A Groom of One’s Own: A Sweet Hockey RomCom
Chapter 12

Eli

She’s … kissing me.

Bailey is kissing me.

Kissing. Me.

And I’m not kissing her back because this shocked me so badly, I am now a statue. A monument whose plaque reads To the Man Who Was Once Kissed Straight into Paralysis.

Thankfully, my frozen state doesn’t last. Because the very last thing I want, after all I just put Bailey through, is for her to think I’m rejecting her by not kissing her back.

She just handed me a free pass to the theme park of kissing, and I’m running through the gates.

“Bailey,” I murmur against her mouth as I angle her body higher, closer, tighter against me. “You never stop surprising me.”

“Good. I … surprised me too.”

She lets out a tiny laugh, and I capture the sound as I kiss her again in earnest. Bailey’s lips are soft, her kisses light and playful, her movements sure. One of her hands tangles in the too-long hair at my neck and her other grasps a fistful of my jersey, holding me captive. Though I am one hundred percent here by choice.

I tilt my head, kissing her softly but deeply, not breaking away for even a second.

Who needs to breathe? Oxygen is definitely secondary to this kiss.

And this—this feels like exactly what my mouth is made for.

Bailey. Only Bailey. Forever Bailey.

The realization is sudden and forces a sharp intake of breath. It’s a laser-guided missile replaceing its target in the center of my chest. The settling after the last aftershocks of an earthquake, seeing a whole new landscape. If I weren’t already breathless, this knowledge would have stolen all my oxygen.

I more than like Bailey as a person. More than think she’s pretty. More than like kissing her.

She snuck up on me like the slow creep of a vine. But now, as her fingers tangle deeper in my hair and she makes a small, happy sound I want to hear again and again, there’s nothing hidden or slow. Emotion swells in my chest, tightening my throat and zipping up my spine.

But …

The thing between us isn’t supposed to be real. Or feel this good.

I file these thoughts away for Later Eli, though that’s partly how I got in this mess to begin with. He’ll figure it out. Now Eli wants to get lost in the moment, to take what Bailey gives me for as long as she’ll offer it up.

She releases my jersey and drags her hand up my chest until her fingertips touch my jaw. Tentatively at first, then dragging over my stubble. I feel her smile, taste it, and want to drink in even more.

A whistle blows somewhere, and I blink my eyes open to see the entire team just a few feet away, crowded in the tunnel and looking like they just cannot wait to give me hell about this later. And congratulations too. But hell first.

With a sigh, I pull back, only enough to rest my forehead against hers. This close, it’s hard to read the emotion in her eyes, but she blinks slowly, smiling sleepily. If nothing else, kissing me eased her anxiety about the very public surprise proposal I really didn’t think through.

She lifts her fingers to her lips, tracing them like she’s reading the memory of our kiss. The guys take to the ice, and I skate Bailey to the edge of the tunnel, depositing her on the floor. But I keep her close, my hands on her lower back, tugging her tight.

“I’ve got to go back to work, Leelee.”

“You’re good at your job,” she whispers.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know it, hockey player.”

“Is this how it’s gonna be—you giving me trouble?” I ask, sliding one hand up her back, watching her shiver as my fingertips graze her neck.

“Maybe,” she says, then her expression shifts, a tiny furrow appearing between her brows. “We should probably talk about that. You know, expectations?”

“We will,” I promise. “We will.”

Bailey’s lips curve up into the smallest smile. But it’s a genuine one.

A smile I can’t help but kiss lightly. Just once more.

Fine—twice more. I reluctantly let her go. I really need to get back to the game. Hockey waits for no man. Not even a newly engaged one.

The third period ends with me scoring twice more. I’m flying. No one can touch me. Or stop me. Despite the other team singling me out—probably just because of the proposal—I barely register them. And my guys don’t like that and give it back just as hard. Maybe harder. I’m somewhere above it all, and though I don’t allow myself to look up at Bailey, knowing she’s there is enough.

My blood is still singing from her kiss, an electric current humming beneath my skin.

Just after the buzzer, I finally glance over to see Bailey practically pressed up against the glass, my mom beside her. Both of them screaming, jumping up and down, losing their minds.

One more thing about all this that feels right—Bailey with my mom.

The biggest wrong thing, maybe the only one, though it’s a biggie, is the fact that really liking Bailey means I’ve severely messed up the timeline of things.

It calls to mind a memory of Mom, sitting patiently with me at the table in the one apartment we had where the heat barely worked in any room but the breakfast nook, where it blasted like a commercial oven. For hours she tried to help me remember the order of operations, something that just would not stick in my mind. It simply didn’t make sense why brackets, which in sentences seem to include something extraneous, would get priority in math.

With Bailey, it’s like I’ve skipped the starting point and gone straight to addition, which was last. No, wait—was it subtraction? Either way, I’ve jacked up the order of operations. And I’m not sure how to undo it.

