Alien Romance: Interview with an Alien (Football Paranormal Invasion Abduction Alpha Sci-fi Romance) (Fantasy First New Adult Contact Science Fiction Mystery Sports Alien Short Stories) (63 page)

*****

              Four games into the series with the Bruins and none of the tapes had been released. Everybody could tell that Colby's game was off. The media kept asking him whether or not he was injured. No. He wasn't injured. And even if he were, he wouldn't have used that as an excuse.

              The Rangers were down three games to one in the series. They were on the brink of being eliminated from the playoffs. This would be the end of their season.

              Colby was tired of worrying about when the videotape would be released, or if any of the videotape footage would be released. He couldn't keep worrying about that anymore. It was destroying his self-confidence, completely eroding any ability that he had to concentrate. If the Rangers lost to the Bruins, he would be at fault. He would never forgive himself.

              The night before game five, the decisive game, he made one of the most important decisions of his life.

              Just before they fell asleep, Colby turned to Ivanka, took her hand in his and squeeze, staring into her eyes lovingly.

              “I want you to come to the game tomorrow,” Colby said. “I want you to sit right behind our bench.”

              Ivanka’s eyes opened wide with surprise. “You're serious?” She said. “Wouldn’t I just be a distraction?”

              “This whole series I've been distracted,” Colby said. “And it’s because I haven't been true to you. Haven't been true to myself. I don't want to do this any longer. Even if I win, I’d feel like a coward if I didn't have you there at the games with me.

              “If you're good enough to lie in my bed then your good enough to come watch me do the thing that I do best.”

              “Well, you do a bunch of other things pretty well also,” Ivanka said reaching under the covers and letting her hand slither and slide down Colby's hard chest, resting it on top of his semi-hard cock, giving it a light squeeze.

They were down three goals to one with 10 minutes to go in the third period.

Colby hadn't been able to focus all game. He kept looking back behind the bench, seeing that empty seat. Where was she? Where the hell was she? The one time he invited her to a game, the one time he really wanted to see her there, to feel her love and support and she hadn't shown up. He had no idea what had gone wrong.

Everything seemed lost.

              Bang! Bang! As he sat on the bench, he heard a fist hanging into the glass behind him. He hated when people did that. He turned around, ready to give the fan a telling off, to release all his frustration on the disgruntled customer. What he saw completely changed his mood. It was Ivanka, dressed up in her fur coat, look looking sexy as ever, waving and smiling and trying to tell him that she had some sort of hang up at the club.

              Colby felt a surge of adrenaline pass through his body. It had been weeks, maybe months since he’d felt this good with all his equipment on.

              “Let's go boys!” He bellowed.

              A few of guys looked at each other in surprise. It had been a long time since they heard Colby take the role of the vocal leader, the alpha dog willing to get out in front of the pack.

              For the next ten minutes, the Rangers skated as hard as they had all season, fighting for every loose puck, desperate to get back into the game.

              Goal! Goal!

              Their hard work finally paid off. They scored two quick goals and sent the game into overtime. Sudden Death. First goal wins.

              Goal! The Rangers Win! The Rangers Win!

              The crowd went crazy. The Rangers won the next two games defeating Boston and moving on to the Stanley Cup finals. They made quick work of the Los Angeles Kings. Four straight wins and they were champions.

              Colby had a great series. He felt like he could be MVP. But unfortunately, yet again he didn't win the trophy. This time, it didn't matter.

              After the final game of the series, he brought Ivanka back into the team locker room with him. Then he brought her on the championship parade through Manhattan.

              It wasn't long before the tabloid seized on the story. The Ranger captain was dating a transsexual? Could that be possible? There was plenty of laughing and giggling and whispering. But in New York the only thing that really mattered, the only thing that counted at the end of the day, was winning. Colby had won. He could date, love, or fuck whomever he damn well pleased.

THE END

Another bonus story is on the next page.

Bonus Story 19 of 24

"I can't believe your room looks exactly the same," Kevin said, walking into the small bedroom at the top of the old house and reaching up to tap the bunkbed wall with one palm.

He turned around and tossed his canvas duffel bag to the floor. The clothing inside made a dull thump when it hit the worn, aged wooden boards and the canvas sagged as if it was as tired after their long trip as he was. Patrick stepped in and looked around the space with a nostalgic sparkle in his eye. He sighed, one hand clasped around the woven strap of the identical canvas duffel bag looped over his shoulder and Kevin saw a soft smile touch his best friend's lips.

