Beauty and the Beefcake

by Pippa Grant

  “The next time you interfere with my relationships, I’m giving Maren all your love letters to Ella Jameson.”

  He freezes beside the wall of shelves holding Gammy’s bobble head hockey player collection. “You don’t have those old things.”

  “Oh, but I do.” Maybe. I think. I’m pretty sure I can find them in my parents’ attic, because I remember Mom and Ella’s mom laughing over them one afternoon last summer. And I can psychologically terrorize him all I want without fucking up my chances of getting hired by the Thrusters someday. They’ve turned me down as their Zamboni driver six times, plus they weren’t interested in using me for either my accounting or marketing degrees, so I’m back in school studying to be a physical therapy assistant.

  This one’s going to work.

  I’m sure of it.

  “Don’t try me,” I warn Nick.

  “You still should’ve called. We could’ve helped you move your shit.”

  “And dipped his toothbrush in the toilet and rubbed Icy Hot into his briefs and hidden raw shellfish on the top shelves of his cabinets.”

  Why, yes, my brother has helped me move out of ex-boyfriends’ places before. Why do you ask?

  “If he can’t handle that, then he wasn’t man enough for you anyway.”

  “I’m done talking to you about this. And you’re cleaning Soggy Cookie Mountain. Understood?”

  He waves me off. “We’ll get to it.”

  “Gammy’s ghost isn’t pleased.”

  “Ssshh!” His gaze darts to the kitchen, where I swear I just heard Ares grunt the word moo. “Don’t freak him out.”

  “Who?”

  “Berger. I told him he could move in here.”

  “Wha—what?”

  Nick clamps a hand over my mouth and drags me to the staircase beside the door, where we have a furious whispering match.

  “He needs a new place to stay—”

  “What what?” I repeat. “Why?” Since being traded to Copper Valley in the pre-season, Ares has been living with another of the team’s newest acquisitions, an honest-to-god prince from some small country north of England. “Manning’s penthouse is huge. Just because Gracie’s moving in permanently—”

  “He doesn’t want to be the third wheel.”

  “Did he say that?”

  Nick tilts a look at me.

  Right. Ares never says anything. The one time I got a glimpse at a text conversation on Nick’s phone, it was one long conversation solely of weirder and weirder gifs.

  Some things you can’t unsee.

  “Then how do you know he doesn’t want to live there anymore?” I whisper.

  “Would you want to be the third wheel with those two?”

  I don’t want to be anyone’s third wheel. Right now, I don’t even want to be anyone’s second wheel. I’m off men.

  For real this time.

  “He seriously can’t find anywhere else to live?” I’m whispering so softly I can barely hear myself, because while Ares freaks me out and I’m not at all comfortable with this plan, I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

  “That ankle hurt much?” Maren asks Ares in the kitchen.

  “Orange,” he answers.

  And now my brother, sender of dick cookies, is giving me the shame on you frown. Because it’s not exactly a secret that a bunch of people wonder if Ares can even tie his own skates.

  “He’s family,” Nick chides.

  The whole flipping team is family. And even I can’t argue with that. They’re like family to me too.

  Even when Nick was playing for other teams, I tracked the Thrusters religiously and could rattle off every one of the players’ stats.

  And I’ve applied for all the open jobs I qualified for even before Nick was drafted.

  “Also,” he adds, his voice going even softer, “he’s not exactly cooperating with doctor’s orders.”

  My heart skips a beat. “What do you mean?”

  “Tried to lace up for morning skate today.” Nick winces. “His ankle’s ugly. Coach chewed him up one side and down the other, and Berger just sat there, staring at him like he was going to eat him. Took six of us to get him out of the dressing room.”

  The news is reporting a high ankle sprain, which will have him off the ice at least six weeks, if not more, depending on how bad it is. He took a bad hit in Florida late last week.

  “He needs to stay off it.” I don’t have to tell Nick, but I can’t help myself. I just did eighteen months worth of PTA school, and now I’m doing my clinicals to finish the degree. I could draw you a diagram. “He can’t start rehab if he doesn’t stay off it and get the swelling down.”

