Pucking Sweet: An MMF Workplace Hockey Romance (Jacksonville Rays Book 3)
Pucking Sweet: Chapter 67

My doorbell rings. Groaning, I roll over in my bed, reaching for my phone to check the time. It’s only ten minutes after eight. God, I’m so fucking pathetic. Lukas Novikov in bed before nine o’clock at night?

Yep, this is my new normal. I wake up, play hockey, eat, go to sleep, repeat. Hey, hockey players love a good routine, right? If I’m not traveling, eating, or playing hockey, I only want to be sleeping. Why would I stay awake, when my reality is a fucking nightmare worse than anything my subconscious mind could ever conjure?

My life now is just one long horizon of endless fucking loneliness. I feel like Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, only that guy got to say he went to Mars.

Emptiness. Isolation. A primal, raw ache.

I did this to myself. I didn’t just walk away from the two best things that ever happened to me, I fucking ran. I bolted. I bailed. It’s what I always do when things get just a little bit tough. For me, the fear of losing something I want has always felt so much scarier, so much harder to bear, than the pain I feel at choosing to let that thing go.

After a lifetime of this shit, I’ve perfected the art of self-sabotage. The rationalizations come so easy now. All my usual standbys play on a loop in my mind:

I was no good for them anyway.

They don’t need me.

I bet they’re happier without me.

I only break things.

Why would anyone ever love me?

It sucks now, but this pain will eventually fade. Someday, I’ll be able to fucking breathe again without it hurting. Can you imagine if I was in any deeper when I started to pull away?

My doorbell rings again.

Fuck.

Rolling out of bed, I click on my bedside lamp. That’s right, I have two now, one for each side of the bed. And my bed is on a frame. And my walls are painted, and I have curtains. Janice and her team have been hard at work these last few weeks putting all the finishing touches together on the house. It actually looks like someone lives here now. Hopefully all the new built-in features and the kitchen renovation will help me sell it faster.

I sure as fuck can’t live here. Not when Cole installed a library on my second floor and ordered eight boxes of books to fill the shelves for Poppy. Half the book covers are pink. The asshole took the smallest bedroom off the master and converted it into a walk-in closet for her. He added an industrial fridge in the kitchen. What’s a single guy who never cooks gonna do with an industrial-sized fridge? Check it now, and the only thing you’ll replace is beer, takeout containers, and half a bottle of ketchup.

I pause halfway down the stairs as I hear my front door open.

Oh, fuck.

Did someone just break into my fucking house? My heart starts to race as I consider my options. I left my phone up by the bed, and it’s not like I own a gun. I think there’s a hockey stick in the laundry room. I’m pretty deadly with that. How do I get to it? I definitely should’ve put on a fucking shirt and some pants.

The door slams shut. “Honey, I’m home!”

Oh, you are fucking kidding me. I jog down the stairs in my boxers and socks, practically sliding on my new hardwood floors into my living room.

Cole is standing over by my front door, two suitcases and a backpack at his feet, a fistful of grocery bags in his hand. “Hey. Did you not hear me ringing the doorbell?”

“Did you just break into my fucking house?”

He brings the groceries into the kitchen. “Don’t be dramatic. It’s not breaking and entering if I have a key. Whoa—” He pauses, glancing around at the kitchen and all the new furniture in the living room. Then he grins. “Bud, this looks fucking amazing. You love the dark cabinets, right?”

“Wait, but you don’t have a key,” I shout, following him.

“You have a hide-a-key rock in your potted plant. I just used that.”

“So, you don’t have a key so much as you stole a key,” I reason, pressing my hands flat to the granite island countertop. “And then you used that stolen key to come into my house in the middle of the fucking night?”

He chuckles. “It’s not even eight thirty, Nov. We have games that start later than this. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that you weren’t invited!”

He hefts his shopping bags onto the island and starts unpacking them. “What, like I’m a vampire? You gonna rescind my invitation like you’re Sookie Fucking Stackhouse?”

“Yes!”

He pauses in his unpacking, two containers of oatmeal in his hands. “No.”

