Adam's Rib

~Sorry a continuation was so late in coming, chapter 3 is not far behind this time.~

"Any yes or no question and you'll answer truthfully no matter what?" Adam asked mischievously, resolving to take every advantage of the offer now that he didn't need to actually figure out who the woman across from him was.

"Yes. Any twenty." If Chaya weren't so suddenly concerned with an odd desire to run her fingers along the laugh lines curling impishly around his lips and the best way to quash that desire, she might have noticed the wicked glint in his eyes or been suspicious of the wording to his question, but just now her brain was back in high school itself…

One of Adam's favourite sports topics seemed to be women athletes. EB thought he was a chauvinist pig and never had any qualms letting him know exactly how she felt about it. The truth was that once he saw how angry it made her whenever he made a comment about it; he'd played up the issue and exaggerated his opinions in hopes of getting her off guard. He liked seeing her slightly out of control and off her mark, it was a rare position for her and truth be told he thought the unexpected passion made her seem beautiful and alive the way her cold intelligence couldn't.

Take the way their feud had started; his assistant Emma. Emma was a lousy reporter and an even worse sports reporter. She lacked the writing ability to make anything seem exciting and she had zero interest in sports, let alone knowledge of how any of them were played. Adam was a perfectionist, he only wanted the best and he damn well wanted some passion to show up in his section, after all it might only be a high school paper, but he intended to use it for his resume if needed. So he told Emma the truth; that he was pissed off that some girl who didn't know jack about sports or sports writing was just stuck on his staff to make it look all title-niney. That brought EB, all riotgrrl guns blazing and she'd been so remarkably upset that he'd just kept pushing it; something he may not have done if he'd known it would make it her personal quest to humiliate him all year over it, and he'd started making comments about women trying to play on men's teams.

He knew EB played goalie for an otherwise all male hockey team. In fact, he'd seen her play once and though he'd never let her know that he even knew she played, in his opinion she was really good. His real objection was about women who couldn't play as well as men playing the gender card and getting on a team at the expense of some guy who was far better than them. EB just heard "women can't hack it on men's teams" no matter how he'd put it and taken it personally.

EB was a tomboy; she'd always just gotten along better with guys and had always been pretty much treated and considered one of the boys. At 18 she'd barely even noticed guys in a sexual or romantic way and it had been an inconvenience at the start of her high school career when out of nowhere it seemed she'd sprouted a double D set of breasts and hips to go with them and had been forced suddenly to be banished to her own locker room for games. She was embarrassed of her body and dressed in baggy clothes to keep guys from making lewd comments or treating her like some dumb, weak girl. She wished that all those years of having to prove herself as good as the guys to get them to see her as an equal was the only reason that Adam's chauvinistic remarks made her blood boil, but she knew for some reason he pissed her off more than anyone else. After all, she'd heard everything he said and worse a hundred times before from parents of other guys in the league who either thought it was unseemly for a girl to be playing on a team and in such close proximity to so many hormonal boys or were humiliated on behalf of their sons that some girl had just made them look stupid, yet for some reason it just mattered to her that Adam Kohn thought she was a good player and deserved her spot and the fact that he made her feel so aware of her gender and insecure that she had proved herself made her even more angry at him. And then there was the dream.

EB dreamed about hockey all the time. For her it was pretty much just a consequence of her single-minded determination to excel at it and her competitive nature and goaltending was such a mentally involved position that all the visualizing she did to get into her zone on the ice translated into playing the game in her sleep too. Most of the time her dreams just involved a normal game, pucks being shot at her and her stopping the pucks, but then there was the other dream.

EB crouched down in front of the goal, staring intently at her goal posts in her customary pre-game ritual. Her friend and teammate Doug skated around the goal and tapped her leg pads with his stick in his own good luck superstition.

"You ready for battle?" He asked.

"Am I ever not?"

"You goalies and your egos," Doug grinned, "It's no wonder no one can get the puck by you, yours blocks the rest of the net."

EB shook her head and tried to repress a smile. "Well maybe if you cultivated your ego into an extra player you wouldn't let up so many breakaways I had to bail you out on."

"Touché!"

"Just keep that Erikson kid away from me, he thinks because he's 200 pounds he's going to intimidate me, but if he runs me one more time this season I'm going to drop the gloves."

"Shit, if you get tossed Rob's going to end up in goal, so keep your temper to yourself at least until we're up 10 goals or something."

Adam didn't really care for hockey all that much. He followed the NHL enough to write recaps stories on it, he understood the rules, he'd just never been enamoured with it and he wasn't looking forward to sitting through this game. He and Jen, the Herald's photographer, were there to cover the game and get a story on Ivan and Fedya, two brothers who both went to Central, but played for different teams and were facing off against each other in the playoffs. He would admit that the story should be a good one, but he really wished that he wasn't the one who ad to spend the next three hours in the cold squinting to see a puck being chased around.

