Page 64 of Playoff

Satisfaction washes over me in the aftermath.

I’m positive I’ve never been so well-fucked, not by him and certainly not by anyone else.

“If you could bottle that, you’d be a billionaire,” I say, relishing in the warmth of his body still covering mine.

“If I could bottle it, that’s all we’d ever do—fuck and bottle.”

I smile at the thought and then a disappointed sigh escapes me when he finally releases my hands. He rolls onto his back and brings me with him, so I’m nestled against his side. Then we just lie there in silence, legs intertwined, heartbeats graduallyreturning to normal. He strokes my arm, occasionally pressing soft kisses on my forehead and along my hairline.

“You make me want to be a better man,” he says quietly.

I want to lift my head, look at him, try to read into that statement—but I’m far too sated and comfortable to actually do it. So I run my hand along his chest in slow circles instead. “What makes you say that?”

“When I’m with you, I don’t care about what my dad thinks, or what’s going to happen when the playoffs are over, or what’s next in my career. I can just be me. I’m not a minor leaguer who never made it, or a college dropout, or anything else—I’m just Blake.”

“Are you not Blake the rest of the time?” I ask softly.

“There’s very few times I can be Blake,” he admits. “With my sister, my mom, a handful of friends… but it’s rare.”

“How come?”

“Because almost no one knows me. I stopped letting people get close a long time ago. My dad sees me as this failure who didn’t live up to his potential. I know some of my college teammates do too. The younger guys on the Rebels kind of feel bad for me, like I’m the guy at the end of his career who’s never going to make it to the big-time.”

“Don’t you have close friends, though? Like Bodi?”

He shrugs. “Bodi’s the only one I call a genuine friend, and there’s a couple of guys from back home that I don’t see very often, but that’s about it. There are people who act like they’re my friend, guys I meet at the gym in the off-season… they want me to train them so they can say they train with a pro athlete. But they don’t care about me. And as long as they pay well, I don’t care. They just don’t qualify as friends.”

“I’m sorry.” I nestle closer, unsure what else I can say. It sounds so… lonely. And I don’t remember him being lonely when we were kids.

“Not your fault I’m a fuck-up.” He huffs out a sigh. “It’s been that way since college. I was always chasing something… that elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you know? No matter how hard or how fast I ran, or what direction I went, I never got there.”

“But thisisthe pot of gold…isn’t it? The Phantoms? The NHL?”

“If I play so well that they miraculously offer me a contract for next season, yes. If not, then it’s all just another dead end.”

“Then you go out there and make sure they notice you—so they have no choice but to offer you a contract.”

“If anything, I’ll get invited to training camp, where I’ll have to prove myself all over again.”

“But you can do it. You’re strong and talented and have a good head for the game. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

“Every guy in the league has those attributes—and more. And a lot of them are younger, stronger, faster.”

“You can’t worry about that. You focus on what you can control.”

“I’m trying, darlin’.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help—training or whatever—let me know.”

“I don’t want to think about all that,” he says after a moment. “I want to hold the beautiful woman I just made love to and think about how many times I’m going to fuck her before breakfast.”

“You can do both, you know.”

“Not if I’m going to make you come five times, like I promised.”

“You need to rest. Five times in one night is for the off-season.”

He chuckles, but then we’re quiet again.

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