Page 58 of Slapshot Baby

"I know she drove to a hospital in the middle of the night because a stranger called her from your phone." She turns on the faucet. "Women don't do that for a man they want to be friends with."

After dinner, Dad catches me in the hallway. He leans against the wall with his arms folded, filling the corridor with his shoulders.

"I have one question."

"Go ahead."

"Do you actually want this woman?" His voice has dropped the dinner-table edge.

I've been asking myself a version of the same question all the time.

In the dark of my apartment when the penthouse is too quiet. During physical therapy when my muscles burn and the only thing that distracts me is thinking about her.

Every time she walks in with food and a joke and the kind of attention that makes four years of nothing feel survivable.

The answer hasn't changed once.

"Yes," I say.

He watches me for a long beat. Whatever he finds in my face must satisfy him because his shoulders drop a fraction.

"Then stop letting her decide this for both of you."

He pushes off the wall and walks back toward the kitchen. I stand alone in the hallway, listening to the muffled sounds of Mira laughing and dishes being stacked.

I want Ava.

And I’m going to do my fucking best to get her.

***

The next evening, Ava lets herself in with the spare key Mira gave her without consulting me.

She stopped knocking a week ago. I haven't minded for a second.

She drops her bag by the door, unclips Biscuit's leash, then places paint swatches on the living room floor.

She's wearing a thin sweater that's too big for her, the neckline sliding wide across one shoulder, and jeans that sit low on her hips. When she folds herself cross-legged on the floor, a strip of bare skin appears between the denim and the hem.

I'm in the kitchen doorway. She hasn't looked up yet.

Her hair is in the careless knot she builds without thinking when she's about to work, strands falling loose against the back of her neck.

There's a pen between her teeth. She bites down on the cap, her lower lip pressing around it, and frowns at the paint swatches.

The sweater slips another inch. The strap of her bra cuts a thin line across her shoulder, pale against the flush that's spreading down her collarbones.

She shifts, pulling one knee higher. The movement stretches the sweater taut across her chest.

I can see the shape of her underneath it. The soft swell of her breast, rising and falling with each breath.

My mind conjures an image of her. The curve of her waist under my palms. Her back arching off the living room wall as I drive into her. The gasp she tries to swallow and can't.

I cross the room, pull the pen from her teeth, and sit beside her. My thigh presses the full length of hers, hip to knee.

She blinks up at me. "I was using that."

"You were destroying it." I set the ruined pen on the floor. "What's the crisis?"