Chapter 12

Sometimes I wish there was gps for writing. I knew where I wanted to go but I wasn't sure how to get them there and what his motivation would be and then it came to me all at once. I hope you like the chapter.

 

He can be excused for feeling like a first time home seller, nervously watching her run her fingertip along the top of the chair rail in the newly renovated and still empty dining room. He has followed her around the house, in and out of all of the empty and mostly dark rooms and she has yet to utter a single sound. None bad, but none good either. 

“It’s probably not your taste. I don’t even know if it’s mine really but I picked out pictures from magazines and approved paint chips and....” She holds up a solitary finger and the rest of his words, mostly gibberish to fill up the silence, evaporate. 

“It’s nice, it’s fine,” she says quietly as they walk into the kitchen, a room that has made Mario’s wife sigh and his own mother hug him tearfully. He knows it looks like something out of Better Homes and Gardens but she still is yet to say a word.

“That’s a gas range,” he points out as she stops to run her fingers over each raised burner, “and a convection oven which I’m told is good for baking,” he adds. She nods, once, as if only to indicate that she has heard and understood his words, which only serves to signify that he has yet to fall into Swahili through sheer nervousness. “The freezer’s on the bottom,” he mutters as she opens the empty but humming side by side stainless steel fridge, “and the microwave and toaster oven match,” he points out, remembering that Nathalie had told him it was important that they do. “There’s even a kick plate, at the island and one over by the sink that has this vacuum thing attached and sucks up crumbs,” he adds, demonstrating with the press of his own toe. She watches, nods and then turns to open a cupboard, an empty cupboard. “If you hate it...,” he begins, unsure of how he will end that sentence. Will he renovate for her? Bring in an interior design consultant with more paint chips, more fabric swatches? He closes his eyes and silently reminds himself that he should not care if she likes it or not. It’s a gift and a temporary one at that. She should just be grateful. 

Her silence; however, appears to say otherwise. 

“So...why do you not live here exactly?” she asks, her back still to him as she walks into the adjoining living room, running her fingertips along the back of the oversize saddle leather couch. “I mean apart from the fact that it’s obviously meant to be a family home and yours isn’t here all the time?” 

“That’s just it,” he agrees, reaching to turn on the light, flooding the room with a soft golden glow. Turning he finds her watching him and the sentiment in her eyes makes him pause. After all he’s done, all he’s put her through, he still catches her looking at him as if she can’t believe that he is real and all at once he feels unworthy of her adulation or anyone else’s. “I want a family, a big family.”

“Your very own hockey team huh?” she smirks and he sighs at hearing the familiar refrain. 

“You know that reality show with the nineteen kids and counting?” he teases, just to watch her eyes get wide again and then laughs. “I don’t know about that but a few, four or five maybe and yeah I guess that when I saw this house I thought it looked like the kind of house I wanted my family to live in.”  She looks thoughtfully around the room, like she’s imagining it filled with laughter and children and the half smile tugging at the corner of her mouth as she does makes his hands itch and his mouth get dry because he can picture it too and in the middle of all of it, he can see her. 

“It must be because you were an only child for so long,” she says suddenly, that Mona Lisa smile turning into a smirk, “the wanting a bunch of kids thing.” He nods because he knows it to be true even as he realizes that the she’s teasing him, like they’re friends, and it makes him smile. 

“I always wanted some brothers to play with,” he admits, thinking about the big back yard and the pool that will now need a security fence and he adds that to the running total in his head labelled ‘baby proofing costs’.

“Yeah for your pre-breakfast shinny game,” she says, finishing his thought. Normally he’d get the heebie-jeebies when a girl knows those kinds of facts about him, even though he realizes that they can be picked up from just about any magazine or off of any internet site but strangely, right in this moment, he finds it comforting that she knows those little things, that they are facts between them that are simply understood and need no explanation. “Is there a basement?” she asks, very suddenly, her eyes alight. 

“Yeah,” he smiles broadly, knowing exactly what she is thinking, “wanna see?”

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The infamous dryer is not there but a close facsimile, only slightly dented, sits open against the far concrete wall with about eight feet of bare concrete in front of it. A number of sticks and an ice cream bucket full of pucks stand nearby as if waiting to be invited to play. It’s impossible not to smile at the set up and Fern doesn’t even try to hide her grin. 

“I know, lame right?” he sighs, hanging his head as if he’s expecting a rebuke. She offers none. 

“No, actually...it’s kind of perfect,” she gushes and then rolls her eyes at her own reaction. “Sorry, that was lame,” she apologizes, wrinkling her nose and ducking her head to hide the blazing heat in her cheeks. She wonders, as she tries to find something in the room to look at besides his high cheekbones and full, soft lips, how it is that she cannot remember that she’s supposed to hate him when he aims that boyish grin of his at her and his hazel eyes crinkle appealingly at the corners. “So, is it really good to practice that way? Shooting pucks into that thing?” she asks, trying to keep him talking so that he won’t keep looking at her in that way that makes her want to touch him, to be near to him. 

