Nothing Personal: A Standalone Romantic Comedy

by Karina Halle

  “I should go back to the house, I didn’t know I’d be out all night.”

  I’m not sure if it helps or not that her argument is totally feeble.

  “Why do you need to go to your house? To check on your geckos?”

  “No, I…”

  “You’re reaching for an excuse. You just want to leave.”

  “That’s not true. I don’t have my toothbrush or toothpaste.”

  “Look, this may not be a Kahuna Hotel but I’m pretty sure they’ll bring that up to the room along with some lomi lomi eggs benedict and a mimosa. You have nowhere you need to be today. It’s January first and you don’t have to work.”

  “But you want me to spend it with my boss?”

  “Fuck yes I want you to spend it with your boss,” I tell her, kissing her. “I’m a damn good boss, at least in the bedroom. And I have this bedroom all day so just forget about going home, forget about all the things you should be doing and just fucking do me.”

  She blinks up at me, thinking it over. “You do make very convincing arguments. No wonder you’re in marketing.”

  “Stop acting like I’m good at what I do. I’m good at everything I do,” I tell her, rolling off her to pick up the phone.

  “Including modesty.”

  I give her the stink-eye and call room service, ordering up the aforementioned eggs benedict while Nova requests fried eggs, rice, soy sauce and Portuguese sausage, along with a vat of coffee and a bottle of Baileys.

  “Really? Rice for breakfast?” I ask, slipping back into bed.

  “Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it,” she says. “You know, you never did tell me how you got into marketing.”

  Question time? That’s a first.

  “Maybe because you never asked,” I tell her.

  “Okay,” she says, positioning herself so she’s on her side, head propped up on her hand. “I’m asking now.”

  I reach over and pull up the sheets so they cover her breasts. “I’m sorry but I can’t talk to you when your tits are out like that.”

  She glares at me mockingly. “You’re such a pig.”

  “Oink.”

  “And don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m not,” I say, even though I guess I am. I clear my throat. “I got into marketing because I’ve always been interested in business.”

  “Was this before or after the NHL?”

  “Before. Way before. I grew up in the frozen north, remember? I was in the middle of nowhere. All we had up there was hockey, and if you were lucky maybe your parents owned a tourist trap in Dawson City. We had that for a while. My father was straight off the boat from Lisbon, don’t really know why he picked the Yukon but I guess he visited once when he was young and fell in love with the land.”

  “I heard it’s beautiful up there,” she says.

  “You wouldn’t like it,” I tell her. “In the summer there are mosquitos the size of your hand.”

  She grimaces. “I’d have to up my game.”

  “You’d need a rifle. Anyway. My dad bought a bar of all places. He thought he could inject a little Portugal into the arctic. But he didn’t have a clue about business, and throughout the years he lost more and more money and pretty soon we couldn’t afford our shack in town. We were relegated to a trailer in the woods and while there are a lot of trailers in the woods up there, you want to be close to people when you’re that isolated. The town is all dusty dirt roads and gritty can-can girls like they have in the Moulin Rouge, and either eternal darkness or the midnight sun.” I close my eyes and I can see the sun in July, dipping over the breadth of the Yukon River but never setting behind those mountains. I sigh, missing home, or at least the memories of home before things fell apart.

  I go on. “And less than two thousand people live there year-round. But those two thousand people count for a lot when you’re in the middle of nowhere. My mother fell into a depression and she left when I was fourteen.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she says softly.

  “Don’t be,” I tell her. “I never blamed her. She needed to go. She didn’t know it would be like that. And she wanted me to go with her, to start over again in Ohio. She was American, and wanted to be with her family. But as much as I loved her, I didn’t want to go. I had just gotten into hockey in a major way. I couldn’t fathom starting over.” I reach out and brush a wayward strand of hair off Nova’s face. “So I stayed and I trained. I knew that if I worked hard enough I could support my dad but I also knew that I had to have a business plan. I had to go to university, get a degree, get business smart, make the right choices. I knew that no matter what happened with hockey, I could never depend on it. And, well, you know the rest.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I eventually moved down to Edmonton, then Vancouver. I was in junior hockey, then farm teams for the NHL. My father moved back to Portugal. I never went to school, I was brought onto the King’s as a defenseman. I got injured, couldn’t play again. And I decided I would do whatever it would take to make sure I wasn’t sitting on my ass and counting NHL checks. I applied for a job with a hotel and that was it.”

  “So where is your father now, still in Portugal?”

  I nod.

  “Do you talk to him?”

  “Sometimes. I’ll call him Christmas morning and on his birthday, but he was never really the same after all that. He has a new family now, I think he just likes to pretend that the Yukon never happened.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She died a few years ago. Ovarian cancer. I made it to the funeral, at least. We were never that close either.”

  Nova studies me for a moment. I have to say, I rarely talk about my past because all it does is bring about pity and people feeling sorry for me when they shouldn’t. It’s just life and life happens to everyone. No one is immune.

  But Nova doesn’t seem to pity me, maybe because she understands this thing called life too. Maybe she knows that when you open up, you’re not looking for anything more than for another person to understand you better. At least, I hope that’s what she thinks.

