Puck Buddies

by Tara Brown

  “Sami?”

  My eyes widen and I’m still panicking but I whisper, “Yeah?”

  “I’m gonna lose that condom inside you if I don't pull out. Can you move?”

  That's the first thing he says?

  I barely realize we’re still on planet Earth, I can’t think straight just like he promised me, and that's all he has to say?

  A harsh realization hits me.

  This is the kiss all over again.

  I’m reading too much into the pleasure and passion.

  He’s good at kissing and good at fucking, and I haven’t ever had that before so I’m a stage four virgin clinging to him.

  He’s like this with everyone.

  I’m making this all mean more than it does. I’m just another girl in his limo to him, and he’s the best at everything to me.

  Shit.

  It’s a one-night stand and I’m leaving dissatisfied, but for the first time, it’s for the wrong reason. You can’t have a one-night stand with someone you’ve had fantasies about dating. This was a huge mistake.

  “Yup,” I reply too chipper and weird as I sit back and pound on the partition between the driver and us. The car stops and I do the strangest thing I’ve ever done—okay, not the strangest but not the smartest either. I grab my underwear, that I didn’t even realize he had taken off, and open the door, stepping out, half naked like a baby deer walking for the first time.

  “Sami?” he mutters, still getting onto the seat behind him and doing up his pants as I walk along the road without another word. Feeling exactly as trashy as I look, I struggle roadside in some random industrial section of the city to get my underwear back where they belong. They’re drenched in some of him and some of me and all the awkwardness one can fit into underwear. “Get back in the car.” He throws the used condom on the road and I gag a little bit.

  “No thanks.” I walk over and try to slam the door, but he stops it with his beast hands. I suspect he could tear it off the hinges if made angry enough. “I’m good. Thanks for the fun night.” I smile politely and wave as I walk, pulling out my phone and pressing the number for my car. “Hey, Vincenzo. Can you track my phone and come and get me?”

  I don't know where I am. I don't think I recognize it. I’m unfortunately back on planet Earth.

  “What are you doing?” Matt strides to me, leaving the door open. “I’ll give you a ride back to the club.”

  “I feel like you already gave me a ride. We don't need to make this awkward. We can just pretend this didn’t happen.” The words are so hard to speak, my voice almost cracks.

  “But it did happen. And I want to give you a ride home.”

  “No, you want to be a gentleman.” I nod at the car. “But I don't need you to be a gentleman after that.” I point at the car and the condom. “I’m not drunk. I have my own limo. You don't have to worry about me. We aren’t friends, Matt. We don’t even like each other. I don’t know what that was but it’s over.”

  “Get in the fucking car!” He’s being super serious so I take a step back because I’m that girl who has to color outside the line you just told me not to.

  “No. You can’t tell me what to do.”

  He takes a step forward but I step back. “I swear to God, I am going to pick you up and put you in the car if you don't.”

  “Whatever, Beast!” I laugh in his face, not daring him to pick me up, but because we have arrived right back to where we were before the orgasms, fighting.

  “I mean it!” He moves toward me fast, lifting me up over his shoulder and carrying me kicking to the car.

  “Put me down!”

  “NO!” he shouts back for the first time and instead of listening I struggle harder.

  “Put me down!”

  He does as I say but he pulls me to the car and slams the door. He sticks one of his meaty fingers in my face. “This is the wrong neighborhood to leave you alone in a skirt and silly shoes! We can wait here until Vincenzo gets here!” He’s huffing his breath and looks like he might murder someone. His nostrils are dangerously flared.

  “You’re a dick.”

  “No, I’m not. I had a hard workout today, like I threw up a couple of times. I’m not in the mood to get beaten up by some carjackers because you have to make this weird. It wasn't weird until you got out of the car. People have sex all the time; it’s no big deal. We fucked. Get over it, Highness!”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Beast, I was over it the moment it ended.” My eyes lower to my phone as I send a text telling Vincenzo he needs to hurry or I will be going to jail for killing a man.

  “Why do you have to do that? Why are you so bent on hating me?” He leans in, his lips twisting into a sneer.

  “I’m not bent on feeling anything for you. In fact, I’m glad this happened. You have just proven to me you are exactly the guy I thought you were.”

  “Holy fuck.” He rolls his eyes and sits back.

  The silence is awkward but the agonizing reality of him being who I thought he was is much worse.

  My mind taunts me with the way I imagined him, the things I daydreamed about.

  All of them were the fantasies of a naive girl.

  We stare out opposite windows as I wish I could have the fantasy version of him back.

  Chapter Nine

  More borrowed whores

  Matt

  The drive home is conflicting.

  I hate myself for breaking the one rule I never break.

  But even worse is the way the ice queen has gotten into my veins. The kind of gotten in where I’m scared I won’t be able to sleep.

  I want to slap myself in the forehead a couple of times for being so stupid and weak.

  She’s a girl, nothing more, and yet she seems to have weaseled her way into my head.

  She acted so crazy, proving she is the nutjob drama queen I assumed she would be, but the feeling of holding her will haunt me for the rest of my life. We fit, we matched. She makes me nuts.

