Unsteady

For once, I’m not thinking. Not as I blindly followed her upstairs. Not as I let her lead me into an empty bathroom. Not now, as I grab at her shoulder to stop her from leaving and spin her, easily pinning her small body against the door.

“This is what you want?” I ask, making sure that this time, she can feel me entirely. Every bit of my body is pressed completely to hers, connecting like a perfect puzzle piece.

She’s so much smaller than me, and with our previous interactions being mostly me on the ground looking up at her like some deity coming to save me, it’s something I only really notice now, me towering over her with my hand broad against her trim waist.

“I just…” she starts, but fades off again. Her pupils are blown and the faux red light somehow only highlights the freckles beneath her eye, the angular shape of her face.

“Tell me,” I nearly beg. Maybe it’s the too-loud music giving me a massive headache, or the red light that makes this almost like a foggy dream, but I can’t make myself shut up. “Because I’ll tell you. I can’t stop thinking about the locker room, and I—”

She shuts me up, slamming her lips onto mine. I’m all too eager to reciprocate, tilting down to wrap my arms around her little waist and lift her closer to me, pressing her back into the panels of the door. Her muscular legs twine around my waist in return, holding herself up with ease while grinding lightly down my stomach, chasing friction like a fix.

Sadie’s like a goddamned drug, the effect just as immediate, my mind relaxing and something good chasing the dark out of my veins until I feel like Old Rhys again; even my headache dulls to an ignorable level. I gulp her presence down like air after breaking the surface from drowning. I soak it all up, knowing from my experiences with her before, the switch will flip.

This won’t be enough for her, and I understand it. There’s barely enough of me left to make a complete human. Why would I be able to hold her together when she’s becoming the one keeping me intact?

My lips take their time, slowing from her frantic beginning, pressing and sweeping my tongue across her mouth. My teeth lightly graze, pulling her plump bottom lip to suck between my own, before releasing and heading south. Two kisses to the corner of her mouth, a drag of my tongue down the underneath of her chin, before I press harder, slowly sucking kisses into the skin of her neck.

The moan she releases is soft and light, so opposite of the intense scratch of her nails on my arms and back of my neck beneath the light shag of my slightly-too-long hair.

My stomach is swirling, nausea from the headache I anticipated coming into the blaring house party stirring with intense lust, and my anxiety at doing this here, with her, in this damn bathroom.

I pull away to tell her that, to ask her to follow me home, to talk to me; but she latches herself onto my neck, sucking and licking against the skin so fast my vision blurs and I stumble into the wall, hands gliding underneath her dress to grip her upper thighs to maintain some kind of hold on her.

She’s so strong, I feel like I could let go entirely and she’d hold tight, keeping herself up easily.

There’s a knock at the door, to which Sadie quickly offers, “Fuck off!”

I smile into her neck, feeling almost high off her.

But the person on the other side is insistent, shouting through the crack in a high melodic voice. “Sadie Brown! You can get off on Sean later.”

A wave of frustration rolls through me, as if I have some automatic claim on her, like a fucking third grader. I licked her so she’s mine.

“What do you want, Victoria?”

“Aurora is jumping off the high dive like a psycho!”

That makes her pause, dropping from my arms entirely, pulling her dress down just as a flash of black peeks at me. Not giving a second thought to her reddened neck, swollen lips or loosened ponytail, she rips the door wide open and takes off in a near sprint.

I’m frozen for a moment, watching her escape me like she’s on fire. My eyes flicker to the mirror, the light of the room half glowing from the overhead bulbs in the hallway, half red cutting me nearly down the middle. My collar’s looser now, shirt askew, with marks from her mouth across my neck.

I can’t help the warmth that radiates up my spine and turns my cheeks slightly red.

I think I like what the aftermath of Sadie Gray looks like on me.

Victoria stares from the doorway, eyes wide with a pretty smile across her face.

We’ve crossed paths before, both captains of our sports in our junior years, both communications majors with a few classes together. I’ve never slept with her, but she was my type, from before. Perfectly put together, at all times. Intelligent, kind, elegant; blonde.

“Rhys,” she finally manages to speak. “I didn’t know you were here… with Sadie?” She says it like a question, and if it were anyone else, I might refute the claim. But that interaction in the locker room comes to mind too quickly, the hurt defensiveness of Sadie makes me want to protect her—even if I know she wouldn’t let me if she were here.

“Yeah, I’m just here to pick her up.” Literally and figuratively, I guess, since her ass was just in my hands. “I should go see if she needs help.”

Victoria smiles at me, even if her eyes look a little less sparkly, and I edge around her and head downstairs.

Thankfully, the music is quieter on the large back porch, only two speakers blasting “Wasted” at max volume. I spot Sadie easily, crouched over the lip of the pool on her knees, only two inches between the hem of her dress and her bare ass.

