It’s been an hour, and Hannah hasn’t come back downstairs. So now I am officially freaking out. What if she’s calling Jayden to complain about the horny dude he invited to Christmas? What if she’s so horrified by my proposition that she’s never going to leave that room of hers? What if… and this is the one that bothers me the most… she is up there pleasuring herself so she can resist letting me do it? Yeah, that one would be the biggest disappointment.
Because I can't stop freaking out, I text Ellery. Somehow, over the years since I started playing for the Comets, I have become friends with the owner's daughter. You'd think that was a big no-no, because not only is she the owner's daughter, but she works for the team herself. But as the last twenty-four hours have shown, I'm bad at making smart choices. Not only I am friends with her, but I've also seen her naked. Once. It was a drunken, after-the-work-Christmas-party thing years ago, which we've deemed a mutual mistake. A one-and-definitely-done thing. But we've remained friends. Good ones.
After making a roaring fire my old Boy Scout leader would be proud of, I settle myself, horizontally, on one of the massive leather couches and text Ellery.
I wait. Ellery is never more than a foot from her phone, so it isn’t long until the typing bubbles appear and her response pops up.
I frown.
Ellery’s response is instantaneous again.
I roll my eyes even though she isn’t there to see it.
It’s a hockey term but also the word we use when we feel like one of us is picking on the other too hard. I can envision her smirking at that. I look out the window and can’t even see the hot tub now because the show is falling in sheets. It’s a literal white-out.
I drop my phone on my belly and stretch. Well, every part of me but my arm. I didn’t sleep well last night. The bed is like a goddamn cloud, but it’s just being in the new environment with the burning attraction to the woman in the bedroom next door that gave me insomnia.
I sigh.
I swear the second I see she’s read the message, my screen lights up with a FaceTime request. I know I have to take it, so I roll off the couch and wander out of the great room toward the wall of sliding glass windows. I step outside as I hit Accept.
Ellery’s face fills my screen. Her brown eyes are wide. Her mouth, which is painted in a shade of pink, is so wide open that I swear I can see her tonsils.
“Dude, this is not a great visual.”
"Jeremiah Waller, do you want to fuck your captain's mother?" She hisses into the screen, like an old bitty at church sharing gossip with her pew-mate.
“Yes,” I reply because, fuck it, Ellery and I have a no-shame, no-judgement rule. “I mean, you said yourself, she’s amazing. And the kiss was sensational. So I kind of offered to be her next bad decision.”
“The kiss? There was kissage?” Ellery slaps her desk so hard I can hear the stuff on it rattle and then she leans back in her office chair.
“Kissage is not a word,” I remind her.
“Shit, Jer, you’ve jumped straight from the frying pan into the fryer,” Ellery notes and chuckles a little before her expression moves from awe to concern. “Jayden hates you. Kissage and then offering to bone his mom is not going to help with that situation at all.”
"I can't help it," I argue. "And besides, I thought she was into me too. If it's mutual and it's just a scratch-the-itch thing like we were, then Jayden never has to know. Right?"
Ellery makes a face. Her freckled button nose scrunches up, and her lips purse and she gives me the stare she has that screams 'Cut the bullshit'. So I do before she can.
“I know,” I confess. “I said I don’t want more meaningless sex. I said I was ready for something real.”
“And we made the pact to both find something real,” Ellery goes on pointing at me through the screen like I’m her ratty little terrier cross, Wayne, and I’ve chewed on her best Jimmy Choos. “No more sex for fun. Now it’s only sex with meaning.”
"It would have meaning," I argue lamely as my feet get soaked from the snow I'm standing in. I'm under an awning, but it's blowing on the deck anyway. "The meaning of it would be to get her out of my system."
Ellery rolls eyes, again. I relent. “It doesn’t matter anyway. She’s locked herself in her room and is probably going to stay there until someone else shows up and we can both pretend none of this ever happened.”
“Spoiler alert,” Ellery says. “That’s not going to happen until tomorrow night, earliest.”
