Chapter 2

My apologies for how long this has taken but I've been dealing with a very sick little doggy who has been my little boy for 15 years and so I haven't been in the mood to write and I've hardly had any sleep so if this doesn't make sense or has a bunch of errors, please be kind

“You’re asking the wrong question. To the wrong person and it’s hurting you to listen. I wanna be truthful but you gotta be certain this is what you mean.” (Lyrics to It’s Not the Thing Henry, by Glenister, Moyet and Alison, Alison Moyet)

“What have you done?” I look up from admiring my god son’s grip on my finger and smile across the room at his mother. “Don’t even try to give me that innocent look Max. Every time I’ve seen that look on your face, the next thing I know, I’m under water or Sid’s got itching powder in his jock,” Tabby adds with a scornful look that I think probably works on Sid and will probably work on Toby and Cody, at least until they’re about thirteen. 

“I met someone.” My admission is met with a couple of sniggers and one over dramatic gasp. I turn towards the source of that derisive sound to look at Tabby’s friend Mel who is currently cradling my other god son in her arms. “What?” 

“I don’t know, you just said that like it was unusual or something,” she says, without even looking up from the tiny squirming bundle in her arms. I can’t tell if I’m holding Toby or Cody. Sid says he and Tabby can, so there must be something I’m missing, but I haven’t figured it out yet. 

“Yeah Max, I’m pretty sure there are women waiting outside your door every night,” Tabby’s other friend Trina adds from where she’d keeping a healthy distance from the babies. Like it might be catching, and when my gaze slides back to Mel and the way Johnny is watching her with that bundle in her arms, I guess she might have a point. Johnny left his wife for Tabby’s friend and she’s already got a bun in the oven. Not too many people know that, pretty much just the people in this room. It’s a little too early for them to be shouting it from the rooftops and besides, it would be hell on earth if Brent’s ex found out so we’re all keeping that particular tidbit of info on the down low. 

“I don’t, as it happens and, well you guys are all tied down, why shouldn’t that happen to me?” I ask looking around the room at Sid with his arms around Tabby’s waist, his chin on her shoulder, both of them looking all blissfully loved up. Then there’s Johnny and Mel and their whole new little can’t get enough of each other, apparently explosively sexual relationship, which kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies to be honest. And then I look up to where the tallest people in the room, Trina and Jordy are standing just a little apart, trying their best not to actually touch one another in public when everyone knows that the minute they’re alone, someone’s getting tied up and all kinds of kinky fun ensues. 

“Hey, don’t look at me when you say that,” Trina coughs, looking green around the gills at the thought, not of being tied up or down, but probably at the thought of being in a monogamous relationship. Jordy still has Heather and apparently, when Trina goes home to Vancouver, she’s been spending some quality time with that big goofy d-man of theirs, Shane O’Brien. I guess neither of them is really into actually taking that next step although when I asked Jordy if I get take a run at the leggy brunette, he threatened to do some serious bodily harm to me. Not that I’m really into sharing with my teammates anyway.  

“I’m just saying I met this woman and…je ne sais pas, there’s something about her,” I try to explain, shrugging my shoulders and turning my attention back to my godson whose fingers are still curled around my thumb in a death grip. He has his daddy’s meaty fingers for sure. 

“I never thought I’d see the day.” I look back up to see Sidney sharing one of those looks with his woman, like he thinks their whole lovey-dovey thing is the best thing in the world, “Max, actually considering a serious relationship.” 

“Like I said, you guys make me feel like I might be missing out on something,” I shrug again watching that silent communication that Tabs and Sid seemed to share that now Brent and Mel seemed to have and even Jordy’s reaching for Trina’s hand with a look that says ‘let’s get out of here and go do something more fun’ but he doesn’t have to say it because they know each other well enough to have that esp or whatever. 

