Page 191 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Outside, the Colorado morning carries on. The mountains are white at the top, the coffee is too strong and somewhere across town the rink is waiting with scouts in the upper tier who have already made their decision about the man sitting across from me, they just haven't put it in writing yet.

“You're going to win tonight,” I say.

“I know,” he says. Simple. Not arrogant, just certain in the way he is about a small number of things that matter.

“Don't get cocky.”

“I'm always cocky.”

“You're always right about being cocky, which is worse.”

The almost-smile again.

His thumb moves against my stomach, one small deliberate motion, and I feel the warmth of it move all the way through me.

“Go get ready,” I tell him. “Cas will be here in an hour and if you aren't dressed he'll spend the entire drive here telling me about your morning routine in levels of detail I don't need.”

He looks at me for one more second.

Then he picks up his coffee, stands, and goes.

I sit at my worktable in the Colorado morning with my hand where his was and the mountains visible in the gap between buildings and the particular quiet of a life that is ours, small and careful and built from scratch, and entirely, completely, mine.

To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.

I'm thriving.

Finally.

Finally.

The jersey is no longer enormous on me now.

This is not a new problem, Xaden's number five Ravens jersey was never designed with a thirty-four-week pregnant woman in mind, but it is a more pronounced problem than it was two months ago when I could still pretend I was wearing it as a fashion statement. Now I am wearing it as a structural necessity and the only person enjoying this more than me is Harper, who took a photograph the moment I walked out of the bedroom and has been visibly delighted about it ever since.

“You look incredible,” she says, completely sincerely.

“I look like I'm smuggling a basketball under a jersey.”

“Xaden's going to lose his mind.”

“Xaden sees me every day.”

“Not on game day in his jersey in the front row.” She loops her arm through mine and steers me toward the ice. “There's a difference.”

She's not wrong about that. There is a specific thing that happens to Xaden Devlin on game days that I have observed enough times now to understand the pattern. He goes quiet in the morning, focused in an internal way that isn't the usual controlled quiet but something more electric underneath it. He doesn't eat breakfast. He skates for an hour alone before the team warm-up. He comes back and finds me wherever I am in the apartment and says nothing, just stands close enough that I can feel the heat off him, and I have learned that what he needs in those moments is not words but presence, so I give him that.

Today I gave him that, then I told him he'd better not lose because I am thirty-four weeks pregnant and in no condition to manage his foul mood after a defeat.

He almost smiled.

‘Almost’ being the operative word.

The rink is full.

Different to the old one I’m used to back home. Everything about this university is different to Stormsend, polished in ways that Stormsend was deliberately gritty, but the energy before a game is the same everywhere, that particular compressed electricity of a crowd that wants something and is very close to getting it. I find our front row seats, because of course Xaden arranged front row, and lower myself into mine and Harper sits beside me, then hands me a hot chocolate.

Someone drops into the seat on my other side.