“Fine,” I whisper. “Ice in my eye.”
We both know I’m full of shit.
Then he steps away and the cold rushes in to replace him and I can breathe again without being too obvious about it.
"Again," he says.
I go again and don’t miss the second one.
He moves on. Calls the next drill. We keep working and I spend the rest of the session doing two things simultaneously — being focused on the hockey, because we are actually working very well together and I take the game too seriously to waste that — and being hyper aware of him.
Every time he skates into my orbit. Every time he stops too close to show me something and I see the way his weight shifts when he moves, the way his hands look and flex when he handles the puck, the tension held in his jaw when he's lost in his thoughts.
We skate to the boards after the hour is up, both breathing harder than either of us will probably admit. I reach for my water bottle and drink and watch him over the top of it as he reaches up to pull off his helmet. I notice the way his blonde locks fall back in front of his face — and there it is, the small wince, a fraction of a second, the slight catch in his movement when his arm comes up. He covers it fast. Not fast enough.
The shoulder.
“That’s still bothering you,” I point out.
“It’s fine.”
“Didn’t ask if it was fine.”
He looks at me with the kind of expression people get when they realize they’ve seen something they were never supposed to see — and from me, of all people, he has no idea what to do with it.
“You weren’t a total asshole today,” he says instead, deflecting, but there’s a flicker of something almost like humor in his eyes.
I huff a silent laugh. “Wow, so you can make a joke. I’msurprised, Captain.” I tease right back.
And then Jamie smiles. Small and sudden, like it escaped before he could stop it.
And fuck, my breath stutters for a second.
I think that might be the first real smile I've ever gotten from him. It changes his whole face. Softens him. Pulls out faint laugh lines on the left side, makes him look younger, warmer, like there's an actual person underneath all that restraint instead of just tension and control and gritted teeth.
It's gone almost immediately.
But I’m still staring at the place it was, feeling my chest pull painfully tight over the fact that he even smiled at me like that at all.
It throws me off enough that I don’t immediately realize he dodged the shoulder question.
“Same time Thursday,” he says, breaking me out of my thoughts. He picks up his helmet and skates away before I can say anything back.
I get to the locker room and sit on the bench and stare at my skates for a long time.
What the actual fuck was that.
Not the practice.
The other thing.
Him behind me with his hands on my shoulders and his voice at my ear and my whole nervous system deciding to freak out.
I've been around Jamie for months. I've been in locker rooms with him, on the ice, in gyms, and have never noticed him like that. Half the time I’m too pissed off at him to even spare him a second glance.
I start to unlace my skates.
Okay.
