17. August

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

AUGUST

E lla's already on the ice by the time the team hits the tunnel. It seems Lumin is giving Remi Red Tail a run for his money as he chases her down the ice. The crowd cheers "LUMIN! LUMIN! LUMIN!" as she glides across the ice with her glowing hockey stick.

I'm so proud of her every time I see her do her thing.

"Look at her go, man!" Ledger says, hitching his thumb behind him from the tunnel. "That girl is fast."

"Tell me about it. She used to kick my ass when I'd make her race me when we were kids. It pissed me off every time until I finally realized she was helping me get faster. By the time I hit high school I was the fastest one on the team."

"Think you can outskate her now?" Griffin asks.

I shake my head and chuckle. "Hell, I'd like to think so but watching her out there now…I'm not so sure."

"Guess we'll have to put you both to the test sometime, huh?" Harrison laughs.

Oliver motions for us to huddle up before we take the ice for warm up. "Alright guys. I'm not losing to my brother-in-law in our house, you got that? Watch their defense. Foster and Malone are strong and Miller isn't going to let much through if he can help it. We've got work ahead of us with these birds but let's show them who's boss in Anaheim."

Just as we turn in line to make our way to the ice, Ella is coming off clapping her hands and raising her fists in victory. The guys congratulate her on a job well done before we take the ice one by one.

"Way to go Lumin!"

"Hey great job out there!"

"That's our girl, Lumin!"

"You're a beast out there, Lumin."

"Think you'd give Blackstone here a run for his money!"

"Nice job out there, babe. Knew you'd kick his ass." I offer her a fist bump with my glove which she meets but she surprises me when she slaps my ass right before I take the ice.

And I can't lie. That little gesture just gave me the extra zip I needed to want to play a hard and fast game.

We go through our normal warm-up routine and then we're called to center ice for the playing of our national anthem. From there, our dance with the birds begins.

Landric and Magallan face off, smirking at each other under their helmets. The puck is dropped and Landric comes out on top with Magallan right on his heels. Landric passes to Quinton Shay but Ledger intercepts and takes it down the ice to Red Tails territory. He's unable to get it past Dex Foster who shifts it to Colby Nelson. Colby takes possession and works the puck out of their defensive zone sending it to Landric but I'm there just in time to check him into the glass.

"Sorry Landric. The puck is mine," I shout as I pass him a quick wink.

Ledger, Oliver, and I work together to get the puck back into the scoring zone, working the puck in front of the net. I shoot my shot but Miller is too quick and blocks it with his knee as he slides left.

"Don't fucking think so brother!" Miller says as we fight to regain a hold on the puck. The crowd boos as the puck makes its way into Anaheim territory but when Landric tries to score, Bear refuses to let it pass.

No goal.

"Come on, Stars," I mutter to myself. "These birds are not beating us today."

Harrison is able to work in a hit but it's deflected by Quinton Shay and pushed back into the Anaheim zone. Shay is jacked into the boards by Griffin and the puck is back in the Stars' possession. Griffin tries to move the puck and succeeds, getting it to Oliver who shifts to Ledger.

Ledger moves into scoring range and tries to shoot this time but the puck hits Miller's other knee pad and ricochets right into Coby Nelson's grasp.

"Dammit," I mutter. "Give it back Nelson."

Colby laughs. "In your dreams Black—ah, fuck!" Harrison sneaks in for the steal and throws it back to me as I laugh at Colby.

All in good fun of course. These guys are a blast to play. A hard solid team, for sure, but a good game is great fun.

I curl behind the net refusing to stop moving while I maneuver the puck back and forth with my stick, waiting for my moment, and when I finally see it, I waste no time taking the shot. Miller sinks to the ground, his knees butterflied, but by the grace of God, it slides just past his leg and into the net and the sirens go off as my arms go up.

"SCOOOOORE! HELL YEAH!"

The crowd erupts and it's hard to hear any train of thought, but the guys all swarm around me, patting my helmet and hugging me.

