Me: You’d miss me if I was gone, sunshine.
I’d barely hit ‘send’ when I cursed, then sent him another message.
Me: Thanks for the ticket.
He didn’t respond, but when I got out of the shower that night and found something in the team’s colors wrapped in clear plastic on my bed, I stared at it. And when I ripped off the packaging and shook it out to see that it was a brand new Three Hundreds jersey with GRAVES written on the back, I smiled so hard my cheeks hurt.
Taking a peek at the clock next to my bed, I saw it wasn’t nine yet and made my way to Aiden’s room, the master bedroom down the hall. His door was closed when I got there, but I knocked, listening for him on the other side.
Sure enough, “Vanessa?”
“It’s Muffin.”
He made a noise I couldn’t distinguish. “Come in.”
I turned the knob and slipped inside, leaving it open behind me. Sitting on the edge of his California king-sized bed, Aiden was busy rubbing a towel over his head. The first thing I noticed was how smooth his jaw was. Without the beard, he looked younger… nicer. I’d only seen him freshly shaved a handful of times in the past since he usually did it at night and it all grew back in while he slept.
“Did the light go out in your room?” The smug-ass dragged a towel over the back of his neck as he asked.
“You’re so funny.” I rolled my eyes so he knew how irritating I thought he was. “Dummy.”
The corner of his full mouth perked up a bit as he tossed his towel into the hamper in the corner of the room.
And it was right then that I realized he was only wearing that little piece of gold resting right by his collarbones and boxer briefs. Gray, form-fitting, made with some kind of spandex, boxer briefs.
My mouth went dry and I averted my eyes to look somewhere else—anywhere else—instead… instead of at those huge thighs I used to see all the time in compression shorts when I would take pictures of him. Or instead of that thick, shadowy bulge tucked along to the left against his leg. I locked my eyes on his dresser. “I, ah, saw the present you left me on my bed,” I noted, grasping for words.
“Uh-huh,” he muttered as I saw him stand up in my peripheral vision and make his way toward the same dresser I was trying to focus on.
What was he doing? I swallowed and peeked at the greatest butt I’d ever seen for one second before looking away again. “I just wanted to say thank you.”
The two bulky muscles lining either side of his neck went up and down. You’d never seen trapezius muscles until you’d seen Aiden’s. “I got it for free, and you needed a new one.”
I glanced at his butt one more time for a second. I was weak. Then I glanced again. So freaking weak. “They gave it to you for free?” My voice sounded strained and why wouldn’t it? I could stop staring at the greatest bubble butt and pair of thighs in the universe. I wanted to bite them. I honestly wanted to bite them.
“It’s the only one I’ve ever asked for. They had to give it to me,” he explained over his shoulder.
His comment warmed me way more than it should have, and it had me focusing on the gold chain around his neck. I wanted to ask him about his parents and why they weren’t figures in his life. I wanted to know if he’d been a pain in the ass when he was a kid. More than anything though, I wanted to find out what was his favorite thing about his grandparents was. But I didn’t. Instead, I asked his back, “Can I ask you something?”
“I said you could.”
We might get along better, but I still wanted to shank him from time to time. Something told me that would never change. “I’ve always wondered, why didn’t you play hockey instead of football?”
He turned that big, damp body around to face me as he slipped heather-gray pajama pants up his legs. Those long, size-thirteen feet peeked out from beneath the baggy hems of his pants. And that upper body…
It hadn’t gotten old, and I hadn’t become desensitized to those hard, square pecs covered with a sprinkling of dark chest hair. Or those hard slabs of stacked abdominal muscles. Those wide shoulders, trim waist, and bulging biceps only made him look that much more spectacular. He’d turned down a magazine cover photo shoot for some stupid reason the year before, and I hadn’t understood why. Even when he was at a higher weight, he still looked amazing. If he sold a calendar filled with pictures of himself in it, he could make so much money.
That was something to think about later when Aiden wasn’t busy telling me I was stereotyping the rest of his countrymen. “Not every Canadian is good at hockey,” he explained, tying the cord of his pajama pants.
I glanced at his calm face and raised my eyebrows. “Are you saying you sucked at it?”
He gave me that smug look I usually hated as he planted his hands at his waist. “I didn’t ‘suck at it.’ I’m good at most sports. I didn’t enjoy playing it, is all.”
Arrogant much?
“You’ve sat through all those interviews with me. You know everything,” he added in a way that struck a chord with me, like he was trying to tell me something I couldn’t piece together.
“You’ve always just talked about how you liked playing lacrosse, but that’s it.” For some reason, no one had ever outright asked him why he didn’t play the more popular Canadian sport than one that was predominantly American, at least as far as I could remember.
The big guy leaned his bottom against the dresser. “My grandfather enrolled me in it for a few seasons when I was younger, but it didn’t click for me, you didn’t know that?” I shook my head. “My high school’s hockey coach tried recruiting me to play for him in grade 10. I was already six feet tall. I weighed two hundred pounds, but I told him I wasn’t interested.”
While I recognized the differences between football and hockey were vast, I still couldn’t comprehend what he was trying to hint at. “What didn’t you like about it?”
“I didn’t like it. It’s that simple.” His tongue poked at the inside of his cheek and the big guy didn’t make any theatrics about what he said. “My dad used to beat the shit out of me because he could, once a week at least until I hit puberty. I’ve gotten into enough fights in my life; I’ll fight somebody if there’s a good reason, but not for a game.”
I never tried to throw myself too much of a pity party over what I’d grown up with. Over not being loved enough by my mom. Over not being important enough for whoever my dad was to stick around or at least attempt to meet me. While I definitely wasn’t as messed up as my sisters, I had a temper. I got angry easily. But I had made myself learn how to control it. I had decided early on that I wasn’t going to let that emotion define me.
I wanted to be better. I wanted to be a good person. I wanted to be someone—not necessarily someone great or someone important—but someone I could live with.
My little brother didn’t drink at all, and I knew it was because of our mom’s drinking problem. While he was four years younger than me and had spent less time in that household than I had, he remembered enough. How could he not? But I didn’t want to avoid alcohol because I was scared of what it could do to me. I didn’t want to demonize it. I wanted to prove to myself that it wasn’t a monster that destroyed lives unless you let it.
Life was all about choices. You chose what to make out of what you had. And I wasn’t going to let it make me its bitch. I could be a mature adult who knew her limits. I could be a good person. Maybe not all the time, but enough.
So Aiden’s explanation, and the fact that his motherfucking asshole dad used to pick on him, pricked at the soft, tender pieces of this place that went deeper than my heart. I knew what it was like to not want to fall into a hole that had been dug for you before you even had a chance to fill it up. It made my eyes sting.