Page 23 of Sexting the Coach (Pucking Daddies #6)

Weston

“Weston.”

I startle, looking up to find Elsie standing in the door to my office. Today she’s wearing her Squids polo and a pair of black slacks. I can’t stop thinking about her in my shorts, my shirt.

In fact, I can’t stop thinking about her, period.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of me and her. The holidays came and went, with Elsie brushing off my questions about her going home to spend time with her family. It was all the same, because I wasn’t planning on going home to Boston, either.

Having a few days of break from games and practice gave us plenty of time to spend together at my place. According to her, Mabel and Hattie went home for the holidays, and she didn’t want to go back to her apartment alone.

Over the past few weeks, she’s completely given up the pretense of sleeping in the guest room. In the evenings, we watch movies together in the living room, and I’ve been treating her to a home-cooked meal every night.

Then, this morning, she woke me up cheekily, with her ass in my lap again, and I had the errant thought that I haven’t been this happy in a long, long time.

After that first morning, we were in the shower together.

That’s when we quietly unfussily agreed to a friends-with-benefits situation.

Or a fake-dating-with-benefits situation, I suppose.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about the details.

I was thinking about the logistics of fucking her in my shower, which she turned down for “safety reasons.”

This morning, after our shared shower, we stepped out and started to dry off when Elsie got a call from Mabel. According to her, their apartment is no longer surrounded by the press. The news cycle moved on, just like I knew it would.

Elsie disappeared into the guest room, and when she came out, she had her duffel packed up. I wanted to grab the strap, tell her to stay with me, but with the paparazzi gone, there was no reason to.

This is the first time I’ve seen her since we parted ways this morning, and it takes all my control not to stand up, cross the room. Do something I very much should not be doing in this office with her. Even though we’ve spent the entire week together, it’s like I can’t get enough.

“What’s up?” I ask, clearing my throat and trying to force my mind back into the moment, trying to ignore the thoughts of taking her in my arms, bending her over this desk right now.

It’s not really working.

“The doors are locked,” she says, and for the first time, I take a second to examine her expression. Slightly panicked, breathless. It whisks away some of the lust building up inside me, makes it a little easier for me to concentrate on what she’s saying.

“Yeah,” I say, brow wrinkling. “They always lock after six. Don’t you have your key card—?”

“No,” she shakes her head and jerks her thumb behind her, in the general direction of the nearest employee exit. “They’re locked from the inside. Like, I can’t get them open. To leave.”

I stand, eyebrows still drawn down low. Although we’d agreed that sex is very much on the table between us, we hadn’t gone much further than that in the confines of what this relationship means.

“You shouldn’t leave without me,” I mutter, darting a glance at her as we walk down the half-lit hallway toward the exit. “Or at least without someone to walk you to your car.”

“I rode with Mabel,” Elsie says, raising an eyebrow at me. “I was just going outside to get some air.”

My cheeks grow a touch hot, though I’m not entirely sure why. Any man wouldn’t want her walking around outside by herself. It’s not like I’m declaring my intentions or something.

We walk wordlessly the rest of the way to the employee exit, where a dull red light flashes lazily every couple of seconds. It looks the same as it does every night, and I push against the exit bar, fully expecting the door to open.

When it doesn’t, I pull back, step to the side, and flash my key card against the pad as Elsie says, a touch sarcastically, “Yeah, I tried that.”

The keypad doesn’t even flash red—it does nothing at all.

“That’s not good,” I mutter. Together, we walk around the arena, moving from door to door, finding every way out shut. A muted sense of claustrophobia starts to grow in my chest, but Elsie is clearly starting to freak out, so I keep my own shit under control.

“What would happen if we pulled the fire alarm?” Elsie asks, starting to sound more and more panicked. Her cheeks are flushed, baby hairs framing her face, frizzy. “Or if there actually is a fire? Are we going to burn alive in here?”

“Hey,” I put a hand on her shoulder, meeting her eyes. “Deep breath. We’re okay. Just don’t start a fire, and we should be good.”

