On My Mind

She looked beautiful.

Sid wasn’t sure what he had expected—he already knew her smile, her dimples, her big blue eyes, the small body that he had seen in shorts and jeans—but when he looked across the table he couldn’t keep his eyes from lingering a second extra. He knew what it was, but at the same time felt clueless: her dress, maybe, just short enough that it had him thinking about what was just past it, or the heels, or the red lipstick, or the way that she was looking at him, her eyes this mixture of awe and curiosity and something he almost couldn’t place. She was killing him with what could only be called curious innocence, sipping the wine that he had ordered in hopes of her liking it like it was water, her eyes scanning his as she raised her glass to his cheesy toasts and offered her own, that damn smile on her face.

They were absentmindedly talking each other in circles when the waitress came with the check, presenting it to Sid with the kind of smile that he had learned to take in stride in the years that he had played in the NHL. Not plastic, but something close to it—the kind of girls that the other guys picked up at bars during cross-country trips. Puck bunnies. When he held out the bill, he didn’t meet her eyes.

“So,” he said. “What now?”

Kaia looked almost surprised, cocking her head to one side. "What do you mean?"

“It’s…9 o’clock,” he murmured, looking at the watch on his wrist. “Not quite curfew yet.”

“Not quite,” she replied. “What do you have in mind, Mr. Crosby?”

He grinned. “Free movies and popcorn at my place?”

Kaia looked at him coyly. “Are you asking me to go home with you?”

“Only if you want to.”

He could see her working it over in her mind, chewing on her bottom lip, and then her baby blues met his, and she nodded. “Only if you have good movies,” she said as they left the restaurant, cracking a smile in his direction.

The ride to his house was uneventful, their hands finding each other on the gear shift sometime after they got on the highway out of Pittsburgh. Sid wasn’t sure why he found himself as nervous as he was, feeling like a rock had been dropped into the pit of his stomach. He would be lying if he said that Kaia was the first girl he had brought back to his house, but she was one of the only girls that he had felt a desperate need to impress and take care of—he wanted to take Kaia on a hundred dates to the best restaurants in Pittsburgh, and to show her off as his girl, to treat her right. He cast a glance in her direction, wondering if she was as nervous as he was—she was staring out the window into the darkness, her legs tucked up under her, heels discarded on the floor.

What was it about her? He knew that, at first, it had been her appearance—the morning that she ran into him, for example, all he saw was a pretty girl, and at the hockey game, he sat with her in the stupid hopes of picking her up, and spending a few hours with her. But then there had been some shift in his mind, and he realized that she was too good for one night stands—dictated by both her standards and his mind telling him that he couldn’t just let her slip through his fingers—and he couldn’t get the damn girl off his mind.

He tried to ignore the way she was staring up at his house as they walked inside, shedding his shoes just inside the door. She followed suit, dropping down to the height that he knew her to be, and bumped her shoulder against his chest, smiling a little. “You keep a nice house,” she said, looking around.

“Not bad for a single guy, huh?” He joked, slipping his coat off of his shoulders. “Here—I’ll take yours, too. The kitchen is up that way—yeah, on the right.” He watched her wander away, her hair swaying a little as she walked, and swallowed thickly. She was going to kill him.

When he got to the kitchen, she was sitting idly at the counter, her phone in front of her. She glanced up, offering another smile. “Do you have a movie collection I should be looking at?”

“Well,” he said, and started looking in the cupboards for popcorn. “It depends. We could watch it in the living room—” He nodded over his shoulder toward the room behind them “—Or we could go downstairs, there’s like a movie room, theatre type deal—”

“You have a theatre?” She echoed in disbelief, eyebrows coming together.

“I don’t use it very often,” he murmured. “Kinda sucks when you’re alone.”

“Well, let’s stick to tradition, then,” she said. “Living room it is.” She hopped off the stool and drifted into the living room, leaving her phone behind, her voice higher when she called back to him. “Are your movies in here?”

“If here is the top drawer in the bureau, then yes.”

“Oh—top drawer?”

“Yeah,” he said, peering at her as she ducked down to look at them. “Pick whatever you want, I don’t mind.”

“You have Legally Blonde?” She asked incredulously, turning to look at him.

“It’s my sisters’, not mine,” he explained, though he could feel embarrassment red in his cheeks. “She left it here last summer.”

“Yeah, okay,” Kaia teased, getting back to her feet. “It totally isn’t your guilty pleasure, or anything.”

“It isn’t,” Sid said firmly as he closed the microwave door, turning to see Kaia a few feet away, leaning on the counter, a movie in her hands. “Is that what we’re watching?”

She held out Alien vs Predator with a cheesy grin.

“Seriously?” Sid took it from her, unable to hold back the smile that crept onto his face. “So romantic.”

“It will be when I’m scared, and you have to keep me safe,” she said matter-of-factly, casting him a sarcastic look. “I haven’t seen it in, like, years and years.”

“Neither have I,” he said. “I think there might have been a reason for that, actually—”

She laughed, retreating to the living room. “It gave you nightmares, right?”

“Definitely nightmares,” he laughed, “Only about how god-awful it is.”

He heard a gasp, and she popped back into his line of sight, leaning off of the couch, her mouth open in fake outrage. “Take it back.”

“Make me,” he muttered as the microwave went off, giving her a look that redirected him to middle and high school, when that had been a realistic comeback.

“I can’t,” he heard her moan, followed a few seconds later by a flying pillow, which hit him in the back.

He dumped the popcorn into a bowl, and walked into the living room to find her sprawled out on the couch, looking up at him innocently. “You’re going to have to make room for me.”

She closed her eyes, not moving. “Make me."

“Do you want wine with this?” He asked then, loosening one of the buttons on his collar.

“Wine and popcorn,” she observed. “Classy as hell.”

“Wine makes everything classy,” Sid said with a laugh, sliding the popcorn bowl across the coffee table to her. “White or red?”

“White,” she said after a moment. “Red makes me sleepy.”

Sid shook his head at the sentiment behind that statement, remembering their conversation when he was in L.A.—her sleepy voice as she snuck around her hotel, listening to him when he told her to go to sleep. He looked at the girl sitting on his couch, frustratedly staring at the array of remotes on the table in front of her, and got two wine glasses from the cupboard.

She was sitting up when he entered the room, studying the movie case carefully, and then held it out to him. “I was twelve when I saw it for the first time. That’s why I thought it was so good.”

He could feel her eyes on him as he put it in the DVD player, grabbing the correct remote from the table, and then fell down onto the couch beside her. He put his feet up in front of him, earning a faux glare in response.

She shook her head at him and leaned back into the couch, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Come here,” he said after a moment, holding his arms open. He felt his stomach drop with now-familiar nerves as she crawled over his legs and settled between them, her back against his chest. “That good?”

He felt her nod, and she turned to look up at him, blue eyes bright with a smile. One hand found the collar of his shirt, pulling him down to press her lips against his. She pulled away after a few short seconds, and leaned back against his chest, her hands on his when he wrapped them around her waist.

He took a deep breath, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. “I could get used to this.”