Page 56 of Hockey Halloween
I turn Hudson by his shoulder. Yep. The seam from collar to waist is split wide open. I stifle a giggle. "I have an idea. How long until they announce the winners?"
"They said they'd do it at midnight, so, like, forty-five minutes," Velma tells me.
“D…” my brother says in a warning tone.
I ignore him and focus my eyes on Hudson’s ruggedly handsome face again. I let my hand slip down his arm from his shoulder to his hand, which I grasp. “I happen to have a room. Here, at the hotel. We should go there.”
Okay, that sounds like a proposition. My cheeks instantly flame. He grins. Ryan curses. "Don't be a whore."
Did my brother, the king of casual sex, just call me a whore? Hudson gets in his face again. “Hey shithead, she’s talking about fixing my costume. But I shouldn’t have to tell you not to call any woman a whore, for any reason, especially your sister.”
He squeezes my hand in his and turns away from my brother like it's physically difficult. I bet he'd much rather punch him, and I would like to let him, but that's not going to win anyone this costume contest. So instead, I flip my brother a middle finger and lead Hudson through the ballroom to the doors.
We don’t speak, but we hold hands the whole walk through the lobby and to the elevators. I use my keycard, which I kept tucked into the sleeve of my outfit, to swipe and punch the floor number. He finally turns to face me as the elevator chugs upward. “Are you okay?”
He looks so sincere and concerned and… familiar. It’s weird. “Nothing Ryan says or does really bothers me. We’re not close and I’ve come to accept we never will be.”
Not entirely true. I had felt a glimmer of hope that this event would bond us, but that's dead now. Oh well. I sigh. "I'm sorry he's such a dick to you."
He shrugs his broad shoulders. “I don’t give a shit. I mean, in a way, maybe the fact that he’s showing himself to be a total asshat will make me try harder at stopping his shots.IfCoach starts me against the Saints in a couple of days.”
"You don't think you'll get the start?" I know a bit about hockey, and I know that a team always has a number one goalie. If you're the number one, you start more games than not. Maybe Hudson isn't their starter? I suddenly regret not paying closer attention to the local team. I only watch games on TV if Ryan is in them and I've got nothing better to do.
"I mean, I should, but… your brother wasn't joking. I have shit the bed recently against his team. And especially against him," Hudson confesses as the elevator doors open and he motions for me to exit first.
His hand lands at the small of my back, casual, but delightfully intimate, as we walk down the long hall to my room. Yes, I live in Vegas and have a great townhouse just twenty minutes from here, but I wanted a place to get ready on site, store my stuff—car keys, wallet, etc.—and so I decided to turn this into a mini-staycation and treated myself to a junior suite with a jacuzzi tub.
I swipe my keycard at my door and push down the handle. I step in, flip on the lights, and motion for him to join. "I know that I get better amenities than most because it's a suite, so here's hoping there's a sewing kit."
I leave him by the door and head into the bathroom. I rummage through the neatly placed silver tray in the corner of the vanity filled with courtesy items. “Bingo!”
I step back into the hotel room and hold the sewing kit in the air like it’s a trophy. He grins. “Awesome.”
I motion for him to follow me as I walk deeper into the room. There's a small velvet sofa, a table by the floor-to-ceiling windows, and a California king against the wall across from the massive television.I start to tear open the little sewing kit and glance at him again. "I can't sew it with you in it. I might stab you."
“Your brother would love that,” Hudson snarks.
“I’m not doing anything that would make my brother proud tonight.” Yeah… that came out dirty. Oops.Sorry, not sorry, I think as I watch his eyes flare and a small, heated smirk tug at the corners of his wide, full mouth. That smirk is oddly familiar.
For the hundredth time tonight, the weird feeling that I know him floods my brain. "I don't have anything on under this. Like, nothing. Not even undies."
“Grab one of the complimentary robes in the bathroom when you change out of it,” I suggest, and he gives me a little nod and disappears into the bathroom.
When he comes back out, he's now giving the soft fabric of the hotel robe a run for its money. "How can a bathrobe be too small?"
“I’m six foot seven and two hundred and forty pounds. I have an ass roughly the size of a hatchback and shoulders the size of?—”
“What did you say?”
He blinks and blushes, which is hella-cute. "I'm not bragging. I mean, I can see how it sounds… gross and egotistical. But I just mean, goalies are big. Skating gives us enlarged glutes. I was a forward before I took up goalie as a kid, so I skated more than most goalies…
I stop listening and the words replay in my head, but in the gravelly, uneven voice of an awkward but totally lovable fourteen-year-old boy.
Ass the size of a hatchback.“Hudson, do you have any siblings?” I ask. “A brother? Who also plays hockey?”
He said the exact same words my very first real crush said to me at summer camp… about how he felt weird because he was so tall and so skinny but had a big butt from hockey. That kid… Palmer. He played goalie in the camp’s ball hockey games, and he was good at it. He had been thinking of asking his coach back home to switch to goalie.
"No siblings," he says. "Just me. Also, you don't have to call meby my last name. The guys do that because it's a hockey thing. My first name is…"
