Finding Emma

by K. Ryan

  I know should was a relative term and that even the suggestion of giving a multivitamin to an animal might seem a little over-the-top, but I’d gone on full helicopter mom mode when it came to Oliver. While the vet tech had told me Oliver probably wouldn’t be an 18-year-old cat, I still found comfort in the notion that if I continued being attentive, if I was diligent and always did what was best for him, my cat would have a happy life—however long it lasted.

  “Aw,” Heather smiled at me. “So you’re still keeping him?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. As if there was any other option.

  Finn pulled me in a little bit closer and, despite the crowd and the presence of my brother, pressed his lips to my temple. But when I dared a glance at Noah, I found him watching us with quirked lips, that stormy glint in his eyes almost diminished completely.

  It wasn’t until we breezed through security and crossed the threshold of Lambeau Stadium that I had the sudden urge to cut and run. Only, this time, it wasn’t because the crowds made me feel like the walls were closing in on me.

  It was because of my boyfriend. Might as well throw the rest of his friends in there, too.

  In unison, every single guy in our party—save for Noah—raised their green and gold clad arms high in the air and howled at the top of their lungs.

  “I’m here!” Finn yelled out to no one in particular. “I am here! Whoo!”

  High-fives were handed out all around and even Noah got in on it with the help of Finn, but all I could do was gape at the scene, frozen in shock at the display in front of me. The rest of the girls with us laughed and shook their heads, clearly well-versed in their significant other’s insanity, but this was a first for me. Cristina, unsurprisingly, threw her head back in laughter and joined right in.

  Finn found me easily after the initial craziness and wrapped me up in a tight bear-hug. “How does it feel to be inside the greatest place on earth, Em?”

  “Oh boy,” I managed to croak out, despite how tightly he squeezed me against his jersey-covered chest. “Um, good. I guess.”

  “You guess?” he chuckled and closed both hands around my cheeks to give my forehead a quick peck.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Oh, Emma. I have so much to teach you.”

  I laughed as he tucked us in with the rest of our group. When we turned the corner, falling in step with the rest of the crowd moving towards their respective seats, it was just sensory overload. I could barely even see two feet in front of me as we tramped through the cement hallways, dodging people with every step. Finn had to grab hold of the back of Slinger’s jersey to keep him in line when he snarled at a person wearing a Favre Vikings jersey—the nerve!—but we mostly survived the trek from the entrance all the way through the mob of Packers and Bears fans, even if the opposing side’s cheering section seemed to be few and far between.

  But when I stepped through the walkway and that ‘hallowed’ field came into view, even I had to suck in a sharp breath. Suddenly engulfed in the organized chaos that was Lambeau Field, I was momentarily blinded by the glare of the sun beaming down at us. The people on the other side of the stadium looked like little green and gold ants and stadium workers dressed in yellow jackets directed people where to go, but it was more than that.

  There was magic here—something in the air, something about the camaraderie between all these people, tens of thousands of them, coming together for one sole purpose to cheer on these gladiators in our modern Colosseum...it stunned me. Awed me. So much to the point that Finn had to practically push me forward to get me up the stairs.

  So yeah. Not even a minute in the stadium and I was already a convert.

  We climbed the ridiculously high cement stairs—seriously, how did people not hurt themselves on a game day basis here?—and found our seats, settling into the cold cement bench with Finn to my left and Noah to my right.

  “See that over there?” Finn pointed to a long green tent-like structure protruding from the bottom of the field to our right. “That’s where all the players run out from. And we’ve got the end zone right in front of us, so we’ll be able to see all the Lambeau leaps...these are freaking great seats.”

  Well, seeing as how we had to climb up about 40 rows, I didn’t really see how they were all that great, but I wasn’t about to ruin this moment for either of us. Now that we were settled, everything happening around me started to sink in. Everywhere I looked, people were high-fiving, sipping on a beer, munching on a skinny, foot-long hot dog, leaning their heads down to speak warmly to their children, taking selfies, clapping along to the warm-up music, and generally doing everything you’d expect to see in a place like this. Somewhere to my left, a group of guys sang off-key, “The Bears still suck! The Bears still suck! The Beaaaars. Still. Suck!”

