Chapter 13

I hope Santa was good to you all and that you had some good down time with friends and family. I have this week off so I hope that means I'll be able to get some writing done now that I'm not cooking and wrapping and shopping etc...

“This is a really fucking stupid idea.” Sidney shushes his teammate and glares at him ominously before glancing over his shoulder to see if she’s heard. From where she’s standing chatting happily in the kitchen with Vero he is guessing that she has not but he gives Jordan a shove nonetheless. “Well it is,” Jordy continues as they head down the hall with another box of his things to the room that is down the hall from the one that she has chosen for herself. Despite his protests she did not take the master, so he has. 

“She’s almost seven months pregnant, it’s not like I’m going to want to jump her,” he mutters, putting the box he is carrying down beside the bed. He has not told anyone about the kiss and he hopes that she has kept that piece of information to herself. He feels strange about it and tries not to think about it too often.

“Obviously, gross,” TK makes a face and then he and Jordan both start making wretching noises and sticking their fingers down their throats until Sid picks up a pillow and tosses it in their direction.

“I mean, she’s gonna cramp your style man,” Jordy continues, wiping at the tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. Sidney makes a mental note for next years’ Halloween party, the Batabi brothers. 

“He’d have to have a girl to bring home first,” the soft lisp of Marc’s voice and his hand on his shoulder have a soothing quality that brings a smile to Sid’s face. He turns and aims that smile at his friend but MAF quickly looks away. 

“I have some numbers you could borrow,” TK says, immediately digging in his pockets and producing a number of ragged pieces of napkin and torn pieces of paper. 

“Dontchu just get them to put them in your phone?” Jordan asks, diving for some of the crumpled pieces that have fallen to the floor. 

“I like collecting them,” TK grins holding up two fistfuls of numbers like they’re the Rocket Richard trophy. 

“I bet you wack off on them to,” Jordy smirks just before TK lets go off his prized possessions and tackles the tall blonde forward onto the bed. 

“I’ve got a ten that says TK pins him,” Sid chuckles, turning to see if MAF agrees only to find the club’s goalie gone. 

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“Oh.” It’s the only sound she can make upon finding him sitting in the near darkness in nothing more than a pair of black form fitting boxer briefs. His skin is moonlight pale and there seems to miles of it. She pulls her black satin robe closer around her. Not that it helps. This robe was not meant to hide the swollen belly of nearly seven months pregnant woman. Still, it is all she has to hide behind and that is what she wants to do as her gaze travels across the distance between his massive shoulders.

“Can’t sleep either?” he asks, reaching to push the barstool next to him at the breakfast bar back so that she can easily slide onto it. 

“Can’t seem to get comfortable, new bed,” she explains. He nods and produces a second spoon as if he’d anticipated her arrival. There is a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in front of him. She raises an eyebrow. He shrugs.

“Feeling sorry for myself.” As much as he’d wanted them to, his teammates had not been able to stay and christen the house. They are off on a road trip; another one, without him. She picks up the pint and examines it closely, peering in the near dark to read the ingredients. 

“Just checking it’s not soy or something,” she grins before scooping some of the chocolate and marshmallow goodness into her mouth. They eat, side by side, in companionable silence for a while, each savouring the calorie laden milky creaminess as well as the silence of the house around them. Or at least she enjoys the silence. She feels certain that he’d have liked them to stay as a form of prophylactic against having to spend time alone, with her. 

“Are you scared?” he asks out of the blue, breaking the silence between them. She chews contemplatively for a moment on a chocolate covered almond and then nods.

“I’m hoping for some good drugs,” she smirks, skirting the question she knows that he is asking. 

“But what is there’s something...y’know...wrong?” he asks, poking at the ice creams with the tip of his spoon and digging out his own nut to chew on. She licks her spoon clean and then lays it carefully on the granite countertop so as not to create any noise.

“Then I guess I’ll love him no matter what and we’ll deal with whatever we need to.” Her answer sounds braver than she feels inside as she says it. The closer the time comes the more she worries that it will all be more than she can handle. He stares at the pint of ice cream but doesn’t dig into it. To ask the question she knows that it must be preying on his mind and that it isn’t just being left behind on this one, last road trip that has him up in the middle of the night eating ice cream. “What about you?” she asks quietly, her heart suddenly refusing to beat as she holds her breath, waiting for his answer. At any moment he could change his mind and deny her and the child; that is the thought that has her wandering the big empty house like a ghost.

“I worry for him...him being compared to me,” he admits quietly with the shrug of one massive bare shoulder, “and if there’s something...if he isn’t quite.....” His voice fades as if he cannot or will not give voice to the words that are obviously at the tip of his tongue. The very real concern in his eyes makes her heart pound so hard in her chest she wonders if he can hear it. Reaching for his hand, she covers it with her own and squeezes.

“He’s gonna be just fine,” she tells him, feeling certain of it in that moment. He gives her a half smile in return and does not look nearly as certain.  She starts to pull her hand away but with the smallest movement of his thumb, he captures her hand in his. She looks down at their joined hands and then up into his eyes, eyes that seem to glow in the dark as he looks at her. 