“Yes,” I say again. “God, just get out, Cole. Don’t you understand? I can’t fucking have you here.”

He tips his head to the side in that way he does. “Why not?”

Groaning, I drag both my hands through my hair. “You know why.”

“I’m sure that I don’t.” He pulls a few more groceries from the bag—eggs, milk, a package of shredded cheese. “I have absolutely no idea what goes on inside that toxic head of yours. But I can imagine it’s a lot of really terrible shit that sounds something like ‘I’m not worthy’ and ‘No one will ever love me.’”

I cross my arms over my bare chest. “Don’t make light of my personal fucking baggage.”

“I’m not,” he replies. “I’m acknowledging that you engage in self-destructive behaviors as a coping mechanism for managing your deep fear of abandonment.”

I blink twice, letting his words sink in. Then I glare at him. “So what, you’re my fucking shrink now?”

“No, I just know you,” he replies. “I know you better than anyone, Nov. Because I’m your person, remember? Before Poppy was ever even in the picture, you picked me.”

“Yeah, to be my emergency contact,” I say on a forced laugh. “It was just some form they made me fill out.”

He’s not laughing. “We both know I mean more to you than that.”

I suck in a breath, hands dropping to my sides. “Please, don’t do this.”

He arches a dark brow. “Do what? Chase you? Someone has to. If your default is to bolt every five seconds, your partners better like running. Lucky for you, Poppy and I are both athletes. Have you seen how sexy she looks when she runs?”

I shake my head. “Cole—”

His gaze hardens to iron as he points across the island at me. “Don’t ‘Cole’ me in that shitty fucking tone. I’ve been letting you handle this your way for three fucking weeks now. I gave you time to run, but now you’re done.”

“Oh, am I?”

“Yes.” He turns that finger around and taps his own chest. “I’m in charge now.”

My stomach flips at the sound of command in his tone. “What are you gonna do, huh? Gonna drag me back to Poppy on my knees?”

“Nah.” He pulls my favorite cereal from the shopping bag, setting it on the counter. “When you’re ready to face her on your own, we both know you’re gonna fucking crawl.”

Fuck, why is this turning me on?

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I’m moving in.” He turns away to put the milk, eggs, and cheese in my pathetically empty fridge.

“You’re…what? But Poppy—”

“Is perfectly fine,” he says over me. “Hell, she might even enjoy having me out of her hair for a bit. That’s a small fucking apartment. She’s set with three cartons of Thai food, two Hallmark Christmas movies, and a month’s supply of bath products. If she needs anything, she’ll call me. And she knows I’ll come running.”

Ignoring the rest of the groceries, he slowly starts prowling around the island, all his attention focused on me. “Because that’s what I do, Lukas. I’m a Leo, and I chase after the things I want. I hunt them down, I hold them in my claws, and I shred them the fuck open until I get to their tender beating hearts…and then I devour them. I take them inside me until they become part of me. Her heart is my fucking heart now.” He presses his hand to his chest, fingers splayed. “It beats in my chest. You wanna feel where yours beats?”

I swallow my nerves, not moving. Desperate to make this stop, I say the only thing sure to send him away. “Nothing’s changed, Cole. I still don’t want kids.”

“Let’s just take this one step at a time, yeah?” He sounds like a physical therapist outlining a rehab regimen. “Because you’re right, how could you ever risk loving a child and letting it love you in return when you believe, to your core, that you’re unlovable?”

“Fuck, I’m not doing this.” Panic rising, I turn away, racing for the stairs.

“You’re not ready to tell Poppy you love her, and that’s fine,” he calls after me. “You’re not ready to tell me either, and that’s also fine. God knows you’re not ready for a big happily ever after with commitment, and babies, and that chocolate lava cake in Aruba! But I’m gonna get you ready because I’m an insufferable fucking asshole who’s too Leo to function, and I love you, Lukas Novikov!”

His words chase me up the stairs and into my bedroom. Slamming the door, I try to block him out. I can’t do this. I can’t let him in. I can’t let him care about me. A few days of this, and he’ll get tired and frustrated and go crawling back to Poppy, and then I win. My freedom will be restored. I can survive having him here. I can resist the urge to fall at his feet and beg him not to leave me.

