“What are you doing here?” I wondered with eyes wide.

My band had just finished its third little gig in Alberta’s capital city. We played six songs at a pizza bar on Whyte Avenue, the central hub of Edmonton’s arts district. Our set list, although short, had been heavily sided on my vocals so I’d gulped down a ton of water right before we went on. After twenty minutes in front of a room of college kids and indie aficionados, I had to go to the bathroom as soon as we were done. When I stepped back into the hallway, there was Ben, waiting for me.

He stepped toward me, closing the gap between us, and kept moving forward until he’d backed me into a corner. “I wanted to see you.”

I smirked. This time there was no second guessing. He wanted to get laid. He’d made it very clear the last time I was over at his apartment that he planned on getting me over there again once his injury healed over. Almost two weeks had passed since then. Tonight was the last day of September.

“How did you know where I’d be?” I asked.

He couldn’t be in the same place as me by coincidence. Ben lived in downtown and the Oilers played their games at Rexall Place, north of downtown. Whyte Avenue, in Old Strathcona, was in the opposite direction. The last time I’d spoken to him, a couple of days after our failed booty call, he told me he had a headache and his neck felt stiff. I hadn’t expected him to seek me out. I didn’t know he’d been inside the pizza bar watching us play long enough to know where to find me.

Ben shrugged. “Facebook.”

Of course. Like any other band, we used our social media accounts to relay information to the world. The Automatic Flowers official Facebook page as of late was a conglomerate of pictures, information on where to see us play in Edmonton, and short videos. We’d committed to doing two videos a week for the duration of our stay at Grant’s studio: one update about our work on the album and one acoustic cover song.

“You could have sent me a text, you know,” I told Ben.

A warning would have been nice. It would have been nice to have extra underwear and facial moisturizer for the next morning. Considering what had happened the first time we slept together, I knew it wasn’t going to be just once before I was sent on my way. It would be until we were both spent and fell asleep in his bed. I didn’t have to ask. If I went over to his place I knew I’d be spending the night.

Instead of apologizing, he put one of his palms against the wall, pinning me against it. He grazed his lips against mine as he whispered, “Surprise.”

It was the most aggressive I’d ever seen him. Or maybe it was just the horniest. He was a good looking athlete. Two weeks was probably the longest he’d gone without sex in years. I probably wasn’t even his only current option. Just his first for the time being.

His other hand was on my hip, inching southward, and I gave into his kiss for a few seconds before I pushed him away. “I have to tell someone I’m leaving,” I said.

Ben smiled at that. He nodded without a word and let me walk away from him.

My bandmates were scattered around the room. After my run to the washroom and my run-in with Ben, I was sure that enough time had passed for all of our gear to be reloaded into the van. The nice part about working on an album and only playing in one city was that we didn’t need to bring the gear trailer everywhere. Since we drove from the ranch straight to the venues and back, and the big green passenger van wasn’t acting as our home, as long as the four of us could fit with all the gear, we could roll in and out. It didn’t have to be too organized or comfortable.

Parker was the first of my bandmates that I spotted. He was in line to claim his personal pan pizza ticket. Another band was starting their set and I assumed the rest of my boys had joined the audience to check out the local talent.

“Hey,” I greeted as I pulled out my own ticket stub from the back pocket of my skinny jeans and held it out to him, “here, take mine, too.”

“What kind of pizza do you want?” he asked, misunderstanding my intention.

“No, I mean, you can have mine,” I clarified.

Parker raised an eyebrow. “You going somewhere, Deels?”

“Yeah, I...” I’m off to go hook up with some of the other local talent. “I’m heading out. I’ll see you in the morning.”

A smirk crept its way onto the drummer’s lips. “Oh, Delia. He’s here?”

My bandmates weren’t stupid. They knew what it meant the two times that I’d been away from the ranch overnight. Beyond that, Parker was my roommate. He’d had a chance to grill me. I only told him that I met a hot guy to fool around with. I didn’t say anything about the Oilers or Ben’s concussion.

“Yup,” I answered.

Parker turned around, facing the room, scanning it without a hint of subtlety. He turned halfway back to me and used his chin to gesture. “Is that him?”

Following the general direction of Parker’s gesture, I spotted Ben near the exit. He was watching Parker and me have a conversation about him. He didn’t look impatient, but he did look ready to leave. “Yeah, that’s him,” I responded.