  My initial assumption about this place wasn’t wrong: there really was some kind of magic here. What I had been wrong about though was the people—they weren’t a mob. They were a community. There was a fellowship here unlike any I’d ever seen at my mom’s church. Here, the Packers were the religion and Mike McCarthy, Aaron Rodgers, and Clay Matthews stood at the pulpit ready to deliver, not a sermon, but a win. Nearly every person in this stadium had come to worship and you could feel it in the air.

  There was a spark here. Electricity crackling in the air as the players prepared for kick-off. Palpable energy blanketed the entire stadium.

  I got it now. I understood the craziness, the face-painting, the Vince Lombardi pope, the basement shrines, and the frenetic worship.

  Here, everyone was the same and green and gold served as the equalizers. Everyone was part of the fellowship—just as long as you weren’t wearing a navy and orange jersey. Here, I truly could get lost in the crowd, but feel like part of it all the same.

  And, just a few minutes into the first quarter, when Rodgers found James Jones in the end zone, every member of the community leapt to their feet, green and gold arms lifted high in the air, screaming at the top of their lungs, clapping along, and singing loudly as Jones jumped into the crowd just beyond the end zone to receive his glory and slaps on the back.

  Now, I clapped and sang along too, one with the crowd.

  “I don’t wanna work...I just wanna bang on this drum all day…”

  . . .

  We were back in my apartment a few hours later and while part of me hadn’t wanted to leave Noah and Cris, especially since I wasn’t sure when I’d get to see them again, the other part was happy to be home. Oliver greeted us at the door, rubbing up against our legs and stretching up on my shins to reach one tiny white paw up to me.

  “Hey, buddy,” I murmured to him. “Did you miss us?”

  “What are you talking about?” Finn laughed. “He probably had a raging party while we were gone. You know, inviting all his cat friends and maybe even a few dogs, too,” he bent down to scratch the top of my cat’s head, “Good thing you got everything all cleaned up before we got home, huh?”

  “Wow,” I muttered under my breath and reached down to scoop Oliver up into my arms so I could give him a kiss on his little striped cheek.

  Finn’s eyes glittered with amusement. “And you think I’m the one with the problem. You should see yourself from my end.”

  Just as I opened my mouth to respond, he jerked his head towards the living room.

  “Hey, Em, you got your computer handy? I wanna show you something.”

  I cocked a wary eyebrow at him, but just shrugged, set Oliver back down on his feet, and padded over to the living to grab my laptop for him. When I brought it back into the kitchen and set it down on the counter in front of him, Finn tilted his chin towards the screen with a small smile.

  “Google yourself, Em.”

  I reared back a little and frowned. “I feel like that could be taken a couple of ways.”

  He barked out a laugh and shook his head, gesturing yet again to my computer screen. “I’m serious, Em. Google yourself.”

  I blew out a deep breath and figured t
he only thing I could do was just go with it. So, I opened up a new search and typed in my full name, something that I hadn’t actually done on my own in a long time. Just the physical act of typing in the letters was enough to conjure the kind of memories that would have my head in the toilet pretty soon, but today had been a good day—one of the best days I’d ever had with Finn. I didn’t want to ruin it so soon.

  But when I hit search, my mind couldn’t process what it was seeing. In the past, Googling myself would’ve rounded up pages and pages of obscene pictures, courtesy of my ex-fiancé and my former students, but now...there were only six full pages of pictures.

  My eyes flew up to Finn, who was still watching me with that glittering smile. “What…?”

  He just shrugged. “I found a work-around on Google.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Google’s got this tool that lets you delete urls from any searches, so I went through and started entering all the urls that had your picture attached to them. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s something.”

