Start Me Up

When Shea arrived outside of Tessa's apartment door that night he didn't knock right away. Instead, he pulled his phone from his pocket and snuck a quick look at himself, just to make sure that he didn't look as nervous as he felt.

He rubbed his palms against the sides of his dress pants before sliding his phone back into his pocket. He took in a deep breath and lifted his hand, knocking lightly.

For a moment he wondered if he had knocked too lightly and if he should knock again but then the knob turned and the door opened just a crack. His brow raised in amused curiosity as the door opened completely to Tessa standing in the doorway of her apartment in a robe.

She grinned and explained, "Needed to make sure I wasn't over or under dressed."

"Well I would say right now you're looking pretty underdressed." he joked, a smile on his face so that she knew that he was joking. Not that she didn't.

She chuckled and explained, "I have two outfits picked out. Just needed to make sure I knew which one to pick."

"And which one are you picking?" Shea asked her in amusement.

"Fancy..." She paused to look him over in his white button up dress shirt and his navy dress pants, no tie and no jacket, and then she said, "Ish."

"Fancy-ish? What does that mean?" Shea asked her curiously.

Tessa smiled at him as she headed to her bedroom and as she slipped inside she told him, "You'll see."

He smiled to himself as the door closed and he sat down on the couch to wait for her.

Tessa, in the comforts of her bedroom, slipped out of her robe and into a fresh, lacy set of underwear, and as she looked over at her dress choice she decided on no bra. So she slipped into her outfit for the evening and then she realized she couldn't reach the zipper that went up over her butt and to the top of the back of her dress on her lower back.

So she sighed and pulled the door open enough to ask him, "Shea?"

"Yeah?" He glanced over at her from the couch.

Her cheeks flushed and she said, "I can't get my zipper."

He jumped up from the couch a little too fast and it caused them both to laugh. With flushed cheeks, Shea approached her in the bedroom. When he walked into the room she was standing with her back to him, her hair was pulled up into a low bun at the back of her neck and he could see the top of lacey underwear where the dress hung open waiting for his help with the last few inches of zipper.

So he stepped up to her and reached down slowly to grip the zipper firmly between his thumb and forefinger as he held onto the soft material of the dress with his other hand. He pulled the zipper up to the top, and after a few failed attempts even managed to get the single clasp on the inside top of the zipper track done up.

And then Tessa turned to him and he finally got a full view of her outfit. His eyes shamelessly looked her up and down and that was when her cheeks flushed. She adjusted the top of the dress and much too self-consciously for Shea's liking she said, "I can change... if you want."

"What?" Shea asked her with a cocked eyebrow, he was looking at her as if he had no idea what she had asked him.

So she clarified, "If you don't like it, or it's too... much I guess. I can change Shea, it's okay. Just tell me if you want me to."

He shook his head and wrapped an arm around her, Palm on the back of her lower back and pulled her into him before he told her, "I don't want you to change. I was looking at you because I think you look beautiful Tessa."

"Oh." She said softly, cheeks flushed scarlet.

"Are you ready?" He asked her and when she nodded he slipped his hand into hers and lead her out to the apartment door. Shea waited patiently while she slipped into a pair of shoes and a jacket, not surprisingly a bright colored leather jacket.

Downstairs in the parking lot Shea held the passenger door open and closed it once Tessa was comfortably in the truck before he jogged around to his side and got in. While he drove to the restaurant he reached out and grabbed Tessa's hand, giving it a squeeze as she asked him, "What time do you guys leave tomorrow?"

"Early. I have to leave by like seven." Shea told her and when she pulled her cell phone from her clutch and started typing his brow raised.

Tessa, having caught his quirked brow when she looked over at him grinned and told him, "Just promising your goalie that I'll have you home before your bedtime tonight."

Shea let out a laugh and informed her, "If anything it's him that needs to be looked after."

"I mean... At least he picked his own house out." Tessa joked, grinning at Shea when he narrowed his eyes at her.

"At least my house has decor." He retorted with.

"Yeah, ugly decor." Tessa fired back, a grin present on her face.

Shea warned her, "You're on thin ice buddy."

"Buddy? Oh yeah?" Tessa asked him in amusement as he pulled into a parking space as close to the restaurant doors as he could find.

He turned to her in his seat once the truck was put in park and he told her, "So listen. There is a catch to tonight."

Her brow lifted, "A catch, like what?"

"You have to sleep with me tonight." He told Her with a straight face.

She told him with an equally straight face, "Okay."

He had been joking, something he voiced with surprise, "I was totally kidding."

"I know, but I wasn't." Tessa told him with a wicked grin.

Shea laughed and then he explained to her, "The catch is I have your birthday gift in the back but you don't have to open them tonight you can open them tomorrow when I call you after the game."

