Jaxson
Everyone on the dance floor seemed used to the sudden change in tempo, save for me and Grace. They broke apart quickly, clearing the floor — or rather, getting into place for a line dance that they were all apparently accustomed to.
I all but threw Grace away from me, but she didn’t react at all. She spun in a circle with her hands above her head like I’d meant to twirl her out, and then she pointed two finger guns at me and started moon walking backward.
I wanted to laugh, but I was too busy adjusting my fucking hard-on in my slacks and hoping the lights weren’t bright enough for anyone to notice it. I checked where most of my teammates were at the bar, feeling a little relieved to find Vince still preoccupied with Maven.
Grace smirked knowingly, but then she fell right in line with a woman next to her and started watching her steps, attempting to pick up the line dance.
I took that as my cue to exit the dance floor.
I didn’t make it four steps before I was being dragged backward.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Grace said, pulling me to line up next to her.
We were both nearly knocked over by the sudden turn and kick in the dance, and Grace laughed as I steadied her with my hands on her waist before we had no choice but to turn around again.
“Keep up!” she yelled over the music.
And I tried, I really did, but while Grace focused on the feet of everyone around her and eventually got the rhythm of the line dance, I just sort of maneuvered around everyone and tried not to be in the way.
I also watched Grace.
She was enthralling, all smiles and shiny eyes as she laughed and twirled and made friends with everyone around her. They were all giving her high-fives by the end of it, and then she turned toward me with a mischievous grin as a two-step began.
That was a dance I could somewhat keep up with.
Growing up in Alberta, I’d been to more than my fair share of country bars. Line dances never called to me, but any excuse to get close to a pretty girl had me chomping at the bit.
I took Grace by the hand and twirled her around the edges of the dance floor while another line dance took place in the middle, and then the cycle repeated itself.
We stopped dancing only long enough to take shots or refill our beers before Grace would be tugging me back out on the floor.
It had been almost an hour when I hit my breaking point, sliding through the crowd when Grace was tied up in another line dance. I checked to make sure the team wasn’t leaving yet before slipping out the back door of the bar to a small courtyard.
It was mostly empty, just a few guys at a table in the corner and a couple making out on a bench under the Edison lights. I blew out a breath, leaning against the brick wall and sucking down half of my fresh beer in an attempt to cool myself off. I was a sweaty mess, my dress shirt sticking to my chest and arms like I’d just played an entire period without a line change.
I noted the guys were eyeing me kind of curiously then, muttering to themselves. I recognized that look on their face. It was the look I got from strangers when they wondered if they knew me, when they thought to themselves, he looks so familiar.
Only the true hockey fans figured it out.
I wasn’t in the spotlight the way Vince was, didn’t have a million groupies on the Internet — mostly because I barely posted there, anyway.
But these guys must have been fans, because one of them lifted his beer and said, “Hell of a season this year, Jax.”
I tilted my beer toward him in a salute of thanks, and I really was thankful, because he and his friends left it at that. No one asked for a photo or an autograph, and I went right back to leaning against the brick wall and trying to cool down.
“I am a tipsy little nipsy!”
Grace wobbled out of the bar a little unsteady on her high heels, all but falling into me before she straightened and peered up at me.
“A what now?” I asked with a grin of my own.
“A tipsy little nipsy,” she repeated — as if it’d make more sense the second time. Then, she shimmied her shoulders a little and leaned against the wall next to me, letting her head fall back against the brick on a sigh. “I love dancing. Dancing always makes me feel free.”
“Funny. It makes me feel reckless.”
She smiled without opening her eyes, like she already knew that, like it was her plan all along.
“Well, you needed to loosen up.”
“Tell that to your brother when he knocks me back to last Tuesday.”
“He didn’t see a thing.”
“How do you know?”
“You’re still standing, aren’t you?”
She peeked one eye open at me with that, a little smile on her lips, and then she turned where she was leaning against the wall until it was her shoulder on the brick instead of her back. She scrunched her nose up at me.
“Would you rather be a fish or a bird?”
I blinked.
