Crew (Hockey Royalty #3)

14. Liv

Chapter 14

Liv

I stand outside the door of the classroom at Royce Hall, and I swear to God my whole body itches. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t want to go in. Tenley mentioned it casually yesterday morning, and somehow I’m here. Outside the Trauma Survivors Support Group meeting.

Clearly, Tenley thinks I should attend or she wouldn't have mentioned it as we were both heading out the door yesterday. I was off to classes, and I guess I seemed tense. Tenley was off to shoot some additional footage with the crew she put together to pitch this documentary she's working on.

She believed me when I said I left Marmont and went to meet school friends for drinks across the street from Marmont and that I ended up crashing at Maria's, a girl from one of my classes. Then I had to text Maria and tell her I was using her as a cover because Tenley is the girl who would bring it up the next time she sees Maria. Maria happily agreed to lie for me and even sent me a high-five emoji and an eggplant because she just assumed I was with a guy. And I was. That's the first time someone has assumed I was hooking up and I actually was, which made me smile.

It's been a little over a week since my birthday and Tenley hasn't even brought it up again. The family group chat also believed my lie, because, of course, virginal shy Livvy wouldn't be doing anything else. Anyway, Tenley has stopped talking about my birthday night and started talking about the college's trauma group which is supposedly a "really positive thing. They don't dwell on what happened to people, they focus on how to move forward. A girl on my crew goes because she was held up at gunpoint. She's really grown in so many ways, not just gotten over the trauma.”

It was the most unsubtle thing Tenley has ever said to me. She’s really bad at subtlety it turns out. Shocked, not shocked. And I guess I'm heinously bad at ignoring her because here I am. But I'm frozen. The idea of stepping into that room makes me want to puke and scream at the same time. I'm fine. Well, I will be fine, but not if I keep dwelling on this… giving validation to the awful feeling I get every time I'm alone and think of that night. Especially at night. When Tenley isn’t home at night I lock every single door and window and crank the AC, even if it’s not that hot, just to drown out the sounds of our apartment building because they suddenly make me jumpy.

A woman brushes by me and walks into the room. She’s got her head down, eyes glued to the tile floor. She’s shuffling instead of walking. She looks beaten down mentally and possibly physically. She looks like a victim. I hate myself for thinking that. It feels mean and I am not a mean girl. But I’m also not a victim.

I was raised by the strongest woman on the entire planet, everyone in the entire Garrison family—hell everyone in all of Silver Bay, Maine, will say that. Uncle Jordan once said at a family BBQ, that it was tungsten that ran through my mom’s veins instead of blood and what he got in response was a bunch of bobbing heads agreeing with him. Not a murmur of dissent in the bunch.

I was about eight or nine at the time and I sleepily asked him what tungsten was. It was late and I was curled up in my dad’s lap half asleep and wrapped in one of his hoodies. “Tungsten is something they use to make steel stronger,” Jordan had explained with a gentle smile.

“But steel is already strong,” little Tate, who was a kid like me at the time, had argued as he roasted a marshmallow, probably his seventeenth of the night.

“Not as strong as Callie,” Dad replied and my mom had stood up and waved a hand around dismissively.

“Stop flattering me you two,” she’d laughed.

But it was true. I grew to learn, year after year, that my mom truly was incredible. She'd lost her own mom young, had already been abandoned by her dad, and then dumped by their grandmother. She and my aunts Rose and Jessie raised themselves from the age of early teenhood. Everyone says my mom was the fiercest. And I saw the way she protected us kids. She was the definition of a Mama Bear.

I never once saw my mother cry sad tears. She only cried happy ones, and even that was rare. And I know the whole family teases that I'm the polar opposite of the woman who gave birth to me. That I got none of her DNA. I roll my eyes at the way my mom overshares, has loud opinions on everything, and voices all her emotions, good, bad, and ugly… but the truth is, I want to be like her. I think if I had been more like her, this jerk wouldn’t have picked me. No one would ever dare try and attack Callie Caplan. And if, God forbid they did, she would make them pay. And she would also suck it up and never be a victim. So I won’t be either.

