Chapter 2

“OMG! Thank you so much.” Kensuke seemed on the verge of fainting. “Is Tom Alan here?”

He even got that right. Some people dropped the Alan even after being told repeatedly the two names went together as one.

“No. Sorry.”

“If I give you my cell, can you have him call it?”

“Oh…I…”

“Who’s going to pay my dry cleaning?” Jimbo demanded.

Was he seriously going to ask a kid making less than minimum wage to cover the cost of washing his stupid shirt? “I will,” Erika said.

“Chillax, old man.”

“Sato!” The manager was suddenly involved again. Kensuke’s charming smile and good looks probably got him out of a lot. This time, however, his boss wasn’t wooed. “Get out.”

“In the middle of the dinner rush?” Kensuke took off his blue apron and maroon bow tie. “No prob, yo. My pleasure.” He dropped them both to the floor, and offered a parting shot. “Eat my ass, Hideki.”

So ended another shot at finding Mr. Right. Erika and Jimbo didn’t even wait for their entrees. She was grateful she had taken her own car. As she got in, she checked her phone.

Billy: Gimme a buzz.

A text from the other ex—the redheaded baby daddy—maybe looking for a booty call. Recalling the last one, Erika seriously considered it.

Billy liked it when she rode him like a cowgirl, but there was something about feeling his weight on top of her that got her off. She’d leaned down to kiss him, and then managed to roll them both over so she was underneath, all without him pulling out. Their choreography was almost as flawless as what she and Tom Alan could do on the ice.

You’re not supposed to be thinking about him now, Erika had told herself.

With one of Billy’s hands on her breast and the other between her legs where he alternated between a gentle sway and quick, jolting thrusts, she’d given herself over to the heat down below that soon rose as a tingle over her entire body. When Billy shuddered, so did she. It was not unusual for them to climax together, despite the fact Erika could still count the number of times they had actually made love—or was it just sex? When Billy kissed her neck, when he left his mouth there and began to hum—Celine Dion, she thought, not the song from Titanic, but one of her other romantic ballads—she’d had to ask herself again.

“This is sweet, babe,” he’d said.

“Yes.”

“Be nice if, ya know, we made it kind of a regular thing.”

“Hmm.” Burrowed into Billy’s sweaty chest, Erika had agreed.

“Except, I’m probably not really ready for that stuff, I guess…commitment and…whatever.”

“Then why do you bring it up?”

It wasn’t the first time he had. Erika had gotten out of his bed then. She’d stood at the side of it, naked, just looking down at him.

“Here comes the pissed off woman stance,” Billy had said with a smirk. “Arms across boobs, like, ‘No way are you getting at these again now.’”

“Nope. Let me tell you something about women.”

“Let me tell you something about women.” Billy sat up, back against the headboard, the sheet falling away so Erika could see almost all of him. He was usually a man of few words, unless he had a reason to use a lot of them. He was particularly fond of post-sex monologues. Erika wished she hadn’t gotten up. The bed would have been a far more comfortable spot to take in what was about to come. “I love women,” he said. “I love women hard.” What he did with his eyes, where he put them, she felt as if she might climax again, just from his look. “You may not know this about me, because we got together and fell apart pretty fast and there wasn’t a lot of time for talking, but women are my main role models in life—my mother and sisters, Irina Mischen, all those years at the rink working with her, Coach LeDoux…I must have mentioned her.”

Erika couldn’t really recall.

“You know when I first got into hockey?”

“When?”

“The sixth grade. We played floor hockey in gym. I wanted to play it every day, but we moved on to stupid basketball. There was no such thing as a floor hockey team anyway, but we did have a field hockey team—a girl’s field hockey team. In seventh grade, when we were eligible to play sports, I tried out.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. I was a freakin’ pioneer, and Coach LeDoux, she put me on her team—went to the principal and the school board to do it. Stuck up for me when other schools complained about having a boy on the team, how it was unfair. She assured them I sucked.”

Erika smiled.