Slap Shot (D.C. Stars, #3)

by Chelsea Curto

Madeline watched our game, and that makes me even prouder than the goal did.

I leave out the part where we sat on my couch together the other night. How her laughs turned into snorts and how I couldn’t help having one more glass of wine because it meant spending a little more time with her.

A man in jeans and a black T-shirt watching Grant’s sister do another pirouette with the hint of a scowl on his face.

sin bin mention

“Do you need anything else?” Stay here with me. Your touch soothes me. Every minute you’re around, I feel like the part of myself that’s been broken for years is healing.

“When I said green, I meant that exact shade. You in that outfit, really.” His cheeks are flushed, and his Adam’s apple bobs. “No other variation is ever going to do.”

Everything narrows down to her, and the careful way she puts a hand on my chest. How her fingers fan out over my shirt and she twists the cotton, pulling me toward her. As if I wouldn’t go willingly. As if I wouldn’t fucking crawl or run or climb a mountain to get there.

“I’m not kissing you unless you tell me to, Madeline. And if I do, it’s not going to be a one-time, casual thing. It’s not going to be a two-time thing. It’s going to mean something, just like it did on New Year’s, because I’m done pretending like I haven’t thought about that night every single day that’s passed. I have. Excessively. But I don’t act on it because I don’t want you to hide from me again. I don’t want to mess this up. You mean too much to me.”

Her lips pull up into a grin. She lifts her chin, a dare there, before she says, “Fuck it,” and crashes her mouth against mine. The planets realign. The earth stops rotating, and this is different from how we kissed on New Year’s.

I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. I want her again in an hour and in a month down the road. I want her body and her soul, and I’d get on my knees and beg until I had them.

“Maddie.” Hudson smiles. Brushes his thumbs along my ribs and drums his fingers against my skin. “This right here—being with you? Touching you? Breathing the same air as you?—is good enough for me. Everything else is a bonus.”

Hudson laughs again, and the sound is like coming home. A Sunday morning in bed and warm coffee when it’s cold outside.

I’ll forget how her laugh sounds. I’ll struggle to remember the traditions she liked to keep at the holidays and what her hugs were like. It feels like I’m drifting out to sea, away from her. The more time that goes by, the more difficult it is to get to the shore. I’m lost in the ocean with no hope of finding my way back to land.

“I think we can up the intensity, Lexi,” she says, and Grant lets out an honest-to-god wail. “Just a smidge, don’t you think?”

“This way I get to see the parts of yourself you say you don’t love. The cellulite, the stretch marks. You don’t have to like them, Maddie, but I’m fucking obsessed with them. I’ll worship them for both of us.”

It might be a big game for us tonight, but I don’t care. I’ll have those two in the stands, which means I already won.