Page 120 of Double Puck

"Stay with me," he whispers. "Right here. That's it, baby." He grinds deeper, both of us groaning together. "Fuck yes. You feel that? That's us."

I think about tonight's game, that gaping hole on the left wing where he should have been. The team falling apart in real time, live, on national television, without him.

The data was wrong.

I was wrong.

I have never once in my life admitted that sentence out loud. I was never allowed to. Yet here it is, sitting in my mind next to the other thing I can't say, while the man I might have destroyed moves inside me like I'm the only thing holding him to the earth.

Because the truth isn't just that the Bears can't survive without Beck Morrison.

It's that I can't.

"This okay?" He lifts one of my legs, deepening the pressure.

"Yes," I breathe.

"Good." He shifts his hips and drives deeper, dragging a moan out of me. "Because you feel so good, Darcy. You know that? You feel like the only thing I've ever got right."

"Beck—"

"Don't argue. For once in your life, don't argue with me. Not now."

He picks up the pace, long and hard and deep, and the headboard starts a rhythm against the wall. He lowers my leg again, only for me to wrap them around him, pulling him closer, my nails in his back, his name falling out of my mouth in pieces.

"I've got you," he breathes. "I've got you, baby. Let go."

And I do.

I shatter with his face buried in my neck, his arms wrapped around me so tight I can't tell whose heartbeat is whose. He follows two thrusts later, groaning my name into my hair, his whole body shaking.

Warmth floods my body. Not just him, but with way too much emotion.

For a long moment, neither of us moves. The Strip glitters through the window. Then Beck collapses face-first beside me like a felled tree.

"Water," he croaks into the pillow. "Need water. Dying."

A laugh bursts out of me, and I reach over and grab the bottle off his nightstand, pressing it against his bare shoulder.

"You played exactly zero minutes of hockey today."

He lifts his head just enough to grin at me, sweaty and wrecked and gorgeous.

"Sweetheart, what we just did? That was the whole playoffs."

Beck disappears into the bathroom, and I hear water running.

He comes back with a warm washcloth and a towel over his shoulder like he's done this a thousand times, except I know he hasn't. Not like this. He kneels on the edge of the bed and cleans me up with careful hands, gentle in a way that makes my throat go tight.

"You know I can do that myself," I whisper.

"I know." He keeps going anyway. "But I'm the one who made the mess."

He tosses the cloth toward the bathroom, digs a second water bottle out of the minibar, cracks the cap, and hands it to me before I even ask.

I take a sip, watching that nicest bare ass I've ever seen strut to pull one of the hotel robes off the hook. He wraps the massive white cloud of a thing around himself, cruelly removing one of Las Vegas's finest attractions from public viewing.

Rude. I was enjoying that.