Puck Me Twice: Power Play Off the Ice by Allie Lasky

Author:Allie Lasky [Lasky, Allie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AES Publishing LLC
Published: 2024-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

seventeen

. . .

Sven

Brad calls me at the ungodly hour of eight o’clock in the morning. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal, except I got home shortly after one o’clock, and then laid in bed until close to four unable to sleep.

Did I fuck everything up?

“You’re headline fucking news, bud,” Brad says when the line clicks open.

“Okay.” What else is there to say? I scrub a hand over my face and sit up.

“Really? You kiss some staffer in front of⁠—”

“She’s not some staffer,” I interject. “She’s my girlfriend.”

At least, she was at the time. Now… I’m not so sure.

“You need to be getting along with the team, not causing more drama,” he barks.

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

“I fucking can’t with you, bud,” he says. “Don’t you want this?”

“I do.”

I wince at those two little words… fuck.

I scared her. I want her, I’m committed to this, and she’s nowhere near ready. Dropping that conversational bomb—on the freaking plane, where others could hear it—really was not my smartest move.

“Fucking act like it,” Brad says. “Stop messing around with some puck bunny and⁠—”

“She’s not a puck bunny.”

“They all are.” He scoffs. “Just be glad the last one walked away before you signed over half your assets.”

“This conversation has ceased to be productive,” I announce. “I’m hanging up now.”

He starts to speak.

I stab at my phone until it hangs up the call.

Shit. I haven’t thought about Marika in years. Not since I ended things. Last I heard, she was married to another player and living back home in Sweden.

Brad wasn’t wrong; it was a good thing Marika and I ended things before the wedding. She didn’t put up a fight. She just… left.

Not for the first time, I catalog all the similarities between her and Vanessa. They’re both blonde and blue-eyed, and Marika was tall and willowy, but she didn’t have Vanessa’s spark. She was… flat. She was a perfectly fine person and would have made an excellent hockey wife. I was content to settle with her—until Vanessa walked back into my life.

And the girlfriend before her?

Anja was—well, she was blonde when I met her, and she had light eyes. She pursued me. It didn’t last long, maybe a few months at most. Once she dyed her hair to her natural auburn color, I realized I’d been comparing her to Vanessa the whole time. It was hard to stay interested after that.

With Janie, it was all hormones. We only spoke in bed—and we didn’t say much. It took six weeks to figure out that physical chemistry aside, I didn’t actually like her, and she didn’t particularly care for me. She kept calling me Steven, like that would erase my Swedish heritage.

Hookups and casual sex don’t do it for me. The lack of emotional intimacy makes the physical intimacy unfulfilling. I’ve tried a few times to make it work and I always walk away feeling worse for it. Most of the time, I’d rather take care of my own needs by myself than pretend to be interested in anyone else.

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