And then I barked out a laugh. “Come again?”
“A fish or a bird, Brittzy. It’s not a hard one.”
I opened my mouth to respond, and then just laughed and shook my head instead. “Uh, a bird, I guess.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Flying seems cool.”
Her mouth pulled to the side. “Fair. I’d be a fish, though. Imagine being able to breathe under water? And you know that feeling, when you’re just lying on your back and floating?”
She spread her arms out and closed her eyes, her face softening in a peaceful bliss.
“Everything is so quiet. Nowhere to be. No one to be. You just… exist.”
I thought I saw something sad tinge her expression then, but she dropped her arms against her sides with a slap before I could fully register it.
“Okay. How about this one. Imagine you have two miniature legs that are constantly kicking,” she said, illustrating the scenario with her index and middle finger. She pointed them down in an upside-down peace sign and wiggled them back and forth like they were walking legs. “Would you want them attached to your chin, or your gooch?”
The laugh that barreled out of me was impossible to contain, and Grace smiled wider, moving the wiggling fingers under her chin before she popped them down in-between her legs in the most unattractive gesture I’d ever witnessed from a woman.
“Come on, you gotta pick one,” she goaded.
I was laughing so hard I had a stitch in my side, watching her move those fingers back and forth between the options.
“This is the fucking weirdest question I’ve ever been asked in my life.”
“Beats talking about the weather though, doesn’t it?”
I wiped a hand over my mouth and shook my head before crossing my arms over my chest. “I don’t know. My chin, I guess.”
“Nice,” she said. “You could join a circus. Or maybe have your own show in Vegas. Oh! Would you put shoes on the feet, or just let them be barefoot?”
“Shoes, of course. I’m not a monster.”
Grace laughed, and the sound was so fucking sweet I felt it like a longing pain in my chest, the kind you get when you recall a memory of someone no longer in your life.
Maybe it was my body reminding me how off limits she was.
“I think you missed out on the gooch opportunity, frankly,” she said, and then she reached down and thumbed off both of her high heels, holding them by the straps in one hand. “Imagine how fun it could be for your… partner.”
“Is this you telling me you like to be kicked in the twat? Because weird but also intriguing.”
She snapped her gaze to mine. “Why do you think it would ever be me?”
Grace held that serious expression long enough to make the smile melt off mine.
“Fuck, I didn’t—” I cursed inwardly as my chest tightened with a zip of anxiety at what I’d said. “I was just—”
“Gotcha.”
She pointed her finger at me, no doubt delighting in the way all the blood had drained from my face. I stood there with my mouth open like a guppy as her head fell back on a loud laugh before she pushed off the wall and did a little spin, her heels twirling in her hand over her head.
She stopped suddenly, her eyes wide like she just had an idea.
“Give me your phone,” she said, holding her hand out.
I was still rebounding from her little joke, and I blamed the witchcraft she admitted to earlier for how I obeyed her command without hesitation.
Grace thumbed out her number and saved it in my phone before tossing it back to me.
“There. Now you have my number.”
I’d no sooner caught the thing before Grace was twirling again, humming to herself as her bare feet danced on the dirty ground.
I slid my phone into my pocket just in time for her to trip and fall into me.
I caught her hips in my hands as she laughed, and then she smiled up at me, holding her heels in one hand while the other just barely curled in the fabric of my dress shirt over my abdomen.
All the jokes evaporated into thin air.
I was suddenly aware of everything — the music spilling out from the bar, the warm breeze blowing down from the oaks, the way the light played with the shadow on her face, how she was pressed against me, every inch of her, and how her eyes flicked between mine as she pressed up on her toes.
Those eyes fell to my throat when I swallowed, and her tongue slid the length of her lower lip before she dragged her gaze back to meet mine.
“Want me to read your palm?” she asked.
My jaw ached from how hard I clenched it, my restraint wearing thin as I removed a hand from her hip and held it between us.
She cradled my palm in her own, dragging her fingertips along the lines that creased my skin. She tilted her head side to side on a smile, tapping one that spanned the length of my knuckles.