“Don’t do it Max,” Brent laughs, drawing my attention back to him and his curvy girlfriend who is cuddled up so tightly against him that you can’t really see where she stops and he begins. “You and Tanger are like the last of the single dudes on the team. You’d be breaking a lot of puck bunny hearts.” 

“Hey, I resent that man!” Jordy chimes in but we all ignore him. Whether it’s Trina or Heather, he’s taken and we all know it. 

“And Tanger’s too fucking shy to be the only single guy on the team. The cougar squad would eat him alive,” Sid adds, creating a vision that makes us all laugh, Tanger, surrounded by older, sexually aggressive women that would have our long haired friend begging for help. Not that anyone of us would because we all know that he’d actually enjoy it, once he got past being terrified. 

“He won’t do it. He’s just feeling left out, but he won’t actually do it,” Tabby states like there’s no argument possible and the minute I open my mouth she just shakes her head and crosses the room to take her son out of my arms. “The minute you even think a girl is getting her hooks into you, she won’t see you for dust Max and you know it.”

“That’s the old me,” I tell her with a smile, placing my tiny charge carefully into her arms. “This is the new me. You’ll see.” 

“I can pick you up,” he tells me, sounding both earnest and hopeful as I hold yet another outfit up in front of me while I make a disgusted face at my reflection. 

“No, that’s fine. Just tell me where to meet you and I’ll be there,” I tell him, trying to sound firm, like this isn’t up for discussion, which it isn’t. 

“C’mon, you know where I live. I have a nice car, I promise the neighbors won’t think less of you if I pick you up in it,” he promises and it’s all I can do not to laugh. I want to tell him if he so much as leaves his car parked outside my ‘place’ he’ll be lucky if he makes it back to his car with it just up on blocks and not torched. 

“No, really, I’m…,” I look around the disaster that is my room and sigh. “I’m running behind and I probably won’t even make it home to change.” It’s a lie and it makes me wince to say it out loud, but it’s better than his continuing to push to pick me up. “So just tell me where you want to meet and I’ll be there.”

“It kind of ruins the surprise,” he sighs, managing to actually sound disappointed. I roll my eyes and pull yet another dress out of my closet and hold it in front of me before discarding that one too and adding it the growing pile on my bed. 

“Well I’m not really into surprises anyway,” I reply as I grab my latest purchase out of the bag and hold it up in front of me. It took most of the money my sister had paid me for the past few days but it’s worth every penny. It’s a black tank style dress that hugs everything, with a rhinestone studded a fleur-de-lis on the right breast and a pair of silver wings on the back that hugs my rib cage all the way down to where the tips of the wings curve around my ass. Even the girl in the store where I bought it had to admit I looked hot in it. 

“I was thinking about taking you to one of my favorite restaurants,” he says, but doesn’t elaborate, which is kind of annoying. 

“Great. I could eat. So where do I meet you?” He rattles off a street address that I end up jotting down in eyeliner on the inside of my arm, before hanging up and running for the bathroom. 

“Who was on the phone?” The sound of my mother’s voice, slurred and half asleep, makes me freeze. Damn. It’s awake. 

“Jen,” I lie, which is easier than answering the twenty questions that I know will follow telling the actual truth and then whole blame game that would follow that; the ‘don’t leave me’s’ and the ‘you’ve never been a good a daughter’ and the ‘you’re such a slut, why can’t you be a nice girl like you’re sister?’ 

Fuck the economy for making me move back to this shithole with my drunk fucking mother. 

“That’s so nice of your sister to give you a job,” she calls to me in this sing song voice that makes my skin crawl but I smile and tell her yes, because it’s easier to let her go on and on about how wonderful her first born is rather than how disappointing I am. “Did you get my cigarettes?” she asks, just as I’m about to step into the shower. 

“Beside your bed mom,” I call, and snap the shower curtain shut and crank on the water and ignore her ramblings because at least now I have something to look forward to. 

