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We begin in medias res.
Rey snaps out of it and comes back to herself as his hand creeps up her thigh. It would be so easy to flip up her skirt, peel down her tights, and continue the path up to her Calvins; maybe snap the elastic band against her waist and tease her with a finger winding around the material until she can hardly take it anymore. It isn’t like she can say anything. Outside the two of them have created, the party they’re at goes on, no one noticing the two of them huddled together on the couch.
She can maybe grab his wrist. So she does. Her hand brushes against the leather band snapped around his thick wrist, soft where the dusting of hair on his arm brushes against her fingers. She knows the cuff covers a scenting gland that will likely make an appearance later—later when they’re alone and tucked away in a room somewhere in this house that belongs to someone she doesn’t know. Rey knows because he’s already whispered that into her ear.
Zoom out again. What’s going on?
She remembers snippets; Finn inviting her earlier that day, a quick question at lunch that makes her shrug and go Sure why not, before the conversation moves on to something else. Rey doesn’t know half the people here, but Finn does because Finn knows everyone; even now, she sees him off in the distance surrounded by a group of people hanging off his every word. It’s not his fault. He’s like a bright beacon that entices, that draws in—she’s one of many moths hovering by his flame.
The house is a towering structure unlike any she’s ever seen before—a frat house, some Greek acronym she’s never going to remember, so why bother? There are Doric columns under the lintel in the front of the house and that’s enough for her to be impressed. The first hour seemed to pass uneventfully. Rey nurses a beer and hangs at Finn’s side, smiling to herself with every new person drawn into his sphere of influence.
Then the second hour comes.
It’s the lightest of scents at first and it wafts just under her nose. Makes her face wrinkle. It’s not delicious at first, just prominent. It gets stuck under her skin and makes her head dart around looking for the source. Distracting because shouldn’t everyone be on suppressants? Rey hasn’t scented anyone this acutely since early childhood during pre-designation, running wild in the sunlight and the grass and the wind, every scent distinct from the next.
Since growing into her omega designation (the switch that flips, the hand that clamps down on a wrist and says You can’t just have this out, the sudden shift that keeps shifting, keeps drawing her down some new path), she only gets slight hints at scent. It’s not something she thinks she’ll ever grow used to—scent blockers, suppressants as they’re called, are not perfect yet. Scent blockers is an accurate name. Even food is muted these days. She can hardly remember the full, rich taste of a slice of apple pie.
It’s something to look forward to post-mating, she thinks. When the band on her wrist comes off and she makes an appointment with her family doctor to go off her suppressants, the world will be like a whole new place. Rey dreams of mimosas at brunch, the smell of freshly mown grass, and the first rich, creamy bite into a tiramisu. It’s not a brilliant way to look at mating, as a means to an end, but Rey wants, more than anything, to live a sensuous, sumptuous life. The ache for it sits behind her teeth.
Despite that though, this scent picks at a spot in her brain that feels raw, unused. It would be less disconcerting if she knew even a single other person here, but they’re celebrating some kind of game that some kind of team won; even Finn’s only here because his on-again-off-again boyfriend is on the team (whatever it is).
The source comes up behind her and snags an arm around her waist.
“Hey, hey, hey, it’s alright,” a deep voice coos into her ear when she lurches away. The sudden strong waft of a potent, rich scent directly under her nose makes her snap back like a rubberband.
Whoever it is standing directly behind is big all around, pulls her back into a broad chest that must be twice the size of her. It’s not a shape Rey can pull from memory; the smell of him though, that—she inhales, presses back into him of her own volition and clenches her teeth on a moan—tugs at a string so tightly wound in her core that it’s a new song that’s never been played before.
Her eyes swing around to where Finn had previously stood, but he’s gone now, on the other side of the room pointedly not making eye contact with her. There’s a significance to that, but Rey’s head is too woozy to put the pieces together. The air is fragrant with the scent of weed and cheap beer spilled over the floor, but layered over all of those is the delectable scent from directly behind her.
“Holy shit,” she murmurs, only half-conscious of the words.
“C’mon, baby, don’t freak out. I’ve got you.” She feels herself get pulled out of the crowd, out of the room, swept away by the scent and big hands on her hips that steer her in the direction of a couch in the back corner of another room.
Zoom back in.