  Nick’s now smiling while he nods.

  I know that smile.

  I don’t like that smile.

  It’s the Keep talking, Felicity, because you’re right, and you know you’re right, and I’m going to wallop you upside the head with a terrible plan once you’re good and worked up about knowing how to treat ankle injuries.

  “What?” I say.

  “You want to work for the Thrusters, right?”

  Fuck.

  I don’t say it out loud, but my brother knows me, and he probably knows I’m already salivating and that my pulse is racing harder than a freaking horse. His grin gets broader. “I told Coach you’re a fucking miracle worker. You keep Berger off his feet so he can start rehab late next week, and we’ll get you an interview.”

  “Because you can’t put in a good word for me without me babysitting Ares Berger?”

  “Half the team have family in sports medicine. You prove you can handle Berger, you’re proving you can handle anybody. I’m doing you a favor.”

  Were it anyone other than Ares Berger, I would be kissing his feet right now. “How am I supposed to babysit him while I’m doing my clinicals?”

  “Take him with.”

  Even if Bring An Injured Hockey Player To Work Week was a thing—which it actually should be, since I have two weeks left on a rotation at a physical therapy rehab clinic specializing in sports injuries—there’s one key point Nick’s missing here. Several, actually, but most importantly—“How the fuck am I going to make him get into my car all by myself?”

  “Mint on a stick,” Nick says without hesitation. “He loves those things. They—Ow!”

  I twist his ear, because he can still play with a sore ear, and I know there’s no way I can refuse this opportunity.

  Even if I have no freaking clue how I’m going to pull it off. “If he gets weird—” I whisper.

  “He’s not weird. He’s just quiet. And he has to fucking get better because we need him on the ice. Also, he likes your dummies. Laughter’s the best medicine. Do it for the Thrusters.”

  “That’s not fair. And they’re puppets, not dummies.”

  He smirks. “You’re the one who had to show off with the monkey.”

  Oh, fuck. The monkey. Last I saw Ares off the ice, at Manning’s place, he had an honest-to-god emotional support monkey sitting on his shoulder. Not his, but the monkey had taken a liking to him, and I’m pretty sure the monkey’s original owner has left the country without her emotional support pet. “The monkey is not moving in too.”

  Nick goes pink and his eyes cut to the door. “That’s between him and Frey. I’m staying out of it.”

  Fuck.

  He brought the monkey.

  “I can’t live with a monkey,” I whisper-shriek. “I’m already living with Gammy’s ghost!” No need to mention how freaking adorable the monkey is. Last time I saw him, I left dreaming about babies. I’m too young to be craving babies.

  “We couldn’t leave him behind,” Nick hisses back. “He saw Ares packing up, and he started crying. Have you ever tried to tell a crying monkey no? It was like I was trying to take away his best friend. He had to come. Besides, you got along fine with him the night you made him talk.”

  “He wasn’t my roommate then.”

  “I swear, Felicity, I’ll put in an extra extra g
ood word for you.”

  Dammit.

  There’s no denying the thrill in knowing this could be my chance to get in with the Thrusters.

  Hockey’s in my blood. My dad played, though he retired before I was old enough to remember. Nick plays. Mom covered all the local sports for the Copper Valley Post and was one of very few women sports reporters at the time when I was growing up. I gave up my virginity to one of Nick’s teammates when I was seventeen, because he was flipping hot, and no, that wasn’t my last hockey player.

  Even Gammy loved hockey. As evidenced by not only her bobble head doll collection, but also her jersey collection and that little black book I’m pretending I didn’t find in her nightstand.

  I want to work for the Thrusters. I love the Thrusters. I’d do pretty much anything for the Thrusters.

  Even if they never pay me.

  So I guess I’m getting a roommate.

  And apparently a monkey.

  2

  Felicity

  Monday morning, while Ares and his monkey are sleeping—yes, the monkey moved in, and no, I don’t want to talk about it—I’m venting to myself like I always do. Not fuming venting, but ventriloquist venting. I can talk without moving my lips. And I do at every available opportunity—like when I made the monkey talk a while back—because it’s freaking fun.