For just a minute I think about continuing down the block and standing her up when I see her standing at the corner of the block. It’s not she’s not fucking hot. It’s just she’s not exactly the natural beauty I remembered. Rather than the cute, peppy, pony tailed fresh faced girl that caught my attention cleaning my bathroom, what I see waiting for me looks a lot like a date I’d have to pay for. 

With knee high black stiletto boots, a curve hugging mini dress and one of those black leather jackets with all the zippers and buckles, I have to admit that if I’d seen her in a club I’d be fighting TK and Jordan for her and I’d assume that I’d be able to take her home, no questions asked. I’d also never ask for her name and I’d definitely be sneaking out before breakfast. 

Is it fair to think less of her because she reminds me of half the puck bunnies that show up at the games hoping we’ll notice them? Probably, but I can’t help it. Maybe I’m just so used to the women that are already ensconced with the team and their designer labels and hundred dollar bang trims. Maybe I forget what Vero was like when we all just arrived, new to the big time. Maybe I forget what it was like to not be able to afford all the nice things that I have. Or maybe I’m just used to all those fashionable girls in Montreal with their flair for the flamboyant. 

So, I tell myself not to be that guy that leaves a girl stranded and pull up outside of the restaurant, tucking my keys into my pocket as I remind myself that there was something about this girl that didn’t remind me of any of those obvious clingers and puck fucks.

 When she turns, as if she has some sixth sense that tells her I’m there, the sultry grin she gives me puts me back on my heels. Her clothes might make her look cheap but the slow once over she gives me has my stomach doing the kind of flip flop that is normally reserved for pre game jitters. 

“Bonsoir mon petit chaton.” I’m half surprised when she lets me greet her the European way, a brush of the lips first to one cheek and then the other. She smells like a summer morning, all honeysuckle and rose petals and I have the strongest urge to bury my nose in her hair and lick the long curve her neck to see if she tastes as good as she smells.

“I thought I told you to leave the lines at home,” she says with a smirk that tells me she doesn’t really mind. 

“It’s not a line,” I tell her, captured by her dark eyes, by the almost invisible freckles across the bridge of her nose. “It’s just a little pet name. You don’t mind do you?” I ask as I watch her attention turn to my sleek, black expensive European car. She tilts her head to one side so that her long, straight dark brown, almost black hair falls over her shoulder. 

“I guess I can live with being called a cat,” she smiles and shrugs and then turns to look up at the sign above the front door of the restaurant. “Not so sure about the raw fish though.” 

“You don’t like sushi?” Sometimes I forget that not everyone likes what me and all the rest of the guys on the team like. Hockey players eat sushi, lots of it. 

“Not as much as I like fried chicken,” she answers with a smirk on her face that doesn’t go far enough to hide the insecurity in her eyes. That has to be it, I decide. That’s what I’m drawn to. She’s got the swagger, but it only covers up a girl that isn’t as confident as she’s trying to portray. I know that feeling, more than I’d admit to nearly anyone. There aren’t many people who know that I’m not really Mad Max, at least, not all of the time. 

“Do you think you can trust me?” I ask, offering my hand, which she looks down at as if she’s expecting there to be one of those trick buzzer things in it. 

“Do you think I should?” she asks, and despite the arched eyebrow and the playful smile, the question in her gaze is real. 

“Probably not,” I grin, “but give it a try.” 

I keep stealing glances at him as he picks things off of the menu that he promises are going to be tasty. It’s hard not to, especially when his biceps flex when he turns the menu towards me to show me a picture of what he’s ordering and the tattooed shield dances before my eyes.

And then there’s the way the plain black t-shirt he’s wearing tugs across his chest, like it can barely manage not to rip at the seams, as if it’s two sizes too small, and yet perfect for that. The temptation to try the strength of those seams keeps me sitting on my hands until the sake comes and I’m forced, once again, to watch his poor shirt strain as it tries to remain in one piece. 