It’s that sliver of pale skin that has me launching down the small set of wooden stairs to stand behind her, blocking her from the small audience forming behind. Only then do I realize that Sadie’s friend Aurora isn’t the only one in the pool; Freddy is right behind her, a few feet away, but close enough to know whatever this situation is, my winger was involved.

I eye him quickly, shaking my head and pressing my thumb backwards over my shoulder, desperately trying to remove him.

He only shakes his head, crossing his arms like a pouting child and casts a quick hesitant glance towards a very wet Aurora, her curls now pulled high atop her head in some crazy knot that looks like it’s tied with—a shoelace?

I try to pay attention to the whispered argument between the two girls, but I’m far too distracted by my stupid friend getting closer and closer to the duet.

Sadie falls back from her whispered conversation, her back tapping against my shins. It doesn’t seem to startle her—far from it, so it seems—as she grabs onto my jeans and starts to heft herself back up.

Instead, I grasp her biceps easily and set her on her feet again.

“Can you find a towel?”

“Yeah,” I agree, no hesitation, despite knowing I have no idea where I could find one.

Spinning away, my foot taps against the two sets of shoes sitting perfectly by the pool, one set of flopped over cream boots; the other a pristine set of white and navy Air Forces with a missing shoelace.

“Don’t touch my shoes,” Freddy barks, and I’m seconds away from shoving him back into the water for getting snippy with me right now. He walks right past me after barking out the order, heading for a wicker chair and table set beneath the overhang of the porch, where two bath towels lay.

“Planned this one, did you?”

Freddy smiles, that same stupid smirk that’s etched nearly permanently to his face, and grabs a towel to sling over his shoulder, taking the other one back to the girls heading towards us.

A quick, “Sure,” is all I get from him, before he’s handing the towel to Rora. She fumbles with it for a moment, before a concerned Sadie grabs it and circles it around her like a blanket over her shoulders.

“Thanks for watching out for her,” Sadie says, albeit reluctantly, as she guides Aurora towards the wooden staircase. Freddy nods, swiping the towel over his hair and letting it rest around his shoulders as well.

“Not a hardship to get a beautiful woman soaking wet,” he quips, before I can elbow him in the gut, or tape his mouth shut, or find a way to rewind time and never let him become my friend.

Sadie and I both jump in simultaneously, barking over each other.

“Jesus, Freddy.”

“Back off it, Matt.”

But, there’s a loud hiccupping laugh that bursts from the drowned girl, cutting off every reprimand sitting on my tongue.

“That was a good one, Freddy,” Rora agrees, dropping the towel and stumbling as she attempts to pull on her boots. “At least, I thought so.” She nearly falls again, but Freddy wraps a hand around her arm to steady her while she gets her shoes over her wet calves.

My gaze finds Sadie immediately, her arms crossed and lips pursed, looking altogether much smaller than she did mere minutes ago, straddling me against a dingy bathroom wall.

“Okay, Gray?” I ask again.

The question seems to jolt her for a moment, her eyes snapping to mine with such sharpness that a shiver rolls down my spine. She bites down on her lip, and my hands tighten inside the confines of my pockets, keeping myself from reaching to pull it loose.

“Yeah. We just need to call an Uber.”

I’m shaking my head before she can finish. “Don’t. We’ll take you back to…?”

“The dorms,” she finishes. “Not far. Honestly, we could walk—”

Freddy shushes her, making that little divot form between her brow again as he passes by her and taps on her head like a child.

“Rhys is an overprotective crazy person, and Rora here is walking like a baby giraffe, so let us drop you, yeah?”

It’s clear she’s battling her agreement, but there’s no way in hell she’s walking home alone. If she won’t take our offer, I’ll just have Freddy drive slowly alongside them until they get back to the dorms.

“Okay,” she nods, while her friend jumps up and down in place, using Freddy’s arm as a stabilizer shouting a chorus of “Yay’s!”

Freddy easily joins in too, a glint of mischief in his squinted eyes that I’m sure is now permanently stuck there.

We leave quickly, piling into Freddy’s ancient SUV that shouldn’t be road legal. It takes a few minutes to maneuver out of the piled-up street parking, which Freddy does one-handed while opening his phone and tossing it to Rora, who has to lean onto the console to use it while it stays connected to the cord hooking it to the outdated system.

“I don’t have connection, but there’s lots in my downloaded. Play whatever, princess.” He smirks, winking over his shoulder at the already flushed girl. I elbow him in the side hard, but he only smiles wider. “Just make it good.”

Rora purses her lips, looking quickly at Sadie who sighs deeply like a parent—but it’s more out of amusement than being annoyed—and she leans forward to sit her chin on Rora’s shoulder.

They both smile brighter as she clicks on something and sets the phone back on the console.