Her brow's lifted in surprise, "You got me a birthday gift?"

"Of course I did." Shea told her, watching as she kept her surprised stare on him. His brow lifted and he asked, "Was I not supposed to?"

"I just... wasn't expecting it is all." She told him honestly, her cheeks flushing for good measure.

"You're something else." Shea mused with a smile, and then he said, "Alright, we're gonna be late for our reservation."

"You made a reservation?" She asked him in surprise and she let out a giggle when he rolled his eyes at her.

He got out of the car and when Tessa got out before he could open her door he scolded her, "You're supposed to let me be gentlemanly, you know."

Tessa shrugged, "Maybe I don't like that."

"Maybe you'd better get used to it." Shea fired back as he placed his hand on her lower back and lead them into the restaurant.

When they stopped at the hostess counter a brunette turned to greet them with a smile, "Table for two?"

"We have a reservation, under Weber." Shea told her, and once they were being lead to their table he looked down at Tessa and joked, "I invited my dad."

She looked up at him with a look of terror that made him laugh, and the moment his laughter bubbled out of his mouth Tessa knew he had been kidding and she gave his side a pinch before telling him, "That was so not a funny joke. I need at least like... two months of prep time before that."

"It's not like you've never met him before." Shea reminded her, Tessa had met his dad before Amelia had actually. Amelia's flight had been delayed coming back from another business trip, and Tessa had been on her way out of Nashville when his father had arrived to visit.

She told Shea as they sat down across from each other in a little two person booth, "That's different."

"How?" He asked her curiously.

"I've never met him as your girlfriend before, that's way more pressure." She informed him.

So he asked her with a small smile, "So in May you'll be okay with meeting him?"

"Maybe." She told him and Shea smiled. Once their waitress had brought their drink orders Tessa looked over at Shea and asked him, "Did you pick this place because you know my weakness is steak?"

"It may have crossed my mind." Shea told her, glancing for a moment with teasing eyes over his menu at her.

"You don't play fair my friend." Tessa stated as she looked back down at her menu. She waited until Shea lifted his glass of water to his lips before she told him with a smirk, "You play dirty, very dirty."

He choked on his water, sputtered and coughed before he told her, "I could say the same to you."

"What that? That was just a warm-up." Tessa told him with a grin.

When their waitress came back to take their orders she took Tessa's first, and then when she turned to Shea and he started to order Tessa slipped her foot out of her heel and ran the side of her foot up the inside of Shea's leg. He jumped at the contact, and then he glanced over at her and she sent him an innocent smile as she lifted her leg even higher, nearly to his knee now.

As he finished ordered Shea reached down skillfully and grabbed her ankle in one hand, and when their waitress left them alone he looked over at Tessa and told her, "That wasn't very nice."

"And neither was feeling me up at a table with two of your teammates, so we're even now." Tessa told him with a grin as she pulled her ankle from his grasp and, despite wanting to tease him even more, slipped her foot back into her heel.

"So this road trip coming up." Shea started, and then he paused and flushed, telling her, "Sorry, I promised no shop talk tonight."

Tessa shrugged and told him, "I don't mind, actually. I kind of like hearing it."

"You do?" He asked her in surprise. That was definitely a first. The small list of women he had dated since arriving in Nashville, and it was small, only three, had a strict no hockey talk during dates rule. Shea had long since come to terms with the fact that his career wasn't nearly as exciting to others as it was to him.

Tessa nodded her head, "You get so happy when you talk about it, and seeing you happy makes me happy. So talk about work all you want."

"Careful, I may not stop now." Shea warned her, and Tessa shrugged with a smile on her face.

"Then I guess I better become better versed in the language of hockey." Was all she said.

So Shea told her, "Well... this trip is short. I'd be back Friday, around midnight... so I guess technically Saturday. I just wasn't sure if you wanted me to stop by or not."

"You can stop by when you get home." Tessa told him with a small smile, and then she added, "You could even stay the night tonight if you wanted to."

"Yeah? You'd be okay with that?" Shea asked her with a smile, and when Tessa nodded he asked, "And tonight? Could I stay the night tonight?"

"It's entirely possible that you could." Tessa told him before she added, "I mean, I already told you that you're gonna get lucky tonight so you might as well just stay because by the time I'm done with you you'll be too tired to drive and I can't be held responsible for that accident waiting to happen."

Shea let out a laugh and then he told her, "Now would be a good time to tell you that I have a very strict four date rule."

"Huh?" Tessa asked him in surprise.

"Yeah, I don't sleep with a woman until at least date number four." Shea told her, trying desperately to keep a straight face.

Tessa grinned and stated, "Well this is one date, and a sleepover definitely counts as at least two so we're at three by tomorrow morning and maybe I'll wake you up really early and make you take me for breakfast so there's four dates there which mean's there is still a prospect of you getting lucky before you get on that plane tomorrow."