“Says here that you’re tired,” she said. “Like you’ve been bearing the weight of expectation for so long that your knees are buckling.”
I knew she was bullshitting, but the accuracy of that statement knocked what was left of my smile clear off my face.
Grace didn’t look at me as she moved to the next line. “But this,” she said with another tap. “This tells me you’re on the path to rediscovery, that your priorities are about to shift, and you’ll find true happiness.”
Again, more bullshit.
But it intrigued me, nonetheless.
“Oh…” she mused, squinting at a small, faint line right in the center of my palm. She held my hand up as if to inspect it closer under the Edison lights. “This is interesting.”
“What?”
“Well, you see this line here?” she asked, running her fingertip along it. “This really faint one that kind of splits into two different roads?”
I nodded.
Grace peeked up at me, the green in her eyes like a deep forest in the low light of the courtyard. “It says you’re going to kiss me one day.”
Those words hung between us, playful in nature and yet sticky like quicksand.
I swallowed, nose flaring when she guided my hand back to her hip, closing what was left of the space between us.
Don’t be fucking stupid, Jaxson.
Teammate’s. Little. Sister.
The warning might as well have been a flimsy spider web, for how easily I swatted it away.
“I thought you had a boyfriend,” I ground out, my heart hammering in my chest. I told myself to let her go, to walk away, but my hands had a mind of their own, and they only gripped her to me tighter.
“I can’t have friends if I have a boyfriend?” she asked, breathlessly — which fucked up her attempt to sound innocent.
“You kiss all your friends?”
“Haven’t kissed you yet,” she pointed out, but she pressed onto her toes, like she was daring me to change that.
And I must have been the dumbest fool in the world, because I gave in — just for a split second, long enough to run my hands gruffly over her hips and down to cup her ass.
It was a greedy, selfish motion — an urge I couldn’t fight any longer. Even if just for a split second of insanity, I had to feel her. I had to.
She gasped, sucking in a breath and holding it as I groaned and squeezed her. For such a slight little thing, she had a great fucking ass. I wondered what it would be like to spank her, to bend her over, spread those cheeks, and feast on her sweet pussy like no boy her age knew how to.
Her eyes were heavy with want as she looked up at me, as if she could see every dirty thought playing out in my mind.
As if she had her own dirty thoughts playing on a highlight reel, too.
Fuck it.
I gripped her by the back of the neck and held her there as I lowered my mouth, ready to make her premonition come true. Grace’s eyes grew wide with surprise and then drunk with desire, with need, and she gripped my dress shirt in her clutches, meeting me halfway.
But before our lips could meet, a rushing river of Ospreys barreled out of the bar, toppling over one another and bringing a chaotic blast of noise with them.
Grace was lightning quick when she tore away from me, and she spun in a little circle next to Carter as if she’d just blown out of the bar with them.
I was still shocked and leaning against the wall when Vince all but tackled me.
“There you are, Brittzy!” he said, ruffling my hair. He frowned then. “Where’s my sister?”
Before I could answer, she jumped on his back with a battle cry, and he laughed and twirled her before taking off toward the bus. The rest of the team followed, all while I chastised myself for what I’d almost done and tried to regain my fucking composure.
I shook my head at what a moron I was as I finally pushed off the wall, following the last wave of my teammates as we exited the courtyard. Maven held back a bit, eyeing me curiously as I caught up.
“You alright, Brittzy? You look like someone else just blew out your birthday candles.”
I forced a smile. “I’m great. Just drunk.”
She arched a brow like she didn’t believe me, and then we both turned when we heard a loud, shrill scream followed by peals of laughter.
Vince was sprinting circles around the bus with Grace on his back holding on for dear life, and the team cheered him on while I attempted to wrangle my common sense.
When they blew past me, Grace tilted her head back on a laugh.
Then, her eyes found mine.
Time slugged to a stop again, everything in slow motion, her hair blowing behind her and a slow, wicked smile spreading on her lips.
One night.
One balmy, rowdy night of chaos.
That was all it took for Grace Tanev to turn my entire world inside out.