Parker waved at Ben from across the room with a toothy grin. Ben looked a bit puzzled but he waved back a few times, less enthusiastically. Parker would have kept waving if I didn’t yank his arm down.

“Oh my God,” I hissed. “Can you not?”

He cackled. He actually cackled. “He’s pretty cute. A little buff for my taste. But hey, if that’s your new thing—”

“Okay,” I interrupted. Just because I was the only girl in the band and Parker was the only gay guy in the band, it didn’t mean I wanted to hear any more of his opinion on Ben’s attractiveness. “I’m leaving now.”

“Well, have fun.” Parker wiggled his eyebrows at me and teased, “Call me if you need any help.”

He may have been all for making fun of me as I went off into the night, but Parker was all for me having my own fun, too. Parker was a fun person – pleasant to be around and proud of who he was. He had gotten into the same sad, angry music as Rich, Trevor and me in high school, because it had been a dark time for him before he came out. Music was the place where none of it mattered. That was how he’d ended up as our drummer, because he was otherwise well-liked by our peers and even involved in school clubs. Hiding who he really was had been a drag for him. The breakup between Rich and me had been a drag for Parker, too. He’d gone through enough crap on his own in the last few years. He didn’t need to deal with ours. He just wanted all of us, as a band, to stay happy. Whatever fun I was going to get into in Edmonton, he would support it.

It was a Friday night in Edmonton’s most happening neighborhood. The bars and restaurants were packed. There were lines forming outside the nightclubs. All of the available free street parking had long been occupied hours before. But Ben wasn’t dirt cheap. It just meant that he’d dropped a few bucks to park his car while he convinced me to go home with him, which didn’t take long. We walked a few blocks to a parkade.

“I’m right here,” he said as he clicked on a keyless remote, prompting flashing tail lights from a black Lincoln Navigator.

“Did you get into a car accident?” I asked when we were both in the vehicle.

“No,” he answered and gave me a quizzical look as he started the engine.

“This isn’t what you were driving the last time I saw you.” I raised an eyebrow at him.

“Oh. A few of the guys on the team—the ones that have played here for a couple of years—they told me that it could basically snow any day now,” Ben explained. “So I took the other car back to the rental place. I figured this would be better for the long winter, you know?”

Actually, I didn’t know. Victoria rarely got more than thirty centimetres of snow for a whole year and the snow in Vancouver, though more, wasn’t really anything to get up in arms about. I’d seen heavy snowfall on tour but the band never stayed in one place long enough to experience the misery of a long winter.

I guffawed. “And what, they didn’t have any Hyundais?”

Ben got a big laugh out of that as he backed out of the parking spot.

“Hey, you know what this car has that the last one didn’t?”

“What?”

He pawed at the middle console with one hand, keeping his eyes where he was steering. After a moment he found a cord and held it out in my direction. I followed the path that it took, attached to the stereo interface out of the AUX port.

“You won’t have to listen to the radio,” he suggested.

My phone was quickly out of the front pocket of my backpack. I plugged it in, unlocked it, and clicked on the icon for my music library. I didn’t keep a lot of music on my phone. I had an old school iPod (the kind with the click-wheel that could only play songs and videos) that housed my digital collection and I had a vinyl record collection back home. I did have a playlist on my phone that I’d been listening to over the last week in preparation for our next acoustic cover.

I powered on the stereo and selected the auxiliary as the audio source. When the first notes of a song were streaming through the speakers, I set my phone down in one of the cup holders.

“Oh man. I was bracing myself for you to put on some gut wrenching heavy powerviolence,” Ben exhaled, recognizing the R&B track, “and then you go and put on something that has Kanye West.”

I was doubtful that Ben ever had to brace himself for anything. I explained, “There’s one song that our band is working on, we kind of want my vocals to be…bigger. Like, I’m used to just singing at a normal volume without vocal runs or anything like that. I made this playlist of women that really sing so I can get into the mindset of belting it out.”

I wasn’t a singer in the traditional sense like Alicia Keys. Not even like Hayley Williams from Paramore. I sang well and my style worked for the band but I didn’t have the kind of voice that would land me on a reality show singing competition. I never really sang loud or explored the full potential of my vocal range. Neither did Rich. We had yet to write a song that required it.

“This guy I know, Kris, one of my former teammates, knew all the words to this song,” Ben said. “They even played a customized version for him on the jumbotron a few times.”

“What do you mean by customized?” I wondered.