Shea let out a laugh and he joked, "I'm glad you're looking out for my well-being."

"Hey, this is all about me. I need to start my birthday off with a bang is all... take that, however, you want to because that pun was totally intended." Tessa told him with a wide grin.

Again he laughed and he told her, "God I love you."

"I love you too, but there is something that I love more." Tessa told him, and again she slipped her foot out of her shoe and she ran her foot up his leg again and when Shea shifted and reached down to grab her foot she stopped moving, grinned and told him, "A perfectly cooked rare steak."

An hour later when they were finished their meal Shea drove them back to Tessa's, and he carried both his away bag and the box with her birthday gifts in it up to her apartment. He put the gifts down by the TV and left his bag by the door before he dropped onto her couch. Tessa looked over at him from the kitchen where she was making herself tea and asked him, "Do you want some?"

"Sure."

"You sure you don't want to change into something more comfortable?" Tessa asked him, eyeing his dress shirt and pants carefully.

Shea smiled and told her, "Nah, I'm pretty comfortable."

"Well, I'm changing." Tessa informed him, heading into her bedroom to slip out of her dress.

When she came back out in a t-shirt style nightdress with a penguin on the front Shea laughed and told her, "Hot outfit."

She rolled her eyes and sat next to him, placing their mugs on the coffee table before she told him, "Well, you're not gonna have sex with me so I'm not bothering to put anything fancy on."

"For the record, I prefer this." He told her, and her brow lifted in surprise so he nodded his head in confirmation and said, "I mean, don't get me wrong, those other pyjama's you have could actually kill me, but I like that you're comfortable enough around me to wear this too."

Tessa grinned, "You're cute."

She stretched her legs out over his and watched him in amusement as he dragged his hands up the length of her legs from her ankle all the way to mid-thigh where they dipped underneath the cotton of her pyjama's and then slipped around to the sides of her legs to run down to her ankles again. He told her, "You may be the devil, you know."

Her brow raised, "Oh yeah? The devil wears cotton?"

Shea smirked over at her and he told her, "You know what these legs of yours do to me."

"I know, it's why I hardly ever wear pants around you anymore." Tessa told him with a grin and she leaned over and silenced his laughter with her lips.

When she pulled away they settled in to watch a movie on Netflix, Shea's choice and neither of them paid much attention to it. Shea was too busy tracing his fingers over her legs and Tessa was too busy watching his fingers and running her own through his hair.

"What's your biggest regret?" Tessa turned to look at Shea when he broke their silence to ask her this. She wasn't quite sure what he meant or how she answered his question.

So she answered with a question of her own, for clarification, "My biggest regret?"

He nodded his head and told her, "Before this year that is."

She smiled gently. He wanted to know what her biggest regret other than him was. She assured him, "You don't even crack the list you know."

He grinned, "I know... But how we became a thing does. So aside from us and this year...what's your biggest regret?"

She thought about it for a moment and then she asked him, "What's yours?"

"Not admitting how I felt about you to myself sooner." Shea told her honestly, and when Tessa looked over at him with a mix of confusion and surprise on her face he continued, "If I had admitted how I felt when I felt it this whole thing could have been a lot easier. Maybe we wouldn't have made such a mess of things."

Tessa smiled gently and told him, "I get what you're saying. The regret isn't that it happened, just the way that it happened."

He nodded his head slowly and he told her, "I wish I would have met you first."

That again made her smile softly, and then she told him, "The way that Jacob treated me."

Shea's eyebrow raised and he asked her, "What?"

"My biggest regret is letting him treat me the way that he did." When she said this Shea nodded his head slowly, honestly he didn't really know what to say to that. So Tessa turned to face him better on the couch and she asked him curiously, "Why don't you ever ask me about him?"

Shea shrugged his shoulders and he told her, "I figured if you were ready to tell me then you would."

"So you're not in the least bit curious?" She asked him, and he shrugged. Everyone was always so interested in her and Jacob and what had gone wrong, and then there was Shea, who had asked her about him once, even before they started their relationship, or whatever you wanted to call it, and hadn't brought it up since.

"Of course I am. I'm so curious that some days it drives me crazy, like tonight when you thought you needed my approval to wear what you wanted. But I don't ever want to make you feel like you have to tell me things before you're ready to tell me, Tessa." Shea told her, leaning over to kiss the top of her head when she smiled gently at his words.

"So... let's say I was ready to tell you?" Tessa asked him, watching as he nodded his head. She went on to say, "I just think it's... relevant information I guess, especially after tonight. I'm one hundred percent ready for this, with us, but... I'm a little nervous because I don't want that relationship to effect us."

