He didn't move back. That was the first thing. He saw me coming and he didn't move back, just stood there and let me close the space between us, and when I got there I got my hand into the front of his shirt and kissed him.
Holy shit, I kissed him.
And not softly, either.
My lips on his lips were fast and desperate, the way I did everything, and I felt him inhale sharply against my mouth. This small caught sound, like I'd gotten past something before he could stop me.
Then Cross kissed me back.
I’ll be one hundred percent honest here. I hadn't been ready for that.
His hand came up to my jaw, the same grip, that fucking thumb exactly where it had been in the training room, nothing like the assessment and completely like it, and he kissed me back.
Slow and deliberate and thorough, the way Cross did everything, and I felt it from my jaw to my spine, felt it in my chest where the stone had been sitting for four days.
My hand was still in his shirt.
I forgot about the game. Forgot about Knox and Dylan and the forty minutes and the reporters and the viral video and everything I'd been running on for four days. It was just his handand the fact that Cross was kissing me like I was something he'd been trying not to do this to for a very long time.
Then he stepped back.
Not far. Just enough. His hand dropped from my jaw and he looked at me and I looked at him and we were both breathing slightly differently than we had been a minute ago.
His face was different.
His blue eyes were looking at me in a way that had no professional purpose whatsoever.
Then he picked up his tablet from where he'd apparently set it against the wall at some point without me noticing, and he looked at me one more time, and he said:
"You should go warm up."
And he walked away.
I stood in the corridor.
The building noise came back in stages, crowd somewhere overhead, the PA doing its pre-game thing, the warm-up music starting up through the floor. The clock had kept going without my permission. Thirty-something minutes.
I went back into the locker room.
Knox looked up. His face had migrated from explosive to neutral, the post-eruption version, the Knox equivalent of calm. I crossed to him and said it low, just the two of us: "That was my problem, not yours. My bad."
Knox looked at me for a second. His jaw worked.
"Yeah," he said. "It was." A beat. "You good?"
"Getting there," I said.
He nodded. That was all Knox needed or wanted, and I respected that about him more than I could usually say out loud.
Dylan was watching me from across the room.
I looked at him. He looked back. Something in my face made him not say a word—made him just hold it for a second,something unreadable moving through his expression—and then he looked back at his gear.
I finished getting dressed.
The room moved through its ritual around me and I moved through it with them, the familiar sequence of it, and I didn't think about the corridor. Didn't think about the hand on my jaw orthat's not what I seeor the way Cross had looked at me before he saidyou should go warm uplike that was the last safe thing he had.
I thought about the game.
