Page 71 of The Pucking Date
He sighs. “I’ll keep the Falcons warm. But don’t sit too long, this is your last big one. Sweet deal like this doesn’t wait forever.”
I give a tight nod, done with the conversation.
She thinks she can compartmentalize what happened between us, file it away under ‘mistakes’ and move on. But some hungers can’t be ignored. And I’m about to prove to Jessica Novak that I’m one of them.
15
EMPIRE OF ONE
JESSICA
Ispit the mouthwash into the sink, a pathetic attempt to scrub the night off my tongue. To erase the taste of him.
But it lingers—salt, heat, and everything I’m trying not to crave. His mouth. That growl. The way he moved over me.
I brace both hands on the marble counter of the hotel bathroom and glare at my reflection.
Lipstick: reapplied.
Hair: redone.
Outfit: flawless.
Perfect Novak polish. No hint that I ran out of his bed before sunrise, barely holding it together.
The morning started with nausea—sharp and sudden, curling low in my gut and dragging me out of bed on a breathless lurch. I slipped from beneath the covers, a thief in my own story, careful not to shift the mattress and wake him.
The bathroom was cold. The tiles unforgiving. I spentten minutes crouched over the toilet, one hand braced against the wall, willing the queasiness to pass.
By the time I stood, flushed and shaky, the panic had already set in.
I need to tell him.
But the idea made my chest cave in. I should have felt settled. Like something clicked into place.
Instead, I felt stripped bare. Not because of what we did. But because of what it meant. That wasn’t just sex. Not to him. Not to me. And that’s what terrified me.
If I stayed, if I looked him in the eye and said the words, I wouldn’t be able to take them back.
And if he answered wrong…or worse, if he didn’t say anything at all?
I didn’t know if I’d ever recover.
The fear crawled beneath my ribs, sharp and suffocating.
I walked back into the bedroom, my steps unsteady. Finn was still sleeping, his body loose. Peaceful. Exposed.
When my phone buzzed with a notification, I grabbed it like a lifeline—anything to quiet the voice in my head screaming that I needed to tell him about the baby. I swiped open the screen, and there it was, a notification from someone who’d tagged me in a TikTok video. @hockeywivesanonymous. My stomach dropped before I even clicked it.
And that’s when everything unraveled.
When Finn O’Reilly says he’s got “plans” but you catch this instead...
#CityNights #HockeyWAGs #NotSoSingle
A ten-second video, grainy but clear enough. Finn walking out of a hotel bar with a woman—stunning, effortless, the kind of girl who wakes up gorgeous. His armaround her shoulders, her hand on his chest, both of them laughing. Easy. Intimate. Like they’d known each other forever.
No tags. No context. Only a time stamp and the slow crawl of jealousy through my veins.
