On My Mind

“So are you guys dating, or what?”

Kaia shrugged as she sat down, folding her legs up underneath her. “I don’t know. Not officially, I guess, but—like, I really like him, I just—I don’t know.”

“Ask him,” Maggie said through a mouthful of low mein, holding out the white paper carton for Kaia to take a forkful, which she did. “Everyone is always so damn weird about girls asking guys out.”

“It’s such a double standard,” Libby, Maggie’s teammate and their friend, added from the opposite end of the couch. “Guys can be assertive, and it’s a turn on, but if a girl does it—”

“She’s a bitch,” Kaia and Maggie said in unison, casting their friend a look.

Kaia shook her head. “I know it’s a double standard, but—I just—I don’t know, I don’t want to be overbearing—”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “I asked TJ to be my boyfriend.”

“That’s fine, Mags, but it’s you,” Kaia mumbled. “It’s not really in my nature to be assertive. Unless it’s on a soccer field, which—it’s not, so—”

“Just pretend you’re on the field,” Libby offered, a devious smile spreading across her face. “Except—instead of the ball—you’re going for his—”

“They haven’t slept together,” Maggie clarified. “It’s all roses and daisies.”

“Shut up, please,” Kaia said, staring hard at the Chinese food container she was holding in her hands. “Please just shut up.”

Libby looked at her almost reproachfully, eyebrows raised. “How long have you guys been together?”

She didn’t look up. “We’re not together.”

“Three weeks or so,” Maggie answered after a moment. “You should definitely just ask him, Kai.”

“You should ask him,” Libby clarified. “Have you at least, like, spooned? Is that innocent enough?”

“She’s slept at his house.” Maggie pointed at Kaia with a greasy fork. “I’m assuming that his mom isn’t there to keep them from sleeping in the same room.”

“It just hasn’t been like that,” Kaia mumbled, embarrassed. She had thought about it before, but to her—in the context of her relationship with Sid, whatever that relationship was—it had never seemed like a big deal. Hearing it aloud, she was almost grimacing, trying to rack her brain for moments when she could have inadvertently turned him down.

“Just ask him,” Maggie said after a moment of deliberating with Libby. “The worst thing he can say is no, right?”

Kaia didn’t reply, stabbing at a piece of chicken with her fork. That was the worst thing—the idea of him not reciprocating what she felt, or that—to him—the past few weeks had been nothing. There was a part of her that had already wondered that, and that had already spent long enough agonizing over the details that she had long since given up on trying to make sense of it all. There was a kind of sweet bliss in what she and Sid had been doing—dates, both lunch and dinner, and stolen kisses on the sidewalk, or even over the divider in his car, or anywhere that they could, really. She had slept at his house twice—once, after the first Friday they had gone out, when she had woken up on his couch at 3 AM and trailed after him to his room, sleepily treading on his heels; and a second time, when he had picked her up from one of her games and she had showered in his bathroom while he cooked dinner. They had fallen asleep all wrapped up in each other, her lips swollen from kissing him.

That weekend, while Kaia sat in her living room with Maggie analyzing the details of their relationship—or non-relationship—he was in New York playing the Rangers, and then Boston, and then Montreal, all places that seemed light years from where she was. They had talked on the phone that morning, briefly, before Kaia left for class and he left for a morning skate, and the night before, when he was awake in his hotel room and she was suffering through reading a textbook at her kitchen table, with texts in between.

“I don’t want to be clingy,” Kaia thought out loud, earning dumb looks from both of her friends. “What? It’s a valid fear.”

Maggie thought for a second before shaking her head. “Of course it fucking is, Kai. Obviously. But—I mean—he’s taken you on, like—what—eight dates?”

“Ten,” Kaia corrected dimly, consciously running through each in her mind.

Libby scoffed. “That sounds like an expensive hookup to me.”

Kaia nodded, knowing that they were right—their dates were always to nice restaurants, complimented with bottles of expensive wine and his undoubtedly designer suits. “What should I do?”

“Just text him,” Libby said, her mouth full of fried rice. “It’s the easiest way.”

She glanced at the clock on her phone, her brow furrowed. “He’s playing a game right now—shit—should I be watching that?” She had made a conscious effort to watch his televised games, but most of the time found herself busy with school work, or at actual work, or falling asleep in front of the TV after a long day.

“Send him a text saying, ‘Will you please be my boyfriend before I shrivel into a prune?’ And then you can fuck him without it offending your virtues,” Libby said, punctuating her words with stabs at the air with her fork.

“Virtues,” Kaia scoffed, rolling her eyes, but picked up her phone anyways, opening their messages.