My feet start to move, and I walk out of the building, and straight to my car. That’s how I find myself driving toward Venice three hours early for my job watching Dylan. Mallory and Tate want a date night so I'm taking over from their day sitter and Mallory is going straight from her classes at USC to meet Tate at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

The fact is I don’t want to head home in case Tenley is there. She knows when this trauma group meets so she will know I ditched. I don’t want to explain myself to her, or anyone, so I find myself parking in a visitor spot at Tate's old townhouse because I remember the code for the gate and they have free visitor parking. And it's only two blocks off the beach. I mean, yeah, technically it's also where Crew lives but… I mean there's no guarantee I will run into him. I'm not here to accidentally do it, but, like, if it happens, it wouldn't be a bad thing….

“Olivia?”

At the sound of his voice, as confused as it is, all my anxiety starts to melt away. I slowly turn my head to the left and see him standing on the small front porch of the unit Tate occupied for years. He's wet. Crew's hair looks darker and is kind of plastered back on his head. He’s wearing a pair of sweats and nothing else, not even socks or shoes on his feet. He’s holding a mug. I stare like a deer who has never seen headlights before. “I… hi. Hello. I just needed a place to park.”

“Oh.” His disappointment is heavy, like a layer of humidity in the already warm California air. He shoots me the most dazzling but poignant smile. “Thought maybe you were here to beg me for another orgasm. You wouldn’t have to beg, by the way, just ask.”

WWMD, my brain yells at me. What Would Mom Do? My mom would completely, without a second thought, jump into bed for another round with this fine specimen of a man, who also happens to be a pretty sweet, nice guy… not that my mom would care about that. She’s told me before how she didn’t give a rat’s ass about a man’s heart or soul until my dad.

I have always tried to ignore the gory details of my mom’s youth but she’s talked freely about it in front of us since we were in the higher end of our teen years. She was sexually liberal. She didn’t want a relationship with anyone, not even my dad, at first. Everyone blames her childhood trauma. She says there is nothing to blame, she did what-slash-who she wanted and she was content with it.

Crew’s standing there watching me, probably waiting for me to go on my merry way so that he can call one of the million women who would kill to get an orgasm from him. But I don’t go to the beach like I’d planned. I just stand there by the gate staring at him. And that’s when I notice the brace on his left wrist.

“Oh shit. Are you injured?” I walk toward him knowing full well being injured at the start of the season would totally suck for a hockey player. Especially one who wants to get back out there and both enjoy and defend his Stanley Cup win.

He glances down at his wrist and lifts it up as he looks back at me, tugging the Velcro on the brace-free. "Nope. I was last year, at the end of the season. Had a quick surgery and lots of physiotherapy over the summer."

He pauses and our eyes meet and damn I don’t want to smile. But I do smile and he smiles back and this little moment passes between us and I don’t know what it is. I’ve had boyfriends before but I’ve never had this level of chemical attraction to someone. Maybe because he’s the only man who has ever been inside me? “Anyway,” he starts, bringing me out of my dirty thoughts, “I lied and said it was still bothering me, so I could skip the pressers and schmoozing VIPs after our first preseason game a few weeks ago and go find you. So now Coach and our trainer want me to wear this off the ice. Just in case. I put it on after practice, after my shower so they would see it, and I forgot to take it off.”

Me. He faked an injury and bailed on his commitments to the team to find me and try and get me to sleep with him again. There’s no way to not be flattered by that. “So,” he continues, “are you meeting someone? Like a date?”

“No.”

“Thank God because I’d be insanely jealous.”

Did he just… I lock eyes with him, and he smiles, but it’s not cheeky like he was kidding, it’s confident and there’s a glint of a challenge in his hazel eyes. Strong ‘what are you going to do about it?’ vibes.

"I was going to go to the beach to watch the sunset, but I just realized I hate walking around after dark by myself and I would have to walk back here alone… so… do you want to come with?"

“Go with you? To the beach? To watch the sunset? It sounds uncomfortably romantic.” He looks down at himself and back up. “Maybe I should put on a shirt to make it less awkward.”

