“Need your eyes over here.” He winks.
Right. The game.
I slide over to him for “thinking time,” the thirty-eight minutes allotted each game for strategizing your next shot. Normally Dougie uses the time to make jokes or plan which appetizers he’s going to order after we finish, but tonight, he wants my advice.
“What do you think there?” He points his broom at the other end of the sheet. Our opponents have a rock in the ring, but ours is farther back and closer to the button. “Set a guard? Or see if I can sneak one in behind?”
I’m not that skilled at curling on a good day. Layer on the fact that my head isn’t even remotely in this game, and I’m basically useless. To illustrate that fact, just as Dougie asks his question, Dax slides past me to confer with Dougie, and his fingers graze my hip bone. In the grand scheme of Dax and Gemma touches, it’s nothing. Yet, the brush of his fingers sends tiny tendrils of want through my bloodstream, where they spread and settle into the farthest crevices of my body until I’m completely consumed.
“You ready?” The gravelly tone of Dax’s voice pulls me out of my sex trance. I almost shout back a hell yes until I realize that Dougie is crouching in the hack, ready to throw his rock, and Dax’s question is if I’m okay to sweep.
“I’m good,” I tell him while simultaneously trying to force any non-curling thoughts from my head.
Dougie slides into a lunge, letting go of his stone with a delicate turn of his wrist. The rock glides toward us. Dax bends over, his forearms taut, ready to sweep.
My defenses hold for exactly fourteen seconds.
The first dirty little thought creeps back in as I grasp my broom with an assured and confident grip. My hand-job grip. Then the back-and-forth of the broom on the ice becomes rhythmic. A quick, firm stroke that has me thinking of other things I’d like to stroke, which then leads to wondering what exactly I will find when I finally get to take off Dax’s pants.
I have to close my eyes so that I’m not tempted to look at the curled tendril of dark hair that falls across Dax’s forehead as he sweeps. Or check out the curve of his sweatpants below his beltline, which bulges every time he leans on his broom and his pants pull taut. Or think about how good he smells when he’s a little sweaty. Like right now, as he’s working the broom, biting his bottom lip in concentration as the muscles in his back contract and flex.
Oh fuck. Now I’m picturing it.
Dax naked.
Fingers, lips, and tongues. Caressing, stroking, licking, and biting. My eyes fly open in an attempt to halt the steamy narrative in my head, and I search the arena for something else to look at. Something safe that won’t have me thinking about dicks, or Dax, or sex. I settle on a game happening two sheets away. An elderly man with a beer belly is stretching the limits of his wine-colored lululemon shirt as he dips into an impressively agile lunge. Yes. He’s safe.
Or maybe not.
“Hurry hard,” yells Red Spandex. He’s talking to his sweepers, but the chant becomes my mantra.
Hurry hard.
Hurry hard.
Hard.
Harder.
Harder.
Harder.
Hard—
Dax looks over at me, as if I’m emitting pheromones that signify that I’m seconds away from having a curling-induced orgasm right here on the ice. His fingers flex against his broom. Oh god, those fingers and all the magical wonders they are capable of. I’m mentally calculating the size of the supply closet and the odds of Larry doing his nightly check of the locker rooms if Dax and I were to slip away, while also simultaneously staring at the second hand of the black-and-white analog clock hanging above the gallery windows, secretly wondering if, in addition to parallel-universe travel, I’ve also been gifted the ability to manipulate time. I have not. If anything, the clock seems to move slower. Tick. Tick. Tick. I’m waiting for the boom.
I am the boom.
No. The boom is the clashing of Dougie’s rock against our opponent’s. Hard and fast, it slams the stone toward the outer ring, then spins in a slow twirl off in the opposite direction. Dougie has completely messed up his shot. Or maybe this was the new plan, and I missed it.
“Sweep,” Dougie yells at me as Dax and I part to tend our respective rocks. I brush my broom back and forth, pouring all my pent-up angst into the motion until the rock clears the house.
When I compose myself enough to look up, Dax is sliding his way back to our end of the ice, and my seventy-year-old opponent is watching me, eyebrows raised.
“Looking a little flushed there, honey.” She makes a point of looking at Dax, then back at me before winking. It’s a go get ’em tiger kind of a wink, and I want to tell her I would if I could.