Only now it was no longer a festering secret in her heart, she wondered if maybe they should talk it out. It might be amusing to listen to his excuses, his sad efforts to come up with a reason why she had never stood out to him and was just another in a revolving door of women through his pro-athlete bed.
Not tonight, though. She needed to process it, maybe talk to her cat about next steps.
No one would notice if she left. Harper might ask her tomorrow if she had enjoyed the party, except tomorrow was Christmas Eve and the front office was closed until the twenty-seventh. Three days to binge Netflix and knock back eggnog and sit around in PJs.
Alone, but she would Skype with her parents on Christmas Day. It wouldn’t be so terrible.
Theo Kershaw emerged from the salon, a big grin on his face. “Hey, Casey, happy holidays!”
“You, too!” Theo was one of the nicest guys on the team, a recent father with a cute three-month-old baby boy. “How’s Hatch?”
“Home with the babysitter giving her hell, I imagine. I’m trying to get Ellie to let her hair down but she hates leaving him. Have you seen the latest pics?” Without waiting for her response, the proud papa extracted his phone and pulled up a gallery of photos. “Here he is in a Rebels onesie. And here he is with a candy cane, which means he’ll have no problem with a hockey stick. Look at that handling!”
“Aw, he’s a natural! And his hair is fuller than when you brought him by before.”
“Yeah.” He touched his own finely-coiffed do. “Lustrous like his dad.”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
After a couple more swipes and the requisite cooing from her side, he asked, “Hey, have you seen Durand?”
“In the kitchen.”
Grinning his leave, he went on his way. The last year had seen several of the players find the one and settle down, including Theo, Levi Hunt, Gunnar Bond, and Cal Foreman. Cade and Dante had welcomed a baby girl and Bren St. James and his wife Violet were expecting their first child. For all the bad rep that hockey players got, some of them were built for the long haul. If she was feeling optimistic about the state of love, that might have given her hope. If.
She opened the hallway closet, a giant walk-in, and stepped inside. Where was her coat? She’d handed it off to Harper who must have—oh, there it was at the back. Just as she went to grab it, the door closed behind her, shrouding her in darkness.
She squealed. It was a little too close for comfort given her elevator-to-hell experience earlier.
“Hey, it’s okay,” a smooth voice said. A smooth, accented voice.
“What are you doing?”
She knew what he was doing, but it was dark, and she did not want to be in another tight space with Erik Jorgenson.
“Casey, we need to talk.”
5
“I’ve already told you I won’t be talking about it.” She fumbled for her coat, just as a pool of light hit the ceiling. Erik was holding his phone with the light on, but facing up like a lamp. He placed it on a shelf, positioned so it gave the closet an eerie, campfire glow.
Like they were about to tell ghost stories.
Well, she had one. Once a girl met a guy who gave her the best night of her life, completely ghosted her (get it?), then compounded her misery by not recognizing her when she ran into him years later.
“You blindsided me, Casey. You dropped this knowledge and then ran out of Rebels HQ, leaving me with my jaw on the floor. Not cool. And now I’ve got Harper sticking pins in my voodoo doll and wishing very evil things would happen to me.”
What did Harper have to do with this? He’d better not have told her.
That thought had barely formed when she found the space shrink to virtually nothing. She could smell his aftershave, combined with something uniquely Erik. He was close, tall, all-consuming. With that light above his head, he looked like a fallen angel.
Something softened inside her. Not her heart, unless it had relocated to below her waist.
“I remember that night,” he murmured, all husky and seductive.
“No, you don’t,” she whispered. “If you did, you wouldn’t have ignored me.”
I won’t be ignored, Dan! Now she was quoting Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction. One boiled bunny coming right up.
“Casey—”
“It’s okay.” She had to forgive him—or some version of it—and move on. Otherwise it would be between them forever and she liked her job. Better to get it over with, if only so she could get out of this closet with some dignity.
Yet as the words bubbled in her throat, struggling for a shape that wouldn’t sound pitiful, she found herself itching to reveal some fraction of the pain. The heartache. Make him understand that it was more than just a night of hot sex.
“I didn’t expect you to call me—I mean, why would you? You’re a hotshot pro-hockey star and I’m just some random girl in a bar. I went about my business and lived my life, keeping that night in here.” She touched her heart with a trembling hand. “Because it was a nice thing to happen to me. A nice thing before …” She shook her head as another potent memory took over. Andrew and Melanie, the woman he had dumped her for. The new model: better, brighter, built to last, or at least put him on the partnership track. “I watched your games with this secret knowledge that I had about you. And me, I suppose. But it faded over time. I was long over it. One-night stand, no big deal.”
“Casey, I—”
She did a zip it move with her hands, needing him to be quiet. Needing this moment to speak her truth without his excuses steamrolling her.
“But then I started working for Harper and I thought, oh, that’s nice, I’ll run into Erik Jorgenson again and it might be a bit awkward but so what? We’ll laugh about it and that will be that. Only you didn’t recognize me. Not even a glimmer.”
It was embarrassing to admit it had meant so much to her. After all, a month later, Andrew had come crawling back saying he had made a huge mistake and she was the one for him. The one he needed at his back as he finished law school. She had stashed the night with Erik in her heart’s attic and thought of it with a what-if fondness as the cobwebs spun the silk of time around them. She was meant for a real relationship, not a fantasy.
But her reality eventually became a nightmare and the fantasy wasn’t much better.
Erik was breathing hard, an agitation in him she would never have expected.
“I didn’t recognize you, I admit that. It’s been something like seven years and you had different hair then. Red, smooth, glossy. I remember it spread out on my pillow, this beautiful waterfall of color as I fucked you.”
She let out a small sound of surprise, maybe because he combined that image of her lying beneath him with the crude essentialism of what that night was about. An amazing release, a fuck for the ages. Yet she sensed he wasn’t trying to diminish it. Back then he had moved inside her, reaching so deep she thought she’d never feel that good again.
She hadn’t, which was so unfair.
What he said about her hair … sure it had looked different, but was it that much of a stretch? Was that why he didn’t recognize her all these years later?
No, she refused to let him off the hook so easily. Of course she wouldn’t be memorable enough to stand out. He hadn’t even tried to contact her.