“Oh hell yeah,” Freddy shouts as the song starts, cranking the volume to an absurd level and rolling down all four windows so the heated summer night air breezes through. They all sing at the top of their lungs to the Taylor Swift song blaring, so loud I can’t really make out their voices in the mixed chorus.

My eyes flicker between both the rearview and side mirrors, where I can just see her, dancing side to side, hands in the air, ponytail wild behind her, eyes closed. They open again, her body stretching across the backseat as she and Rora hold hands and yell the chorus into each other’s faces, giggling along.

As many times as I’ve seen her, she’s only really smiled at me twice. But this smile—this is different. It’s so big, her pillowy, faded red lips stretching, the apples of her sharp cheeks softening and creasing the collection of freckles beneath her eyes that I’m just as desperate to touch as I am to get close enough to count them.

Too distracted by the indecent path of my thoughts, my entire body jolts as she suddenly grabs hold of my shoulders, leaning over the middle as far as her seatbelt will let her. Her hands settle and squeeze, and it’s embarrassing how difficult holding back a moan becomes.

Her lips are nearly at my ear as she shouts over the music, “Why aren’t you singing?”

Sadie is infectious, so much so that a smile to match hers dances quickly across my face.

“I don’t know the song.”

“You don’t know “Getaway Car?” Rora joins, smooshing in next to Sadie, which only presses her cheek to mine for a second, the corner of her lips hitting my skin like a goddamn fire poker.

Freddy graciously turns the volume down. “He’s not really a Taylor Swift guy; unless they’re playing it in the arena, I doubt he knows it. And even then” —he shakes his head— “Rhys is too focused to hear anything besides ‘Get. Puck. In. Net.’”

Sadie rolls her eyes at the robotic impression, sharing a look with me like she understands how deep that implication goes for us.

If you play it, I’ll listen.

She gestures with her chin towards him. “And you’re not focused?”

“I’m a good multitasker,” he says, but in usual Freddy fashion, it’s ingrained with the perverse double meaning, making Sadie and I groan, while still-drunk Rora laughs again.

I grab the dial and turn the music back up to save us all from Matt Fredderic’s relentlessness, letting the music blare as we cross South College and head to the edge of campus.

“We’re in Millay,” Sadie offers before either of us can ask, pointing to the red brick buildings facing each other at an angle, the fountain and benches between them barely lit by the orange sidewalk lights, disrupted only by the blaring neon blue of an emergency box.

Freddy pulls right up to the curb, and I nearly spring from the car, terrified that if I don’t try something now, she’s going to slip through my fingers once again.

Sadie looks a little shell shocked at the sight of me standing, but keeps her arm around Rora’s waist and doesn’t say anything as I walk them both up to their dorm entrance. Sadie swipes her Waterfell ID and lets Rora through with a strict command to wait, before spinning back to me.

“Thanks for the ride,” she says. “And for my car. I didn’t mention it before, but that was… You didn’t have to do that, so thank you.”

My head is shaking before she finishes her sentence. “Of course.”

From my angle on the ground and her two steps up, she’s slightly taller than me so I have to look up at her. I’ve been looking up at her from every panic induced dream I’ve had since that day on the ice, like she’s meant to be there.

A fucking guardian angel, I guess. Which is something I’ll never say out loud because I’d never let myself live that down. Especially considering how much I crave that from her.

Like she would want to save me.

Pathetic.

Self-hatred swirls again, and now I want to tape my mouth closed before I say something stupid like, “You could repay me by getting coffee. With me, I mean.”

My laugh is just as self-deprecating, and I want to tell her that I used to be good at this, that I was charming and not whatever this shaking pitiful thing is that’s replaced that part of me.

Sadie doesn’t laugh, but she does start shaking her head.

“I’m not really the go and get coffee girl… honestly, not really the get anything together kind of girl. And definitely not the girl to date someone like you.”

I smile, completely forced and fake, somehow accepting the absolute kick to the gut her response is. My mouth starts to open, to beg her not to say anything else, but she keeps going.

“Tonight was—”

A groan etches from me, my hands covering my face as I beg, “Please don’t say good, I don’t think I can handle that again.”

She laughs lightly, stepping down to my level.

“Alright, duly noted,” she says, reaching her hand into my pocket and grabbing my phone. She doesn’t ask, or say anything, but turns it to my face to unlock it, texting herself the most recently used emoji, which is, unfortunately, a hockey stick. Her eyes dart to mine with a quick eye roll as if to say typical.

“What’s that for?” I ask, taking my phone back from her outstretched hand. We’ve spent over a month together, but never crossed the line to communicating outside of the rink.

I don’t want to get my hopes up.

She takes two steps up the short staircase before turning to look at me and shrugging.

“I don’t know yet. Have a goodnight, hotshot.”

I can’t help the small smile that appears. Despite everything else, I now have something of hers.

“Goodnight, kotyonok.”