Chapter 14

grrr, writer's block...this was tough to get out, so bear with me...

“You’re doing it again.” Jon smiled. Every time she used that tone he knew he was racking up points.

“What’s that?” he asked, though he knew what the answer was going to be. Her exasperated sigh did nothing to quash his happy grin.

“You’re being adorable. I don’t think I’ve ever had flowers delivered to me at work before.” Jon put a mental check next to flower on his list. Kaner had said it would be too much, but Jon was quickly finding out that what his road roommate knew about women could be fit in a thimble. “All the girls are jealous. Did you pick out the arrangement yourself?”

“Well, I decided roses were kind of cliché, and then I thought I’d get you something more rare, kinda more like you.” That made her laugh, which resulted in his grin broadening and Pat rolling off his bed while making a loud, guttural sound of disgust as he limped towards the door. He’d had ample opportunity to do that lately and just as he had all of the other times, Jon paid absolutely no attention to it. “So you like the daisies okay?”

“I really do. I don’t know how rare they are, but I do like them better than I would have liked roses,” she replied in a tone that told him that not only was she telling the truth, but that she was smiling too. He felt sort of proud of himself for making her smile, even though that had been the goal. “So…it’s the baby Oilers tonight?” she asked, like she was trying to extend the conversation. Jon slid down on the hotel bed and stared up at the ceiling. He hadn’t planned to be able to have one of their long, rambling, changing topics every five minutes kind of conversations, what with her being at work, but he was happy to talk as long as she could.

“Coach says should be an easy one. Then two days in Calgary, woohoo,” he sighed and listened while she laughed. “Are you sure you can’t fly out?”

“Well you have a choice,” she chuckled. “I either join you in Calgary, or I fly out with you after the game here and have two days in Vegas with you. Your choice,” she added with another chuckle. Like there was any choice. Ever since Coach had thrown out that particular little carrot, he hadn’t been able to think of anything else but being locked in a massive hotel room with her for two whole days. “Of course that does mean you have to win here doesn’t it?” she prompted and that made Jon’s heart sink. The Canucks had been playing really well lately and the Nucks had just snuck by them in their last game, in a shootout. Still, he wasn’t the only player that was ready to kick some ass to get some down time.

“Duncs keeps warning me that you’re just trying to drag me to one of those all night wedding chapels,” he admitted. The guys had been hoping to get a rise out of him by saying it, it hadn’t worked when they’d first brought it up and the idea still didn’t do more than raise the smallest of butterflies in his stomach.

“Well you tell Duncs he can be best man,” she laughed. He could tell that she didn’t give the idea a second thought. Funnily enough he had given it a second and even a third thought.

“I think Sharpie’s feelings would be hurt,” he told her seriously, but she only laughed it off.

“I thought you were gonna say Kaner’s was going to be jealous,” she said as if she meant it. As if he’d ask Kaner to do something that serious. 

“Pat would never be able to pull something like that off with a straight face.” Edie’s pen stopped in the middle of the page. He was dead serious. Not that she didn’t whole heartedly agree, Patrick Kane was the kind of best man who’d tie a guy naked to a telephone pole with a skipping rope and leave him there. But Jon’s tone was more serious than just dismissing his on the road roomie for being a party boy.

“You’re not…you’re not actually…you don’t think that we…?” she bit down on her bottom lip as she felt panic rising in her chest.

“I could lie,” he said quietly and there was silence. Silence as she stared at the photos sliding by on her computer monitor. Silence as she knew that he was waiting for her to respond. Looking down at her notebook, she found the page in front of her covered in hearts and flowers and his initials intertwined with her own. “Okay, awkward,” he mumbled, sounding distinctly unhappy.

“You have to…I mean…we haven’t even seen each other again,” she pointed out in a strangled voice. Part of her brain told her to hang up the phone, climb under her desk and stick her thumb in her mouth. The other part wanted to jump on top of her desk and tell her whole office that Captain Serious wanted to marry her. She’d never felt quite so bipolar in her entire life.

