Sparkling Hope (The Eastburgh Devils Series Book 1)

One thought that unsettled me was that this kiss felt so incredibly right. I would love to never take my lips from Luna’s again. Everything inside me, including my dick, had a desire for her.

I felt my dick doing a quick salsa dance against the fabric of my jeans. I was sure that she felt what she was doing with her lips on mine, as close as our bodies were.

Not even a sheet of paper would fit between us.

‘Fuck,’ Luna said, breaking off the kiss.

At first, I thought that was her reaction to what had happened here between us, but when I turned around, I saw the real reason. A security guard was shining a flashlight at us from the stands on the other side of the arena.

Shit.

‘We’re fucked if we don’t run now.’ I grabbed Luna’s hand and skated to the gate to get to the locker room.

There was never anyone here over the weekend, and I’ve extra turned the lights back off everywhere to make sure we wouldn’t be seen.

Of course, a security guard has to show up here today.

Never in my life has my boner gone as fast as it came.

In the locker room, we quickly removed our skates and slipped into our street shoes before the security guard arrive.

With the flashlight on my phone, we snuck to the back exit of the ice arena, and when I jiggled the door, I realized it wouldn’t open.

‘Fuck,’ I hissed, leaning my forehead against the glass door.

‘What?’ asked Luna, standing behind me, looking around in a panic every few seconds.

‘The key is still in the locker room. I left it there.’

Why would anything work out in a situation like this?

Luna and I walked down the hallway, and just as we were about to go into the locker room to get that fucking key, the security guard came around the corner. Within a second, I grabbed Luna’s arm, pulled her with me, and rattled the doors, hoping some would be open.

The room we were hiding in was narrow. Tighter than Sigma Devils’s storage room, I was sure she could feel my breath on her forehead.

‘If we get caught now, it’s your fault,’ she grumbled at me in a whisper as we hid in the room by a cleaning cart.

I would love to remind her right now that she willingly agreed to all of this, and I did.

‘You didn’t have to come.’

‘Did I have a choice?’

‘You could have said no,’ I justified myself.

I could have sworn she rolled her eyes at that moment.

Suddenly, the security guard’s footsteps got louder until we could see the glare of his flashlight through the crack of the door.

‘Those fucking students must have figured out how to get out of here and go fuck somewhere else. Sometimes I hate my job, Terry,’ the man grumbled into his rushing walkie-talkie.

Luna clapped her hand over her mouth and tried to suppress a laugh, which didn’t work so well, and I also had to pull myself together not to laugh.

‘I’ll go back to the main entrance and check everything there again.’ The man’s footsteps grew quieter until none could be heard at all.

So there were two of them.

Luna and I stayed in that room for a few more minutes until I pushed the door handle down, stuck my head through the crack, and we both disappeared from the room as soon as the coast was clear.

We quickly walked to the locker room, grabbed the key, and disappeared out of the ice arena.

It was quiet between us, as it almost always was, as we sat in the car, and I followed the road.

If we weren’t discussing anything, I was either fingering or kissing her, and I didn’t think you talk about that kind of thing during a car ride.

So we kept silent.

While concentrating on the traffic, my mind kept wandering to her and that kiss, and I wished I knew what was going on in Luna’s head right now.

You could always tell from her face what she was thinking, but not this time because she stared out that damn window the whole car ride without turning her head to me.

Could I blame her?

She was probably just as confused as I was.

I wanted to tell myself that I didn’t like kissing Luna and didn’t crave more, but that would all be a lie. A thousand questions filled my head, and pure chaos ensued.

One half was still hanging on the ice at that moment, while the other half was wondering how such a delicate figure could suddenly occupy my head just by kissing her.

My brain was just full of her.

The best and most straightforward solution would be to distract me with a party, but the desire for that was less than ever today.

Even that thought I questioned, and if Carter got wind of it, he would drag me to a therapist the next day.

I would love to ask her what she was thinking, but I didn’t want her to think I was worried about it.

It didn’t mean anything.

None of it did.

I did this today because I felt sorry for her and owed her something. I wanted to show her that it was okay to be afraid of something but that she could also manage not to give this fear any power. That the whole thing ended with a kiss was also new to me.

