Would You Rather

12 - WYR: never go anywhere without socks or never walk on grass again?

To: f.koskinen@nhl.wolves.com

From: bauer.ice.arena@nhl.wolves.com

Topic: OVERRIDE // RE: ice time request / 2 week

YOUR ICE TIME REQUEST HAS BEEN MANUALLY OVERRIDDEN. DETAILS:

I'm giving you just Wednesday night.

You need to rest more than you need another twenty-six hours of ice time.

I admire the passion, but there is a limit to what is helpful and what is overexertion. 

Nico.

Do not break into the rink or do dryland outside of practice, I will know and I will scratch you. Do not try me. 

***

FIDAN

We use more than half of the Nashville condoms in the next week. There were ten in the box and she was thoroughly surprised when I stated I can and normally like to go twice. She likes that I can go twice. I make a point to myself not to exhaust myself too much with extra ice time on the days she wants to get together. Which I let her decide, because if it was up to me, I'd spend every fucking second of my week in her bed.

By Wednesday of the following week, we're sort of built into an idea of a routine. I go over or she comes to mine and we're on each other the second we see each other. It's great. Then I lay around and she reads her textbook chapter and we wait, like, fifteen to twenty minutes for her to get in enough studying and for my dick to recover before rolling back together again, slower the second time.

I cook up a list of questions in my notes app to have during those fifteen minutes. She probably finds it annoying but her input is funny and I like laying face down in bed and letting her scratch my back while she flips through flash cards.

It's like that right now, my face halfway submerged in her pillow, stretching out the back of my calf with flexes of my foot, trying to get the tingling to go away, breathing in her cinnamon smell and watching her flip cards over.

"Would you rather..." I start, watching her long fingers on the white paper. "Live a hundred years in the future, or a hundred years in the past?"

She stops on a card, rereading it, then turns to me, flattening her palm over my mid-back. "The past. I think I could neck it as a farmer a hundred years ago. The prejudice against women would probably suck and I don't love the clothing options but... I don't know what's in the future. The Earth could be uninhabitable in the mid-strip from climate change or... I dunno. The Pope could send us into a nuclear winter. All unknowns."

I nod, drowsy and a bit sore. I want her to rub my back at all hours of the day. I'd be so content to just lay here and feel her fingernails gently scrape over my skin. "I think I'm going to the future. I want to know, you know?"

"But what if it sucks? Is there a clause in the question that you can come back?"

"Naah," I blink my eyes shut. "There's no such thing as undoing time travel. If you go into the future you're going to know too much to come back and if you go into the past you're going to fuck up the timeline too much to mess with it more."

"I guess that's a good point."

We're quiet, listening to her flip cards for a few minutes. I let my hand snake out from beside me, returning the favor, circling my fingertips around the skin on her thigh. She's soft and warm, a slight peach fuzz over the skin there that I can feel against my fingertips.