Tomboy

Yeah, thinking of his parents was definitely not what he wanted to do at the moment. What he wanted was Fallon, but he had no idea what he was doing. She wasn’t a booty call, she wasn’t a puck bunny, and she wasn’t the single girl from college that had been his last actual relationship. Not that he wanted a relationship. He just wanted to hang out with her—but naked, and then they’d talk after, argue hockey greats, and order in food.

Christ. He made himself sound more pathetic the longer he thought about it.

Locate your balls and call her, Blackburn.

He tossed the empty pint carton in the trash, put the spoon in the dishwasher, and grabbed his phone—which he stared at in confusion for way longer than someone who used the damn thing eight billion times a day should.

Your balls. They’re currently in deep storage. How about taking them out?

Hip-checking the annoying, mocking voice in his head, he opened up his contacts. There she was under LL, which just seemed stupid. She was more than Lady Luck; he and his missing balls could both agree on that.

He tapped the edit button and added an FA in front of the LL and then an ON after. Then, a quick Google images search later, he uploaded a contact pic of her screaming bloody murder from the stands while he and Johansson traded haymakers on the ice. Like an asshole, he grinned at that shot for way too long.

Fuck this. Your gonads have been ball-napped. You’re on your own.

Ignoring the douchebag in his head, Zach hit call.

“Hey,” she said, her voice groggy and sleep-roughened.

He winced. “Sorry, I thought you’d just gotten off work a little bit ago.”

“I did,” she said. “Came home and collapsed in my bed.”

And he was the jerk keeping her up. “You shouldn’t have picked up. Go get your sleep.”

“If I didn’t want to talk to you, I wouldn’t have,” she said. “Great game tonight, I got to see a couple of minutes of highlights during my break.”

If that’s how she wanted to play it, he wasn’t about to argue. Instead, he started back toward his room, shutting off lights on his way. “Wish you’d have been there.”

“I think you did fine with the stand-in.” The muffled sound of covers being tugged into place carried over the line. “That guy was a good sport to wear that sash thing.”

“Yeah.” It was true, but that dude was also the last person he wanted to talk about when he had Fallon on the phone. “So, are you working Thursday?”

“There’s no game that night.”

“I know.” He walked into his room, flipped the phone audio to speaker, and tossed it on his bed before he started to undress. “I was hoping we could go out to dinner, maybe catch a movie.”

There was a pause long enough for him to shuck all his clothes off and crawl into bed—which was really damn long.

“You still there?” he asked.

She let out a soft chuckle. “Are you asking me out on a date?”

Yes. Absolutely. “Maybe.”

“Considering what happens when there’s not plexiglass between us, I’m not sure if it’s a good idea.”

“You’d rather just come over here?” Okay, he was completely down with that. “Or I can come over there.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He took her off speaker and put the phone to his ear again, the activity giving him an outlet for the sudden onset of nervous jitters making him not just want but need to move. “What do you mean?”

“That despite my better judgment, I’m starting to like you.”

His pulse sped up, even though he was lying propped up on a pair of pillows instead of skating his ass off to stop a breakaway, which was what this felt like. She liked him. Liked. Him. Not a coy tease or an implied maybe, but just the facts, straight out and without adornment. That was his girl.

“You make it sound like a bad thing.”