“Christmas Eve?” I bark, shocked. “You honestly don’t think the roads will open until Christmas Eve?”
“It’s Vancouver. We get weather like this in the city once every five years, tops,” Ellery replies. “There’s like one snow plow for the whole lower mainland. Sorry. You’re stuck alone with her for the foreseeable future. Hope you brought condoms.”
“Who brings fucking condoms to a holiday with your straight captain, his girlfriend, and his mom, who you thought was like this late-fifties, adorable-but-not-my-type woman?” I ask indignantly. Ellery is laughing soundlessly at me and then I mutter, “So once I met her I bought some in town.”
She slaps the desk again. “You dirt ball! You are going to break the pact.”
“I am if she’ll let me, and it will be worth it,” I reply, simply admitting the truth not just to my friend but to myself and all the bears and wildlife currently eavesdropping. “I can no longer feel my feet. I came outside for privacy. I gotta go. Can you at least wish me luck?”
“I sincerely hope you don’t blow up team relations with this, Waller,” Ellery says and then she pauses and swallows, and her skin seems to go kind of grayish green. “Don’t do anything that leads to an incident I have to address, okay? You know I’m avoiding Jayden like the plague.”
“I know,” I reply and try not to think about why that is. Meanwhile, Ellery is looking more peaked by the minute. “You okay there, Isles? You look like Felicity does when she eats a cucumber.”
Felicity has this deep-seated hatred for cucumbers. She says they taste like dirt and make her puke. Ellery nods, but it's a quick, sharp movement. "Yeah. I just… too much booze. Hangover. Have fun but be good. And if you can't be good, be careful."
The screen goes dark before I can say another word. I stare out at the white wall of snow. This weather is insane. I glance back over my shoulder into the house. The fire is still going strong, but I decide to cut a little more firewood just in case and to burn off the energy this fatal attraction has built up in me.
I go back in, grab my boots, and stomp out to the wood pile. With only one useable arm, it takes me a while to build a nice pile of firewood on the back deck. I’m thankful I didn’t bother with my jacket even though my shirt is getting soaked with snow. I’m exhausted by the time I finish. That’s two workouts today. At sunrise, when I gave up on sleep, I went for a bit of a hike through the woods behind Jayden’s house. And then I jumped in the hot tub, naked, because it was so early I didn’t think Hannah would be awake. I was wrong there. So now, as darkness starts to fall and I decide on another dip, I don’t get naked. I keep my underwear on. It’s dark and not revealing, and I just don’t feel like climbing the stairs to my room to grab the trunks I brought. If Hannah wants space I’ll give it to her.
Only, Hannah no longer wants space, it seems, because after turning on the outdoor Christmas lights, peeling off my clothes and my sling in the great room, lifting the cover off the hot tub and sinking into it, she appears.
Her long dark hair is piled on top of her head, and she's wearing a bathrobe and boots. I can see a small portion of her bare calves in between. She looks a little nervous and a lot uncertain, so I break the ice. "Great minds think alike."
“Yeah.” She bites her bottom lip, and I try not to let my dick notice how hot that is. “I saw you getting it ready so that’s why I decided to join.”
“Cool,” I say trying to sound, well, cool. Not like the guy who wants to lean over, grab the tie on that robe, and undo it while also pulling her into the hot tub and kissing her senseless.
She walks closer, and her hands move to the tie as she does out of her boots. Our eyes meet. She bites her lip again. “Are you naked in there?”
I shake my head. “Kept my underwear on. Didn’t want to scare you again.”
“I wasn’t scared,” she replies immediately. “I was inspired.”
“Inspired?”
“Among other things, yeah,” she replies, and I can see red hit her apple cheeks, and it’s not a reflection of the twinkling Christmas lights around us. She’s blushing. “Inspired to do it too.”
And then she pulls on the tie of her bathrobe, and it opens and drops to the cedar deck. And Hannah Diaz, my teammate’s mother, is completely, gloriously, naked as she climbs into the hot tub beside me.