Page 15 of Puck Me Sideways

I shook my head, my curls hitting my cheeks. “I’m not your toy, Solace,” I whispered back.

“But I want to play with you,” he countered.

My heart shattered in my chest. I tugged my wrists free of his hold and miraculously, he let me go. “Toys get replaced. Set aside. I’ve been the toy that was left. You know that.” I turned my head away, horrified when my vision blurred.

His hand at my neck turned my head back. Damnit, I couldn't escape him at all. “You’re not who I’ll ever be bored of Hallie. I promise.” His dark eyes bored into mine, and I so desperately wanted to believe him.

“What if you just don’t know yet?” I couldn't take that heartbreak again. I knew I couldn't. “The last time… it hurt so bad.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this to anyone, let alone him.

A cough at his back stiffened his body. “What do you want?”

“Just the coffee, Solace,” a sugary sweet voice I knewthat I knewtoo well floated over us like a cloud of sticky cotton candy.

I broke back from Solace with a gasp to find two gold talons curled into his bicep.

She can get her fingers around his shoulder better than I can.

My rational thought was obliterated as I found his eyes, the discontent there. He shrugged her hand off, his mouth turned down.

“This is my girl's coffee. The other stuff’s over there,” Solace dismissed her without another look.

It can’t be. Don’t check.

But I had to, peeking about his shoulder. Kylie Smart, the same OW in my relationship with Travis smiled back at me, baring fangs I swore had been sharpened since the last time I saw her years ago. Somehow her body looked more toned, more golden. Even her hair was blonder. The line of her jaw stood out as more angular.

I had no idea how that was possible, but the girl who gave me so much grief and cost me a broken heart as well as a broken relationship stood in the same damn room as me, and just had her claws in my man.

My man.

I shouldn’t have looked.

“Hallie,” Solace murmured. Concern and authority laced his voice. “Talk to me.”

I shook my head, pushing at his chest then his shoulder when he wouldn’t budge. “Let me out.”

He sighed and stepped back, his fingers trailing my wrist. “Tonight?”

I shook my head, kept my eyes on my floor and scurried back to my desk, setting up my work for the afternoon behind a towering in tray that thankfully allowed me to hide from everyone else. Kylie didn’t approach me. I called that a win, but then the doubts crept in.I walked away from Solace. She had her hands on him.The familiar tendrils of panic latched into my heart, all too ready in shred mode as I sat frozen at my desk, and didn’t leave.

I hid. Because I couldn’t see that, not again.

Solace didn’t approach me for the rest of the day. I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Nor did I see him when I headed for my bus, my single footsteps my only company for once.

When I got home to my cat, Mica, my hands shook so much I could barely feed her. Shaking and crying stupidly over something that happened so long ago. Something I thought I’d managed to extricate myself from.

Stumbling into my room without turning on a single light, I sat on my bed, thumbing through my phone. Travis’s number sat right below Solace’s. I held my breath as I ran the pad of my finger over the screen. Calling him would be ludicrous. We didn’t part on good terms, and calling him now would look like begging.

Shaking my head I tossed my phone onto my bedside table, then remembered to charge it. I yanked my clothes off over my head, slipped into bed without eating to Mica’s greatest disgrace, and tried to fall asleep.

Sometime after midnight, I half woke from a dose of a half-dream, half horrendous nightmarish memory about a puck bunny in a pink dress and gold nails wrapped around Solace to realise I hadn’t sent him a message to say I’d gotten home safely. I rolled over, knocking Mica off the bed. She mewled piteously and leapt off the mattress. Her feet pattered across my floor as she slipped out of the bedroom door to find somewhere else to sleep for the rest of the night, leaving me alone and feeling more guilty than ever.

I flicked the screen on my phone and nearly blinded myself. Two AM. It was way too late for me to message a man and risk waking him. Especially someone like Solace who went home the last thing at night and got up hellishly early to be there when I opened the office too. I couldn’t wake him now, if he even cared after the way I blew him off.

Fresh tears tracked my cheeks, the overwhelm of the whole week leaving me shuddering and alone through the coldest hours of the night. I pressed my cheek to the cold pillow, and tried not to remember the night that the last hockey player brought home a puck bunny to the bed we shared because he’d been drunk enough to forget I lived there too.

* * *

I opened my door the next morning—well, the same morning, really—grumpy, tired and bitching about leaving my thermos in the Chimera’s kitchen. I wasstillmuttering about it while pushing Mica’s head back in the door so she didn’t escape and so distracted that I nearly screamed at the behemoth standing right on my freaking doorstep.

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