There were so many memories in that space and they were all reflected in Patrick's gaze as he looked at each piece of furniture, each poster, and each reminder of his younger years throughout the bedroom. It was as if he had never walked out of it six years before when they left together to join the Navy. Now with the years of SEAL training and their first tour behind them, they were finally back in their hometown. Even though they felt completely different, much of what they had seen had proven that nothing had really changed in the little town where they had both grown up.

"It hasn't," Patrick said.

"It's like your parents kept it as a shrine to you."

Patrick laughed and stepped into the room, seemingly broken out of the sentimental spell that had been cast over him by the sight of his childhood bedroom by his best friend's sarcasm. He dropped his bag to the floor beside Kevin's and immediately clambered up the ladder onto the top bunk of his old bunkbeds.

He had never had a sibling that occupied the bottom bunk, but he had asked for the beds when he was six, and, like always, his parents had obliged. When he met Kevin just a few weeks later, it was like he was being given the brother that was supposed to go into that second bed and his instant best friend ended up spending what seemed like just as much time, if not more, in that bottom bunkbed throughout their childhood than he did in his own bed at his home.

"That's fine with me. Maybe that's what made them keep the house rather than selling it when they retired to Florida. They didn't want to interrupt a historical landmark."

Now it was Kevin's turn to laugh and flop onto his back on the lower bunk so that his position mimicked that of his lifelong best friend on the bed above him. He reached up and ran his fingers along the faded marks of the words and drawings that they had made there over the years. It was like looking at a collage of their lives, the handwriting and themes of the sentiments changing and becoming sharper and edgier as the boys grew older and the lines layered on top of the softer, more playful inscriptions of their younger years.

"That's a plausible idea," he said. "But I think it has a whole lot more to do with them wanting you to finally settle down and find some girl to marry and have a horde of little babies with. They figured that if you had a house to live in, you would just have to fill it up with a family or it wouldn't make sense."

"Yeah," Patrick said. "That will definitely be happening some time soon." Kevin heard him give a derisive laugh. "After six years in the Navy, I have no interest in getting tied down. They are just going to have to be happy with me living here with an equally not tied-down roommate for the time being."

"Speaking of which," Kevin said, swinging his legs off of the side of the bed so that he could stand up and grab his bag. "I'm going to go peruse the bedrooms and decide which one is mine."

"Peruse?" Patrick asked with another laugh. "You sure did pick up some fancy words during the tour."

"They sound good to the girls," Kevin told him. "Something about a man in uniform who sounds smart. They love it."

"Yeah, well, that might work for the girls out there, but I wouldn't recommend wandering into the bar tonight wearing your uniform. I think the girls around here are all too used to you to get fooled by that bull."

Kevin shot a glare over his shoulder at Patrick and walked out of the room. He was familiar enough with the rest of the house that he knew where all of the bedrooms were. Now that he was going to be living there with Patrick as adults, though, the space seemed different. He no longer had to think of the big room at the head of the hallway as Patrick's parents' room, or the smaller room between that room and Patrick's as his mother's sewing room. The room that had been Patrick's father's den was now empty except for rows of heavy bookshelves along one wall and a faded globe on the floor.  The final bedroom at the opposite end of the hall had acted as the guest room, but as far as Kevin knew, had never had an actual guest.  It had been preserved like Patrick's, exactly as it had been when they were children, complete with frilly white comforter set and pillows covered in a spray of miniature purple flowers and delicate green leaves.

*****

Patrick and Kevin spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking the truck that contained Kevin's belongings that they had gotten out of the storage unit where his parents had put them before they moved to another town. The family had never been particularly close, but that had been a difficult blow for Kevin to deal with when he got the letter from his mother informing him that they had sold the house that they had always lived in and were moving three towns over so that his father could be closer to his new job.

It had all sounded so positive and optimistic, but Patrick knew that that wasn't the case and that for the most part, the letter had been a lie. Kevin's family had never owned any of the houses that he lived in when he was growing up. Rather, they bounced around from rental property to rental property burning bridges with landlords and making more enemies out of their neighbors with their arguments and late night drunken screaming fits than they did friends.