Her legs hang off big, bunched up thighs—it makes her own athletic legs look lithe, almost delicate. Her feet are hooked around his calves, Blundstone-covered toes pressed against the muscle there. Rey knows she’s straining against something, a feeling, but awareness only floods back into her at the sudden cacophonic laughter from one room over.
Big hands run up her legs and she—she knew not to wear a skirt to a party like this. Even with the tights underneath, it’s like there’s nothing there at all.
She caught a glimpse of him, before he turned her around and sat in her lap, nestling her up against the thick, plumped up length between his legs that makes her dizzy even thinking about it. Cascading waves of dark hair swept back to expose his face. Sloped forehead. Plump lips. Alpha. Alpha alpha alpha. Everything about his size and stature screams alpha, but so close now she can smell it intertwined with the smell driving her crazy and it’s nuts that she didn’t catch onto it before.
Her own hands are balled into her shirt, wrinkling the fabric. She’ll probably need to iron. All around them, the sounds of other people mute into a barely audible hum, only the sound of his breath reaching her ears.
“Why have I never met you before?” Stupid line. It makes her lip raise into something like a snarl. Hackles up.
She doesn’t know his name, but she knows what his big hand looks like when it cups her tummy under her shirt, raised from where she has it balled in her fists. Her vision unfocuses briefly, splitting the sight into two images that make her mind slip dangerously into territories she shouldn’t be exploring. Like what his hand might look like all over the rest of her.
Rey grits her teeth. Her eyes dart around the room, suddenly extremely aware of what they must look like. She’s going in and out of self-consciousness, like one minute she can see herself externalized and the next she’s in a bubble with just the alpha behind her.
“I don’t know,” she manages to get out, trembling slightly when his other hand traces over her knee. He pinches the fabric there, the nylon stretching with his fingers until he lets it snap back down.
“Do you go to Chandrila?” He asks, meaning the university they both attend. Her mouth opens to answer but he cuts her off before she can. “Never mind—doesn’t really matter. You come here with anyone?” Again, she goes to answer and he cuts her off. “Actually, that doesn’t matter either.” His voice carries with it the sound of a smirk.
“It would be really cool if you let me fucking talk,” she says snippily.
“Oh, you’re funny. Who do you even know here?”
“If you’re trying to kick me out, you should know I’m friends with Finn.” Rey twists her head to glare at him over her shoulder. “Poe’s on the team.”
Her words make a vicious sort of grin spread across his handsome face. Up close he’s even prettier than when she looked at him before. Hair a little damp like he just washed it. She wants to drag her hands through it and loop the wavy bits into curls around her finger. The sheer intensity of his stare, even softened by his grin, makes her falter.
“Oh yeah, Poe’s on the team, huh?”
She sticks her nose up. “Yes, he is.”
“That’s so, so funny because I am too.”
Oh. She tilts her head back down. “Ah. I—um—”
“Didn’t recognize me?”
Rey studies his face harder. He’s gorgeous, but there’s nothing in his face that rings a bell. It shouldn’t come as that much of a shock—Rey thinks Poe plays hockey or something like that, something with lots of padding, but she’s never actually gone to a game because that’s not really her thing. She spends more time in the lab; she’s on a pre-med track and it necessarily means she doesn’t get a whole lot of free time to waste. Even this party had been a stretch for her schedule and now she’s regretting it in a whole new way.
“I play goal—the guy in the net, y’know?”
She winces and shrugs, half-sure she knows what he’s talking about.
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“You’re really cute, y’know,” he suddenly says, running a hand up her leg. “I scented you from across the house. Like, uh, berries, or something. Berries that like, pop in your mouth.”
The eyes that stare at her are dark, pupils the size of dinner plates. It makes her antsy. She might be shaky and acting a bit inappropriate herself by tracing the cuff on his wrist, elaborate swirling patterns meant to distract her from the hard muscle of his thighs or the fact that Rey is almost positive that he’s going to make a move on her.
Of course she’s right.
He smells perpetually of sweat and earthen want, something drawn deep from the underground, chthonic. She can’t explain it. He traces the side of her face with his nose, which she knows from brief glances is large but still oddly attractive, like everything about him is.
“Do you think anyone would even notice if I put a finger in?” He breathes, hand not resting against her stomach sliding just up her skirt. She knows what he’s talking about. The hand that pushes on his wrist does nothing to stop the ascent.
It shocks her, his boldness. “E-excuse me?”
“If I finger you, baby. You just, ah, smell so good and I think I could make you smell even better if I made you come.”