  While I’d heard the words, they still just did not make any sense. He’d actually went through and deleted everything...well, not everything, but he’d still whittled 20-plus pages down to just six. My mind went blank. My throat went dry. And my heart...my heart screamed for joy.

  “It doesn’t delete the pictures from the internet,” Finn explained, hands on his hips and brow creasing a little with worry. “It just removes the url from popping up in a search, so say some idiot posted one of the pictures on their Twitter account, it just deletes the url that hosts the tweet, but doesn’t delete the tweet itself from the person’s account. Right now, it’s just a search through Google, so technically, anyone could still find them. They just have to do a little bit more digging, which, let’s face it, will probably happen, but it’s better than nothing, you know?”

  Yeah. I did know. And now, I felt a little stupid, too, that this option was out there and I never knew about it. I’d been so preoccupied by getting the pictures removed all together that I hadn’t really looked into other alternatives to reducing the traffic. At a certain point, I think I’d just given up hope that it was even remotely possible.

  He sighed again and rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not an easy fix. Hell, it’s not even that great of a fix. Some of the pictures have been retweeted, reposted, that sort of thing, which creates a new url, so it’s...complicated, to say the least. At one point, I had the search results down to two pages, but then the next day it was back up to ten. There’s probably a better way, but this was the first solution I could find, so I went with it.”

  I didn’t care about any of that because I knew, just as well as anyone, that those pictures would always be out there on the internet in some form. What mattered to me was the steps Finn had taken to help me.

  “But you went through and entered all that? That had to have taken you—”

  Finn just shook his head to shut me up. “It doesn’t matter, Em. Do you think I could really just sit here knowing all that shit was out there without even trying to do something about it?”

  I bit down on my bottom lip, but my mouth still curled up into a hesitant smile. I knew I shouldn’t have been all that surprised, but I found my eyes stinging with fresh tears all the same. That he would take the time to do this for me, that he cared enough to sit at his laptop and enter in all those urls one after the other...I reached for his neck and pulled his lips to mine, kissing him long enough to tell him everything I couldn’t find the words to say.

  Finn pulled back a little, dipping down with both hands closed around my face to look me in the eye. “Em, I didn’t do it for...this. I did it because—”

  “I know,” I murmured breathlessly and sealed my lips back where they belonged, wrapping my hands around his neck to pull him in deeper.

  Then the awkward shuffling began. Step by step, we trekked around my counter and headed for my bedroom. We’d barely made it halfway down the hallway before I felt him pulling me closer and a hand snaked around my waist, just barely skimming the space between my jeans and my borrowed Rodgers jersey. I shivered into him and it was difficult to keep my entire body in check, to keep from trembling after just one brief glimmer of contact.

  I pulled away for just a moment to watch him as he edged us closer and closer to the doorway of my bedroom and the intensity darkening his normally light eyes just about knocked me sideways. I’d seen that before whenever we’d gotten tangled up in each other all the previous nights he’d spent in my bed, but there had been some restraint there as well. There was none of that pooling in his eyes now. The sheer force of his eyes, which took on an even more magnetic force in the dim hallway light, pushed me deeper until I was crossing the threshold to my bedroom. There was no going back now, even if I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to go back. I just wanted to keep moving forward.

  Just as my hands wound around his neck, his lips descended on me and I felt his hands burning into my waist as he pressed me more closely to him. He was still walking me backwards, closer and closer to the bed, when my hands took on a mind of their own and tugged Finn’s jersey up and over his head. They didn't stop there and reached around to lightly skim up the hard muscles of his back. He leaned back, a grin dancing on his lips, as he lifted his arms so I could pull his T-shirt off, too.