I laugh at his stupidity. Crew disappears into the townhouse. I glance in through the big living room window and notice boxes everywhere. He must be moving soon and I don’t like that I don’t know where he’ll be going even though I don’t have a right to know. He appears on the front porch again in a simple, pale blue t-shirt and slides on his feet similar to the ones every male in my entire family wears, because hockey players love slip-on shoes. The wrist brace is also gone. He shoves on some sunglasses and pulls his door closed.

“Let’s go Fireball.”

Is he always this confident and cool? I mean a random girl just shows up at his house and he rolls with it. I don’t roll with it when Tenley invites me to brunch spontaneously. I know for a fact my mom rolls with anything so…

“You think a lot, don’t you?”

“You don’t think?” I counter as we walk the crumbling sidewalks of Venice toward the beach.

“I think a lot too,” Crew admits with a sheepish, fleeting smile. “But I don’t overanalyze things. That trait went to the other twin. But thinking, yeah, I do that. I’ve been thinking about our night in the hotel a lot. Like all the time. Almost non-stop.”

I glance up at him, but I don’t know where he’s looking because of the sunglasses he’s wearing. I decide to throw my own on because they’re big round things that will hopefully hide the hue of my skin when I inevitably blush if we keep talking about this. “It’s definitely a fond memory for me.”

“Fond?” he repeats as the light turns and we start across the intersection. “A fond memory is something you make over Thanksgiving with your grandparents. I don’t want it to be a fond memory for you. I wanted it to be a life-changing one. Something that you think about when you’re ninety-nine, on your death bed, and it still makes you wet.”

I bite the inside of my cheek to keep my mouth from hanging open. My mom wouldn’t be stunned by that. I fight the blush wanting to take over my complexion. I try to channel my mom and say something confident and sexy. “I guess fond was an understatement. And if I’m still lucid at ninety-nine, and remember my own name, perhaps I will remember that one crazy birthday I spent naked in a suite at Chateau Marmont. Perhaps.”

He laughs. “Well, Fireball, I’m going to ask for one more night so that I can really cement the memory. I’m not liking the use of the word perhaps.”

“Oh my God.” I can’t fight the blush now. “You really don’t have anyone else to proposition?”

“Sure I do. I have tons of options. But you’re the one that showed up at my house,” he reminds me as the wind takes a few strands of his drying hair and pushes them over his cheek. He shoves them back again. "I'm freshly showered, horny, and well… feels like fate. And to be honest, I think you want to do it again too. There's lots of other places to park in Venice."

I don’t respond because I’ve been busted and there is no way to talk my way out of it. Yeah, I could have paid for parking anywhere else. Deep down I was hoping to run into him. We walk another block. The famous Venice boardwalk and the Pacific Ocean are visible now.

“You’re thinking about it,” he murmurs confidently.

“Yeah well, I think a lot, remember?”

“Touché.”

We don’t talk again until we’re sitting in the sand, the famous outdoor gym and boardwalk behind us, and nothing but the blue-gray Pacific Ocean and a warm golden ball of light slipping lower and lower in front of us. That's when I find my words.

“Since you know my big secret, that I was a geriatric virgin, tell me some big secret of yours,” I request and dig my fingers deeper into the warm sand as I lean back on my arms.

“I’m divorced.”

“I know. You’ve mentioned that. Tell me something I can’t Google.” He looks hesitant so I add. “It’s only fair and you can trust me.”

“I don’t trust women.”

Wow. I lift my sunglasses and push them into my hair to really study his face. He lifts his too and I can see the seriousness in those stunning hazel eyes. “You seriously just said that and meant it? Like, all women.”

He kind of shrugs. “I mean, I guess I trust my mom.”

Red flag? This feels like a red flag. Huge, giant, waving red flag. Crew knows it too because he looks guilty as he runs a hand through his hair and sighs. “I know how that sounds, but my ex really fucked me over. I trusted her with everything. So I won’t be doing that again.”

“Harsh.”

“Truthful,” he replies, and we both turn to watch the sun as it dips toward the ocean and paints the sky in hues of orange and red. It’s a real stunner tonight.

The silence is comfortable but heavy because his little announcement was a lot and I still don’t know what to do with it. He must feel it too because he speaks again and I can feel his fingers graze mine in the sand behind us. “Also, that sad little fact is not something I’ve admitted to anyone else, so it counts as a secret.”