The last was from him earlier that afternoon, when he had left a media storm and found peace somewhere in the Rangers’ stadium. She started typing carefully, feeling her friends’ eyes on her.

Hey, Sid, she wrote, just wondering—can we make this official? I kind of want you to myself.

She ignored Maggie’s begging to proofread and pressed send, throwing her phone and taking a big bite of General Tso’s all at once. She hated that she was so nervous, and bit back the nerves harshly.

“It’s very Kaia,” Maggie observed, offering her phone back. “He’s going to say yes, Kai—come on.” She shoved her friend’s shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

Kaia nodded, sinking further into the couch. “Let’s just watch a movie. I need to stop thinking about it.”

Libby and Maggie seemed to let it go, and the three friends settled in, the opening credits of The Breakfast Club silencing their conversation. Halfway through, they paused to get ice cream, and Kaia found herself alone for a moment, anxiously checking her phone to find no new messages. She looked up the score, thankful to see that the Pens were winning; Sidney had mentioned off-handedly that he was nervous about it, the Rangers being one of the top teams in the NHL. The idea of Sid being nervous had almost come as a surprise to her—she always seen him as a rock, so sure of himself and everything that he did, purposeful even in the way he held her hand or wrapped his hands around her waist.

Kaia had crawled into bed, already in her pajamas, when her phone rang, illuminating the darkness in her room. Sidney. She felt her stomach drop to her knees, and she stared at it for a second before answering, her voice quiet. “Hello?”

“Are you awake?” Sidney asked before anything else, his voice surprised. “It’s so late, Kai.”

“You’re awake too,” she mumbled blearily, glancing at the glance on her bedside table—2:45.

“I got your text.”

She swallowed, burying her face in her pillow. “Yeah?”

“And the answer is yes,” he mumbled. “As long as you let me do one thing.”

Her eyebrows came together. “What?”

“Let me take you out and ask you,” he said simply. “I was going to ask—I really was—but I was nervous that you—I don’t know, I just thought—I didn’t want to be overbearing or something. You have so much on your plate right now, with soccer and school—”

Kaia almost laughed, but bit it back. “I thought I would be annoying you.”

“You—seriously? Kaia.”

“I just didn’t want to ruin it.” She looked blankly up at the ceiling. “Everything is so great and—like—I don’t know—I just really like you, so—I didn’t want to screw it up—”

She heard him laughing quietly on the line, unable to keep the smile off of her face.

“Hey,” she said then, “great game tonight.”

“You watch it?”

“The highlight reel,” she murmured sheepishly. “Mags had me on movie duty.”

“Watch my game tomorrow?” His voice rose with the question, almost embarrassed.

“Score a goal for me.”

“I’ll do my best,” he promised. “You should get to sleep, Kai. You sound tired.”

“I was stressed out,” she mumbled as an explanation, pulling her comforter up over her legs.

“About what?”

“You.”

~

Kaia was halfway through a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when she heard the knock on the door.

It was a Friday afternoon, and she was fighting off the heating in their apartment that had spiked up to almost 80 degrees—one of the important knobs on their ancient radiator having broken off, in Maggie’s words, in the few days that Kaia was away. It was the first time that she had found herself alone in almost a week, having left on Tuesday with the team to play the semi-finals in Delaware. After a failed attempt at napping in her too-humid room, she was trying to avoid breaking a sweat, sitting at the kitchen table in a pair of pajama shorts and a tank top with a window open, her foot propped up on a chair in front of her with a slowly melting bag of ice on top of it. At the sound of the knock, she almost groaned, taking a second to look over the comfortable position that had taken her a considerable amount of time to assume, and forced herself up, hobbling a little on her swollen ankle.

The peephole in the door revealed Sid, unshaven, wearing a thick coat and dark baseball cap, anxiously looking around the hallway. It was the first time she had seen him in almost a week and a half, when he had come home from a roadtrip and they had dramatically reunited in his driveway.

She swung the door open with a slight air of confusion. “Sid?”

“Hey,” he said, almost casually, and then looked her up and down, his eyebrows coming together. “You do know it’s October—right?”

“It’s the tropics in here,” she groaned, closing the door behind him. “Something’s up with our heating.”

“Holy shit,” Sid almost gasped, pulling his coat off of his shoulders. “Have you tried turning it down?”

Kaia cast him a glare. “I’m not an idiot,” she muttered, hobbling back toward the kitchen. “We have an old heating system, or something—it’s the radiator. Our landlord called a guy to fix it, but he can’t get here til next week...”

“What’s up with your ankle?”