  What’s not fun?

  My phone dinging this early. I abandon my search for Gammy’s sugar spoon, which I swear I put back in the utensil drawer when I unloaded the dishwasher fifteen minutes ago, and check my phone.

  One word.

  From Doug.

  No.

  “Goats go to heaven, dickheads go to hell,” I vent in my Lucy the Cat voice. And yeah, I’m forcing the Lucy cheer—she’s my hockey-loving, see-the-bright-side-of-everything cat puppet—because now I’m fuming and practicing talking without moving my lips.

  Yes. I’ll be there at six, I text back.

  Because his no was in answer to my very polite request that he let me into his apartment to finish packing my clothes, books, pictures, and my old Thrusters trading cards that I was organizing when I finally told him two weeks ago that things between us weren’t going to work.

  He still has one other thing too.

  My grumpapotamus puppet.

  I can’t believe I left Harold there.

  My phone dings, and—“Real mature, asshole,” I vent in my Harold the Grumpapotamus voice.

  Who sends dick pics to their ex-girlfriend?

  A shadow suddenly descends through the kitchen as Ares steps into the room.

  Though steps isn’t the right word. He’s limping with the aid of a crutch, but somehow managing to make the movement look as graceful as a dance.

  And he’s quiet too. No thump of the crutch—probably helped by the brown patterned velvet carpet in here—nor is there a clomp from his boot.

  Conspicuously absent?

  His monkey.

  Not that monkey. The monkey-monkey. Loki. The monkey’s name is Loki, and he charmed Kami—who’s a vet—last night with monkey puppy dog eyes, and while Nick was helping Ares get settled in the guest room upstairs, Loki threw a bobble head at me.

  Little booger smiled when I caught it too.

  Like he knew Gammy’s ghost would flip this house inside out if her Wayne Gretzky bobble head got broken.

  And now her sugar spoon is missing.

  Coincidence?

  Probably not.

  I swallow and shove my phone in my back pocket. I’ll deal with Doug later. “Morning,” I say.

  Ares grunts, nods, and stares longingly at my French press on the counter.

  Which I bought last week, since getting my old one back is one less thing to fight Doug about.

  “You want coffee?” I ask.

  He looks at me not as though I’ve broken the unspoken rule of not attempting conversation before coffee, but rather as though I’m speaking Klingon to an overgrown Oompa-Loompa.

  I’ve been around hockey players my entire life. There are the hornballs, the egomaniacs, the romantics, the quiet ones, the loud ones, the big ones, the smaller ones—relatively speaking, of course—the cute ones, the ones missing half their teeth, the secret geeks, and the ones who leave practice to go home and play hockey video games. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to these guys, and usually none of them faze me.

  I’ve slept with more than one and enjoyed myself immensely, thank you very much.

  But Ares Berger is in a class by himself.

  He has to duck to get through the doorway, and his shoulders are so broad they barely fit. His dark hair is just long enough to hint at some curl. Thick dark scruff covers his face from his cheeks down his neck. The grayish-purplish T-shirt stretched over his pecs announces Goats are Spoons, with a sunflower as the P in spoons and a smiley face in one of the O’s. Movement under his navy sweatpants suggests he’s freeballing it, or possibly that he’s storing that emotional support monkey in his pants.

  That’s…not big enough to be the monkey.

  Except it…might be.

  I blink and force myself to look away from his monkey pocket, because no matter how many hockey players I’ve slept with, Ares Berger will never be among them.

  It’s not just his size that makes him different and more than a little intimidating.

  It’s…well, him.

  The biggest brutes on the ice usually smell like sweat and dirty gym socks and sometimes like stale sex. Testosterone pours off them in waves, and even when they’re in their suits and ties arriving for the game—okay, yes, especially then—they have this look of total power.

