WHO: Hockey & Figure Skating WHEN: Friday night, 27 August WHERE: Figure Skating’s apartment in NYC WHAT: Hockey was in a bachelor auction; Figure Skating didn't buy him and it's all about the woman who did. WARNINGS TBA
The night hadn’t gone like it was supposed to and, looking back with the help of six bottles of beer, four glasses of wine and a shot of Scotch, Figure Skating was no longer surprised. She also wobbled when she walked and her shins were scraped raw from all four corners of the coffee table. A coffee table she was going to bash into firewood the minute her head stopped pounding—except she didn’t have an axe, or a fireplace. The bachelor auction had had candles on the tables, little cheerfully flickering flames on scentless white votives in red glass bowls at every table like a bad Chinese restaurant on Valentine’s Day. The type of place that a selfish, self-centered, egotistical hockey player would take whatever bleached-blonde-puckbunny happened to be his one night stand at or around February 14th. Or in late August, after being bought and paid for by a cheap knock off of his ex-girlfriend, who already looked suspiciously like his fucking publicist. Fucking. Publicist. Figure Skating slumped deeper into the couch; her head smacked its arm and she whimpered. Fucking and Hockey and his tall, blonde, buxom Amazons did not belong anywhere near each other in a sentence. Or near each other at all, in a perfect world, but Figure Skating had very much given up on perfect Worl—, er, worlds. Whatever. Hockey was most definitely not fucking the knock-off-Amazon-whatever; he wasn’t. Probably. Probably not. Figure Skating grunted as she kicked her legs off the couch and threw the rest of her body over them, wobbled more, but walked on the spindly heels; she was still wearing the delicate black ankle boots and silver dress from the stupid auction. One step, two, three and her ankle connected sharply with the corner of the coffee table. “Fucking piece of trash!” She pulled up her foot, grabbing at the heel as she hopped on her other foot because that would help her balance. But it did, sort of; she didn’t fall as she completed minute turns by jump around the obstacle course of her living room and at least she was still moving.
Everything would have been just fine if that old woman wearing too much White Diamonds had won the auction and gotten that date with Hockey; that had been the plan and the reason Sonja, Stan’s lovi—ah, caring girlfriend had sipped her champagne and savoured his discomfort without ever touching the paddle while he was on stage. The white haired woman had had a gleam in her eyes that Figure Skating could see from across the room and she’d thoroughly enjoyed the prospect of Hockey fending off her advances during a dinner. But no, in the last thirty seconds of the bidding, there’d been another bidder – someone that Sonja didn’t even see and before she’d had a second to process it’d been all going, going, gone and her first look at the cheap blonde in the tacky dress was when the puckbunny draped herself all over Hockey. For photographers. That’d been when Figure Skating had decided to start knocking back the wine in earnest and to hell with her morning routines. Her head was spinning now; she’d avoided banging into the coffee table – had, actually, made a full circuit around the table – until she crashed into the other arm of the couch and stayed there for a second. It was nice to not be moving anymore, to cling to something solid and safe and familiar – like clinging to Hockey, but not. This was just the arm of her couch, which had banged the knee of her less damaged leg, and her apartment… her apartment was just going to be her tonight. But her hand still moved, against her will, and picked up the small clock on the table by the couch. Late, late, late, late, late, it drummed in her head like Bolero, a call to arms, a war march in her temples. Not just in her temples. The world was pounding, loud, aggressive—drunk.
For the hundredth time that night, Figure Skating stumbled away from the couch and wobble around her living room in the ridiculously spindly ankle boots that had seemed so essential when Hockey’d be spending his night with an eighty-year-old woman that’d grab his ass at every opportunity. Well, so much for that dream. Figure Skating did stay on her feet all the way to the door, which was the longest walk she’d taken since coming home and unlocked the door in only two tries. It took longer to recognize Hockey standing there, on her front door, and she had blink twice and shift to one side to get the light to him – and the lipstick on his collar. For a second she almost slammed the door, but that would be loud and frost her head hurt. “Well you look… spiffy,” she said and ‘spiffy,’ in this case was code for: ‘you totally tumbled the hot blonde, didn’t you?’ Rather than wait for an answer, Figure Skating retreated back into her apartment and carefully retraced her steps to the couch, the nice couch, the couch that never cheated on her with trampy puckbunnies that looked like his ex-girlfriend. Probably.