“Don’t you already have a girlfriend or something?” Rey hisses, fingernails sliding into the give of his flesh. She means it to hurt, but he’s unperturbed.
“Girlfriend? Who’s been saying that?”
“It’s just—” Her brain briefly goes offline when he pinches the tender part of her inner thigh, like he’s just feeling the plushness of her skin “—don’t hockey players usually…”
She trails off, bites her tongue. Hard. He—nameless still—huffs a laugh.
“Usually what?” He fits his teeth against the tender skin of her neck. “Fuck around, you mean?”
Rey winces. “Not that crass. I just meant—”
“I think you’re looking for some kind of— ah —excuse.” The exhale punctuates the slide of his hand over her clothed pussy, thick fingers rubbing over the material like it isn’t even there. He can probably feel the wetness of her slick even through the two layers.
It’s not good to let him touch her there so casually, jumping straight from conversation to necking in the middle of a crowded room. Or whatever this would be called. He isn’t even going for her neck yet, but the intent is there, swirling in his scent, which is like its own language to her that only she can decipher.
“Not an excuse but—you’re going to make me…we’re too compatible.”
The realization unfolds in her head like a pretty envelope (maybe perfumed, a gorgeous wax seal on it). Good alpha smell comes with a host of considerations that she hadn’t bothered to rifle through in her head like: Heat partners. Mates. Already the gland on the base of her neck throbs. Beneath her pink leather cuff, her scent gland itches something fierce.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You smell, ah, you smell real fucking good, you know that, omega?”
A big, desperate inhale. His nose burrows into her hair, which is, again, worrisome—the behaviour makes her think of sex ed classes, watching videos of alphas scenting omegas, porn she watches on her phone with her AirPods in at night, and every single daydream she’s ever had. Every time he goes for a whiff of her, he descends more into neolithic behaviour, grabbing her harder, more proprietary.
“Oh, you should—you should probably stop touching me now, this really isn’t good—”
Rey’s grasping at straws, trying to sputter out a reasonable enough argument for this to end, for her to get off this alpha’s lap and scurry away out of the frat house and down the street and back home, but the alpha at her back fits his whole paw against her cunt. He holds it down. She chokes back a moan when it presses her back up against his cock, which strains against the fabric of his pants.
“What? I’m your alpha—I can touch you. Just—” Here he grunts, swallowing so thickly that she hears it loudly in her ear, the pre-rut saliva making him salivate “—just sit there and look pretty, baby. You’re so… you’re so pretty.” The growl rumbles into his voice so abruptly that it makes her leak a bit. He’s coaxing the heat out of her.
That’s not normal. A prickly thought creeps into her head like a sudden intuition that this alpha’s bad news, this alpha doesn’t care if he puts us into a heat in front of a house full of other people, alpha is going to demand something we aren’t ready to give.
The sound of fabric ripping reaches her ear first; Rey’s aware of the rip he’s torn into her tights, the seam right at the apex of her thighs, giving him newfound access to her. That, more than anything else he’s said or done, wrenches Rey out of whatever weird headspace she’s currently in where the walls seem to be swimming and all of the colour seems sucked out of the room. Even the music is dimmed, only the pump of the bass in her bloodstream.
Her hands clamp down on his wrist again, this time with a rush of adrenaline that stalls his hand for just a second. “Wait, wait, not here—”
His hand lifts off her belly and he takes her by the neck. Shakes her a bit.
“Let me put it in.” The eyes that stare into hers are dark, deadly serious. It makes her flinch. Her usual inclination to bite back is bitten right out of her, so Rey whimpers, looks away first. Breaking eye contact with an alpha. His scent goes extra spicy with smug conviction.
“That’s good, baby, that’s better,” he goes back to cooing, being so, so sweet when she listens to him.
This time, she doesn’t try to stop him when he presses two fingers into her heat, already drenched with slick. Even though it’s too much. Even though she’s virgin tight and she’s seen the size of even one of his fingers and it makes her stomach clench and makes her bite her bottom lip painfully. He hisses into the skin of her neck, making the hair rise.
Each push of his fingers up to the knuckle into her cunt makes her gasp, heart in her throat. The sound of her own squelching wetness is lewd, debased; even in the darkness of her own room, she’s never this wet.
“See, isn’t that nice?” The whisper in her ear makes her tremble.