  Biting my lip, I trailed a hand lightly down his bare chest, gently tracing the muscles I found there, marveling in the way his skin jumped taut at the contact. My fingertips continued their explorations and trailed down his rippled stomach, feeling my breath quicken at the sensation of his skin. When I tugged my gaze back up to him, his eyes were closed. Deciding to test out just how much I was affecting him, my hand drifted a little bit lower and gently skimmed over the section of skin that led directly to his belt buckle. When I heard him take a sharp intake of breath, I grinned slyly.

  I hadn’t forgotten this after all. Somehow, after being so out of practice, my body still knew what to do.

  Feeling a newfound sense of empowerment, I yanked him closer to me by his belt buckle and his eyes shot open as his muffled laugh tickled my ear. His hands were tugging up my jersey now and I said a silent prayer of thanks that I’d decided to wear one of my sexier pairs of bra and underwear today.

  While my shirt floated to the carpet at our feet, Finn’s mouth captured my lips and this time, his tongue darted in and out of my mouth as his hands trailed up the sides of my back until he had both hands full and kneaded them roughly. A moment later, he reached around and made quick work of unclasping my bra, shoving it to the side and onto the floor. He gently nudged me closer to the bed until my calves hit the edge.

  I scooted backwards, with Finn in hot pursuit, and settled back against the pillows, allowing him to move in between my legs. This was what I’d been waiting for and now that this moment was finally here, it just felt surreal. I had a rough, tousled, unshaven Browning Adonis in between my legs and I wanted to savor every single moment of it.

  Of course, savoring the moment would only take me so far. I needed him closer and he was still wearing too many clothes to get as close as I wanted. Before I could stop myself, my fingers worked on his belt buckle and he reached down to help me, shoving his jeans down and kicking them off to the side, his attention never leaving my lips.

  By the time I kicked off my own jeans, my patience had started to wear thin. I didn't want to wait anymore. But when he lowered his head and placed a light trail of kisses from my collarbone all the way down to the edge of my lacy boy-shorts, I knew what was coming next and I’d had every night for the last two weeks to prepare myself for it.

  I almost couldn't take it anymore. I just wanted him closer, deeper.

  I had no idea what I’d been waiting for...all this time, we could’ve been doing this and I denied myself for no good reason. Why the hell had I ever wanted to take things slow with him?

  His head jerked up when another unabashed moan fell from my
lips and Finn grinned back at me. Then he was scrambling over the side of the bed, rifling through his discarded jeans for his wallet. When he came back up with the foil package in his hand, he wasted no time to simultaneously rip it open with his teeth and kick his boxers off. He propped himself up on an elbow as he hovered over me and I could feel the tip of him pressing into me.

  "Finn, please..." I pleaded breathlessly.

  He kissed me again and when he pushed himself inside me, my body tensed at the invasion as I inhaled sharply. Catching the pain in my voice almost immediately, Finn froze and broke away from my lips to look in my eyes.

  "You alright, Em?" he asked softly, concern shining in his eyes in the moonlight.

  I nodded quickly. "I'm fine. It's just...been a little while. Just give me a second."

  He nodded, bending down to suck softly on my neck, helping me relax and I ran my hands up his arms until they were tangled in his hair to pull him down closer, to draw him in deeper. He took that as his signal and began moving, slowly at first, and then picking up speed until he gripped my hips to pull himself in deeper with a deep groan.

  I gasped at the sudden motion and ground my hips up to meet him halfway until I was pulling lightly on his hair with each thrust of his hips, his hands still viced tightly around my hips, bringing me up to meet his rhythm.

  Everything started to get hazy and I could feel myself getting closer and closer to the brink of coming undone beneath him. I had to move a hand down to his back to hold on because he just kept moving faster and faster, both of us too caught up to slow down, too entangled to break away and when it started, my head fell back into the pillow, my nails dug into his back, and my back arched against the mattress as my entire body surrendered, crying out at the release.

  Little tremors shot all the way to my toes as I convulsed against him and then, in a brief moment of awareness, I felt Finn shudder against my skin and he let out a low groan as his body went rigid. I could've sworn I heard him stop breathing completely.