  Shit!

  Usually the thought of being with someone my friends have been with makes me sick, but I can’t make myself regret it. I want to watch her orgasm over and over. I never want to watch another girl orgasm unless it’s Sami Ford. Sami-fucking-Ford. Satan herself.

  I don’t know how to feel about that but I think it should be bad.

  Desperate to talk it out and hoping to make some sense of it all, I press the button for the intercom. “Can you pull over so I can come sit in the front?”

  “You know what I think about you sitting in the front of the limo.” Charles sighs into the speaker.

  “Come on.”

  The car stops and I hop out before he even has his door open.

  When I get in the front seat he gives me the look, the one where I know he knows and he knows I know, but he doesn’t want to talk about what he knows.

  But I don’t care. “So, she was interesting. Some display back there on the road. She acted like a child.” He’s quiet so I force the answers from him, “What do you think?”

  “She’s Sami Ford. I don’t know what you think you’ve bitten off, but let me assure you, you will not be able to chew it.” He turns onto our road.

  “Oh, dude, I agree. She’s going to be the death of me. Which might be for the best since she’s dated like three guys I know already, and you know how I have that thing with that.”

  “Young man, do you want my honest opinion?” He sounds tired. I wish I were.

  “I do.”

  “I don’t know how to break it to you politely, but telling your body and heart someone is off limits because they have dated someone else is not only immature, but it’s also dangerous. Men like the hunt. When someone tells us we can’t have something we want it more. I’m afraid you’ve set yourself up for failure here.” He laughs softly, shaking his head.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now. She hates me again. So there’s no point in worrying about her being off limits.” I glance out the window at the city, muttering, “I
thought we worked out our issues and then bam, right back to hating each other.”

  “How did you work them out exactly?”

  “We screamed at each other, she gave me the worst apology I’ve ever heard, and then we had sex. It was fairly amazing.”

  “Okay. But there was little to no rational conversation, which means there was no closure on the issues you had before. I’m not up to speed on your problems with her so I’m afraid I can’t be of much help.”

  “She hated me and thought I was an asshole, and I thought she was a snobby psycho.” I don’t want to get into the whole backstory.

  “That doesn’t explain much, but I will go out on a limb and suggest that the moment you told her that fucking her was no big deal was the one that sealed your fate.” He chuckles and I wince. I don’t know why but hearing Charles say “fuck” is almost like getting an extra cookie and kicked in the balls at the same time.

  “You heard that part?”

  “I did unfortunately. I had the symphony playing quite loudly until I stopped the car and then I turned it off, hoping to get direction as to where we were off to next. I dare say though, she won’t be giving you another chance to change her mind about you. So your problem with girls your friends have dated is solved.” He mocks me.

  “I don’t even know why I said it. She was just being so weird and I was trying to smooth things over. She was hot and then she was icy cold. And something happened from the moment it ended to the moment she shut down, and I don’t know what.” I try to shrug it off but all I want to do is scream, loudly.

  He laughs. “My dear, young man. She is a woman. It’s her prerogative to be angry with you. Especially, postcoital in a car.”

  “I think I coitaled quite well. I thought she was happy.”

  “Until she wasn’t.” He chuckles harder. “Being a heterosexual man has few advantages in life. Loving women is not always one of them.”

  “Tell me about it,” I groan and stare out the window until we pull up to the front of the building. The doorman grins as he gets the car door and tips his hat at me. “Good evening, sir.”

  “Almost morning, Mick.” I slap him on the shoulder as I climb out and wave at Charles. “See ya tomorrow.” I head for the elevator, bummed out. I contemplate a late night workout to kill my twitching, but I’m still aching from the beating the physical trainers gave us.

  When I get upstairs I pace in the dark, restless and regretful.

  Having the huge apartment all to myself makes the longing in my chest worse.

  I slap my hand against the back of my phone repeatedly and walk back and forth in the shadows on the floor while I consider whether or not to get her number from Carson. But then I’ll have to explain. Do I want to explain? And where do I start? The story is getting convoluted.

  No, phoning her is out of the question.

  She’s my hard limit. I need to see this as a sign I shouldn’t have done it.

  Instead, I kick around the idea of getting a cab to her house, in spite of my need for sleep. We have an afternoon training session that involves sprinting on the ice treadmill with resting periods spent on the super slide boards. It’ll be grueling. And going to her place will involve fighting and then fucking and then maybe more fighting. She seems to be one of those girls who want the drama.

  Do I want drama?

  No.

  Going to her house is out of the question.

  I drop my face into my hands and groan as I lean on the marble kitchen island and consider eating something.

  She’s in my head.

  I’m night eating and stressing out like a woman.

  Fuck.

  I grab my phone and leave the kitchen. No crazy girl is going to ruin my first week at Rangers camp with her magical vagina and crazy temper tantrums. I’m stronger than that.

  And if I’m not, I’ll fake it till I make it.

  But the shower doesn’t make it better.

  Cleaning myself and remembering her body against mine gets me hard again, but jerking off, even with the soap, just isn’t the same.