  “I’m glad you told me,” Nova says. “I feel like a dick now.”

  “Why do you feel like a dick?”

  “All those years of ribbing you over your motives. I just thought you were another guy trying to be a hot shot in the corporate world.”

  I laugh. “Well, I am trying to be a hot shot in the corporate world. But my motives are the same. I don’t want to ever just rely on one thing. Hell, I don’t even know if I’ll stay in this corporate world forever.”

  She frowns. “What do you mean?”

  I shrug with one shoulder. “I like the hotel world and I think I’m good at it. But I like hockey more. I’d like to get back into that side of things for a bit. Maybe open up a hockey school.” I pause. “Here.”

  “Here? In Hawaii?”

  “I went to that skating rink – they take their hockey pretty seriously. I was talking to the guy there for a long time and maybe there’s a future there. It would take a lot of funding and time and I don’t know if I’m ready for that at this stage of my life but it’s there and it’s nice to know that there’s always another path to go down.”

  “Something tells me that you’ll be great at whatever you decide to do.”

  “You’re paying me compliments again. Is being nicer to me part of your resolution?”

  “Maybe,” she says slyly as she inches closer to me, sliding her hand down my chest and to my dick. I’ve been semi-hard just being in the same bed as her, naked. “I can be nicer.”

  I raise my brows, interested to see where this is going.

  She smiles like a devilish angel as she moves down the length of my body and sticks my cock into her mouth. I watch, unwilling to take my eyes off her as she proceeds to give me head, sucking and licking with her perfect blow-job lips. Nova has never been one of those girls who sucks me off as a chore, she does it because she genuinely loves having my dick between her l
ips, loves what it does to me.

  But I’m not coming again like this.

  I need to come inside her.

  “Hold on,” I tell her. “Come up here.”

  As she moves up, I reach over and grab a condom from the stack on the bedside table. And yeah, they’re Magnums, no piña colada dick for her anymore.

  I open the foil and slide the condom on, then grab Nova by the shoulders and flip her over so she’s on her back. She giggles as I attack her neck and my hands go under her ass, hiking her hips up. I slip a pillow underneath her for leverage and then in one swift motion, push inside of her.

  Fuck. Me.

  A lustful groan escapes me as she envelopes my cock, so hot and tight and slick. Her hips buck up into mine and I slowly start working myself in and out of her, biting and licking at her nipples. We have a rhythm together, something easy and fluid, our bodies working together in time. I know every inch of her as she knows every inch of me and it’s kinetic, electric synergy.

  I piston my hips into her harder, the headboard slamming back against the wall. My ass muscles flex as I pound and pound and pound, my cock deep inside, sweat dripping off of me and onto her, the air smelling like our decadent sex.

  “Fuck yes,” I growl, one hand gripping her hip, the other slipping over her swollen clit. She stares up at me in awe and wonder and pleasure and fear just before I stroke the right sensitive bundle of nerves and she’s going over the edge.

  This is raw. This her split right open.

  She cries out and then she’s coming hard, creaming all over my cock and I’m letting myself loose, fucking her harder in quick, sharp jabs until I’m letting out a hoarse cry.

  “Fuck!”

  I spill into the condom again and again and it’s like the orgasm never ends and I can’t stop coming until I’ve filled it to the brim. I wish I was inside her bare, filling up every cell inside her.

  Then I’m drained, emptied, sated, and I collapse on top of her in a sweaty heap of pounding hearts and ragged breaths.

  “Jesus,” I swear, wondering when the world will stop spinning and if I’ll ever come down off this god damn high. My heart is so loud in my head it sounds like someone knocking at the door.

  Oh shit.

  Someone is knocking at the door.

  Room service.

  I stare at Nova’s sated eyes and smile.

  “Hope you’re still hungry.”

  God knows I’ll always be starving for her.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  NOVA

  “NOVA, WHAT DOES WAHINE MEAN?” Hunter asks, looking at me with his floppy sun hat all askew.

  I do a double take at him, impressed that he’s picking up Hawaiian.

  “Wahine means woman,” I tell him, adjusting his hat. “Like me. And Kane means man, like your dad.” I gesture to Kessler who is lying on his back on a poolside lounger, soaking up the sun and looking ever so much a man.

  Since it was my new year’s resolution to be real and more open, Kessler’s resolution was for the two of us to work less. That hasn’t really happened. It’s been four weeks since New Year’s and with the year underway, both of us have been working late trying to get our projects pushed through for the summer ahead.

  But we are making time for fun.

  Every Saturday and Sunday, Loan gets time off from being a nanny, and Hunter and Kessler come out to see me on the North Shore. Sometimes they just stay the day, sometimes the night, sometimes the whole weekend. But whatever time we get, we make the most of it.

  We’re in the water a lot and I’m busy teaching both Hunter and Kessler to swim. Usually we’re at the local pool like we are today, but sometimes we’re at the beach. It’s kind of funny teaching them both at once, but it’s actually easier this way and it’s making them bond like nothing else.