I didn’t know how it felt when a kiss was more than just a kiss.

I wasn’t going to break my rule for her after that kiss.

But something about it made me feel new things I didn’t know before. Those feelings won’t change my attitude. Telling myself that I didn’t care about the kiss and didn’t need to obsess over it also calmed my thoughts, which were screaming in my head for attention.

In addition, the song, which the presenter announced, distracted me, and I I tapped on the steering wheel, matching the rhythm of the song.

We stepped out, and while she already went ahead, I still fetched the sports bag with the skates from the back seat.

She had already turned on the small lamp on the dresser when I entered the house after her and ran into the basement.

The basement was a complete disaster in terms of neatness.

No one has taken care of it since Mom left, and I think I was also the first person to have been down there in a year. I often imagined how it would be if Mom and Dad had not divorced.

That everything would be good, but that will forever be wishful thinking.

I didn’t even know where she was, let alone which country she was in and who she had by her side.

My parents’ marriage ended up being toxic, and it was good that they got divorced, but Mom leaving town and leaving me behind hurt. They went to couples therapy, which I wasn’t supposed to know about until I found bills from the hours between other papers.

But when Mom found out that Dad cheated on her with Camilla, it was all doomed anyway.

I will never understand how anyone can cheat on someone.

It’s the most disgusting thing you can do to your partner. My Dad justified his cheating by saying Camilla made him feel alive and fresh.

Fresh? What a shitty statement.

Young would be more appropriate because Camilla was only thirty-three, thirteen years older than me, and my Dad had already reached the golden fifty.

Mom’s not entirely innocent in all this shit, either. She cheated on him while Dad was always away on business trips. At least twice a month, he was in some other U.S. state for an extended time.

If we had one of those cheesy family calendars hanging on the wall in the kitchen, it would be all filled with my Dad’s business trips.

At times like this, I wondered if Dad and Mom would still be together today if she hadn’t hired Camilla into Dad’s construction company back then and if Mom hadn’t cheated.

To this day, I was sure their affairs hadn’t been the only reason for their divorce. Mom and Dad had repeatedly argued about the same thing over the years, but I never found out what it was about.

The clock on my wall now read past ten p.m., and on a weekend day at that hour, I would be found either at a bar, Sigma Devils, or at a frat party.

Today I had no desire to go anywhere, even though my best friend had threatened to shove a puck up my ass if I didn’t accompany him to the frat party he wanted to go to today.

Or maybe something was bothering me that I’m not quite ready to admit.

CARTER BUNNY

I’ll shove a puck up your ass if you don’t go. I’m sure there’s a girl in there for you too.

WESTON

My dick is on standby today.

CARTER BUNNY

Maybe I’ll move the party to your house.

Your parents aren’t home.

WESTON

No, Luna is here.

CARTER BUNNY

Did you take her to the ice arena?

WESTON

What the fuck, no!

You better get your way too big ego fucked away.

CARTER BUNNY

Do you want me to call you on FaceTime then?

WESTON

Do you want my cell phone to break?

CARTER BUNNY

You need to take the call on your laptop so my dick fits on the screen.

WESTON

Sometimes I wonder why I’m friends with you.

CARTER BUNNY

I’m great. Feel honored, you sucker.

WESTON

I appreciate your nickname.

As I sat on my worn brown leather sofa, continuing to watch the True Crime series on TV that I paused earlier, I considered going to the frat party.

Maybe I should go there to distract myself and get my mind off things and just drink and fuck away all the current chaos in my head.

Pussy solved ninety-nine percent of my problems, if not all of them at that moment.

ILFPAILP.

I live for parties, and I love pussy.

That’s what the letters meant in Carter’s and my high school graduation book under our stuffy portraits. But tonight, the first four letters didn’t apply.

Suddenly, a knock on my bedroom door led to the bathroom from me. A small crack opened, and Luna’s head came out. My first thought was to send her away again, to let her know I didn’t want to know anything about her after that shitty good kiss.

Because what did we have to work out? Absolutely nothing.

Never would I admit that I was still thinking about that kiss. Not even to myself would I want to admit it.

