Page 50 of Top Shelf
There was nothing except him and wild ecstasy I didn’t know was possible to feel.
A short forever later, I blinked down at him. He had pulled off me and tucked me back into my sweats before I was aware of anything happening. There was a dazed look on his face—his eyes sort of feverish and red. When he noticed I was staring, he lifted my shirt and pressed a warm kiss to my lower stomach.
“Do you…should I—?” Those were the only four words I could manage right then, and all I could hope was that he understood what I was asking.
“No. Sweetheart, that was all for you. You’re so gorgeous when you let go.” He kissed my stomach again, then let my shirt fall down and used his powerful hands to turn me and ease me back down to the couch beside him.
I fell against him, easy, like I had always belonged there. For the first time in so long, after being so stimulated, I didn’t need space. I just needed the weight of his body against mine and the way he was still while my hands were restless.
He didn’t move as my fingertips danced across his chest, and when I looked up, he was smiling.
“I’m okay here?”
He met my gaze, and his mouth lifted higher into a grin. “You’re perfect.”
Chapter Fourteen
Quinn
Being toldI didn’t have to give up skating completely had been the highlight of my recovery. At first, I was afraid it would feel like a compromise—and in a way, I suppose it did. Watching people at the rink move around the ice with an ease that I no longer had was hard some nights.
But usually, it just felt good to be out there.
Nothing worked up a better sweat than powering around the wide expanse of ice until my hip ached and my knee felt like it wanted to evict itself from my body.
It was also freer than it had been when I was playing. Everything in the NHL had been so regimented. My diet, my ice time, my public face, my gameplay. Hell, even my free time was carefully curated and scheduled, so nothing about it was actually free.
I hadn’t realized how much of myself I’d lost to the world of sports, which I knew was entirely my fault. Not every player was like me. Not everyone struggled to regulate or compartmentalize. Not everyone made their position and stats their entire personality.
It was the one thing I’d been afraid of when I decided to go back to school. What if I lost myself again to a new career? Andmaybe that would have happened—hell, maybe it still could. But for the moment, Ferris was back in my life, and he was holding me like an invisible tug-of-war.
Everything about the relationship was wrong on so many levels. He might have been a virgin, but he was so much more in tune with his own body than I was. And he understood his own heart, where I had always tucked mine away in a little closed box.
I used to blame that on having no one. My parents died when I was young. I had no siblings. There were distant cousins who didn’t live anywhere near me, and no one had really checked up on me when my mom passed.
I was just some guy they could brag about every time we made playoffs or I won some sort of trophy. Occasionally, one of them would call asking for money, but since being retired, those had also dried up.
So yeah, it was easy to make that part of my personality too. But meeting Ferris made me realize how much of it was my fault. Over the years, so many of the guys had reached out, trying to pull me into their little family orbit, but I’d been so fixated on not getting attached.
What if I got traded? What iftheygot traded?
What if the worst happened and I was unable to play again? Back then, I very much doubted any of them would try to stay in my life.
Except they had tried to keep me in the loop after my injury, and I was the one who shut them out.
I was feeling a bit foolish and very lonely. Having Ferris in my space had been thrilling, erotic, and terrifying all at once. One set of wrong eyes and a single report, and everything I’d worked for would be down the drain. I couldn’t imagine the scandal headlines.
NHL rookie fresh from college seduced by former NHL star turned physical therapist.
Or…something like that. There was a reason I wasn’t a journalist. But it wasn’t just my reputation on the line. I didn’t want to ruin Ferris before he had a chance to make something of himself.
But dear god, he was addicting. I didn’t know if something was fundamentally wrong with me or if the universe was trying to show me that there was that one perfect man out there for me. He didn’t seem bothered by the fact that I was quiet or closed off. He didn’t care that I rarely smiled or that my laugh was so unused it sounded like a wheeze. He didn’t mind that I had nearly two decades on him.
He just…liked me.
I didn’t know how to handle that.
“Yo!”