  I think when it comes to Kessler, it teaches him humility, takes his rampant ego down a peg, and lets him shed any fear of not being “man enough.” For Hunter, the fact that his daddy is learning with him makes him feel like a big boy and there’s a lot of trust going around between the three of us that wasn’t necessarily there before.

  It’s the best part of my week. I leave everything at the office, including the roles that Kessler and I have. At work we are strictly professional. Sure we have fun but I’m no different with him than I am with Kate or Teef and we make sure it stays that way. On the surface we are just work colleagues and nothing else.

  But I’m often at Kessler’s after work. We have a lot of dinner dates. We go out for drinks. We have a lot of sex in his car when it’s too late to drive over to my house and we don’t want to disturb Hunter or Loan at his.

  I’ve even been with him to an ice hockey rink and done a few laps around while he checked out the hockey teams and talked to the administration, and he’s been with me to the mental health center to do a shift of volunteer work with me.

  It’s been…complicated.

  I don’t even know what we are. We haven’t had any kind of talk, though that’s probably because I run the other way when it comes up. And we’re careful not to show too much affection in front of Hunter in case he gets confused or if things go south between Kessler and I.

  And it could go south. That’s the thing that’s always hovering in the back of my head.

  I keep thinking to the past.

  I keep fearing what was.

  I keep thinking about my sister, of all people.

  I think about that space in my heart that was filled with her when I was growing up. How she was my everything. Where she went, I followed. She was my best friend, and the kind of love I had for her was something I still can’t really describe. I guess that’s the way it is with sisters.

  But then she broke my heart. And it sounds so fucking selfish to make it about me. That it was my heart she broke when she was so broken herself. But it’s the truth. I loved her and I thought that my love would be enough to save her. I thought if I sat her down and told her that she was hurting me, hurting mom, hurting dad, that she would stop.

  It never happened that way. I kept bringing her back and sitting her down and begging for her to be a part of our family again. I told her that I loved her and missed her and needed her.

  And she would look me in the eye and tell me she loved me too.

  She’d lie.

  She took my love and she’d lie and she’d say she was on her meds and she’d say she wasn’t on drugs and she’d say she was still at rehab. I know my parents got the worst of her lies and that pretty soon I was traveling up and down the west coast as a means of escape.

  I started distancing myself from her because I was afraid of losing her.

  I was cutting her out of my heart because I was afraid she’d keep hurting me.

  I pretended everything was fine and put my feelings in a glass jar where I screwed the lid on tight and vowed to never open it, even though I could always see it.

  But it didn’t matter.

  When I got the call that she died, the loss I’d felt was worse than anything I could have imagined. All this protection didn’t help me at all. It didn’t make me love her less, it just made it hurt even more when I lost her because of all the love I lost with it.

  All that lost time, where I could have just loved her without fear.

  Now there’s Kessler in my life and I keep wanting to do the same thing with him. Every time my heart seems to spread wings, I try and clip them. Every time I come with him inside me and dream of doing this with him forever, I tell myself that we might only have one month. Every time I glance at him and he takes my breath away, I tell myself that I’m falling for his looks like last time.

  I tell myself lies.

  Over and over again.

  I ignore the truth because it’s safer to pretend, even though I know the truth, even though I know first-hand what it’s like to put up walls. When it comes to love, they’ll eventually come crashing down.

  So much for my new year’s resolution.

 
“What’s keiki?” Hunter asks, snapping me back to the present. I blink at him.

  “You’re keiki,” Kessler says, peering over his shades at him. “A kid.”

  Now I’m impressed with Kessler. Perhaps he’s assimilating here after all. He’s already a million shades browner now that he’s been in the sun every weekend.

  Still sweats a little, but we pass it off as a glisten.

  “I think I’m going to get a drink,” Kessler says, sitting up. Yup, just look at those abs glisten.

  “Nova?” He practically waves his hand in front of my eyes. “You want anything?”

  “Anything except a piña colada,” I tell him, bringing my gaze off his body.

  “I want a piña colada,” Hunter says.

  “Oh you do not, little buddy,” Kessler says. “I’ll bring you some POG.”

  Hunter makes a happy sound and I watch appreciatively as Kessler walks off over to the bar. We have a Kahuna Hotels property on the North Shore by Waimea Bay and so we’ve been using their pools a lot for the swimming lessons. We’re done for the day, hence the booze, but I think in a few more sessions Kessler will be swimming like a fish.

  While he’s gone, my mind wanders and I feel like getting back to the book I was reading the other day, so I get up and start rummaging through my bag, trying to find my Kindle. That’s the problem with e-readers these days, they’re almost too slim and lightweight that they’re hard to find.

  I’m rummaging and rummaging with my back to Hunter when I hear him say, “No, no I think I want pine-abble juice instead.”

  “I’m sure the POG will be just as good,” I assure him.

  But when I finally find my Kindle and turn back around, Hunter is no longer beside me.

  He’s gone.

  He’s running away from me, along the edge of the pool toward his father, yelling about pineapple juice.

  And that’s when everything happens in slow motion.

  I’m yelling “Hunter!” for him to stop running, for him to turn around and come back.

  He’s running faster, his little feet stomping through the slick poolside.