“Everyone can see,” Rey hisses, wringing her hands again in her shirt. This isn’t good. The skirt falls over her lap, providing a kind of pseudo-cover, but there’s no way of mistaking the way his hand is fully petting her pussy. Anyone looking over at them would instantly be able to see the flex of his forearm as he dips his fingers into her warmth again and again.
“Um, okay?” He laughs, like it’s no big deal. “People fuck at parties all the time, y’know?”
“Yeah, upstairs in a bedroom. Not on the—oh my god, please—”
“You’re not even getting fucked.” He sounds exasperated, like they do this every time even though Rey only met him twenty minutes ago and she’s not even sure if this qualifies as ‘meeting’ because she doesn’t even know his name or anything beyond the fact that he plays hockey and he smells absolutely delicious.
Several spine-tingling minutes pass where she squirms in his lap and tries to ignore the cock pressed against her ass even though the alpha groans and forces her hips back down when she tries to move away. He’s using her to tease himself. He pulls his fingers out every so often to circle her clit and he coos in her ear about it, about how hot it is and how cute it is and how he wants to pull her skirt up so he can look at her little button—and he almost does until she flattens her hands against her skirt and hisses something vitriolic out.
It makes him laugh.
“C’mon, not even a peek?” He teases her, fingers fiddling with the ends of her skirt.
“I’ll bite you,” she snaps. “I swear I’ll— ah —I’ll bite you.”
“Fuck, say that again,” he groans, leaning forwards into her and pushing his fingers in until there’s no possible way he can get any deeper. “Where? Would you bite my gland, baby? Give me a little mating mark? Fuck, that’s so hot.”
Rey recognizes that she made a mistake in saying that. His breath fans out against her neck and she’s clearly riled him up because he fingers her with a kind of desperation, driving her further and further up a hill that she’s about to fall off. It builds up at the base of her spine, licking up like tongues of a flame and the whole while the earthen scent of her alpha clouds her brain and makes every switch inside of her turn on. Little broken ah, ah, ahs fall from her lips.
She comes when he buries his fingers in deep and rubs his palm right up against her clit, pulsing again and again around his fingers. She covers her mouth with her own hand to stifle the moans, but it’s a losing game; her fingers do little to trap the caterwaul.
His fingers are sticky with her slick—there’s no way she isn’t in some kind of breakthrough heat now, not with the way the fire in her belly burns and burns like it does when she’s home for this and can bury herself under the blankets and nestle her clit-sucker against her tender parts—and he rubs them into her clit once he pulls them out. It makes her legs twitch, hurts. Rey whines into her hand.
“Baby, I know it’s, ah—it’s too soon, but I need to fuck you, okay?” Her alpha grunts, lifting his hips off the couch for just a second so he can shimmy his sweats down just enough.
She tries to throw herself off his lap, but his arm comes around to act as a band, holding her tight to his chest. She has no leverage, nothing to fight against—his arms bulge when he picks her up to pull down his pants, no underwear underneath, but it’s like it’s no trouble at all for him.
There’s a tear in her tights and her underwear are pushed to the side. Before she can even say a word, he lifts her up and brings her down slowly onto his cock, impaling her on the length. It’s tricky at first—gravity does a lot of the work, but she’s tight and he’s big and he isn’t going to fit. Not her first time. Not when even just the tip is too much.
“Oh my god, oh my god, alpha, please, just take me upstairs,” she whispers desperately, choked up. “Y-you can—you can fuck me, ah, upstairs, but not here, not here—”
Her plea is cut off by a hand on her throat, heavy there, unyielding. He doesn’t move, just lets her sink all the way down until he bottoms out and Rey squirms because she’s never been so full in her life. It takes forever. Her thighs strain to the point of burning where they’re draped over his legs.
“What are you whining about, huh? You’ve got a nice big dick in your tummy, don’t you, baby?” His hand tightens just the slightest amount, not enough to harm but enough to have her still. “Be a bit grateful, okay? I’m taking…I’m just taking care of my—” she knows it’s hard for him to say the words because if he gets out I’m taking care of my omega in heat, she knows he’s going to break into his own rut.
“Okay, okay, okay,” she whispers, trying to get him out of that headspace. It’s bad enough that she’s sweating and shaking, stomach cramping up already. It’s going to be rough, Rey can feel it in her bones.
A sudden noise has her head turning away from her alpha and towards the rest of the room.
