Page 38 of Riding the Pine

I swallow the sour lump of bitterness at the back of my throat.

“That tracks.” I haven’t answered her, and she’s staring at me like I’ve taken too long to answer.

“Scottie?” She hardly ever calls me that. She pushes off the wall to face me. “You okay?”

She reaches her thumb out like she might be thinking about touching my busted-up lip. “Do you need stitches?”

Probably, but I wasn’t waiting for the medical team to do them. I hauled ass out of the rink like my ass was on fire. I shrug.

“Want me to butterfly Band-Aid it back at the hockey house?”

I don’t want to go back there, not yet. And she narrows her eyes like she can feel that.

“I can patch you up and kick you out.” She grins at me, lit up by the streetlight, her thumb still poised to brush against the gash on my lip.

“Except I live there.”

She gives me a one shoulder shrug, but I swear the edges of her lips curl into a smile.

The door opens behind me and a couple of the guys trickle out onto the street. Athena retracts her hand but doesn’t move. Every part of me tingles, like if I just reach out and pull her to me, she’d make everything better, she’d makemebetter.

It’s like some cosmic punishment, being put in her orbit but never being good enough to even stare directly at her sunlight without fear of getting caught watching her.

Ares steps around me into view. He glances over his shoulder at me. “You good?”

Athena nods, pointing at my face. “I need to patch him up.”

Ares grabs my cheek and squeezes. “Such a pretty face.” He doesn’t ask why Athena’s taking care of me, why I didn’t let the medical team do their job, or why I won’t go to Urgent Care if I need my shit fixed. Instead, he slings his suit jacket in the back seat of Athena’s car and climbs in after it, waits for us to get in, and starts singing along to the music on the radio. “We can go to my place.” He pauses, and I swear I can hear a smile in his voice. “It’s quieter.”

It feels right, normal, easy. It’s as though walking out into the street didn’t loosen the tightness in my chest making it hard to breathe, hard to calm down but seeing Athena, my Bright Eyes, made the heaviness dissipate, made it easier to breathe, easier to think… She makes everything so much easier just by existing.

We get to Ares’s apartment; it’s a couple floors down from Artemis and Apollo’s penthouses on the top floor in the same building. The de la Peña’s should just buy the whole building at this point.

He tosses a small medical kit our direction with a bottle of something that’s absolutely going to sting like fuck, then kicks off his shoes and strips off his shirt. “Snacks? Drinks?”

Athena looks at me, a puzzled frown wrinkling her forehead then back at her brother. “You’ve stocked this place? I figured you just stored your shit here but spent your time at the hockey house.”

Ares laughs from the kitchen. “True. I sleep here, keep all my shit here, but I like the vibe of the hockey house. I like having somewhere quiet for Eloise and me to hang though.”

Athena’s eyes widen like she realizes he’s talking about banging his girlfriend, and she shakes her head as though ridding her brain of the images contained within. I don’t know how she does it, having three brothers who are all sexually active… Ares’s personal life has been blasted all over the internet for years, it’s not like she can just block her ears, close her eyes, and sing ‘la la la la la.’

“Here, have a drink.” Ares tosses me a can of zero percent beer and gives Athena something that looks like Sprite in a glass.

She gestures her glass in my direction before taking a long drink. “I just need to butterfly his face with a Band-Aid, or three, then we’ll be out of your way, hermano.”

Athena pulls out two Band-Aids and a small pair of scissors before she sets to work. She glides the scissors across the fabricBand-Aids cutting them into a kind of butterfly. When she’s done, she jerks her chin at me to sit or kneel in front of her. I’m instantly fighting a hard on.

On my knees, between her legs, staring up at her as she purses her lips, focusing on my face with a furrowed brow. “You’re bleeding again.” Her scowl deepens as she puts down her makeshift stitches and picks up the bottle of liquid and a cotton pad to clean up the split lip.

“You’re a menace, Scott Raine, you know that?”

I can’t help chuckling at the dismay in her voice. She sounds like a mother hen scolding a child. “You know your brothers are way worse than I am. You rarely ever have to patch me up, Bright Eyes.”

She rolls her eyes. “You know better.”

Ares snorts from a few feet away without looking up from his screen. He’s leaning on a fancy black leather armchair that matches the couch Athena is perched on.

When the cold liquid meets my open wound, I hiss out a slow breath not breaking eye contact with her. There’s something combustible, a spark, shared heat. Something almost erotic about the way she’s cleaning me up. The air around us is charged, thick with lust pulsing through my veins as she wipes the blood from my chin, has me hold the wound together, and places the Band-Aids.

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