Page 31 of Knottingley Ever After
Matteo.
I can smell him, too. Sweat and citrus rind and the deep churned-ice sharpness I had not noticed until he was right up on me, close enough that I could count the gold flecks in his irises. It hits me with a surge, the memory, so vivid it makes me lightheaded.
My hand works rough and desperate, nails scoring my own skin, and I chase the feeling like it is a game I can win.
“You’re going to have me on my knees,” he says, but not on a hockey rink.
It’s somewhere undefined, a liminal hallway of sweat and steam and whatever molecules linger in the air between two people when neither is backing down.
“Begging.” His voice goes low, velvet and threat all at once, and the noise shivers up my spine and gets buried somewhere behind my teeth, a coin dropped in a well.
He pushes me, in the replay—the way he did in the hall, but this time there is a wall at my back and his hand is braced next to my head, not caging but inviting.
His mouth finds the line of my neck, not soft, not gentle, teeth grazing the skin in a way that says hunger and only hunger. The hood is up, shadowing his face, but I know those eyes are on me, always.
Just before he bites down, he says my name.
It is a neat trick of the mind, how nothing about the scenario is real and still my hips jerk, a full-body spasm I can’t contain, and my own voice starts to rise, shredded and higher than I ever let it get.
I cover my mouth with one hand and keep going, because the fantasy is relentless, it always has been, and if I am going to lose I want to lose all the way.
In the fantasy, he is the one to say it first.
“I want you. Not a show on the ice…for the crowd...or mere logstics. I simply want you.”
And that is what does it, the honesty of it, the brutal lack of performance.
I clutch at the tile and the pulse hits in waves, unspeakably good and also so humiliating that I want to dissolve through the drain. I make a noise, a real out-loud noise, which is the first rule-breaker, and the sound of it—raw, too loud, and dare to admit is mine—makes the orgasm snap and then keep cresting, like some tide I cannot call back.
My body craves for this to be reality…no matter how desperate it seems.
It is over, after, in a ragged heartbeat, and I am left with my cheek on freezing tile and my entire skeleton gone soft.
Above the sound of the shower, I can just make out the thin, disbelieving laugh I let out.
The kind of laugh you give a car crash you walked away from.
“Jesus Fucking Christ, O’Shea. Get a grip.”
I rinse my hand under the water, bracing myself for the sting of cold, and breathe in slow, then out. It is not only my body that is shaking; my head is a snowglobe, all the pieces of me knocked out of their neat rows.
Blockers, right.
I am going to need blockers that work on my own goddamn brain, not just eighty-mile-per-hour slapshots.
I exhale, shaky, forehead still to the tile, and mutter the verdict to the drain.
The locker room door opens.
My eyes snap wide.
I have the shower off before I have finished registering the sound, palm slapping the knob, the arctic stream cutting to a drip, and then I am standing dead still behind a pool-blue curtain, dripping, naked, my own release still slick on my fingers, listening to male voices pour into a room that is supposed to be the one place in this building they cannot follow me.
“Bruh, she should still be in here.”
“Her stuff’s not on the benches.” A second voice, lazier. “She probably left already.”
“Still smells like her, though.” A third, and this one drops lower, into something that turns my stomach over. “Fuck. Say what you want, hate her guts all you like, you can’t exactly argue she doesn’t smell good.”