There’s a group of clustered alphas near them, watching eagerly as her alpha shoves his cock into her hole. Rey keens, yanking the collar of her sweater up until she can duck her head into it, hiding her eyes. If she can’t see them, they can’t see her. Her alpha lets out a breathless laugh, holding her again by the tummy as his hips rock up.
“You better be careful,” she hears him chuckle, driving up into her again and her thighs bounce in his lap like she weighs nothing. “You’re going to have them thinking you’re my good luck charm. Gonna need a hit of this before every game.”
The slick coating his dick is thicker now—the stuff of heats, of mating, of nests, of little pups nestled in feathers and furs. Rey feels him rub his fingers through it with the hand not digging into the flesh of her stomach. Swirls over her clit and then down to where they’re joined, nudging his finger just the tiniest bit into her hole beside his cock.
“No, no, no, no, I can’t—I can’t take it—I can’t—”
“C’mon, yes you can,” he coos, and oh god, he stills his hips to push his finger in and it hurts, it makes her whine and gasp for a breath she can’t keep down. “You’re doing it, baby, look at you.” He’s in awe of her; it seeps into his voice and Rey can feel it in the way he pulls the back of her sweater down a bit to get his mouth on her mating gland, sucking the raised, swollen knot of flesh there.
Bad behaviour. That’s like the most raunchiest of heat sex porn. He sucks on her mating gland in a room full of people, and he is maybe teetering on the edge of just biting her. Rey can feel the intention in the play of his teeth. It doesn’t bode well for her leaving here unmarked.
She can feel the eyes on them; there’s some wet, slapping sound coming from the other end of the room and she doesn’t have to take her head out of her sweater to know that someone’s getting themselves off to her being fucked. All she can hope is that Finn and Poe are somewhere else in the house, on another floor or outside smoking or long gone home together to fuck in private like normal people normally do.
He takes his finger out and wrenches down her sweater before pushing the finger coated with her slick into her mouth. “Tell them how it tastes, baby.”
Them. Her eyes flit wildly around the room now, no barrier between her and the outside world. She sobs around his finger as she sucks on it, her own taste filling her mouth.
“You’re lucky I’m not taking your shirt off,” he breathes into her ear, thrusting up into her again now she isn’t so stuffed full. “I didn’t even get to see your tits. That’s not fair, is it? I’m being so nice keeping you all nice and cozy in your sweater, so tell them. What it tastes like.”
Another acid growl in her ear that makes her clench up so tight that he almost can’t pull out.
“P-peach,” Rey gasps, tears welling in her eyes because it’s so good, so good, but there are no less than five other men staring at her with dilated eyes, and it’s humiliating to be like this in front of someone other than her mate. “It t-tastes like peach.”
He laughs. “Peachy, creamy little cunt. Such a good fucking cunt.”
“Is it tight?” Someone actually has the audacity to ask. It draws the alpha’s attention away from her towards whatever meathead had the nerve to ask an alpha in pre-rut if his omega’s pussy was tight.
Still, he responds: “Obviously, fuck.”
It makes a couple of the guys laugh at the one who asked, his ears now red with embarrassment. Rey’s not quite been reduced to an object for their entertainment, but the possibility of it still rankles her. Makes her want to take her manicured nails to her alpha’s pretty face and leave him a nice little scar to remember her by.
“Are you, uh—” stutters the guy holding his cock in one hand, and whoa, Rey does not want to look there, so she shifts her eyes to the wall beside him “—you gonna m-mate her?”
That’s taboo. Mating in front of an audience is probably more than her dignity can withstand and Rey prays that her alpha knows that somewhere down deep. Still, he brushes her hair to the side again—it tumbled back over her shoulder on a particularly deep thrust that had her teeth clacking against each other—and gives her gland a playful little lick.
“Dunno,” he mutters, and gives another little teasing lick. “What do you think, baby? Think they—fuck, yeah, tighten up, that’s g-good, that’s good, fuck —fuck, uh, think they deserve it?”
Rey can’t say a word. Her breasts heave with each breath, every part of her narrowing down to the delectable slide of her alpha’s cock into her heat. Everything else is a foggy dream of real life. She’ll rejoin later, when this has passed, but for now she sinks into the miasma of a heat.
His lips twitch against her gland. “Nah, this is…that’s just for me. I’ll bring you upstairs in a bit, okay, baby? Nice and private.”
She’ll learn in time that he always does what he says.