"Tessa I'm never gonna treat you like he did. I know that's a big thing for me to say considering I don't even know the whole story but I can promise you right now that's never gonna happen. I have way too much respect for you to treat you any less than what you deserve." Shea promised her, and again his words made her smile.

Still, she told him anyway, "It wasn't always bad, obviously. When we first started dating, honestly even when we first got married things were normal, and then he got some big promotion and all of a sudden it was all about him. I think back and I wonder how in the hell I could have just sat back and been okay with that, with our relationship and the way he treated me. Because if anyone treated me like that now I'd have more than a few things to say but back then I was just so... complacent."

Curiously Shea asked her, "Do you think it was because you knew the alternative?"

"Probably. You know, I grew up with parents who were never together, and probably never should have been, so I always said if I got married that was it, that there was no divorce. So even when he filed I kept telling myself that we could fix things, we could work things out because marriage was a serious thing to me it wasn't something you quit." She paused, looked down at their hands, tangled in her lap, and then she continued, "I'm disappointed in myself, honestly."

"What do you mean?"

"That I didn't see what was going on before, that I stayed as long as I did fighting as hard as I did to fix things. I was never happy, but I was so used to not worrying about what I thought and focusing on him and his career that it didn't even occur to me to ask myself if I was happy and if I loved him or if I was trying to fix things for him and his reputation." Tessa told him honestly. She paused for only a moment before she told him, "After he got that first promotion everything changed. Suddenly I was someone's wife, instead of a person. That was when he started having issues with me working, that should have been the first red flag. At first, it was I was working too much, and then it was he needed me to be home to take care of everything so that he didn't have to worry about it. So I quit my job, I stayed home, I cleaned and cooked and hosted whatever he needed hosted for work and I never complained.

And then it got to the point where he decided that I wasn't quite... I think the word he used was professional enough. I never saw me being his wife as a part of his job, but I guess he did. It got to the point where I couldn't leave the house without his approval on what I was wearing, because if anyone he knew saw me it would come back on him. Like me wearing a skirt that didn't hit my knees would destroy his career.

And I understood it, then. I made excuses when Amelia would bitch about it and I stood up for him because I thought that was what I should be doing. I thought that because he was my husband I should respect what he wante, like it was totally reasonable for him to dictate what I wore, who I talked to and where I went."

"Did he ever..." He trailed off, but the words had come out the moment she stopped talking.

She shook her head and assured him, "No, it was never like that Shea, really."

"Good."

"I'd like to say that I definitely wouldn't stand for that... but back then I think I probably would have let him get away with that too." When she said this it surprised Shea, and it must have shown because she continued, her voice soft and gentle, "I didn't feel like a person for so many years... and when you spend that long being told over and over again that you're not good enough... I guess you start to believe it."

"He told you that?" Shea asked with his brow raised in surprise.

"Not in so many words. But when you have to change every single thing about yourself to fit someone else's image of what you should be it's basically the same thing. I wasn't good enough for him, but I tried so hard to be for so many years that when he filed... there aren't words for how that felt. For a really long time, I felt like I failed him, and it took me a long time to realize it wasn't him that I failed it was myself." Tessa told him honestly, and she laughed at herself when she had to reach up and wipe at her cheeks. Before Shea could say a word she said, "I still don't understand how I could have allowed him to do this to me, to turn me into this person that I don't even recognize, even now. Because that's not who I am, and it's definitely not who I was before I married him."

"For the record, I'm not glad that he treated you like that, but I am glad that I'm the one that get's to treat you the way you should have been from the beginning. I'm incredibly grateful that I'm the one that get's to show you how great this can be if it's done right." Shea told her, leaning down to kiss her quickly before he told her, "I don't ever want you to change yourself for me, or for anyone. Tessa, the way that you are; how smart, and kind and confident and sure of yourself that you are is one of the reasons I fell in love with you."

She let out a chuckle, more so to hide the tears that wouldn't stop coming, and she tried to joke, "I'm glad I have you fooled there."

Shea smiled gently, but it wasn't a happy smile, and he told her, "I can guarantee you that if you show me yourself, it's not gonna make me run for the hills."

"I wasn't kidding when I said it might be a long time before I can be over all of this. I might ask you one hundred more times this month alone if what I'm wearing is okay, or if it's okay for me to do things and I need you to be okay with that. I'm working on it, but I need you to be okay with the fact that it might take me a while." Tessa told him, watching him to see what his expression showed.

It was soft, and gentle, and filled with concern but also Tessa thought it might be filled with a lot of love as well. That was proven when he told her, "I'm okay with that, as long as you're okay with me telling you how beautiful I think you are, how amazing I think that you are, and everything else that I love about you every single day."

Tessa smiled and she leaned up and kissed him softly, before she told him, "I'm more than okay with that."

"Good, you didn't have a choice in the matter."