"That'a boy, Blackstone!"

"Damn, that was fast, Auggie!" Harrison says with a smile. "Proud of you!"

"Great start, Blackstone!"

The first period ends with the Stars leading 1-0.

During the first intermission my face is glued to the television in the locker room as I watch Ella do her thing. She happily makes her way through the crowd until she finds two people she can tell are there together and places her fur-covered paw on each of their heads forcing them to turn toward each other. The crowd cheers for the couple to kiss and when they do, Lumin claps and cheers and then pats them both on the head. She does this for four or five more couples and then makes her way to the t-shirt cannon in the corner of the arena. With each blow of the cannon, she pretends to almost fall backward and then proceeds to shoot t-shirt after t-shirt into the excited crowd.

"Aww, look at our boy Blackstone," Griffin says as we're all seated in the dressing room in various stages of undress. "Pussy-whipped and in love. He hasn't taken his eyes off that screen."

"She's a hell of a lot prettier than you are, Ollenberg," I tell him as I wipe my sweat-soaked face with my towel.

"Touché, my friend."

"And you're right. I'm fucking proud of her." I gesture to the screen. "Look at her out there doing her thing for the team. She's amazing. If that means I'm pussy-whipped, then so be it."

"You really care about her," Oliver says with a smile. "We can all tell that."

"Hell yeah, I care about her. She's…"

Everything.

"She's my home. She's always been my home. And if I play my cards right, she'll always be my home."

"Wow," Harrison chuckles. "Talking a little fast aren't we? That's a huge turnaround from the man you were before Ella came along."

I shake my head. "Not fast at all. I'm thirty years old and we've known each other since we were two. Twenty-eight years is a fucking long time to build a relationship. We just finally got to the point where we didn't need to deny our feelings for one another anymore."

"Have you consummated this new phase of your relationship yet, Blackstone?" Ledger asks from the other side of the room.

"Trust me, it's not that I don't want to," I tell him, grabbing my water bottle and twisting it open. "I'm just putting the ball in her court. I don't want to force her into doing anything she doesn't want to do."

"Do you think she doesn't want to?"

"Nah, I just think the timing hasn't been right. You guys know what our schedule is like."

Bear stands and adjusts his pads in preparation for the second period. Then he pats my shoulder and gruffly says, "Tonight is the night then."

I laugh. "Okay, Bear. And when exactly should that happen? While we have game night with the Red Tails at Oliver's?"

"Hey!" Oliver admonishes. "Don't knock game night. Charlee says it's a fucking fun time and she can't believe we don't have routine game nights."

Ledger pipes in. "So, what are we playing tonight? Spin the bottle?"

"Fuck no," I say with a stern shake of my head. "And risk someone else kissing my girl in front me? That's a hard pass."

"Oh, I imagine the guys or gals from the Red Tails will have something in mind. From what Charlee says, their game nights are always hella inappropriate and top-notch fun."

"That was an amazing win!" Ella throws her arms around my neck when I stop in her dressing room after the game. "And you scored! Oh, my God, I thought I was going to pee my pants from cheering so hard!"

I kiss the side of her neck and chuckle as I hold her against me. "They're a hard team to beat, that's for sure. For a while there, I wasn't sure we were going to come out on top, but once Harrison scored at the end of the third I felt rather good about it."

"As you should have. And the crowd was electric tonight. You can tell they were really excited about a solid game."

"Those are the games we love playing. When the crowd is as into it as we are." I pat her ass lovingly. "You looked magnificent out there as well, you know. Watching you kick Remi's ass before the game was hot. Reminded me of old times."

She winks and gives me a chaste kiss to my lips. "You mean those days where I cleaned your clock on the ice."

"Yep. You had no idea at the time, but I was crushing on you so fucking hard back then."

She pushes off my chest. "What?"

"Your tight little ass always looked hot in those leggings you would wear. I enjoyed chasing after you very much."

"Is that so?" Her voice is less incredulous and a little more seductive.