He doesn’t let them see her come this time though. Instead, he holds her by the hips and turns them over until she lies flat against the back of the couch, breath knocked out of her as he fucks her harder. Her alpha goes nonverbal as his knot swells in her, making her wail when the stretch is too much, more than she can handle. It’s meant to hurt, he says in her ear, he doesn’t want it to, but it’s good for heats, it’ll keep her temperature down and she’ll relax when she comes so just fucking come already, omega.
Rey doesn’t even feel it when he comes in her. Just hot inside. Sweat plasters her sweater to her back and he licks up the sweat on the nape of her neck. The back of the couch is almost a heavenly place. Her alpha’s hands skim up the sides of her ribs, wrapping around her and holding her tight to his chest. If there are people still huddled around them, she has no mind for that now, not wrapped up in her alpha, high off two orgasms and stuffed tight.
Upstairs, he brushes her hair to the side and locks his teeth in place. Makes her lick his scenting gland when he pops the cuff off his wrist. It’s the single most intimate experience of her life.
Skip forward a couple weeks. Where does that take us?
Rey sits on her hands in the seats overlooking the rink, watching as Ben goes round and round on the ice, so fluid and graceful that she feels her body heat up in spite of herself. The pads on his legs and hands make him look larger than he usually looks. Imposing.
She’s nervous. She’s never had a boyfriend before, never mind a mate. There are groups of other people in the stands, a group of other girls that she knows are dating some of the other players on the team, but Rey sits off to the side because even though it’s been a few weeks, she still—she knows none of them were there, she only remembers the faces of Ben’s teammates, but she’s shy nevertheless. Suppose they know.
She looks up. None of the other players look at her with any derision. They’re exceedingly normal, in fact, pleasant to her when she’s around them, which is often because Ben is clingy when he isn’t horny. Also clingy when he is horny. It’s a bad mix. So maybe she needn’t be embarrassed because when she brings it up to Ben, he laughs and says something along the lines of “team bonding,” which is a frustrating notion, but, ultimately, better than ridicule.
The world moves on. Her friends have already met Ben and they have made no bones about the fact that they adore him, particularly Poe who has a sort of hero worship for him. Even though they’re the same age and play on the same team. She rolls her eyes whenever Poe’s around, always fawning over Ben. She’d worry about it if it weren’t for Finn, who Poe is very clearly enamoured with even if their relationship still goes cold for days at a time when Finn is pissed about something or other. Poe always sweet talks his way back in.
Ben skates over to the boards and takes off his helmet, sweaty locks falling around his face. A sheen of sweat covers his face, cheeks red from working out. He runs a hand through his hair to pull it back and waves her over. Rey stands up—she could feel the pull to him before he even skated up to the side of the rink—and makes her way down the stairs, her boots going clunk-clunk against the concrete.
“Hey, baby, can I get a kiss?” His eyes are big and bright. Smitten.
The funniest thing is how tiny she is when Ben’s on skates. He has to lean so far down just to give her a peck on the lips. She’s grown used to the sweetness with Ben, when they aren’t in bed or he isn’t stoned or he isn’t worked up after a game—okay, so it isn’t often, but when he sucks her bottom lip into a kiss, it makes her heart well up tight in her chest. It warms her up when she sits in the freezing bleachers.
“How was chem?” He asks, nuzzling his nose into hers. She scrunches up her face because he is gross and sweaty, but it’s cute.
“Not so bad. Got a ninety on my test.”
His eyes sparkle when he grins. “Oh, I’m making you sit on my face tonight.”
“Oh my god,” she groans with a blush, already slapping a hand to her cheek. Ben has no sense of time nor place, and it’s not like he started off in a good place. She supposes he has nowhere to go but up.
“You having fun at least? I like when you come watch us; it’s good having you in the stands.”
“Yeah, I am. Can I ask you a question, Solo, after tonight’s game?” Rey asks, pretending she has a recorder in her hand before passing it to him. She always loves watching them talk to the media after a game; it’s endlessly funny watching her goofy boy get all taciturn and serious. “What went wrong for the Knights tonight?”
“Yeah, uh, of course,” he plays along, schooling his features and pretending to be the serious Captain he is on the ice. “Uh, y’know, we just didn’t play a disciplined game out there. We gotta stay outta the box, y’know, get more pucks in deep. It’s up to, uh, the guys in this room to get pucks in the net and, uh, play some good hockey.”
Rey laughs, always tickled by it. It’s still kind of a stupid sport, but she’ll learn to like it if it’s for Ben.