“I guess I’m just saying that you make me think things like that,” he told her in that deep, masculine timbre that made her heart swell in her chest.

“When do I get to meet this Captain Serious who never does anything outrageous?” she asked, shaking her head. The Jonathan Toews she knew was not the serious, safe, boring one she kept reading about on the internet.

“If you even consider it, probably never,” he told her and she could hear that boyish grin she knew so well reappearing. Closing her eyes, Edie pictured him with his lopsided grin, the mole just below his mouth, a sort of sparkle in his dark eyes as he looked down at her.

“I’m going to go back to work now before you say something you can’t take back,” she mumbled and heard him laugh It really wasn’t fair. She had never been one of those annoying giggling girly girls who turned bright red the minute a guy so much as looked at her but he had turned her into that girl.

“Who says I’d want to?” he asked her, and this time she was sure he was laughing at her and not with her. He was beginning to like having the upper hand on her. She was going to have to figure out some way to regain the high ground.

“Aren’t you supposed to be having a nap or something?” she squeaked, sliding further down in her chair and shading her overheated face with her hand as Carolyn’s head appeared over the top of her divider.

“How can I sleep after talking to you?” he growled, making the butterflies in her stomach erupt in a fury of beating wings.

“Do whatever you have to do to…y’know, take care of that,” she hissed, trying, in vain, not to think about him lying alone in bed, taking himself in hand. Her entire body pulsed at the thought. “And then get some sleep so you won’t embarrass yourself out there and then,” she added in a softer voice, crouching further in her chair and cupping her hand around the business end of her headset, “if you’re a very, very good boy, I might help you with that…ummm…issue again later.”

“Does that mean I have to score?” he asked in that teasing sort of way that caused her to think of him with that silly grin on his face that turned her into a quivering mass of jelly every time she saw it. It was a deliberate double entendre. He knew and she knew it.

“Oh…you’ll score,” she mumbled and felt her entire body clench as a vision of him moving over her, all of his muscles flexing and extending with each thrust. “If you’re good, I mean.”

“I seem to remember you telling me that I’m pretty good,” he continued to tease her.

“Stop,” she hissed, undecided if she should be angry at him for choosing to torture her at work or if it was just the torture in general that was giving her the throbbing headache right behind her eyes.

“Okay, okay. I’ll be a good boy and have my nap so that my girlfriend will talk to me later.” Girlfriend, she still wasn’t used to that word. It made her stomach hurt, in a good way.

“Make sure Pat tucks you in,” she added, making him laugh.

“What? No bedtime story?” he prompted, making her squirm. Nearly every night since they’d parted at O’Hare all of their phone calls had ended up in heavy breathing and self-conscious giggling.

“Later,” she hissed, feeling her entire face get hot. Three days was going to seem like an eternity.

 “Mmm, is that a promise?” he growled in that deep sexy voice and suddenly that vision was back in her head, of him, alone on a bed in a hotel room, his long, thick cock in his hand.

“I have to go…really. Shit, Jon, you can not do this to me at work,” she insisted, feeling as if every set of eyes in the office were on her and that they could all tell what she was thinking.

“Okay babe, I’ll let you go,” he laughed, at her expense but not in a mean way. “But I am going to take you up on that bed time story later,” he added with that edge to his voice that he used when he made her tell him when and how hard she was going to cum. Edie’s feet were up on her chair and her forehead was pressed to her knees as she hugged them to her chest.

“Okay, I really have to go now,” she squeaked and then hung up to the sound of him laughing on the other end of the line.

“Oh. My. God. Who the hell are you and what in the fuck have you done with my friend Eden?” Edie looked up at Carolyn and smiled.

“I think I’m in love.” 

“You were right Kaner.” Jon looked up to find a group of his teammates standing at the foot of his bed. “She’s totally fucking with his head.”

