Charming as Puck
Pippa Grant
One
Nick Murphy (aka a hockey god on the verge of being demoted back to mortal status)
Kami stayed over. That’s weird. I must’ve drunk too much last night. Or she did.
Actually, is she still drunk?
She doesn’t usually lick my ear. Or sleep in my bed. We don’t do breakfast together unless it’s some god-awful early morning meeting demanded by my sister, in which case we pretend we’re just the same old friends who don’t bump uglies, because Felicity would fucking kill me.
However, risk of death aside, if Kami’s up for something this morning, I could get on board.
My dick’s already showing off.
My eyes are gritty. I definitely had too much to drink last night. I barely remember Kami showing up at all after the game. It was our season opener, at home, our first regular season game after winning the cup last year, and it was fucking brutal.
We won. Of course. But it was still brutal.
“Lower,” I tell Kami, my voice ragged in my throat, angling my head, because being licked is nice, but if she’s going to lick me, she could go for somewhere better than my ear.
“Mmmooooooooo,” she answers.
She licks my ear again, reaching the tip of her tongue right into my ear canal, and I lift a heavy arm to guide her face.
And then I freeze.
She’s…furry.
Like a smooth kind of furry, but still furry.
And I’m king of morning breath, but she smells worse than my sister after one of those vegan wheatgrass garlic avocado smoothies she likes to drink.
“Kami?” I rasp out.
“Mmmooooooo.”
I touch her lips, which are wet and sticky and thick.
My eyes fly open.
Kami has brown eyes.
The eyes staring back at me are brown.
Except these brown eyes are huge.
And set behind a thick fuzzy brown snout, beneath a rigid brow line, with ears sticking up where I expected to see morning bed head.
“Fuck!”
I trip over the tangled sheets while I leap up, my head swimming. The cow watches me with those calm brown orbs. “Mmmmoooooooo,” it says again in its baby cow voice.
Shit shit shit. “Ssshhhh,” I hiss at it.
I can’t decide what to think first. My head’s pounding. I’m going to fucking kill my brother-in-law, who is absolutely behind this, unless Kami’s a shapeshifting cow, which isn’t possible, even when I’m hung over.
Also, after the duck incident, if I get caught with another unapproved animal in my condo, I’ll get kicked out of the building.
I don’t have time to move. The season’s just starting. My parents would move me, but I’m thirty-one fucking years old. My parents aren’t going to move me.
Especially since if they did, they’d probably move me into their house, and that’s not happening.
I might be playing in my home city, but I will not move in with my parents.
I fumble in the dim light, looking for my phone. “Don’t shit in my bed,” I tell the cow. “I’ll get you out of here, just please don’t shit in my bed.”
My phone’s not where it belongs. It’s not by my bed. It’s not on my dresser. It’s not in the bathroom.
My pants.
Maybe it’s still in my pants.
Where are my—fuck.
My pants are under the cow. Which is still lying on my bed.
It moos at me again. I fist my hair and stare at it. “Get up,” I tell it.
It stares back.
It also doesn’t move.
Or moooooooove, I can hear my teammates saying.
This would be hilarious if it was anyone else’s apartment.
I grab one pant leg and pull. The cow sniffs at my dangling dick. I shift out of the way, because I’m not into getting my family jewels licked by a freaking baby farm animal.
I’d wonder where the fuck Ares found a baby cow, except I, too, know a thing or two about delivering unexpected livestock to apartment buildings.
And the fucker just one-upped me.
For a quiet dude, he’s fucking evil. He better never put a baby cow in Felicity’s bed or he’ll wake up strapped to the underside of an elephant halfway around the world.
I tug and pull on my pants, the cow gives an indignant baby moo, and finally, my jeans come free.
Without the phone in the pocket.
I press my palms into my eye sockets and think.
There was the game.
Vegas scored on me twice. We still won, because Ares and Frey and Lavoie were on fire, but I shouldn’t have let Vegas score. Not that second one anyway. The first—nobody could’ve stopped that biscuit. But the second was an easy shot to block, and I flubbed it.
I skipped Chester Green’s with the team afterward. Haven’t been in a mood to hang with the bunnies at the bar since charm school last season. Opened a bottle of Jack at home instead. Texted Kami because I shouldn’t drink alone.
She showed up with that wide, borderline innocent smile. I was buzzed. She teased me about it. Said she wouldn’t take advantage of me in my compromised state.
Turned on The Mighty Ducks.
I fucking love that movie.
I talked her out of her pants before the Ducks won their first game, and—and that’s where my phone is.