17
DAKOTA
I think that might have been when I fell in love with him.
Fuck me, right?
Seeing how much all the seniors adored Ryder, how he wasn’t patronizing and instead just treated them like people.
One elderly man tearily told me about how his only son had died at age nineteen in Vietnam, and Ryder was like his grandson.
You’re a shitty, shitty person, I told myself. I couldn’t actually break his heart, right?
You’ve only known him for two-and-a-half days. This is ridiculous. Timmy is your brother. Your flesh and blood. And I will do anything for my family.
But Ryder was just so fucking perfect. If he was one of those asshole billionaires, I would have betrayed him in a heartbeat.
I gazed at him. He was humming along with the Christmas carols one elderly man was playing on the piano while two women measured him for a new Christmas sweater. Once they realized they weren’t getting a lot of juicy details about Ryder’s bedroom performance, the seniors started to tell me about all the hijinks they’d gotten up to when Ryder was around.
“You stole a nativity scene out of the director’s car?” I was shocked.
“Shh! Keep your voice down.” Ryder kissed me to shut me up, setting off shrieks from the seniors.
“I didn’t know I was stealing it,” he admitted. “They told me it was supposed to go into the bingo room.”
I parceled out the food I’d brought for Ryder. The seniors insisted on trying to force-feed him their portions.
“Look at that boy eat.”
“Did you make that?” Edna asked me.
“The turkey? It’s a miso honey glaze.”
She nodded approvingly.
“Don’t fuck that up, Ryder,” Edna ordered. “I used to make my husband a home-cooked meal every single night. You know what he did?”
“He left you,” Ryder said solemnly.
“Exactly!”
“He’s heard this story a thousand times.”
“He’s gonna hear it again!” Edna leaned forward. “That bastard left me. Went off with this floozy. But she didn’t know how to cook. He came crawling back to me. Begged me, hat in hand, to take him back. He’d lost twenty pounds. Got food poisoning twice.”
“And you took him back?” I was horrified.
“Of course!” Edna sniffed. “You didn’t get divorced in those days, and besides, after that, he did whatever I told him to do, no question. Once you spend all that time training a man, it doesn’t make financial sense to throw him out and start over.”
“Ryder seems pretty well home-trained.” Myrtle patted his cheek lovingly.
“If I didn’t know his family situation, I’d say his mother did a bang-up job. Better than my daughter-in-law. Never brings my grandkids to see me. Thank the lord for Ryder.”
“I hope you’re visiting your grandmother.” Another elderly woman eyed me critically.
“Oh, all the time. She lives with my aunt,” I explained. “Well, technically they live with her. She owns the house.”
“Poor woman.” Frances shook her head. “That’s why I moved in here. My son and his girlfriend and all their ferrets moved into my house, and I never could get rid of them.”
“I think Aunt Bethany probably wishes my cousin would let Granny Murray move in with her and her husband.”
“Hudson’s not going to allow that,” Ryder said with a snort.
“Nope, he does not want an OnlyFans studio in his attic.”
“She’s got an OnlyFans?” Several elderly men perked up.
“It’s not free,” I warned them, “and it’s not particularly good.”
“I have a military pension and a social security check burning a hole in my pocket.” Charles was giddy.
“With any luck, he’ll jerk himself off into a heart attack, and I can move into the presidential suite,” Myrtle said matter-of-factly.
“That’s not very nice.” Ryder frowned.
Myrtle shrugged. “I didn’t make it this far in life by being nice.”
“I can’t see that. I’m old,” Horace said, peering at his phone over Charles’s shoulder. “Screen cast it.”
“Do you need help?” I asked then suddenly wondered if I actually knew how to do it.
“I got it.” Frances hustled over. “I used to work at Microsoft.” She tapped the phone.
Ryder covered his eyes, as there on the screen was my grandmother shooting beer out of her vag.
“This is an amazing third date,” I said to Ryder, kissing him.
“What, no!” he sputtered.
“This was your date?” The senior citizens turned on him.
“We went over this, Ryder,” one elderly man insisted. “Over and over about how to impress a lady.”
“Your instruction sucked, Joe.”
Mildred swatted Ryder with her cane. “What are you still doing here?”
“I just got here,” Ryder protested. “We’re eating lunch.”
“Lunch, my ass. You and you girlfriend need to go out on the town. You kids can’t waste your Saturday on us old geezers.”
“Get a life, Ryder!” one lady yelled affectionately.
“Or just fuck her in the back of your truck!” Edna called.
I laughed at him as his face reddened.
He was still trying to fend off advice-giving seniors as I pulled on my coat.
There was a bony hand on my arm. Myrtle peered up at me critically. “Ryder is very dear to all of us. He’s a good boy. Don’t you dare break his heart.”
“Usually I stay several hours,” Ryder confessed. “I feel bad leaving early.”
“You’ll have to make it up to them next weekend and tell them all about our date.”
“Not a date,” he corrected, putting the truck in gear and flipping on the radio. Christmas music played. “Oh, I love this song!” he said happily, turning up the radio.
