Page 9 of Puck Me Twice Over

Somehow I found myself at the edge of the bed and had to worm my way back to the middle.

“I can hear you fighting with nothing but air, Flick,” Knox muttered from the sofa, a few dozen feet away.

He’d told me this was his smaller place before he turned the lights out—a slip, I suspected—because he took the words back pretty fast, but I caught it. I mean, who didn’t know Knox Vandevere? He had a blessed career as a hockey player. As everything he did. And he didn’t start life broke like most of us, anyway. His family always had money. And me… I was just a regular person with an average job and an average life.

Who decided tonight was the night I’d stay and watch a Chimeras game.

Sorry, Garrett.

But the truth was that Garrett and I hadn’t been right for each other for a long time. Not since the argument where he told me to ‘act my wage’. And if I’d been able to afford to walk away from everything right then and there, maybe I would have.

But I couldn't, and Garrett knew that. Held that one little fact over me, right up until he found the perfect place to pull the rip cord.

In the middle of a parking lot. On a storming night.

Asshole.

Asshole ex.

If Knox hadn’t been there, I would have had to walk—who knew how far—to find a bus stop or train station and pray it was a safe trip home. If Garrett even let me back in. I had my doubts.

Not once this evening had my phone gone off. He never checked where I was, if I was safe. Garrett never came looking. He discarded me. Now I slept in another man’s bed.

And I very much wanted to be here.

I wrapped the sheet around my fists, pulling them tight. The tiniest, strangled sound tore from my lips at the pain that lanced across my heart, at the mess I’d made of my life that I couldn’t escape. And in the darkness, in the silence of Knox’s condo in the hills above the city, that tiny, vulnerable sound was horrifically loud.

I pressed my sheet-wrapped fists to my mouth, biting down. Pain stung my knuckles even through the thin barrier. The night blotted out as I squeezed my eyes shut, avoiding everything. The reflected city lights below us, the star studded sky outside his windows that blurred through endless sheets of rain that never let up.

The mattress dipped under a weight that wasn't mine and I curled tighter into myself. Maybe If, like a child, I pretended I wasn't here, in his place, then he wouldn't see me. That I could hide from him, and myself. From all the fantasies I’d had of him that I pretended I hadn’t all this time.

A stupid, stupid wish, because the man who reached for me, tugging me into his embrace was very much real, and not the figment of a dream or a memory at all.

“Felicity.” My name dripped from his lips like thick honey.

Heat that matched that image pooled between my legs. God damn this man. He said my name once. A single time, and I ached. Dripped for him. My legs pulled up to my chest, forming a physical barrier even as I tried everything I could to ease the pressure building between my thighs without touching myself. Then he’d know, and that would be worse.

So much worse.

“Flick.”

I closed my eyes. Squeezed them shut tight like I used to do when we played games when we were just kids. The sweet sort of games that always had a sense of underlying tension that Knox never crossed. Back then he was a gentleman.

Who had he become?

“Stop,” I whispered, but I didn’t mean him.

I uncurled when thick, roughened fingers caught my chin. Knox was relentless, refusing to acknowledge my reluctance, tugging my face up to his until I gave in. Warm breath brushed across my lips, his so close that the tingles I remembered from our first dates started, dragging across sensitive skin though he’d barely touched me.

And that heat below pooled and pooled and pooled.

My lips parted and all the usual lies tumbled out. “I shouldn’t be here. I should be⁠—”

Home. But I wasn’t sure I had one of those any longer. The Ex—I didn’t want to even think his name—had probably tossed all my things out of the house we shared in a tantrum of epic proportions. G— He was good at those.

It’s all replaceable. I can fix everything tomorrow.

But tomorrow was an abstract concept that would come with the rising sun, so many hours from now. Both were too far away. Not close at all. Not like the Chimera sharing the only breathable air in the room with me.