Penalty Kill

Harper

I'm tired, I'm annoyed and I'm over it—and that's just the tip of my pissed-off iceberg. For starters, I slept like shit last night. Sure, I fell asleep just fine after I spent hours convincing myself I was no longer going to be thinking about a well-dressed hockey player after the events of my evening. Turns out my mind had different plans after I successfully fell asleep. And that plan just so happened to include a very vivid, very intimate sex dream.

I woke up in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat and breathing heavy, thoughts of Jake's large, warm hands roving over my naked body in ways that I'm sure had me moaning in my sleep. He never stopped kissing me, my hands taking in the stubble on his cheeks and running their way through his long, slightly curly hair. I swear to god I woke up and could still feel his hair on my hands.

What the fuck is wrong with me. Seriously. I encounter one attractive athlete during my ordinary, normal day, and all bets are off? I get so derailed that my subconscious conjures up the most realistic sex dream I've ever had in my life. Even taking a second to think about it now, in the last fifteen minutes of my shift, is bringing heat to my cheeks and making my heart race.

And not only did my overactive imagination wake me up at three in the morning, it kept me up for hours afterwards, making this ten-hour day even more of a slog than it needed to be. Oh, and I slept through my alarm, which not only made me miss my train, but in turn made me late for work and unable to consume any good coffee before I got to work. It also meant I didn't have time to pack my lunch, so I've been living off of shitty vending machine snacks throughout the entire day.

The catalog system crashed earlier, resulting in an abnormally high volume of phone calls I needed to answer back to back for several hours of my morning. And the few people I've had to interact with today have been nothing short of assholes, having short tempers due to materials not being available when they said they would be online, or just generally taking out their negative, shitty moods on me for no good reason.

Fuck, and I can't emphasize this enough, this day. Royally.

All I want to do is go home. I want to go home, and I want to crawl into bed and enjoy my day off tomorrow doing nothing but reading in said bed with snacks and my cat, Clover. That's it. All I have to do is make it through the next fifteen minutes of re-shelving books in the kids section, which appears to be mercifully empty based on how quiet it currently is at nearly six at night.

The kids section is a nightmare. Not only are most of the books I'm re-shelving in various states of stickiness, but the whole area is always in some state of disarray. Sometimes it's just a few books strewn here or there, and sometimes it's a whole lot of books literally thrown about everywhere. I haven't been over there all day, and while I regret saving it until the very end of shift, I'm grateful it will keep me thoroughly occupied.

As I'm getting ready to turn down the first aisle of kid-height shelves, I pause to take a look at the large stack of books I currently have in my arms to determine which part of the alphabet I should start at first. After combing over the spines for a minute, I look up to gain my bearings and take in just how fucked up the section is after a long Saturday. What I see at the end of the aisle has the books in my arms nearly clattering to the floor.

Sitting on a brightly colored ottoman that's usually occupied by a small child is the comically large Jake Bryers. I fumble to keep the books in my arms, my mouth agape as I take in the sight before me. He's got his nose in a copy of Green Eggs and Ham, and he's slowly lowering it so his pretty eyes are peering over the top of the book.

I'm stunned as my eyes rove over his backwards hat, trailing down his sweatshirt-clad torso to the silver watch poking out from his sleeve at his wrist, to his distressed jeans, down to his sporty sneakers. He is the very essence of well-polished jock, and my heart is doing stupid little cartwheels while my brain is simultaneously sounding alarms in an effort to get me to keep my fucking shit together.