She holds my gaze for a second, then forces a breathy laugh. “There go my plans for the night.”

I make her sit on a bench while I step to the side and pull out my phone, thumbing through my contacts. One by one, I make calls until I find someone who knows what’s going on.

“It was in the company-wide email,” Karlee Meyer says, and though I can’t see her, I can imagine her pinching the bridge of her nose. “System update tonight. Everyone was supposed to be out by four.”

I glance over at Elsie. Apparently I’m not the only one who just skims those emails.

Karlee grumbles more, bemoans her perfect Friday night off, then promises to send someone over from the security company to let us out. There are still guys on the property.

Ten minutes later, a security guard arrives on the other side of the doors, but he can’t get them open, either. A specialist from the security systems IT team is called.

“How long do you think this is going to take?” Elsie asks, shifting her weight side to side.

I glance at her, “Why? You got a hot date?”

“Actually,” she says, a flash of heat crossing her face. “Yeah. I mean, I thought I did.”

The sound of that goes right to my cock. I shift, and the longer our gazes hold, the more I’m thinking about where in this building is going to be the best spot to get her clothes off.

At that moment, my phone rings.

“Karlee,” I say, but she cuts me off.

“Okay, I just got word from the systems IT team that you’re not going to get out of there for a few hours,” she says, the words coming quickly and on a single breath out, turning hard.

“Let this be your reminder that every inch of that arena is covered in cameras. Don’t you dare make me—or anyone else—see something that I don’t want to. Is that clear?”

Elsie lets out a choked little laugh, and I realize Karlee’s voice is loud enough that she can hear her, even without the phone on speaker.

“That’s clear,” I say, ending the call a minute later and meeting Elsie’s eyes again.

“Too bad,” she whispers, tilting her head. “I guess we’ll just have to find something else to do with ourselves.”

“You know,” I say, as Elsie and I take the ice together. “I’m pretty sure my PT forbade me from getting on the ice.”

“She’s giving temporary permission,” Elsie says, pushing off gracefully and gliding in front of me, looking backward over her shoulder. “Just this once. And you need to be careful. Nothing too drastic.”

“Noted.”

At first, after the call with Karlee, Elsie and I had gone up to my office to wait it out, but that quickly proved to be too difficult, and she suggested we come down to the ice instead, to literally “cool off.”

I don’t want to cool off. Since this morning—fuck, since the first moment I saw her months ago—I’ve been able to think about nothing else.

But Karlee’s voice was still ringing in my head. And the last thing I need is to piss off the GM again. So here I am, on the ice, trying not to think filthy thoughts about the woman skating in front of me.

For the first time in a while, it starts to become surprisingly easy.

“Hey,” I say, pushing a little harder than I should to come shoulder-to-shoulder with her. “You’re good.”

Elsie shoots me a smug grin, “Really, Weston? Are you telling me you didn’t Google me yet?”

“The hell are you talking about?”

Elsie laughs, performing a little twirl that sends her braids flying, and my mouth practically dropping open.

When she’s done, she turns, skates backward, and lifts a leg into the air while saying, “I could have competed in the Olympics. You really thought, growing up in my family, that I didn’t spend a childhood on the ice? ”

Like always, the moment she mentions her family, or her past, something shutters on her face, and it’s like I can see her recognizing her mistake. I’m not going to let her back away from it this time.

“You’re right,” I say, holding her gaze. “I definitely should be Googling people more.”

She turns and starts to skate away, but she forgets that I grew up on the ice, too, and I’m in front of her in a second.

“What was that, Elsie?”

“Nothing,” she says, letting out a quick breath, then turning it into a quick laugh. “Nothing—let’s just think of something more interesting to talk about.”

“I can’t think of anything more interesting than the stuff you’ve been hiding.”

“I’m not hiding anything, Weston.”

Her voice is tight. Something tells me I should let up, but I can’t. It’s never been in my nature to back away from something like this.