After all, it’s just a few days…

It’s been four days, and I’m totally fucked. The asshole shows no signs of letting up. Cole is like this six-foot-three parasite that’s crawled into my house and infested every part of my life—my fridge, my DVR, my laundry pile, my fucking bed.

Yeah, on the first night, he gave me an hour to cool off before he came tiptoeing into my bedroom. I was laying there with the lights off, wide awake. I told him to leave, and he told me to shut up. Then he stripped down to his boxers, got in my bed, and fell asleep in under five minutes.

He hasn’t touched me. Hasn’t even tried.

Frankly, I don’t know what I want here. So long as he keeps not touching me, I get to feel this exquisite squirming, aching, bleeding kind of pain of desperation that is really pairing well with my crippling doubt and self-loathing.

But if he does touch me…well, then I’ll get to shatter like a glass Christmas ornament, fall at his feet, and beg him to fuck me. Knowing Cole, if I beg prettily enough, he’ll do it.

But so far nothing. Not even a casual handshake.

What he is doing is saying he loves me a hundred times a day. He’ll ask me for the remote, I’ll hand it to him, and he’ll say, “Thanks. You know I love you, right?” I finished the last of the milk and put the carton back in the fridge (just to piss him off), and he just tossed it in the trash with an, “It’s fine. I still love you.” He crawls into my bed at night and turns off his lamp with an “I love you so fucking much.”

I’m gonna break. This is harassment, right?

Did I mention the pictures?

Yeah, I think one whole suitcase he brought over was just pictures of us. He blew them up from phone pics and slapped them in IKEA frames, staging them all over the house. He put a picture of Poppy and me right on my bedside table. It’s the two of us snapped from behind in her kitchen. He must have taken it when we were making granola. She looks so good in her little silky pink shorts, her blonde hair in a messy braid over her shoulder. She’s looking up at me like I hung the moon, and I’m laughing down at her like she’s the funniest goddamn person I know.

Yeah, seeing that picture was a punch right to the chest.

He hung more pictures in the hallway. There’s a large one of the two of us, an action shot from the ice a few weeks ago. The asshole even found some old pics from our Thunderbirds days. I was in a bleached hair phase. It was awful.

He put the framed yacht selfie of the three of us in Poppy’s library room near the cozy reading chair. Pictures from karaoke night—me on the stage, Poppy too. I opened my underwear drawer this morning and got a nice little jump scare. Our dick pic. He printed it out and framed it like a total fucking lunatic.

He can’t mean this, right? Or maybe he means it for now. But shit like this can’t last. No one can ever be this happy. The other shoe always drops. People lose interest. They replace another shiny object. They fade away.

Okay, most people fade away. Apparently, Leos don’t.

I make my way down the hall to the bedroom to replace Cole is already there. He’s sitting shirtless on the bed in a pair of shorts, eyes on his phone, one foot propped up on a bunch of pillows. His heart stuff means he sometimes deals with swelling in his ankles. Most nights, if he’s not icing his knees, he’s propping up his feet.

He was gone most of the night, having dinner with Poppy since we leave tomorrow for a quick away. Thinking of them together, laughing and happy without me, was a perfect kind of torture. Did they fuck? Does she miss me?

As if in answer to my question, Cole glances over his phone. “Poppy says hi.”

“She can say it her own damn self,” I mutter. “We still work together.” I step into the bathroom and flip on the light to brush my teeth.

“You could be living together,” he calls over the sound of the running water. “She could be sitting in that tub soaking in a salt bath right now. She could get out, towel off, and crawl between these sheets and fall asleep with your cock in her hand.”

I spit into the sink, putting my toothbrush away. “Don’t be a dick.”

“Don’t keep her waiting much longer.”

I go still, hands on the hem of my T-shirt. “She’s waiting for me?”

He rolls his eyes, focusing his attention back on his phone. “Yeah, ’cause she’s not the asshole I am. She still thinks you deserve space and time to process your feelings on your own. Childhood trauma is complex, Nov, and she respects that. But she’s ready to start being happy again. She wants to be happy with you.”

