Page 171 of The Offside Rule
Hunter: Ice cream?
I looked at Isla. She was already watching my phone.
“Is that Dad?”
“Yes.”
“Does he want ice cream?” she asked. It wasn’t that Hunter wanted ice cream. He didn’t eat ice cream during the season. It was that he knew his daughter wanted ice cream, and maybe I did too, because he was kind and considerate.
Me: We’re definitely up for ice cream.
An hour later, we were in a booth at a small ice cream place ten minutes from the arena. Hunter sat across from me, baseball cap low, one knee brushing mine under the table. Isla sat beside him, building something terrifying out of vanilla ice cream, sprinkles, gummy worms, and hot fudge.
“That’s a whole lot of sugar, Bug,” Hunter said, looking at her bowl.
“I don’t do it often, so it’s okay, right?” she asked. Hunter laughed and nodded.
I laughed into my spoon. This was what we had become. A little family. Not officially. Not in a way anyone had labeled out loud. But a routine had formed around us so quietly I hadn’t noticed until I was already inside it. Dinner after games when Hunter was home. Homework at Hunter’s kitchen table while Isla did math and I edited my residency personal statement. Movie nights where Hunter pretended to be annoyed by animated soundtracks and then hummed them two days later.
Sometimes I went back to Taylor’s after Isla went to bed. Sometimes Hunter walked me down the hall, kissed me outside Taylor’s door, and looked like he was considering whether the security cameras were worth respecting. And sometimes, when he had a babysitter at his apartment after Isla was asleep, he came to me. Like tonight. Taylor was in her room pretending she didn’t know exactly what was happening, even though she absolutely did because subtlety had never been one of Hunter’s strengths when it came to me. My laptop was open on my bed, my residency personal statement staring back at me. I had written the same sentence six different ways. None of them sounded like me. I am passionate about internal medicine because…
My phone lit up beside me.
Hunter: You awake?
My pulse tripped.
Me: Unfortunately. My personal statement is trying to torture me.
Hunter: Let me in.
My stomach flipped so hard it was embarrassing. I climbed off the bed and padded barefoot down the hall. The apartment was quiet except for the low hum of Taylor’s white noise machine behind her bedroom door. I unlocked the front door and opened it. Hunter stood in the hallway in black sweats and a dark T-shirt, hair damp from the shower, jaw rough withstubble, one hand braced against the doorframe. He looked tired.
“Hi,” I whispered.
His gaze dropped to my oversized T-shirt and bare legs.
“Hi.”
“You look exhausted,” I said.
“I am.”
“Then why are you here?” I asked.
His eyes lifted back to mine. “Because I want you.”
There were things a woman could survive. That sentence, in that voice, was not one of them. I stepped back and let him in. He closed the door softly behind him, because Taylor was down the hall. He turned the lock. The small click went through me like a touch. His eyes met mine.
“Bedroom,” I whispered.
He followed me down the hall, close enough that I could feel him behind me. Heat at my back. His clean soap smell. The tension in the quiet. The second my bedroom door closed, he was on me. His hands found my waist, and he backed me against the door, his mouth coming down on mine like he had been holding himself together for hours and had finally found the place where he could fall apart. I grabbed his shirt and pulled him closer. He groaned into my mouth, low and deep, and the sound went straight between my thighs.
“Missed you,” he said against my lips.
“You saw me two hours ago,” I laughed, but it came out breathless because his mouth had moved to my jaw, then my neck, and his hands were sliding under my shirt. His palms spread over my ribs. I arched into him.
“Hunter.”