The smile he’d been wearing while talking to Edie faded to a quizzical frown as he searched the faces of his teammates, Shooter, Greyhound, Jelly, Kaner and Soup. None of them so much as cracked a smile. He waited for one of them to break, watching their mouths for signs of a twitch, but as long as he waited, they just stood there, staring back at him.

“What?” He looked at Kane, because whatever this was, his curly haired teammate had obviously started it.

“You’ve been grinning like a dork ever since you met that chick,” Jelly pointed out. Jon could only shrug. There was no argument to be had. He’d woken up smiling and gone to sleep smiling. The only time he wasn’t grinning like a fat kid in a candy store was when he was on the ice, and even then….

“We’re not saying that we’re not happy for you,” Shooter added more mildly with a quick glance over both shoulders at the guys beside him, “or that we haven’t been saying that you should get some balance, have a relationship. I think we’ve all said that to you.” That was true. Guys were always telling him that he needed to have something, anything besides hockey in his life. “But…,” Sharpie shrugged and then sent a meaningful look towards Soup.

“We just think you may have gone a little overboard,” Rusty shrugged, looking deadly serious, wearing the expression he often did when he was facing down a Kesler or a Crosby. Jon blinked and shook his head. The boys and the Coaches were always telling him there was more to life than hockey and here, the first time he actually tried finding something else they were actually telling him to cool his jets. It was hard to believe his ears.

“What Soup’s trying to say, is that maybe you’re a little distracted out on the ice,” Greyhound was always straight to the point. He wasn’t the kind of guy that pulled punches, and though he was full of shit a lot of the time, Jon was pretty sure Bolland was also a straight shooter, but it still hurt.

 “Are you saying I’m sucking?” he asked, irritated and a little embarrassed at being called out. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone questioned his work ethic, in fact, most of the time he was being told not to work himself to death, to ease up, even just a little.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Shooter was trying his best not to make this too personal, Jon could tell. Sharpie had softened a lot since he got married.

“You’re jerking it all into your sock and not putting it out on the ice.” That was Pat. Bring it all down to the bottom denominator, making everything about sex. So, that’s what this was about.

“So the first time I have a girlfriend and you don’t…,” Jon sneered at his mop topped friend and shook his head.

“We lost to the Rangers, then the fucking Devils,” Kaner counted out the losses on his fingers. “Then we barely got by Atlanta, then lost to the fucking Oil and then the Desert Dogs and….”

“We beat the Ducks,” Jon pointed out, running a finger behind the collar of his now rumpled dress shirt. It felt too tight. The room felt hot.

“You do see the pattern though, right Cap?” Greyhound looked at him with his shrewd, rat like eyes and Jon flinched.

“Yeah, I guess,” he mumbled. Jesus, he wondered, could they really be right? “But uh…hey it’s not all about me.”

“No,” Sharpie agreed with that ‘everything’s gonna be alright’ smile, “but if Pat passes you the puck and you’re off in dream land….?” Jon held up his hand. He’d heard enough. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear anymore.

“Maybe it’s a little too intense,” he shrugged and then, when Kaner gave him one of his patented eye rolls where there was nothing but the white’s off his eyes, Jon sighed. “Okay…I’ll cool it off, promise.” Everyone but Pat seemed to be placated. “I won’t call her ‘til we get to the Coast. Okay?” Pat grinned and then tossed Jon jacket on his bed before herding the other guys out of the room. They were already talking about what movie to watch in Sharpie’s room when the door closed with a click behind them. Jon stared at the closed door and cursed under his breath. ]

He was in love with Edie and he was pretty sure she was in love with him. He’d never felt anything like this in his entire life, except maybe when they won the Cup. That was a fucking amazing feeling and he didn’t want to only feel that once in his life.

There had to be a balance, he thought to himself as he lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He was probably just going at this whole relationship thing a hundred miles an hour, like he did everything, with too much intensity. All or fucking nothing. There had to be a happy medium.

There had to be.