“Okay…”

“I said no thank you and I don’t have to say anything else!” a voice shouts suddenly and both Crew and I swivel our heads.

Behind us, on the edge of the paved boardwalk, a woman is yelling at a man. She’s dressed in a cropped tank and a long flowy skirt and sandals. He's in a tank, workout shorts, and sneakers.

“Wow. I take it back. You’re a cunt,” the guy snarls.

Everything in me turns to lead. I’m like a human paperweight, held down in the sand by fear and anxiety and, worst of all, memories. Something way back in the attic of my brain says logically, “But he never yelled at you. He never called you names.” But it doesn’t register with my nervous system and I remain frozen, eyes glued to the two as the woman turns from the angry, volatile man with a bitter, “Fuck you.”

She starts marching away but he repeats her words, almost in shock, and then takes menacing strides towards her. I feel a flutter beside me, sand rains onto my jeans and shirt from Crew's lightning-quick movements. I'm still frozen in my fear, helpless. I also can't seem to catch my breath. It's like I swallowed some of that ocean water in front of me even though I haven't even dipped a toe in.

I watch him step between the woman and the man and calmly intervene. "Hey, buddy. You wanna walk the other way.”

“Why? Who are you?” the guy asks angrily and points to the woman who is looking over her shoulder but hasn’t stopped walking away. “If you’re her boyfriend, all she had to do was say she had one. I mean, fuck, all I did was say she looked pretty. She didn’t have to be such a rude cunt. I wouldn’t have bothered her if she was walking with you.”

"I'm not her boyfriend," Crew replies. "I'm just a dude who understands women don't owe me anything just because they're pretty and walking alone. And I guess I'm here to teach you that lesson."

“What the fuck you gonna do about it?” He seethes and steps into Crew. The two would be nose-to-nose except the menacing dude is a few inches shorter than Crew. Crew isn’t being aggressive, not even in his stance. His shoulders aren’t back. His hands are in his pockets. He’s relaxed… and shockingly, when he doesn’t get a reaction, this guy backs down. Can you imagine, I think to myself both bitter and amazed, to be able to intimidate without even using body language? If I had that superpower, I wouldn’t have been jumped.

“Look, women aren’t out here looking for strangers to hit on them or even to compliment them,” Crew goes on and the guy mutters something under his breath. “Walk it off and do better. Don’t do it again because I promise you, I’m not the only man out here who will tell you to back off and some will be a lot less chill about it.”

The guy stomps toward the outdoor gym. Crew starts walking back to me. The woman is nowhere to be found, having used the opportunity to get the hell away from the situation, which is exactly what I would have done.

Crew walks to me casually, like he isn’t a fucking hero. I watch him. He isn’t looking around for accolades from strangers watching or from the girl he saved. He didn’t do it for himself. He did it because it was the right thing to do.

I realize Crew may have announced he doesn't trust women, but he's a guy who has been burned. Badly. And nothing else about Crew screams red flag. In fact, everything about him screams anchor. Safety. Warmth. He's the guy you go to when you're in trouble, which is why I think I picked him. Without realizing it. So by the time he reaches me again, I'm no longer paralyzed. I'm on my feet, dusting sand off my jeans.

“Sorry about that.”

“Let’s go.”

“Where?”

"Back to your place," I tell him and it feels like the boldest thing I've ever done. I keep walking toward the boardwalk, and the road, without looking back so I don't lose my nerve. Out of my peripheral, I see him fall in step beside me. I swear I feel the smile on his lips. "I've never had a quickie before and I've got a little less than forty-five minutes before I have to be at Tate's. Think you can get me off in that time?

“Phew!” Crew tips his head back as if what I said is ridiculous. “I can do it more than once in that amount of time.”

“Show me the ways, you sexual Jedi.”

I don’t even have time to worry if he’ll get that nerdy reference because he chuckles and replies, "Please can I be Obi-Wan and not Yoda? The young Ewan McGregor version not like that old guy.”

“Alec Guinness.”

“God your brain is hot, Fireball.”

I can’t help but smile.