“Elsie.” I skate in front of her, stopping her in her tracks. My hip twinges and I ignore it. Her gaze drops to the precise area of the pain, but I don’t let her change the subject. “Tell me about your brother.”

I fully expect her to use her skating abilities to dodge me, pirouette—or whatever—away, but she just sighs and drops her eyes to her skates. The droop of her shoulders when she begins to speak is like a weight has been lifted from them.

“We were teenagers,” she says, her voice soft, and together, wordlessly, we start skating slow and easy, moving around the rink.

“We used to go on the ice together all the time. Drew had a D-1 scholarship lined up, and he was only a junior in high school. We had a rink in the backyard—obviously, my dad made sure of it—and we’d go out there together, sometimes to practice, sometimes just to goof off.

I was begging Drew to help me with some of my lifts, even though figure skating wasn’t his sport. ”

She hasn’t even gotten to the end of the story, and I can already see where it’s headed. The brother whose occupation she’s not quite sure about. Them not speaking. The weird tension between her and her dad at the charity gala.

“I was trying to do a basic lift,” she says, her voice growing quiet, slightly choked.

“We miscommunicated. My skate…I hit his leg. There was blood everywhere, and we fell to the ice. At first, I thought that I’d cut him, and that was what caused the most damage.

But the cut was minor. It was my weight on him when we fell. That’s what tore his ACL.”

I don’t mean to, but I suck in a breath through my teeth. Torn ACL is the death blow no athlete wants to hear. As much as you train and heal and work, you never really come back from something like that.

Luckily, Elsie just nods, not taking my reaction too hard. “Yeah,” she says, breathing out. “It was…not fun. And it was my fault. That’s why—I mean, I know it’s stupid, but I just have this feeling that if I can help one guy avoid injury, or get better, that it will make up for it.”

“Stop.”

I pivot and turn, stopping at the entrance to the rink, facing her.

There’s a single tear running down her cheek, and she hastily wipes it away.

My mind flashes back to the flag football game.

I remember the look on her face when we went down, the panic in her voice, and suddenly it all clicks into place.

“First,” I say, moving closer to her, cupping her cheek in my hand. “It’s not stupid. The way you feel is never stupid. And second, if anyone is holding an accident against you, that’s on them. Something like that shouldn’t dictate the rest of your life, Elsie.”

Not unkindly, she lifts her chin to me, “Oh, like a hip injury?”

I bite my tongue. “That’s not the same thing.”

“You spend so much of your time hiding it. Pretending like it’s not real. That’s the same thing I’m doing with my brother, but at least I’m willing to admit that I’m avoiding it.”

“If I’d been honest about my injury,” I say, through gritted teeth, “I would have been pulled from the ice. They might not have picked me for the coaching spot.”

“How could you know that?”

“I didn’t,” I admit, steeling myself, “but even though you grew up around the NHL, you have no idea what it’s like.

To rely on your body for performance, for pay, for your entire career, only to have it fail spectacularly.

For other people to comment on it and analyze it.

Pick it apart and list all the ways you should have been different.

This league is all about strength. And the moment you reveal your weakness is the moment you’re on the way out. ”

“But having an injury isn’t a weakness,” Elsie protests, moving even closer to me, and although we’re standing on the ice and I should be cold, my entire body fills with heat at her proximity.

“If anything, it shows how much stronger you are. To fight through that pain and still show up everyday, just like everyone else.”

“Yeah, well,” I finally tear my gaze from hers, swallowing, not sure what to do with the information that she thinks of me as being stronger. It’s probably not true—probably just something she tells all her PT patients to up morale. “The rest of the league doesn’t see it that way.”

The rest of the league doesn’t see it that way, and that’s something I’ve known from the first time a recruiter came to one of my high school games. In fact, it’s something I knew from the first time I laced up a pair of skates.

Weakness isn’t tolerated in hockey.

“Maybe someone needs to change that,” Elsie says, quietly, and I can’t stop myself from returning my gaze to hers, meeting those gorgeous, honey-brown eyes.

Maybe someone should. I’m just not sure I’m the one to do it.