She squirms under the weight of his gaze. He is searching her face, looking at her as if he has never seen her before. She reaches with her free hand for the ice cream, her fingertips barely grazing the rim of the container. His gaze breaks from her face and he pushes the container into her hand.

“I think I’ll try and get some sleep,” he mutters, sliding onto his feet. She watches him pad slowly away down the hall. The door to the master bedroom opens and closes. She does not take another bite of ice cream. She puts the top on it and puts it back into the freezer and puts the spoons in the dishwasher and then heads for the living room, pulls a thermal throw around her, finds an old black and white movie and settles in for the night. 

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He lies awake, staring at the ceiling. He’d like to think that this wakefulness is a symptom of his head injury, except that he’s been symptom free for weeks now. The churning in his gut is more than the nausea brought on by his concussion but he is not willing to admit that it has anything to do with the young woman in the room down the hall. He tells himself it is all about the child she is carrying and he almost believes it. 

When Vero instructed him to take good care of her as they stood in the driveway saying their goodbyes, it was easy for him to make that promise. He feels protective of her, or at least of the child she carries. He tells himself that it is natural, instinctual and he is a slave to his instincts out on the ice so he feels no reason to ignore them off the ice. He does not; however, understand the overwhelming urge he has had again to kiss her. He wanted to do that tonight when she’d tried to console him. He’d wanted to capture her full mouth with his and taste her lips. 

Closing his eyes he does his best to dismiss the image from his mind. He has made her a promise that they will be friends and roommates and he has no intention of being anything more to her and yet he continues to have these possessive thoughts that leave him lying awake, thinking about her and now that she is so close, that she is right down the hall, his body refuses to relax. 

“She is the mother of my child,” he tells himself quietly, turning over to curl around his pillow while he squeezes his eyes tight and does his best to force her big, brown eyes from his mind. “It’s natural I should feel something,” he continues, trying to wrap his mind around these strange emotions he is feeling. There is a young boy inside him that is making faces and disgusted noises at the idea of feeling any kind of attraction to a pregnant woman with her distended belly and yet, her full ripe breasts and the sort of glow she walks around captures his attention time and again. 

Sidney shuts his eyes tight and tries his best to bring to mind hockey plays, like going over tape with the boys. He even imagines Dan pointing out flaws, encouraging them to do better, coming up with new and innovative plays they can try in the next game. But even as he does, as he stares at the white ice with the players racing around, as he tries to imagine himself on the ice, it isn’t the puck he focuses on. Instead he stands in the middle of the ice, ready to take a face of and looks up into the stands for her with those dark rimmed cat’s eye glasses and simple pony tail. Not a model, not a sexy siren of the silver screen; just the girl from the diner. 

Groaning, he rolls onto his stomach and presses his face into his pillow. There is a simple explanation for this he tells himself, and yet that does nothing to help him expunge her from his thoughts. Rolling his hands into fists he beats them into the mattress. He is at once angry with her for putting him in this position and drawn to her in a way that he cannot understand but beating the mattress into submission gets him nowhere and sleep eludes him and once again he finds himself on his feet, walking patterns around the carpet of the large, lavish and lonely room with its empty king sized bed and a silence that feels like a weight on his shoulders.  

His life is upside down and frustrating enough without this, he thinks as he reaches for the handle on the door, thinking somehow that he needs to cast blame on her but as soon as he pulls the door open he shuts it again. It might make him feel better, for now and maybe long enough so that he can sleep but it will not solve their dilemma and, he knows as he runs his fingers through his dark hair, fighting with her will only make it worse. 

Heading back to his bed he sits on the edge of the mattress and stares at the back of the closed door. This arrangement that he had instigated, that he had thought would make it easier to keep her from being found out by the media, has him feeling like a tiger in a cage and that thought makes him smile. It is not a gilded cage for her, as his father had thought it would be, it is a fortress of solitude for him. 

Her high, bell like laughter suddenly rings out in the silence and the gloom of his room and he lifts his head, nosing the air like a predator, the warm scents of popcorn and butter making his stomach contract and his fingers dig into the mattress. 

“How can she laugh?” he hisses to himself as he glares at the back of his bedroom door as if he is waiting for day break and his jailor to free him. Giving his head a shake he pushes himself to his feet and heads for the door. “My house,” he mutters to himself and drags the door open and pads almost silently down the hall.

There is a light, a sort of blue silver glow on the walls as he reaches the living room and finds her tucked into one corner of the couch under a throw, watching some old black and white movie with a guy and a little dog and some not bad looking chick in a fancy gown. 

“Want some?” she asks, holding up the bag of microwave popcorn that is so fresh it is still steaming. 

“You don’t mind?” he asks, scrambling over the back of the couch, grabbing the end of the throw and pulling it over his lap. 

“Can always make more,” she shrugs before tossing a handful of popcorn into her mouth and chewing happily. Sid blinks at her and then at the screen and then digs his hand into the bag.

“So what are we watching?” he asks, his mouth full.

“Shadow of the Thin Man,” she replies, reaching her hand out for him to tip some popcorn into. 

“So what’s going on?” he asks as she tosses a couple of hot buttery kernels into her mouth.

“Well there’s this racetrack see and....”