"Hey, want to bet on who's going to win?" Jen asked.

"Not really."

"You're no fun. I'll bet you five bucks the blue team wins."

"Why?"

"Their goalie has weirder rituals."

"What kind of an analysis is that?"

"You're not a hockey fan are you? The more bat-shit the goalie appears the better they are; that's just the way it is."

"What are you, the farmer's almanac of sports' superstitions?"

"Dude, my family is Canadian, I know these things."

Down on the ice the game was beginning to

get ugly. It was the beginning of the third period and the score was 1-0 in favour of the Bluejays, EB's team. The game had become a real goaltender duel and EB made some insanely spectacular saves the first two periods to keep her team ahead, even Adam would have to admit that the acrobatics of the goalies were keeping him thoroughly engrossed in the game. The Falcons were getting frustrated and things were starting to get chippy. Doug was doing his best to keep Tim Erickson, the Falcons chief instigator away from EB, some might say that he was trying to protect her from getting injured, but in Doug's estimation Erickson was the one in danger if he set off EB's temper.

"Whoo," Jen muttered to Adam up in the stands as the third scrum broke out in five minutes, "the refs are really fucking this game up now. Absolutely no control."

"See, this is why hockey isn't popular here, all this fighting, I'm going to get a coffee, maybe they'll actually be playing a sport again by the time I get back." Adam made his way out of the ice area and out into the lobby to the concession area, thereby missing an important detail.

While the refs tried to separate two shouting players, Erickson skated into the goal crease so far that he was actually pushing EB into the cross bar. Doug tried shoving him back out as Tim continued to bump his chest up against EB.

"You come in the blue one more time Erickson and you're going to be singing falsetto." EB growled. Erickson punched Doug just below the throat hard enough to knock him back.

"Any time little girl." Tim snarled, knocking her helmet back off her head. In the bleachers Jen started laughing as she recognized the entertainment editor.

EB had had it, she lunged at Erickson throwing her blocker off and curling it into a fist. Doug grabbed her arm just in time to keep her from slamming it into Tim's face.

"Cut it out EB, you're going to get a suspension."

"You, and you out of here," the Ref yelled, pointing at Erickson and EB.

"Oh come on," EB argued, "He was in my fucking crease; he's been running me all game."

"I don't care you're all out, and that goes for anyone else, the next person I see throwing a glove is gone too, open your mouth again and you're going to get a game misconduct."

EB glared at the ref, muttered threateningly at Rob, her back up, "just keep the next 5 minutes scoreless or I'm going to have Doug take slap shots on you with the weighted puck, understand?" and stormed off to the locker rooms

"Dude, you missed the show," the photographer said to Adam when he returned bearing two cups of coffee.

"Wait, that's a different goalie."

"Yeah, that hulking guy picked a fight with the first one."

"I thought goalies didn't fight?"

"This one does. They're from Central too, you should get an interview."

"Where is he?" Adam asked.

"The locker room," Jen said with a smirk. She figured for all the shit that Adam talked about women athletes he deserved to be shocked to find the goalie he'd been raving over happened to be none other than a female.

Adam was about to be shocked alright.

EB threw her gear down on her hockey bag angrily as she stripped out of it., she was getting so fucking tired of the refs in the league letting the other teams take almost unlimited runs on her trying to show her up as some weak, scared female and then penalizing her for standing up for herself. She didn't care exactly that she was being challenged, she just wanted them to be fair and let her give back what she got. She wished that she didn't know that the team's chances of taking home the championship didn't require her to be in goal because she sorely longed to just really throw the gloves, beat the crap out of one of the goons that was always getting in her face and ending the toughness question that was always hanging over her once and for all. While she appreciated Doug and the other guys on her team's willingness to deal out justice to anyone who tried to injure their goalie, she was getting sick of others fighting her battles.

Naked, she grabbed her towel and walked back into the shower area. At least, she thought, getting booted early means I don't have to wait until after everyone else finishes showering. Even though her locker room was separate from the rest of her team's, both rooms shared the shower area, and having a lot more equipment to divest of than the forwards or defensemen she always ended up having to wait for the showers.

Adam bored of the game now that the goalie holding clinic wasn't playing, agreed to go down and try to get an interview, while Jen took some more photos and headed back toward the hall with the locker area.

EB shivered as her feet stepped across the cold tile floor of the showers. She turned the tap on as hot as she could stand without getting scalded and stepped below the shower stream.

Adam passed the Falcon's rooms, and stopped in front of the door marked Bluejays, goalie. Geez, he thought, they give the goalie his own locker room? He must be eccentric on game-day.