As for leaving so that his father could be closer to his job, Patrick knew that Kevin's father had never been one to be able to maintain a job for more than a year or so and that at last count he had been without a job for more than a year and a half. More likely than him moving to be close to his job was, they had run out of people who were willing to rent to them and were now moving on in hopes of finding somebody who would hire such an undesirable candidate and rent to a couple without checking their rental history or credit.

Patrick had always felt bad for Kevin and the experiences that he had back home with his family, but he also knew that it was those experiences that made his friendship with him even more important. They were the closest of friends that either of them had ever had, and in a way he felt like having Kevin as his best friend gave his parents the second child that they had always desperately wanted, but had never been able to have, and had given Kevin the type of loving, supportive family that he had never been able to experience either. Almost as soon as they met, Kevin became a fixture at the dinner table, on weekend outings, in the yard playing, and even on family vacations. It was only logical that the two of them would decide to join the Navy and go for SEAL status together.

Once they had everything in the house, Patrick and Kevin took showers, got dressed, and headed out to the neighborhood bar where nearly all of the adults in town gathered on weekends. When they were just out of high school, the pair had spent evenings in the bar playing pool and eating the overly greasy food that filled the menu as they tried to stay beyond the 9 PM cut-off for anyone under the age of 21. Eventually they became such fixtures that in the last weeks before they deployed, they spent nearly all of their time at the bar collecting the good will and advice from the friends, family, and neighbors who gathered there to support them.

Walking back into the bar after more than a year since they had been able to visit on leave before their deployment was just as much coming home again as it had been to step in the house, and immediately Patrick felt the last of the tension and stress ease out of his muscles. They walked up to the bar and slipped onto two of the worn leather stools, but before they could even order their beers, Patrick heard a shout from across the room.

He turned toward the sound of their names being yelled in their direction and saw Evan pushing toward them through the crowd. One of their close friends from school, Evan was supposed to be there that night for their homecoming celebration, but the gleam in his eyes and the slight wobble in his step said that he had been there for much longer and might be celebrating something beyond just his friends coming back.

"Hey, Evan," Patrick said as his friend clasped his hand and pulled him in for a hug.

Evan stepped back and hugged Kevin, pounding him on the back a few jovial times.

"I'm going to do it," Evan announced, opening up his arms and sloshing a bit of beer over the edge of his glass.

"You're going to do what?" Patrick asked.

He looked over at the bartender and gestured at the glass in Evan's hand with his eyes and then between Kevin and him with one finger. The bartender nodded and reached for two glasses, filling them with a frothy ale from the tap and sliding them toward the two men.

"I'm getting deployed."

"What?" Kevin asked, setting the beer his had picked up to sip down and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"I'm getting deployed."

"I thought you were in the reserves."

"I am, but my unit got called up. I'm leaving in six weeks."

"Wow," Patrick said, unsure of what else to say. Evan seemed unusually excited at the prospect and he wasn't sure what the appropriate response at that moment would be. "That's…"

Before he could finish, Evan whirled around and reached his arm out toward a blond woman standing a few feet away. She took his hand and let him pull her toward them.

"That's not the good part," he said. "This is."

"Hi," the woman said, extending her hand to them. "I'm Brandy."

"Brandy and I are getting married."

"Married?" Patrick asked.

He had never met this woman and the announcement was truly surprising to him.

"Yep. She just agreed to it a few minutes ago."

"That's great, Evan," Kevin said, sounding more convinced than Patrick was feeling, but still hesitant. "When's the big day?"

"As soon as possible," Evan said. "We want to do it before I leave. I wanted to ask the two of you if you'll be my groomsmen."

Patrick looked at Kevin and then back at Evan. They both nodded. Regardless of the circumstances, their friend was getting married and they knew that it was their responsibility to be there for him.

"Of course," Patrick said, lifting his glass as if in toast of Evan.

"Awesome," Evan said. He looked back over his shoulder and another blond woman, this one smaller and slightly younger-looking than the first, walked up. "This is Brandy's sister, Eileen."

"You'll be helping me plan the wedding."

Patrick was so lost in Eileen's big green eyes and the swell of her hips beneath her tight jeans that he almost missed that sentence. When it sank in he snapped his eyes to Evan and then back to Eileen.

"What?"