She slid into her seat, her legs back up on the chair in front of her. “I rolled it during our last game—I don’t know. It wasn’t so bad, but now it’s all swollen.”

He dropped down into the chair where her feet were, pulling them into his lap, and inspected her ankle carefully, his fingers grazing over the bruise that stretched down her foot. “Looks like a sprain.”

“The medic on the field said it might be,” she said, shrugging as she bit into her sandwich. “I’ve been icing it.”

Sid nodded, and grabbed the ice from the table in front of him, pressing it gently against her ankle. “Congrats on the win.”

She smiled. “Thanks.”

“So it’s—quarter-finals now, yeah?” He ran a hand absentmindedly up and down her leg, his eyes on hers.

Nodding, Kaia leaned back and offered him a bite of her sandwich, which he took. “Up in New York.”

“I wish I could be there,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“It’s fine,” she said through a mouthful of peanut butter, tucking her hair behind her ears. “You’d make me nervous.”

Sid laughed a little. “I still want to support my girlfriend.”

She glanced up at him at the use of the word, a faint smile on her lips. She had to remind herself that she was his girlfriend—that she had asked him and he had accepted, even though she had been terrified in the time that she waited for his reply. “I’ll have a hundred more games.”

“Yeah?” He looked over at her curiously.

She shrugged. “I’ve been talking to the guy from the US team, but I don’t know. There’s a women’s professional soccer team out of, um, Mount Lebanon, like half an hour from here…” She stopped, looking at her ankle dumbly. "I don't know yet. It's too soon to tell."

“Maybe focus on Pitt for now,” Sidney said softly, offering her a small smile. “Jesus, it’s really hot in here.”

“I know,” Kaia moaned, throwing her head back. “I don’t know what to do.”

They sat like that for a while, talking about nothing in particular—the weather, both of their upcoming games—relaxing into the heat and each other. This was Kaia’s favorite thing about him: they could sit together and lose track of time, letting hours drift by like they were nothing. She had never experienced that with someone before—except maybe Maggie, but she had been her best friend for years—and there was something about it that even made her nervous, that she was so comfortable when she was wrapped up in him. Between their conversations, she found herself wondering if he felt the same way, or if he was like this with everyone, or every girl. He refilled the bag of ice for her ankle, pressing it tenderly against the bruise, saying that he was afraid of hurting her even though his fingers barely touched her skin.

Sid had absentmindedly left his hand on her thigh somewhere between getting ice and Maggie getting home, and didn’t move when the apartment door opened, casting a glance in Kaia’s direction.

“Well, hello, lovebirds,” Maggie said, closing the door slowly behind her. “What’re you to up to?”

“Literally nothing,” Kaia mumbled. “Trying to survive the heat.”

“Yeah—about that,” Maggie muttered, pulling her hair into a bun. “I’m gonna go stay at TJ’s tonight—he said you can crash on his couch if you want—” She looked between the two of them slyly. “I mean, he has a small couch.”

“I think I’m just gonna stay here.” Kaia glanced at Sidney, shrugging a little. “I miss my bed.”

Maggie just nodded, and moved like a whirlwind around the apartment, leaving within a few minutes after slamming doors and emitting a long string of curses about how hot it was. “Don’t overheat!” She called over her shoulder as the door swung shut, leaving Kaia and Sid silent for a second before they both started laughing.

Kaia swung her legs down off of Sid’s lap, glancing at the clock. “We should probably eat something.” She groaned a little as she stood up, the weight of her ankle sending pain up her shin. “God, fuck this.”

Sid’s hands found her waist, holding her in place. “You gotta take it easy, Kai—it’ll only heal if you rest it, okay?”

She nodded grudgingly. “Literally nothing is worse than being injured.”

“I know,” he said, tilting his head to one side. “At least you’ve got someone to take care of you, huh?”

She laughed a little, pressing her forehead against his chest before she looked up at him. “C’mere,” she mumbled, tugging at his shirt until his lips met hers.

He pulled her waist toward him until her chest was pressed against his, his hands trailing up her neck to tangle in her hair, lifting her face to his. His hands were calloused and rough on her skin, his thumbs tracing her jawline. “Kai,” he whispered, pulling away, and met her eyes.

She just shook her head, standing up on her tip toes—on one foot; the other, still swollen, held precariously a foot off the ground—to reach his neck, kissing him there softly. She laughed a little as she looked up at him, hissing when her sore ankle and foot met the ground. “Ow,” she whined, and leaned into him.

Sidney said nothing, pausing for a second to lift her up easily, her legs wrapping around his waist. “Want me to make it feel better?”