EB inhaled and exhaled in slow measured breaths as she scrubbed her body with the shower puff of soap, trying to will her frustrations and anger to dissipate under the steaming shower. She lathered her short black hair with shampoo and closed her eyes just standing under the spray and feeling the hot water beat down on her and slide down her body.

Adam opened the door and walked into the locker room, he was greeted by a pile of sweaty goalie equipment, but no goalie. He could hear the shower running in the back room and debated whether he should go speak to his intended interview now, or wait until the goalie got out of the shower.

If ever there was a vice that EB had, it was showering; she could happily stay under a shower as long as it stayed hot, 45 minutes an hour, no problem. She found merely standing under hot running water to be extremely calming, and knowing she had first shower rights, she was in no hurry to stop standing there in the steam and water eyes closed.

Adam pushed open the door to the shower area, deciding that it would be better to take care of his interview before the rest of the team crowded into the locker room. Four steps into the shower area he stopped dead, the words of his intended greeting frozen in his throat as his jaw dropped slack.

Standing naked beneath a sparkling jet of water, steam sliding around her fit, muscular body like blanched flame, stood EB, head tilted back into the stream, a half smile on her face. Adam was so shocked he was unable to formulate any kind of thought about whether he should turn and bolt from the room before she noticed his presence or stand there soaking in the feminine curves he'd barely even considered EB having or, as his swiftly engorging cock would probably prefer at the moment, walking up to her and joining her beneath the shower and nibbling on her arched throat while fondling her full spectacular breasts.

At some point that felt like five minutes later, enough sense started to seep back into him that he realized that he was probably going to be in a lot of trouble if he didn't choose the get the hell out of at least the shower area and fast option and he turned to make a quick retreat. His stealthy attempt to sneak out didn't quite work out as the rubber sole of his shoe squeaked on the tile just enough to startle EB out of her oblivious shower world.

"What the fuck! Get out! Out! Fucking A!" EB shouted trying to cover herself with her hands as she dashed for her towel, as though the sight of her naked body weren't already etched for the next 40 years on the back of Adam's eyelids.

""I'm sorry, I- I- didn't know you were the goalie. I – I thought it was a guy. Sorry, I mean it really, shit" Adam said covering his eyes with his hand in order to demonstrate that he hadn't meant to see her naked, even though he peeked between his fingers just a little bit."

"G-d damn it, why are you in here" she shouted through the metal door between rooms that no separated them.

"I was coming for an interview. "He called back through the metal. "Your game was amazing; it almost made me into a hockey fan. Seriously I've never seen goaltending like that"

"Really," EB said skeptically. "You're not just trying to kiss my ass so I won't have you arrested for being a peeping tom?"

"I'm serious and I didn't know it was you or I never would have gone back there. That was completely an accident"

EB felt both strangely ecstatic that he complimented her playing in such an unbackhanded manner and yet felt oddly sad that he'd said he wouldn't have peeked at her naked if he'd known it was her. Stop it, she thought, what the fuck, you don't care what Adam Kohn thinks, and you certainly don't want him to see you naked. Oh yeah? The other side of her brain said, then what was that feeling shooting around n your stomach when you saw the look in his eyes? Shut up, he startled me is all, I mean you don't expect so see some guy standing and watching you shower when you turn around. Please, you wanted him to kiss you, to just walk up and grab you and press your warm wet body against his, look into your eyes with that stark desire you saw there before he started stuttering, pull your mouth hungrily into yours and kiss you like there was no tomorrow. You want to feel the hard length of that erection of his pushing up against you, hungry to slide into your pussy. You know it too, you know that if he did walk up and grab you by the shoulders and slip his tongue into your mouth you'd lean into him and part your lips for him and let him seduce you. You ought to just face up to it and walk through that door naked, stop fucking around with all the stupid name calling and arguements in the newsroom- G-d shut up, shut up brain, I am so not attracted to Adam Kohn, I can not be attracted to Adam Kohn, he's a pompous chauvenist prick.

On the other side of the door Adam was trying desperately to think of every unsexy thing he could to ease the very obvious bulge straining against his trousers. EB had seen the tent of his hard-on, that was reason enough to turn and flee the locker room now. Adam's own inner demon was telling him to walk back through the door and kiss her.

Chaya always woke up as she was opening the door to the locker room, (wearing the towel damn it.) Sometimes she wondered if in osme part of her mind that she could't get access to that dream had played itself out all the way. She shuddered and blushed that here, ten years later, she could still remember the dream...

"What are you thinking about?" Adam asked seeing the pink blush crawling up her neck and cheeks as she stared distractedly into space.

"That's not a yes or no question." Chaya said, staring pointedly at a spot on his forehead, deliberately avoiding his eyes....