I couldn’t stop the smile.
“What?” He glanced at me sheepishly. “It’s Christmas. Who doesn’t like Christmas?”
“I love Christmas,” I told him. “And I love that you love it.”
Ryder whistled along to Bing Crosby as he pulled onto the main road. “I guess I’ll take you home.”
“We just watched my grandmother shooting beer out of her cunt and hitting a target. I’m maxed out on family time.”
“You like your family. I can tell,” he said, slipping on his sunglasses as the sun reflected off the freshly fallen snow.
He drove slowly down the winding road through the snow-covered forest back toward town.
“What do you usually do on Saturday?” I asked him, hoping it included snuggling naked under a blanket.
“I should be prepping for the big game. Do some drills.”
“Not spend time with your girlfriend so she doesn’t distract you?” I teased, trailing my fingers up his arm.
“Coach did say take it easy.” He grinned at me. “But this still isn’t a date,” he added quickly. “I want to do something special for our third date.”
“So it’s date two and a half. Is that like ‘you suck on my tits and finger me while you hump my leg’ territory?”
“That’s not—I wouldn’t do that.”
“Suck on my tits? Didn’t you hear what Myrtle had to say?”
“I’m not humping your leg.” Jaw set, he drove down the road. Both hands on the wheel.
“But you will suck on my tits?”
The blue eyes darted to me then back to the road. The corner of his mouth twitched. “You have low standards if that’s all you can fantasize about.”
I ran my hand up his rock-hard thigh. “Someone’s cocky.”
He grabbed my hand. “I am a professional athlete,” he teased. “I have to know exactly what level my body is capable of performing at.”
My brain unhelpfully supplied me with an image of Ryder barreling down the ice—focused, powerful.
“Why is this not a third date, again?”
He lifted my hand to his mouth, kissed my knuckles. “Because you deserve something magical. You deserve the world.”
“The Christmas market is full of holiday magic,” I said as Ryder took one of the sole parking spaces left on a side street near the market. “That’s a third date if I ever saw one.”
“We were technically here for our first date.”
“The Noelle Noshery is on Main Street,” I reminded him as he looped an arm around my waist.
It felt like we’d known each other forever, just engaging in a familiar back-and-forth, arguing about facts as my sister liked to complain our parents would do. The important thing was that we were talking. It didn’t matter what we said.
“Ryder!” A middle-aged woman wearing reindeer antlers and an oversized red sweater festooned with bells shoved a steaming cup at him. “I added dehydrated limes like you said. What do you think?”
Ryder took a thoughtful sip.
“Hmm… I like it! What do you think, Dakota?” He handed me the paper cup filled with rich golden cider.
It was sweet but not cloying, with a nice tang. “It’s delicious.” I took another sip.
The stall owner beamed. “Guess I won’t be seein’ ya tomorrow, Ryder, on account of your big game. Good luck!”
“Thanks!” He gave me a sheepish smile. “I come here a lot.”
“Like the cider stall a lot?”
“Uh, no…”
More stall owners called to him by name. One woman foisted a pastry on him, another guy gave him a poinsettia that was on its last leg for the senior center, another lady gave him a handmade handkerchief that looked like a reindeer.
“Must be nice to be a star hockey player.” I teased him when another older woman plied him with smoked reindeer meat.
“You play hockey, Ryder?” she asked, incredulously. “Guess I should have known from the size of ya. I’m not a sports person. I figured, polite young man like you, you were an office manager or something.”
“No, ma’am,” he said, accepting her questionable jerky.
I took it from him before he could eat it.
“You play for, what’s it called, the NHL?”
“No, ma’am. One of the minor league teams in town.”
“Uh-huh.” She looked at him critically.
“You need to get a real job,” she warned. “You finally got yourself a nice little girlfriend. Don’t deny it. I see the way you look at her.”
Ryder gave me a warm smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t you ‘yes, ma’am’ me. Get a real job. You can’t be playing hockey and supporting her and all the babies you told me you wanted,” she scolded him.
“He’s a pretty good hockey player.” I came to Ryder’s defense.
The reindeer jerky lady snorted like she didn’t believe me.
“He could go big league and make bank.”
“You need to go to the community college like I told you, Ryder. They have that accounting certificate you can get in three semesters if you do the summer. You already have that business degree. I told my son to take it, but he didn’t listen. Said he’s tricking out a van or some nonsense and going to start a YouTube channel. Don’t be like him. Listen to me, now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shook her head and sighed. “You’re just too handsome. Look at those eyes. You’re going to get some poor girl in trouble.” The stall owner winked at me, then she foisted more reindeer jerky at Ryder.
“Have you ever gotten in trouble in your life, Boy Scout?” I teased, wrestling the reindeer jerky away from him and dumping it in a trash can.
“Hey, you can’t waste food.”
“You have a big game tomorrow, and that stuff is making me sick just smelling it. There aren’t reindeer anywhere near here. And I don’t think it’s sanitary for her to be smoking questionable meat in the middle of the Christmas market. It’s probably roadkill deer that she’s serving to people.”
