She pulls me down and kisses me and for the first time in weeks my brain goes quiet. We stumble backward into the front row of chairs. The armrest catches her hip and she laughs against my mouth and I catch her and pull her into me. She wraps her arms around my neck and kisses me like she’s been thinking of nothing else.
I sit down and pull her into my lap so she can straddle me, her knees sinking into the seat on either side of my hips with her skirt riding up her thighs. I grip her hips and pull her down hard against me and she gasps and rolls her hips and the friction is—fuck. I’m already hard and she can feel it because she does it again, a slow deliberate grind that drags her center along the length of me.
“Shh,” she whispers against my mouth, grinning.
“Don’t tell me to shh when you’re doing that.”
She does it again, purposely, and I’m losing track of the plan. I had a plan. The plan was controlled and measured and it did notinvolve me coming apart in the first five minutes because she’s grinding on me in a chair where I watch penalty kill breakdowns.
I slide my hands under her top and up her back. Her skin is so soft and so warm that I let myself have a moment to rest my hands on her before I find the clasp of her bra and undo it. She pulls back just enough to let me push her shirt up and the bra with it. She’s bare from the waist up, sitting in my lap in the video room, the screen dark behind her, and I lean forward and put my mouth on her chest and feel her arch into me so hard the chair rocks back.
She’s pulling my hair and making sounds that are way too loud for this room. Her hips are rocking against me in a rhythm she’s not controlling anymore and I have to stop this or it’s going to be over before we get to the part that matters.
I grab her hips and hold her still.
“Wait, I brought something for you.” I reach into my hoodie pocket and feel nothing.
“The laces,” she breathes. “Where are they?”
Fuck. I can see them on the shelf above my stall where I left them because I was so busy being distracted by Rodriguez noticing brand new skate laces that I didn’t want to grab them in front of him and make a huge thing about it.
“They’re in the locker room,” I say.
She pulls back and looks at me. “You forgot the laces.”
“I didn’t forget. They’re in the building. They’re just not in this room.”
She drops her forehead against my shoulder and starts laughing. “Go get them.”
“Right now?”
“No, next Tuesday. YES right now.” She climbs off my lap and sits in the chair next to mine, crossing her arms over her chest, looking thoroughly kissed and amused. “Go. Hurry.”
“Don’t move.”
“Never. I’m emotionally committed to this chair.”
I unlock the door and slip into the hallway. The wing is dark except for the glow of the exit signs. I’m harder than I’ve probably ever been in my entire life walking through a professional hockey facility to retrieve skate laces from my locker for the purpose of tying up my teammate’s daughter in the video room. The locker room is dark when I enter and I make my way to my stall at the far end, grabbing the laces from the shelf above my helmet—new, unwaxed, and soft.
I’m rounding the corner past the coaches’ offices on my way back to the video room when a door opens.
I stop so fast I almost trip over my own feet.
Coach Barrett is carrying a laptop under his arm and he’s wearing a coat like he just walked in from outside, which he did, because he’s supposed to be at home but instead he’s here, in the building, approximately forty feet from the room where Mackie is sitting half-undressed in a chair waiting for me to come back with skate laces.
“Almardon,” he says. “Forgot something?”
“Mouthguard,” I say, and my voice sounds completely normal, which is a miracle.
He nods and I take three steps past him almost in the clear when he says, “Hold on—what’s that?”
I follow his eyes down to my hand. “Skate laces,” I say.
“I can see that.” He studies me for what feels like four hundred years but is probably three seconds. “What kind of knot are you planning to use?” he finally asks.
I open my mouth but nothing comes out. Because there is absolutely no version of this conversation that I prepared for and my brain, which has been running worst-case scenarios all day, did not include the scenario where my head coach asks me about knot selection in a hallway at ten o’clock at night.
“I—haven’t decided.”
