any better than her family life. She’s sworn them off completely. It doesn’t stop her from appreciating the male specimen, but she doesn’t want anything to do with one romantically. At least for now.
Kit has been continuously tested in life. Being so close to her has taught me a lot; she grounds me, and I love her to death. I wish life had thrown us in each other’s way years earlier.
“I don’t know why I can’t just get over this crush. It’s not like I’m twelve and still figuring my way through puberty or something. I’m an intelligent woman, on her way to a PhD no less. Being hung up on a man that doesn’t think twice about me is embarrassing.”
“Stop that,” she chides. “He likes you more than you pretend. But I agree that he’s not a sensible choice. Hot, yes, absolutely. Available? Apparently not. Because you’re a catch, a dream woman. And since he hasn’t snatched you up by now, fuck his dumb ass.”
“I’d love to do just that,” I tease. “Maybe that would get it out of my system, and I could hop on the next dreamy man to come along.”
We reach the vendor that serves salmon or ahi poke as I say the words. The lady working the counter, a retiree just taking a part-time job for something to do, if I had to guess, smiles at us and then winks.
“You young women enjoy your night,” she sings happily as she hands us our food and beer. Seems even this stranger understands my need to get laid. It’s been a while. I like sex, but it hasn’t been a priority of mine lately. I just entered the doctoral program for feminist studies at the University of Washington, it’s a big course load and I don’t plan on fucking it up.