Ryder shifted the poinsettia to his other arm so he could take my hand.
“There’s my favorite customer!” a man called.
Ryder bought a beef Wellington sandwich for each of us.
“Damn, that has no right to be this good,” I said around a mouthful of juicy beef. “Don’t tell my aunt, but this beef Wellington is way better than any she’s ever made.”
“I know, right?” Ryder made a happy noise. “I eat way too many of these. He also has this killer sandwich that tastes exactly like Thanksgiving. Or what I always imagined it would be like anyway,” he said conversationally. “I usually get one or the other. Sometimes both.”
“On your daily foray into the Christmas market.” I raised an eyebrow.
“I’m supporting local businesses.” He wiped his mouth.
“I don’t think even my cousin who is all Christmas all the time goes to the Christmas market as much as you.”
“You have to enjoy Christmas,” he said lightly. “Lean into it, otherwise it just makes you too sad. Holidays can be depressing if you’re not careful. Thankfully, there’s usually a hockey game on Thanksgiving so I can just skate through that.”
“Well, I missed you for Thanksgiving, but you’re not spending Christmas alone,” I promised.
Ryder turned to me with a wide smile and kissed me. “Don’t worry about me. I usually go up to the senior center,” he confessed, “so I haven’t really done holidays alone since college.”
The blue eyes had a faraway look.
“That was pretty depressing, really. The short, cold days then the end-of-semester letdown and having to wait around awkwardly with everyone else being superexcited to see their family again—talking about how they’d see their dogs and sleep in their childhood beds. Ecstatic parents would come pick up their kids. The dads—that would always get me. Everyone expects it’s the moms, but it’s the dads. They’re so excited to see their kids, like it’s Christmas morning when they picked them up.”
“No one else stayed on campus?” I asked him carefully.
“Some people didn’t leave, obviously, but those were the people who lived off campus, mainly. Only younger students lived on campus, except me because I had a special financial aid package because of foster care and—sorry.” He cut himself off. “You don’t want to hear all that.” He crumpled up his sandwich wrapper.
“No.” I took his hand. “I want to know everything about you. Like why did you choose B school?”
“I was dumb,” he said with a rueful laugh. “I thought a business degree meant you were guaranteed to get a high-paying job. Turns out it’s just for rich kids to be parked at until they take over their dad’s company. If you’re just a rando, you aren’t even qualified for temp work. I should have done accounting. Will do accounting. I’ll start on the certificate in January.”
“While trying to play hockey?”
“It’s just the minors.” He shrugged one of those massive shoulders.
“Dude, you keep playing like you do, and one of the really, really big teams is going to sign you,” I urged.
He rolled his eyes, his lower lip catching in his teeth. It had no right to be that sexy.
“Hmm,” he said. “I don’t know. I kind of messed up when I was younger. Didn’t enter the draft even though teams were asking me. College was offering a scholarship and the draft… You never know, you know? Then I was in a weird age range when I got out of the NCAA and wasn’t going to get hired. Spent too much time chasing hockey and didn’t do an internship that would get me a job out of college.”
“It’s hard if you don’t have anyone there to help show you the signposts,” I assured him. “I mean, I had not just my parents but aunts and uncles, cousins, so many cousins . My uncle basically gave me a job at his company, then my cousin took over and promoted me. It’s hard, is all I’m saying. Don’t beat yourself up. But don’t give up on hockey. It kills me to say this as an Arctic Avengers fan, but you’re really good. Better than anyone I’ve seen. Even better than a lot of the NHL players.”
Ryder smirked. “You really do want to skip to the end of the third date, huh.”
I grabbed his hands. “No, I mean, yes, but, dude, you have hockey IQ. I’ve seen you play. It’s like you have the map of the game in your head and you’re five steps ahead of everyone else and know where the puck is going to be. People will pay a lot of money for that hockey brain.” I ruffled his hair.
He made a face. “It’s not realistic.”
“Don’t you want to play hockey? I can tell you love it.”
He gave a shake of his head. “Hockey is… It’s a game. It’s not real life, you know.”
“You’re the captain of the team.”
“It’s kind of a substitute for family.” He looked out over the Christmas market. “You know, being on a team, the camaraderie, the coaches. I just… That was the only time I could really get it. Then the people-pleasing tendencies took over. I didn’t want the coaches to be mad at me, didn’t want to disappoint my teammates and have them not like me.”
“And you suddenly tripped and fell into becoming one of the hottest players in New England?”
“You’re really overselling me. The only reason people are talking about me was because of the stalker.”
“I’m so sorry about my grandmother,” I apologized again. “My aunt is keeping her locked in the house. And I’ll make sure that she donates the money she’s making talking about you online to the animal shelter.”
He suddenly scooped me up with his large hands on my waist like I weighed nothing. “Then make it up to me.”
Was this it? I stared down into those glacier-blue eyes.
“Come ice-skating with me.”