“Nausea?”
“No.”
“Vision?”
“Clear.”
He was quiet for a moment. I could feel him breathing, and my brain was doing something extremely unhelpful with that information.
“Good,” he said finally.
Then he moved.
Not away—not yet. He shifted his weight, and his hand came up to the side of my face, thumb brushing just below the bruise on my cheekbone with a gentleness that made my breath catch. His palm was warm. His fingers were careful, deliberate, checking the swelling the way he’d probably checked a thousand injuries over twenty years of hockey, and there was absolutely nothing unprofessional about it except for the fact that I was losing my mind.
“Swelling’s down,” he said.
I made a sound that might have been agreement. His hand was still on my face. I could feel my pulse in my throat, in my wrists, in every place that blood moved through my body with increased urgency, and I was absolutely certain he could feel it too.
Especially in the place all my blood seemed to be migrating to.
He pulled his hand back.
“I’m going to—” I started, and my voice came out rougher than I’d intended. I cleared my throat. “Bathroom.”
“Okay.”
I extracted myself from the bed with what I hoped looked like normal morning stiffness rather than the careful maneuvering of someone trying to hide a situation. My back was to him as I stood, which helped, and I made it to the bathroom without looking back, because looking back would have required me to meet his eyes and I was not prepared for whatever I’d find there.
I closed the door. Leaned against it. Stared at my reflection in the mirror—bruised, disheveled, face flushed in a way that had nothing to do with the injuries—and tried to get my body to understand that we were not doing this.
The problem was that my body had apparently spent the last few hours curled up against Theron Kincaid in a hotel bed, and it didn’t seem to be regretting that decision.
I ran cold water. Splashed my face, careful around the bruise. The cold helped, a little. Enough that I could think past the immediate physical situation to the larger, more complicated situation underneath it.
I’d woken up wrapped around my head coach. The man who controlled my ice time, my career, my entire professional future. The man who’d spent two months deciding whether I was worth keeping, who’d looked at me in that corridor between periods and said you’re not on trial with a certainty that had rearranged something in my chest.
The man who was in his fifties and had probably seen a thousand kids like me develop inconvenient crushes and knew exactly how to manage them without making it awkward.
Except he’d gotten in the bed.
That was the part I kept coming back to. He’d gotten in the bed. He’d made a choice, at some point in the night, to be that close, and I didn’t know what to do with that information except turn it over in my head like something I’d found and didn’t quite know how to use.
I looked at myself in the mirror. The bruise on my cheekbone had deepened to a purple that was going to be spectacular by afternoon. My jaw was swollen on the left side. I looked like I’d lost a fight, which was accurate, and felt like I was about to lose another one, which was probably also accurate. I needed to get in the shower, except I wasn’t looking forward to the water hitting my face. I also needed to call my mom.
I splashed more cold water on my face, wincing as it hit the bruised skin. The swelling around my jaw made everything feel tight and foreign. I dried off carefully with the scratchy hotel towel and stared at myself one more time—purple cheekbone, split lip I hadn’t even registered last night, eyes that looked too bright in a way that had nothing to do with the concussion.
I opened the bathroom door.
Kincaid was standing by the window, looking out at Chicago in the early-morning light.
He turned when he heard the door. His eyes did that quick assessment thing they always did, cataloging, measuring. “How do you feel?”
“Sore,” I said honestly. “But okay.”
He nodded. Pulled his phone from his pocket and checked something. “Cinder is on his way up. I told him you were cleared, but as team medic, he’ll want to see for himself.” I nodded, not trusting my voice to be steady.
There was a knock at the door—professional, efficient. Kincaid moved to answer it, and I registered the way in which he’d timed this, the way Cinder’s arrival created a clean exit that didn’t require either of us to acknowledge what had or hadn’t happened in the last eight hours.