“Forget something, lover boy?”

As we enter the locker room, Van presses an object to my chest with the force of a punch, his grin wide.

It’s the ring box.

The one I never removed from the puck. Never gave to Bailey.

Because I actually never got around to asking her to marry me.

Worst. Proposal. Ever.

Van must take in the shift in my face, which probably looks something like a seven-year-old sugar-crashing hard twenty-minutes after chasing a candy bar with a soda. He gives my shoulder a squeeze meant to be comforting but is actually painful and says, “No worries, man.”

“If she says yes without looking at the ring, it’s for real,” Dumbo adds.

Van and I exchange a look. That’s what it might normally mean. But in our case … it does not.

Only the guys at Felix’s the other night have any idea what’s really going on. I didn’t fill them in on how we got from point A to point proposal less than a week later, but I’m assuming they connected the dots. I think the rest of the team shares Malik’s belief that I was already seeing someone and just kept it quiet. Until it got very, very loud.

“A ring is sort of important in the typical engagement process,” Alec says, grinning.

Like anything about this is typical. Still. I’m glad for his comment, which is so very Alec. It allows me to unclench the fists I didn’t know I was making, one hand gripping the ring box.

“Must have been some kiss if it made you forget the ring.”

Van smirks. I shove him. And we’re all back to normal.

I tuck the ring into my bag and strip off my shirt, dropping onto a bench so I can fully gear down. I’m eager to get showered and get back to Bailey. I’m hoping she stayed with Mom and will be waiting in the family room. We didn’t talk through all those details, and now I’m wishing we had so I’m not left disappointed if she goes home.

After the way I overwhelmed her with everything … she just might go.

“So, dude—did she say yes?” Tucker asks.

I fumble with the laces on my skates before recovering, untying them so fast I practically give myself rope burns. “What?”

“Didn’t you see the kiss?” Dumbo says. “Looked like a yes to me.”

“He played like she said yes. You could have saved a few goals for the rest of us, man.” Van tosses a sock my way.

“You should’ve tried harder.”

Without thinking, I use two fingers to pick up the sock, which is damp and came directly from his foot—disgusting!—and toss it toward the locker room’s laundry bin. It misses. But Van can take care of his stupid sweaty sock. I probably shouldn’t have even touched it. Now I need to soak my hand in antibacterial gel.

Passing by on his way to the showers, Logan gives me a nod and says, “I thought it was great. Took some mental notes.”

Parker will be thrilled about that.

I’m grateful for Wyatt’s vow of violence suggestion because every guy who was at Felix’s seems to be acting as my own personal defensemen. One of them runs interference, changing the subject when the other guys ask questions about Bailey or make cracks about how fast I’m moving. It’s like I’ve got my own personal force field, made up of a bunch of sweaty guys in various states of undress.

A guy could get used to this.

I’ve never showered so thoroughly, so quickly in my life. I ignore the slaps on the back and congratulations—as well as the snide remarks about the old ball and chain that have me wanting to kick the patriarchy right out of a few people—and practically sprint down the hallway. Droplets of water trail down the ends of my hair to the neck, making me shiver as I push open the door.

Faces in the room turn expectantly toward me, but there’s only one person I see.

Bailey. She’s still here. For me.

And still wearing my jersey.

I briefly wondered while getting dressed if maybe the sense of rightness I had when she kissed me was exaggerated. A product of the moment, snowballed into feeling like something more than it was. Nope. Seeing her now, even across the room, there’s a tug in my gut, and my feet respond, carrying me toward her with purpose.

Her smile is slow, a little tentative at first before it blooms into something that takes over her whole face, making her eyes crinkle and a not-quite dimple appear in one flushed cheek.

Huh. Never noticed that before. Wonder what else I haven’t noticed about her? Probably plenty. But I’m not going to miss anything else now.

I cut through the crowd, seeing no one, hearing nothing, until I reach Bailey. With no hesitation, she walks right into my open arms. I pull her into a hug so tight, her feet lift off the ground, dangling against my shins.

She’s warm and smells so good and fits right here: arms linked around my neck, face tucked against mine. A wave of emotion swells and crests before tumbling through me. Bailey is the kind of perfect I could get used to. A permanent fixture. The kind I’d fight to keep.

I want to kiss her again, but I don’t know if that’s allowed. I don’t know if she would want me to, or if kissing me once was a green light for kissing any time. We never sat down and talked this through, and now I’ve catapulted us ten steps ahead. I have no idea where we stand with anything at all.

Her lips brush my ear as she says, “What took you so long, hockey player?”

“You miss me or something, Leelee?”

I expect her to say something smart back to me, keep up this teasing dance of words. Instead, she surprises me again when she’s flat-out earnest.

“Yeah. I think I did.”