“It’s good for the aim, y’know, top shelf,” he grins and she can’t help but imagine the goalie’s water bottle popping up into the air and the exuberant celebration that would follow with his arms thrown in the air and his boyish grin shining. She’s imagined it a hundred times and then some, that moment when he would turn that boyish grin towards her in the stands instead of at his teammates and how they would share a moment, a moment in which they would just know it was all about them. It takes her a moment now to dismiss the all too lucid and fantastical image from her mind and a moment longer than that for her breathing to slow so that she can speak without her voice quaking. 

“I wouldn’t think you’d have to practice anymore,” she says quietly as she watches him pick out a stick from the rack along the wall, testing its weight in his hands before he effortlessly plucks a puck from the bucket with the blade of the stick and then, with a twist of his wrist, sends it straight into the dryer with a loud ‘clank’ that echoes around them. 

“Always have to keep your skills sharp,” he replies, plucking another puck and dropping it in front of his feet, “especially now.” He frowns and she knows that not all of the suddenly focussed expression on his face is about locking in on the target in front of him.

“So all of that stuff about loving it...that’s really not all bull is it?” she asks as he raises his stick up and behind him, ready to aim a slapper at the innocent dryer. His stick pauses in mid air and his expression alters from grim determination to the kind of darkly brooding sort of smile Edward Cullen wishes he could master. 

“Not all the time anyway,” he replies and launches the puck so hard against the dryer that it rocks backward. The puck drops to the concrete floor leaving a dark dent just above the gaping mouth of the appliance. He curses, shakes his head and then laughs. “See, I’m out of practice.” She watches his fingers curl around the shaft of the stick as he plucks another puck from the bucket and begins to bounce it on the blade. Fern rubs at her wrist, remembering how it felt so small in his hand, how he had controlled her as easily as he controls the vulcanized rubber that seems to be bouncing in time to the rapid beating her heart. “So you’ve had a chance to look around, what do you think?” It takes a certain amount of will power for her to tear her gaze from his bulging biceps and a slight shake of her head to shelve the visions in her brain of him moving over her, all of his muscles rippling and flexing before she can reply. 

“I think...I think that it’s too nice for me. I think it’s a really amazing offer but this place is way too big for just me. I mean, you don’t want to live here alone, why would you think I would?” The puck lies flat on the blade of his stick and he stares intently at it for a moment and she almost believes he will levitate it, because he is Sidney Crosby and it wouldn’t surprise her if he has magical powers but instead he suddenly flips the stick backwards and without looking behind him nets a hole in one from his backhand. It’s a feat she can’t help but grin and giggle at. 

“And if I moved in?” he asks. She stops mid giggle, claps her hand over her mouth and stares at him in utter disbelief. “I mean...wouldn’t that be the best way we could get to know one another?” he asks in a tone that begs for agreement and that makes it abundantly clear that it is an idea that has just popped into his head and he does not want her to laugh at him. His gaze holds hers’ for a long moment, willing her not to. As if she could, except perhaps to nervously do so. “It’s not that crazy an idea, right?’ 

“It’s pretty crazy,” she gasps, trying to catch her breath as if she’s just run up a flight of stairs or been hit in the solar plexus with a two by four. 

“Well so’s having a kid with someone you don’t know, right?” he suggests, his tone lighter but still with that edge of hysteria in it. She nods and surreptitiously pinches her upper arm because this cannot be happening. Sidney Crosby cannot be asking her to move in with him. “There’s uh...there’s lots of rooms and with practice and games and your work we’ll probably hardly see each other and whatever but...that way I don’t have to hang out at that diner and you don’t have to come to the arena....” 

“Wait...you don’t want me at the arena?” she asks quietly, the snag suddenly becoming clear. “Are you like...forbidding me from the arena or from seeing your teammates?” 

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There it is again, he thinks as her gaze becomes suddenly hard and mistrust leaks into her dark eyes; the spark of defiance, the evidence of a backbone that transforms the slightly mousy girl in front of him into the kind of woman that he might actually want to be with. When her eyes flash a warning that tells him he had better answer carefully he has to fight the urge to smile. 

“I just think it would be simpler if this was just about us and other people didn’t get involved,” he replies cautiously. She purses her lips and then looks away, but not before he sees the look of distress in her face.   

“Marc’s my friend,” she counters almost inaudibly. 

“Yeah well, we can all be friends but stuff like this,” he says, pulling the now folded picture from his jeans pocket, “should come from you not him.” It makes perfect sense to him but the minute he says it her hands curl into fists at her sides and her head snaps up and the fury in her gaze is murderous. 

“You know what would have been better? If you’d been there instead of him,” she snaps and every single solitary ounce of hero worship is erased from her gaze. “Where were you? Huh? What were you doing?”

“Me? I was talking to my dad about moving you in here!” he cries defensively, “and I didn’t even know about it.” He adds, feeling stung by the accusation that there was something more important than that moment. He doesn’t realize it until that moment, doesn’t recognize the sting of jealousy he feels at having been robbed of the moment of hearing his son’s heart beat for the first time.  MAF heard it. It should have been him.