"Yep."

"Hmm. Well maybe if you're really lucky, I'll let you place your hands on this tight little ass later and take your best shot."

I palm both of her ass cheeks and pull her tightly against my body. "You're such a tease."

She laughs. "In all the best ways, babe. I've got to give you something to think about while we're playing games with the birds tonight."

I lean in and connect my lips with hers, tasting the cotton candy I know she had earlier. "Babe, you just guaranteed that's all I'll be thinking about for the rest of the night."

She cocks her head and gives me her best fake sympathetic look. "Aww, you poor thing."

"Yeah, yeah. Keep that up and I'll be spanking that tight little ass tonight."

Her eyes grow wide and playful and her smile widens. "Ooh, don't make promises you don't intend to keep, Auggie."

"Ella Montgomery, I have every intention of keeping that promise."

"Bodhi Roche?" Colby asks when his name is brought up in conversation. "Yeah we've been watching him too."

We're all seated around Oliver and Scarlett's backyard enjoying the warm weather of a California evening in November. Knowing both teams have tomorrow off from game play, Oliver and Scarlett invited the Red Tails to hang with us for the night and Oliver's sister, Charlee, brought up the idea of game night. Apparently this is something the Red Tails do often, which I think is kind of rad as I gaze around the room at these big burly men about to play games.

Although if I'm being honest, the only real thing on my mind right now is what's coming later tonight when I get Ella home. I don't even care if it's not straight up sex because I know whatever we get ourselves into, it's going to be out of this world. Every now and then she gives me a look that says she's thinking about it too which will make a few hours from now that much hotter. Anticipation is everything.

"He's garnered quite the following on social media," Carissa says. "Apparently he's quite the player."

"Probably in all senses of the word." I roll my eyes. "We've heard he's a bit of a pompous little dick. You guys can have him if they move him up to the big boy leagues."

"I don't think it's a question of if," Zeke adds. "More like when."

"I thought I heard somewhere that the Bay Scrapers were looking into grabbing him," Milo says before taking a sip of the beer in his hand.

"I heard maybe the Grizzlies." Harrison shrugs. "So, I guess only time will tell."

"Okay so teams!" Charlee announces, wanting to steer the conversation away from hockey for the night. She holds up her game night cheat sheet. "Team one will be Dex, Barrett, Ella, Rory, and Zeke. Team two is Tate, Kinsley, Harrison, Milo and Scarlett. Team three is Quinton, Carissa, Ledger, Hawken, and Griffin. And Team four will be Colby, August, Ada, myself, and Oliver."

Ella gives me a swift kiss on my cheek and whispers, "You're going down, Blackstone."

I merely smirk back at her and lick my lips before saying, "Damn right I am."

I give her a pat on the ass like she did me earlier tonight and then watch proudly as her cheeks pinken immediately. Then I simply smile and enjoy the sway of her ass as she walks away from me to join her group.

Yep.

Flirting with her is going to be fun.

"We're going to play Mad Gab, completely NSFW addition and we're going to make up our own phrases because I don't really have the game with me. So, everyone takes a couple slips of paper and a sharpie. You want to write the actual phrase on one side and then on the opposite side, you'll write out that phrase by using other words or word-soundings. So, for example if you were saying ‘a paper jam' you might write ‘ape ape purge am.' Get it?"

Everyone nods and passes around the paper and markers. After a few minutes of subtle and not so subtle chuckling, because of course most of us are in our middle school boy eras right now, Charlee collects the folded phrases and mixes them up in her black bag.

Shaking the bag as she speaks, she explains, "So, one of us will pull the phrases out of this bag and someone from each of your teams will say them out loud. You'll get one minute to get your team to figure out as many sayings as possible and the team with the most phrases completed wins."

"Easy peasy," Dex says, rubbing his hands together and fist bumping Ella. "We've got this in the bag."

I pass him my most mischievous smile and tell him, "Yeah that's probably what you said before tonight's game."