She nodded slowly, looking into his eyes, and then looking over his face—finally level, she took in his stubble and his lips, his dark eyes that were studying hers, the crookedness of his smile as he was looking at her. She hoped and prayed in that moment that he couldn’t feel her heart beating at breakneck speed, bringing almost shaking hands up to hold his face. “You make me nervous, Sid,” she confessed then, laughing breathlessly. “You know that?”

“Then I’m not alone,” he murmured, looking over her face almost cautiously.

Kaia almost felt her heart drop when his teeth met the skin of her neck and he moved toward the hallway, her legs still around his waist. One of his hands was working at her tank top, tugging the soft fabric over her head to reveal the lace bra that Kaia had put on only a few hours before.

Sidney’s lips trailed down her neck to her chest, sucking at the exposed skin, and she pulled his mouth back up to hers almost roughly, her hands tangling in his hair. There was a heat growing in her chest that swelled to her legs and the pit of her stomach, her breathing slowing as she and Sidney pulled apart for a moment, looking at each other quietly. She bit at his lower lip, his sharp intake of breath spurring her on.

It was the back of the couch that caught Sid’s foot and sent them tumbling, arms and legs tangled up as they both crashed down onto the carpeting, Kaia on top of him. They were quiet for a second before Kaia started laughing, rolling off of him and onto the floor and her back, giggling hysterically as she glanced over at Sid. He looked almost dumbfounded, an embarrassed expression on his face.

“So romantic,” she breathed, pushing his side with a loud laugh, and curled over, holding her stomach as she laughed. There was a part of her that had erupted into embarrassment while the other side erupted into laughter, her cheeks red with blush for both of them. “Sid—”

“Shut up,” he muttered, but started to laugh, rolling onto his side to look at her, anything that had happened between them seconds before now gone. He looked over Kaia’s face—her eyes bright and mouth wide open with laughter—and started laughing harder, shaking his head.

“That was nice,” she said after a while, her laughter having slowed, rolling her shoulder into his.

He traced a hand up her exposed stomach, settling on her rib cage.

As he opened his mouth to speak, Kaia sat up, taking his hand in hers. “It’s too hot in here,” she muttered, slowly and clumsily getting to her feet. “C’mon. I’ll make dinner.” She could feel his eyes on her as she limped toward the kitchen, her ankle sore under her weight, and swallowed thickly.

His baseball cap had been discarded on the floor in the kitchen, and she put it on backwards, glancing back at the living room. His legs were just visible through the doorway, not moving. She wanted to pick up where they had been cut off desperately, but stayed quiet as she heard his footsteps come up behind her, filling a pot with water.

“Mac n cheese?” Sid held up the two boxes of Kraft she had pulled out of the cupboard curiously, studying the cardboard.

“Are you judging my dietary choices?” She asked, casting him a faux serious look.

“I haven’t eaten that in years,” he muttered, leaning back against the countertop. “Do you want me to find your shirt?”

She looked down at her bra—black lace—and slowly shook her head. “It’s actually cooler to not wear a shirt.”

He shook his head. “Now I just feel weird. You’re half-naked—I’m not.”

“Half-clothed,” she corrected with a laugh. “Take something off. I don’t care.”

“Oh, you don’t?” He asked, and tugged his shirt over his head, dropping it onto the countertop.

She made a point of not looking at him, feeling her cheeks warm up as she dumped the pasta into the pot on the stove. “See? Isn’t it better like this?”

His hand found the small of her back as he moved behind her, looking over the stove. “Yeah, it is.”

“You’re still wearing jeans, though,” Kaia observed, glad that he couldn’t see her face. “So, really—”

“You’re just trying to get my naked,” Sid said with a hmph. “You only want me for my body.”

“What else is there?” She giggled and hit his hip with hers as he moved away. She looked at him then, her eyes moving slowly down his chest to his stomach—and his abs, which, she noted with an almost hesitant glance, looked like they had been carved perfectly—and the deep V-shaped lines that led below the waist of his jeans, and she slowly looked back up to his face, where she met his curious eyes. “What? What do you want?”

“You just checked me out,” he observed, a cocky grin spreading over his face.

She scoffed. “Dream on.”

He laughed, and Kaia couldn’t help but look at him at the genuine sound, watching as he ran a hand over his hair. “You’re killin’ me, Kai,” he said after a moment.

She felt her heart well up at the look in his eyes, swallowing back to urge to drag him back to her bedroom to finish what they had started. She stirred the pasta in front of her hastily, staring at it. “Good,” she said finally, glancing at him. “I’m glad.”