“You wouldn’t have gone anyway,” she sighs, wincing and clutching at her belly.

“I...I might have. I don’t know, and that’s not really fair,” he argues, but he is watching her hand travel over her stomach with concern and a sense of rising panic. “Are you okay? Is everything alright?Do you need to go to the hospital?” 

“No,” she wheezes, backtracking towards a plush overstuffed couch and choosing the chaise to sink onto. “He just gave me a boot...just hurt for a minute,” she explains breathlessly, rubbing her expanding stomach in slow, soothing circles. He stares down at her, his hands opening and closing uselessly at his sides as his gaze focuses on where her hand is rubbing. “Do you wanna feel it?” she asks, her softer tone making it clear that she is momentarily setting aside the animosity that has reared its head again between them. 

“C...can I?” he asks, looking first at her belly and then up into her eyes, feeling a sort of childish wonder, his hands tingling as if he’s about to open the gift on Christmas morning, the one he’s been waiting and hoping for.

“Well he is yours too,” she replies softly, letting her hand slide away so that his can take its’ place. His hand is so much bigger than hers’ and covers so much more of her stomach and he is very careful as his hand barely presses into her skin at all. “No, here,” she whispers, readjusting his hand so that it is more on the side of her stomach. His gaze meets hers’, a question in their green gold depths. “Just a minute, you’ll see,” see smiles and no sooner has she said it then he feels a roundhouse kick beneath the palm of his hand that makes her gasp for breath. 

“Oh my god,” he breathes, staring down at where his hand is resting just over the spot their son has tried to kick his way out of, “he’s so strong.” 

“You should feel it from my side,” she chuckles as he continues to stare, dumbstruck, at where his hand lies over the curve of her stomach.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, raising his gaze to meet hers’, letting his legitimate concern for her fill his eyes.

“Sometimes,” she replies with a shrug. “Mostly it’s kind of neat.” 

In that moment she has that look, the look that universally says ‘mother’ on her face. It is sweetness and tenderness and loving and it makes his heart ache. It also makes something else ache, something lower in his gut that reacts purely on more primal and more basic instincts and he hears it in his mind like the growl of a lion and it says ‘mine’. 

He doesn’t think, does not process the thought that enters his head at that moment. He just moves, quick and sure the way he does out on the ice when he sees a play forming. He cups her face in his hands and presses his mouth over hers’ and kisses her like he’s marking her, like he is branding her his. 

_________________________________________________________________

It happens before she can consider her actions and she is as surprised as he is when he recoils from the slap that leaves a livid red welt on his cheek and her hand stinging from the contact. 

“What did you do that for?” he hisses between clenched teeth and there is just a tiny part of her that is impressed that she can inflect pain on a man who is regularly run into by mountain sized opposing players with linebacker sized pads and sticks that off the ice would be considered lethal weapons. 

“You don’t even like me!” she counters, her gaze still riveted to the imprint of her hand on his cheek. He stares back at her, his mouth open as if he would argue, but knows that he cannot and some part of her, something deep in her chest, shatters when he doesn’t. “I think I should go,” she mutters, straining to get to her feet, a task that has become increasingly difficult in the last couple of weeks. She wants to but does not object when his hand grasps hers and his arm settles around her waist supporting her. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, withdrawing his support as soon as she is on her feet. “I guess I just thought...I thought if we’re doing this...,” his voice trails away and he shrugs as if he doesn’t know what it is that he wanted to say. 

“I don’t want you to patronize me,” she tells him, her voice half caught in her throat as if her body is trying to stop her from speaking the words aloud. How can she be telling him, the handsome prince of her dreams that she does not want to be kissed? 

“I’m not,” he replies immediately and then shrugs again. “At least I don’t think that I was,” he adds in a tone that makes it clear that he does not know for certain. 

“Well...I don’t think all this is such a good idea then, do you?” she asks quietly, glancing back at the now dented dryer with a longing look. With all of her being she wants to watch their son here with him learning to shoot at that dryer. But that hopeful thought, like all of her dreams about him, seem to be far from coming true. 

“That won’t happen again, I can promise you that,” he says gruffly, shoving his hands deep in his jean pockets. “We’ll be...uh, just roommates that’s all.” She thinks that her answer should still be no but the gourmet kitchen upstairs calls to her.

 

“I don’t know,” she mumbles, the rational part of her brain reminding her about his unpredictable Jekyll and Hyde personality.

“At least we should try it and uh...you can always slap me again if I get out of line,” he offers with half a smile; half a smile that transforms his face from sullen to heartbreakingly handsome. “That’s a pretty good right you have by the way,” he adds, his eyes creasing at the corners. 

“Okay,” she whispers, her heart still aching for his touch even as she tells herself that it can’t be that way between them and dreams don’t come true. “A month and we’ll see how it goes.” 

“Deal,” he smiles and her heart breaks just a little more.