Something about her posture let me know that the kiss wasn’t the reason why she stood in my room.

‘Hey,’ she murmured almost so softly that I could barely understand her if I hadn’t muted the TV.

‘Hey.’

‘Can we talk?’

With a nod, I answered her question in the affirmative, and she slipped into my room like a ghost through the open crack in the door.

It was the same t-shirt as tonight, with the only difference being that instead of her white shorts with red hearts, she was wearing pink and white striped linen pants that were too long.

Luna initially hesitated about where she should sit down, but I straightened up on the sofa and threw down the laundry to show her that she could sit there.

‘You can sit here if you like,’ I told her, and her face showed only uncertainty as I sought eye contact with her.

In all the weeks since Luna has been living here already, I have only recognized uncertainty in her face once, and that was at the swimming pool.

I wasn’t sure if the insecurity was because of me or if there was another reason for it.

I didn’t like the idea that she might feel insecure because of me.

Would she then come to my room and seek out conversation with me?

 It remained quiet between us. Luna and I would place first when it came to creating uncomfortable silences.

‘I was thinking again about what you said to me on the ice earlier in the ice arena,’ she began to tell me, playing with her dark blue hair tie.

I turned the TV off with the remote and turned to face her on the sofa to show Luna that no matter what she told me, I was listening to her intently.

‘My Dad and I had a car accident almost a year ago,’ she looked up at me and hesitated a little further to talk after sitting beside me on the sofa.

‘Luna, you don’t have to tell me if you’re uncomfortable with it.’

‘I want to tell you, though. All of it,’ Luna chewed her lower lip with her incisor, and her gaze was blank.

‘My Dad always had a drinking problem. My Mom met him with it. Sometimes he would be clean again for a few months, and suddenly, he would relapse again. There wasn’t a Christmas that he didn’t drink gallons of the expensive wine like it was water and scotch after it,’ her voice broke after the last sentence, and she looked up at me for the first time.

‘Take your time, Luna. I’m listening to you.’ I hoped I hit the right words with that, and maybe I could comfort her slightly.

I wished I had been told something like that precisely by people in situations like this.

She sniffled and played with the hair tie again, which she was staring at. At that moment, for the first time, I had such a strong urge to hold her against my chest as tightly as I could so that she could hear my heartbeat.

The way she sat there, cross-legged, so helpless, while I propped one arm on the back of the sofa backrest and continued to listen to her. I gave her all the time in the world until she was ready to talk again.

‘Somehow, he managed to hide his relapse. He said he had to work a lot of overtime at the office because some numbers didn’t add up, and one case, in particular, was taking up a lot of time.’

I watched her wipe away tears on her face with her fingers as soon as they left her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

‘All the numbers were right, and no case took that much time either. Later, my mother found out that he relapsed and emptied scotch bottle after bottle into the night,’ Luna said, wiping another tear from her face with her hand.

This wasn’t how I imagined the Saturday night in my life. Everyone could find me where someone was throwing a party, but I was exactly where I wanted to be now.

‘I used to be on the swim team in my high school senior year, and we had practice every Thursday night. I walked there and called my Dad to pick me up because it was raining. We drove over a bridge, where he lost control of the car, and we slammed through the bridge’s fence into the river.’

Now I just realized what I had done when I pushed her into the water and how wrong that was.

‘At that point, Mom, Ethan, and I didn’t even know that Dad’s law firm had gone bankrupt and he was an alcoholic again. While you can read everything in Mom’s and my facial expressions, my Dad was excellent at blocking out his crappy alcoholism and pretending everything was fine.’

Individual tears filled her cheeks, dotted with freckles. She didn’t wipe away a tear from her face this time and let them run free.

‘There were a thousand signs that he was driving with that much alcohol in his blood, but I just didn’t notice, or maybe I just didn’t want to notice. I thought I was dying, Weston,’ Luna whispered the last six words. After that last sentence, she collapsed in front of me like a pile of misery, and without hesitation, I took her in my arms, and Luna’s face nestled against my torso.

‘Please don’t ever blame yourself for this accident again, Luna.’

There was nowhere I preferred to be now, and it felt so damn right.