“The rap part, instead of of Kanye it was Kris,” Ben answered and chuckled to himself, adding, “and he could not rap.”

Estelle’s “American Boy” was the song playing. I’d chosen it for my playlist not because it featured Kanye West but because it had a little bit of everything I was studying vocally for the next week. Her voice had such a nice vibrato in its undertone and it sounded effortless. She could sing slow or fast—she was a rapper, too—without it compromising her smooth tone or how she hit her notes. The song didn’t use dynamic vocal range but if I had to guess, she was actually holding back.

The drive from Old Strathcona to downtown felt longer than the drive from downtown to Prairie Barn Studios. Maybe it was the anticipation of sleeping with each other again, knowing that we’d already meant to until Ben got his concussion. I sang along half-heartedly to the music that came through the speakers once in a while. Ben wasn’t much of a talker. He was more of the strong, silent type, I decided. He said and did only to get what he wanted.

My theory seemed pretty plausible once we were in the elevator. Back at the pizzeria, I already knew I was going to fuck him. But the way he kissed me in the elevator really drove the idea home. He wasn’t overly demanding. His tongue slipped into my mouth only a few times, just enough to get me to respond and try to get closer to him. Forget words. He didn’t need them. He was better at doing than saying. I was pretty sure that the way he was stroking my ribcage with his thumb was enough to make me jump him right there if the doors hadn’t opened.

There was no detour on the way to the bedroom once we were inside his apartment. He had me pinned to the mattress on my back in nothing but my thong in no time. My fingers trailed down his solid core to the waistband of his boxer briefs where he was pressed against me. My fingers dipped beneath the fabric on his wide hips and I eased it down as far as I could as I went over the cheeks of his ass.

He moved off me momentarily, ending our skin-to-skin contact as he got rid of his underwear and went for a condom in the drawer of the bedside table. He changed our lighting situation, clicking on the lamp. We’d been too busy making out and undressing each other to think about that when we entered, the only light coming in from the hallway. I took the moment to catch my breath as he ripped open the foil packaging.

“For the record,” he said as he rolled the condom down his length, “I like the way you sing.”

It was a little confusing. I raised an eyebrow. The conversation about singing had long been over back in the car. “Thanks, Ben,” I responded anyway.

He reclaimed his spot, moving over me and settling between my legs. He kissed me on the mouth once and worked his way down, leaving a trail of kisses down my navel. He stopped where my waist and underwear met, kissing my thigh instead. Then he peered up at me with his beautiful blues eyes and gave me a new kind of smile that I’d never seen on him before.

“You make this face sometimes when you’re singing. You close your eyes as you’re feeling the music you’re playing. It’s incredibly sexy,” Ben’s words were a harsh whisper as he finally slid the thong down my legs and to the ground. “I want to make you make that face right now.”

---

We got it down to a science in the next two weeks. Ben and I liked the pleasure we brought to each other, so we kept at it. We also got healthier about it compared to the first two times we slept together. My small backpack was expertly packed with bathroom essentials and clean underwear. I took my makeup off and we both brushed our teeth before we got down to business. Each of us got up to pee at some point, either right after the sex or in the middle of the night. We fell asleep against each other, because Ben was still convinced that he’d keep me up with his snoring if we didn’t.

We’d even established two ground rules. First of all, we knew what we were getting into. We were only hooking up; we weren’t in a pre-stage where we were “getting to know each other” and we weren’t dating each other. There obviously wasn’t a fidelity clause on our non-relationship, but I would be surprised if he was sleeping with anyone else. We were both so busy.

The Automatic Flowers were finally done demoing and we were into the rehearsal portion of pre-production. Ben had been cleared by the Oilers medical staff to resume workouts and the NHL schedule was so finite. Even without seeing game action post-concussion, he still went to the practices, morning skates, and games like every other player on the team. I’d never even seen Ben carry out his normal life in the daytime, unless dropping me off at the ranch after morning-afters counted. I saw him at night, at his place, and alone.

The other thing we’d agreed upon was to not interfere with each other’s lives. I was a musician in an indie rock band and he was an NHL hockey player. Ben was out of commission for the time being but soon he’d be back in game shape and ready to play for his team. He told me that he didn’t fuck the night before game days. He didn’t get much ice time, he said, so he didn’t need to be sluggish, too.

My extracurricular activity didn’t trip me up back at the ranch either. Ben and I both knew that I was accountable to my band. I could have all the fun I wanted as long as I showed up on time, prepared to work. But I would never be late anyway because Ben’s internal clock had been adjusted to Hockey Player Time for years. He was always up early, so I was up early when I spent the night with him.