It makes me wonder what it would look like balled up on my bedroom floor, but only briefly, because that’s never going to happen. Not as long as I live in the Locust Mobile Home Park and my mother is surgically attached to a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. So I down a couple thimblefuls of the warm, sharp liquid and try not to think about the way his chest looks under his shirt. 

“So tell me about yourself,” he begins, as he leans back in the high backed chair of the darkened restaurant, a faint smile playing across his full lips as he watches me play with the little clay tumbler, rolling it one way and then the other, anything to stop myself from nervously shredding every napkin on the table.

This was the part I’d been dreading. I’d been hoping he was one of those guys who could and would talk about himself endlessly and that I would be able to just smile and nod and not have to say anything more than ‘oh really?’ What did I have to talk about; life in the trailer park or my mother’s penchant for downing an entire bottle of whiskey in one night? Or that my last boyfriend ended up in jail after a bar fight? Not really topics of conversation for a first date…or any date if I can help it. 

“You mean that I’m a Taurus? Like that?” I ask, answering his dubious gaze with what I hope is a vaguely innocent expression. 

“For a start,” Max grins encouragingly, as if his devilishly charming smile is going to loosen my tongue. Luckily the food begins to come on its’ long thin plates and I force him to explain each roll in detail before I put any of them in mouth, and he forgets that I haven’t told him a thing. 

“Thanks for the burger.” She holds up the bag from Fatburger and we both laugh. I guess raw fish isn’t to everyone’s taste. 

“Next time we’ll do Italian or something,” I promise as we walk back towards my car, weaving our way through the crowded sidewalk, filled with other couples who are laughing and talking animatedly. In comparison, we’re strolling along like an elderly couple, her arm linked in mine, taking our time like neither of us wants to get to the car too soon. 

“So there’s going to be a next time?” Laughing, I think about how I’d almost driven by her earlier, almost stood her up, and how I would have missed all her funny facial expressions, especially when she tried wasabi for the first time. Now, I know, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world and I am already thinking about the next time I can see her, and I realize I’m already looking forward to it. 

“Well I guess if I wasn’t too boring, I thought you might let me take you out again.” She’d listened, bright eyed and attentive to all my war stories, laughing at all the right places, but not too loud, and frowning when she should. That kind of thing shouldn’t make a difference to me, but it does, especially after so many wannabe WAGs that laugh at everything, like I’m some kind of fucking comedian twenty four seven, those girls whose ears you can blow in and change the air pressure in their heads that are good for one thing and one thing only. 

“No, not too boring,” she agrees and lets me slide my hand down around hers until we’re walking around like all the other young couples around us out on their dates, hand in hand and I realize that I can’t remember the last time I did this. 

“Maybe you’ll let me make you dinner,” I offer, feeling happy and confident. “I make a mean tourtière, maybe with some pudding au chomeur for afters,” I suggest, only to watch her pull another one of those sour faces, just like she had at the miso soup. 

“Don’t get ahead of yourself Frenchie,” she tells me quietly as we come to a stop in front of my car. Trying to hide my disappointment, and not wanting to ruin the good vibe that has developed between us, I bend and reach for the car door but as I open it, she whistles for a cab instead. 

“Oh c’mon, at least let me drive you home. It’s late,” I offer but she only shakes her head as she waves at the car gliding towards the curb. 

“No,” she replies, turning me down flat without leaving the topic open for discussion. “I had fun,” she adds, grabbing a handful of my shirt and pulling me towards her, towards her lips. I can taste the sake on her breath and for a moment I forget to feel disappointed that she’s not even leaving me a glimmer of hope of waking up next to her. “Even with the raw fish,” she adds before she plants her lips over mine in a hot, eager kiss. Her lips part and her tongue winds itself around mine like a serpent in a slow and sensual dance, like a stripper on a pole. “Goodnight Max,” she purrs in my ear and then she’s gone, dancing past me into the street where she slips into the back of the cab, leaving me standing on the street corner where I’d found her, grinning like a country bumpkin…like Jordan.