  Stuck with a sad boner and a desperate urge to run to her place if need be, I go to bed.

  But I don’t sleep.

  I replay every moment from her sitting back and me spreading her legs. Everything was great then. She was happy, I was happy. Then we banged. That made me happier.

  Then she was huffing her breaths and I was huffing mine and the condom started to slip off, and I don’t need babies, not even Sami Ford babies.

  The moment I told her the condom was slipping, she was upset. I felt it. She tensed and climbed out of the car.

  I grab my phone and call Beverly, my sex guru cousin in Kentucky.

  “Someone better be dead or I’m going to kill you myself.” She says it keel.

  “I need help.”

  “Matty, it’s three in the morning. Don’t you have some puck business to attend to?” She sounds like she’s smoked a pack of cigarettes.

  “It’s wicked serious. Like life and death.”

  “Oh my God, it’s a girl, isn’t it?” she growls.

  “Sami Ford.” I close my eyes as I say it, knowing the beating I’m about to take.

  “Fine, you have three minutes.” She doesn’t mock me, which is weird. No Southerner lets a moment like this one pass her up but she does.

  “So we were fighting at this bar, me and Sami. And then we ended up making out and instead of being smart and shutting it down, I messaged Charles to come to me and he did and then we got in the car.”

  “What did I say about calling Charles to drive you around while you screw girls?”

  “I know. That part of the story is sort of irrelevant though.”

  “Is she mad at you?”

  “Yeah.” I pause.

  “Well, it’s not irrelevant if she’s pissed. You drove around with one of the richest girls y’all know in the backseat of your limo and fucked her like a borrowed whore.”

  “Why is borrowed whore the new thing? Is everyone saying that? Am I the last to know we have a new insult? And how is a borrowed whore a bad thing? ‘Cause if you can’t pay aren’t you the lame one—”

  “Matty! Two minutes,” she snaps.

  “So we’re screwing and she comes and I come and we finish, and she’s sort of clinging to me and the condom is slipping off, and I say that it is, and she tenses up and freaks and leaves the car—”

  “You’re an idiot,” she interrupts me again. “The first words out of your fool mouth, after you bang her like you paid her for it, is that the condom is slipping off? No ‘That was amazing’? No ‘God your tits are perky’? Not even a ‘Fuck you, Sami Ford’? Just the cold, hard fact that the condom is slipping?” She groans. “If you can’t figure this one out, I can’t help you. Even God ain’t gonna touch this one, moron.” She ends the call before my three minutes are over.

  “Ohhhhhhh.” I put the phone down and close my eyes. “Shit!”

  There’s only one way to make this horrible pain end. I get up in the dark and stalk across the room to my violin. I lift it from the stand, tighten the bow, and position it. Closing my eyes, I begin.

  Beethoven is the only thing that will let me kill this annoyance at three am.

  I give up after half an hour and pull on clothes to leave the house quietly. I don’t call for a car. I walk in the dark to her place. The sun is coming up soon but I don’t care.

  I don’t care that she dated dudes I know, I don’t care that she hates me.

  I care that I fucked up.

  Unlike her, I can apologize.

  When I get to her building the doorman nods at me as he gets the door. In New York I am my mother’s son so he doesn’t bat an eyelash at my being here. I don’t know how the hell these guys know who’s who in New York, but they always know me.

  They have remarkable memories.

  In the elevator my hands start sweating.

  What will I say?

  Besides obviously what an idiot
I am.

  When I get to her door I lift my hand to knock but I stop when I hear it.

  I step into the alcove for the stairs and listen as the elevator makes its way to the floor. She stumbles out, laughing and clinging to the blonde.

  They’re drunk and giggling. “Shhhhh.” She holds a long finger to her lips.

  The blonde staggers, barefoot and holding her shoes.

  When they slam their way into the apartment I slump against the wall, wishing I’d just done the right thing the first time.

  I wait three minutes and then knock.

  The blonde answers, cocking an eyebrow. “Hi.”

  “Hi. Can you get Sami?”

  She nods, her expression is a confused one, but she closes the door.

  A second later the door opens. Sami gives me a disgusted look. “What?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh me too.” She slams the door.

  I lift my hand to pound on it, but pause, certain that would be another mistake.

  Chapter Ten

  Sighting 2,000,017

  Sami

  Manhattan

  December, 2014

  “Sami, he’s here,” Nat whispers and glances over at the scarf rack in Bloomingdale’s.

  “Who?”

  “The only person you ever avoid in Manhattan since he randomly showed up at your place that night in the summer.” She rolls her eyes.

  “Oh, come on. Is he following us?” I tighten everywhere to the point my hands are shaking, and turn in the opposite direction of where she’s looking.

  “Man, we see him a lot.”

  “That’s it, I’m moving as soon as I grad. I’ll just move to Europe and we’ll leave it at that. Then I’ll never see him again.”

  “Oh my God, stop. He doesn’t even see us. Don’t move and he’ll walk by and you can go back to shopping.” She grabs my shoulders and continues to watch. “You’re being a baby about him anyway. Maybe it’s time to confront the fact you guys have a thing you never speak of.”