I’d slept in his bed more times than my lower bunk at the studio house by the time the weekend of my rehearsal week came around. Every night was the same but different. There was no way I would be able to walk if I let him fuck me into oblivion each night, even with days off in between. A few times we’d gone at it a few different ways until we were completely spent but usually, after we’d both been satisfied, we just ended up next to each other, Ben tracing over the tattoos on my arms until we fell asleep.

He was particularly fond of outlining the umbrella tattoo on the inner side of my right elbow. I had no complaints. I liked the feeling of the feather-light pressure of his finger.

“Are you guys taking Thanksgiving off?” he asked as he traced over a raindrop.

Ben meant the band. All week long we’d been practicing and building off our demos in anticipation of recording. We started at noon and went until dinner time. We couldn’t power through it and play for seven straight hours; there was a lot of starting and stopping. But my fingers felt raw from all of the guitar I’d been playing—acoustic, electric, and bass—every day over the last week. My fingertips were ugly and calloused on the palm side.

“Yeah,” I responded. “I can’t wait.”

It was a good thing that we as a band had allotted an allowance week into our album production timeline. The Automatic Flowers were supposed to take a whole week off after a week of rehearsal. But the week was over and we all agreed that we would be better off if we practiced on for a few more days. Even at the discounted rate from our producer, recording an album was ridiculously expensive. Time was money, literally, in the studio. We wanted to maximize our studio sessions with Grant recording our material instead of wasting precious time making small adjustments to it.

So instead of taking the whole coming week off, we were going to work through the weekend, take (Canadian) Thanksgiving Monday off, then get back to work on Tuesday. We didn’t want to over edit or over rehearse either—that could do more damage than good. We wouldn’t rehearse again after we played our weekly gig, which would fall on a Thursday.

“Do you want to come to Thanksgiving dinner?”

I’d been watching Ben’s index finger trace over my skin but his question prompted me to look him in the eye. It was out of left field. We had ground rules. We’d settled into a routine the last couple of times we’d seen each other.

“What?” I didn’t screech but I didn’t hide the surprise in my voice either.

“My friend Cam and his wife, Kelsey, they love Thanksgiving. Cam and I were roommates when we played together in Chicago,” Ben explained. “Anyway, it’s our first season here and they insist that they have to have their own dinner even though most of our teammates either don’t care or are going to another guy’s dinner. I’m worried that there will be a feast for like, only five people, if you don’t go with me.”

“So if I go it will be six people?” I giggled. “I’m in the apathetic group, Ben. I don’t give a shit about Canadian Thanksgiving.”

The only way The Automatic Flowers had been able to move on from Victoria was because we’d toured relentlessly for the last few years. We couldn’t have created an American fan base without playing upwards of 80 shows a year. I hadn’t been home for Thanksgiving since my last year of high school. My dad was First Nations and a small business owner. Thanksgiving wasn’t exactly at the top of my family’s holiday priorities. Actually I was pretty sure that for most Canadians it was just a nice three day weekend.

“It’s not like a date, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Ben stopped tracing over my skin. “It’s just food. Lots of food.”

That wasn’t what I was worried about per se. I was worried about the questions that would be asked. You couldn’t just bring the person you were sleeping with to a social event and not expect to have to answer questions. So you couldn’t bring the person you were sleeping with to Thanksgiving and reveal you were just sleeping with them—so please don’t ask any questions—over turkey and cranberry sauce, either.

“How would you even introduce me?” I said skeptically.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ben’s tone was about as sarcastic as mine. “Maybe I’ll say, ‘hey, this is my friend Delia’.”

I didn’t argue with that. He was right. He could say that. In fact, it could be his pack of Thanksgiving lies. Because Ben and I, we weren’t friends. We were only benefits.

Notes

Uh, is this the ex-Blackhawks chapter or what? Kris Versteeg somehow ended up with a shout out. His version of "American Boy" that got played on the United Center jumbotron is [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=addu5vCTRh8]here[/url], for anyone that hasn't heard it. Canadian Thanksgiving is in October. It's the next chapter. So I guess I've also revealed that the first of Ben's 2011-2012 Oilers teammates (and former Blackhawks teammate) that Delia will meet is...Cam Barker? What? Strange choice, I know. You'll see why.

Extended Chapter Notes

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