  I can deal with power and meatheads and chauvinism. Hell, I like manly men. I’ve dated more than my fair share. I work with goons-in-training during clinicals every day right now, and I’ve had three previous careers where I’ve also dealt with goonballs on a regular basis, though sometimes more of the vocal variety than the muscular variety.

  I’m well-prepared for this.

  Except Ares Berger, known as the Force on the ice, capable of glowering at opponents in a way that makes you wonder how many children he ate for breakfast, who once challenged a monster truck to see who could push a concrete barrier farther, and who out-machos half the men in Copper Valley combined merely by breathing, smells like cake.

  I simply cannot reconcile a man this big, muscled, and intimidating with cake.

  Or with the whole friend-of-the-monkeys thing either.

  It honestly freaks me out a little.

  “Sleep okay?” I ask.

  “Corn,” he answers.

  And then there’s that.

  I’ve never met a hockey player I couldn’t talk to. I’ve never met a person I couldn’t talk to. I don’t always say the right thing—ask me sometime about getting fired from my first job—and I frequently introduce myself without moving my lips, because I’m just a little bit of a freak, but I’m not as socially awkward as my IQ says I should be.

  Still, what the fuck are you supposed to do with corn being the answer to sleep okay?

  “Um, is that what Loki eats?” Mental note: research monkeys.

  He grunts and pulls out one of Gammy’s spindle chairs from beneath her prized Amish breakfast table—she won it in a high-stakes bingo game when my dad was a baby and god help anyone brave enough to risk breathing on it wrong—sits, and lifts his bad foot halfway to resting on another chair.

  The wood beneath him creaks, and he freezes. Like solid freezes.

  The man’s holding his breath because a chair creaked.

  Also filed under the irreconcilable contradictions of Ares Berger is the idea that he would probably also be terrified at the idea of Gammy’s ghost.

  Who seems to have moved the cinnamon shaker too. Is cinnamon toast too much to ask for on a Monday morning?

  “The chair won’t eat you,” I vent in my Tim-the-goat voice. Tim’s one of my three main puppets, and he’s quite logical as only a goat puppet can be. “It alrea
dy had breakfast.”

  Ares’s eyes land squarely on mine, an unexpectedly brilliant and intense blue hiding beneath the solid ridge of his brow, and heat creeps over my chest and makes my mammary glands swell.

  He’s intense.

  “Sorry,” I mutter. “I practice in the mornings. Seriously, you drink coffee or not?”

  I’m not asking if the monkey drinks coffee.

  He grunts and slowly finishes lifting his booted foot to rest it on another chair, which is also good, because I didn’t want to fight him about his ankle before breakfast.

  I take his grunt as a yes and assume he’d add an And I’d love a cup please if it didn’t look like he was concentrating so hard on getting his foot up and not falling out of the chair. I also peek into the living room.

  Where is the monkey?

  “Hazelnut, vanilla, butter toffee, or French roast?” I ask.

  His brow twitches, but he doesn’t answer.

  I grab the French roast bag—I have no idea if that’s what he wants, but it’s what he’s getting unless he says otherwise—and measure beans into the hand grinder. “Half and half, Felicity,” I vent in my Harold the Grumpapotamus voice while I crank away. Fucking Doug better not do anything to Harold, because if he hurts my puppet—I refuse to call them dummies—I’ll…I’ll… Fuck. I’ll do something. And I’m related to Nick Fucking Murphy, king of horrible revenge. I can come up with something.

  And if I can’t, the internet can.

  “Half caff, half soy, half vanilla, half chocolate, half caramel, half macchiato,” I vent. I make quick work of cleaning out the press and prepping Ares’s coffee, my venting rapidly turning into a conversation between my puppets even though all of them—except Harold—are tucked away upstairs in a trunk, which probably makes me look mentally unstable.

  But I have to practice sometime. I started talking to myself while hanging out waiting for Nick’s practices to be over when I was little, and then as I was reading calculus books in fifth grade—which I did when I was seven—and ventriloquism just sort of morphed into this hobby that I love. I do open mic night at a club downtown some weeks, and I’m always working on new material while I keep my skills sharp.