My heart drops with my shirt to the floor. “She’s not happy?”

“Half her heart is missing,” he replies with a shrug. “Are you happy?”

I just sit on the bed, leaning back against my stack of pillows.

“Wanna hear something cool?” he says after a minute.

“Sure.”

We do this at night. We scroll on our phones and read out funny headlines and share cool animal facts. I’m expecting him to show me footage of some deep-sea jellyfish. Instead, he plays an alien sound. It’s this weird womp-womp-womp heartbeat-sounding thing—

“Oh shit.” I glance his way. “Is that…”

He nods. “Yeah. That’s the heartbeat.”

We’re both quiet for a moment as we listen to it.

He shuts it off, a tense silence filling the empty space between us on the bed. “I’ve been trying really hard to keep it all together for Poppy, and just be there for her, and be excited…and be hopeful.” He turns to look at me, tears in his eyes. “But the truth is that I am so fucking scared, Nov.”

I take his hand. “What? Why?”

“I want it to be yours,” he says, squeezing my hand. “I want it to be yours so fucking badly.”

“Why?” I say again.

“Because you don’t have my heart conditions. Nov, what if I hurt him? What if I set him up to fail? You can’t get far on a weak heart. Trust me, I know.”

“Hey.” I roll up to my knees and grab his face in both my hands. “Stop. Do you hear me? Enough. Have the doctors given you any cause for concern?”

He shakes his head. “No. They say development looks normal.”

“So then cling to that,” I say, my tone firm. “Do you have a picture?”

He nods.

“Show me.” Anything to calm him down and get his mind out of the bad place. I let him go, and he shows it to me. It’s just a black image with a little white thing floating in the middle that looks like a peanut. “Is that it?”

“That’s him,” he replies with another nod.

My heart stops. “Him?”

He smiles. “Yeah, it’s a boy. We’ll have the full anatomy scan in a few weeks, but the doctor is like seventy percent sure. Poppy calls him Lentil.”

“Well, we’re changing that,” I mutter, my eyes locked on the phone screen.

Poppy’s having a boy, and Cole wants it to be mine. Another Novikov, with her pointy chin and my bad attitude? Oddly enough, I can picture it, a preppy little kid wearing Oshkosh and talking with his hands on his hips, just like his mom. He’ll be a terror. He’ll break my stuff and steal my car keys and talk his way out of everything because he’ll have her blue eyes.

Fuck.

“Nov…”

I glance up at Cole, seeing the depth of his anxiety etched on every line of his face. “What?”

He groans, dropping the phone to his lap. “I don’t know how to…I don’t want to cross this line or push you. I mean, there’s pushing you, and then there’s pushing you—”

“Just say it.” I wait, heart in my throat.

“Will you hold me?” he whispers. “Just for a minute. I just wanna try it out.”

“Yeah,” I say on a breath. “Yeah, Coley, I’ll hold you.”

We turn off our lamps, set aside our phones, and lie down on the bed. Unsure of exactly what he wants, I slide over across the middle of the bed onto his side. He rolls over, making space for me at his back. I slot myself in as the big spoon, wrapping one arm around his waist as I tuck the other up under the pillow.

We settle into each other, Cole, weaving our fingers together and tucking my hand up against his chest. We lie there, the heat of our skin transferring until it feels like we’re a human furnace. I’m not asleep, and I know he’s not either.

Brushing my lips to his shoulder, I whisper the words sitting heavy in my fragile, skittish heart. “I miss you so goddamn much.”

Lifting my hand to his lips, he kisses my knuckles. “I didn’t know I was looking for you until I found you. Now that I have, I’m not letting you go.”

I breathe a sigh of relief, nestling my face at the nape of his neck. His comforting scent surrounds me, and I shut my eyes tight. For the first time since I bolted in LA, I don’t try to crash into the oblivion of sleep. I stay present. I hold him in the dark, and I let myself imagine the possibility that someone could stay. I imagine that someone could really want me…love me.

Feeling bold, I imagine I could let them.