He and I had been fighting nonstop while we’d been camping—a trip that was supposed to be relaxing. The situation had been escalating for a long while, but it had finally reached unmanageable. I was done in so many ways. After seven years, Benji’s persistent needling and negativity had become an anchor, weighing me down, keeping me tethered to a history that no longer felt good.
While I wallowed in the aftermath of my poor life choices, Randy had sat at the table, eating bowl after bowl of Corn Pops and reading the sports section of the newspaper. Benji had followed me around the house, pushing every single one of my buttons. Heedless of our audience, he wouldn’t give up. I’d told him in no uncertain terms that we were done, but sometimes he was thickheaded. Or he thought it was a game. We had broken up before. Several times.
And then he called me a bitch.
It felt like a verbal backhand. And it was humiliating in front of a bystander.
Randy had dropped his spoon in his bowl. Milk splattered the table and his shirt. “The fuck you say to her?” he’d asked as he pushed back his chair. It toppled over, clattering to the floor. He wiped his mouth with the back of his tattooed hand.
And then he’d stalked over to Benji and threatened to kick his ass—even though I’d come after him with a toilet paper holder earlier.
So I did what any hot-blooded Canadian woman would when a hot man—hockey player or not—threatened extreme violence on her behalf: I grabbed his face and stuck my tongue in his mouth.
I played it off as though I’d done it to make Benji jealous. But I hadn’t. Mostly I wanted to kiss Randy’s face for what he’d done. Play a little tonsil hockey with him. Plead insanity for a minute.
His beard was soft where it touched my lips and chin. His mouth tasted like Corn Pops. His tongue—oh God, his tongue. Despite my unexpected assault, he’d kissed me back. Benji’s freak-out had become mere static in the background. Sunny and Miller must have returned from their “walk in the forest” somewhere between Benji’s insult and my jumping Randy, because when I opened my eyes, there they were, witnesses to my attack.
Mortified, I locked myself in a bedroom at the cottage for the rest of the afternoon. I told Sunny I needed to be alone. During that time, I relived the kiss over and over, wondering if it was so electric because Randy had defended me, because I was angry with Benji, or because Randy was so damn hot.
I promised myself I wouldn’t attack him like a starved lion on steak again. But by dinner, Benji had taken off, his raging texts cementing my conviction that we were now as over as we were going to get. Calling me a “flat-chested, cheating whore” wasn’t much of a point-winner in my book.
And still here was Randy. Gorgeous. Cocky. Chivalrous. Maybe a little arrogant. An excellent kisser and an absolute flirt. I needed a distraction, and he seemed like a good one. We ended up dry-humping in the kitchen. Later he came to my bedroom with promises of fun and orgasms. No obligations. No strings. Just a casual fling. Inhibitions loose from drinks and hormones raging from all the flirting, I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to, either.
Randy followed through on his promise to distract me from my problems. The orgasms were out of this world. Intergalactic.
But we didn’t have sex.
He was okay with being a rebound lay, but he drew the line at revenge fuck. I didn’t ask what the criteria was for one or the other, but as the receiver of plenty of non-penetration-related orgasms, I could hardly complain. At the time. Regrets came later.
I thought he was so sweet. Until he and Miller went to a charity car wash the next morning, leaving Sunny and me at the cottage. The guys were only going to be gone a couple of hours, and Randy promised more orgasms upon his return. I had plans to make them the sex kind.
Then things got complicated. Before they even got back, pictures of Randy and Miller with what appeared to be topless models went viral.
I got a little ragey.
Pissed that I’d been hoodwinked, I deployed a black permanent marker with the wrath of a thousand PMS-ing women on a full moon. I defaced every pair of Randy’s underwear with the same message: TINY DICK INSIDE. It was a lie. A fabrication. Based on what I’d felt the night before—it was too dark to see—he was packing a substantial stick in his pants.
I gave his T-shirts a similar treatment, decorating them with ASSHOLE, so he knew how I felt about the bullshit he’d pulled. Like I would let him give me any more orgasms after some bunny’d been all over his dick, probably riding it because I wasn’t allowed to.