Page 192 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“You look ridiculous in that jersey,” Carnage says.

I turn, look at him and immediately feel my whole chest loosen the way it always does when he's in the same room as me. He's in a black jacket, arms crossed, already surveying the rink with the expression of a man cataloguing all potential threats in an enclosed space, which is just his face.

“You made it,” I say.

“Said I would.” He looks sideways at me. His eyes drop to the pendant at my collarbone, then to my stomach, then back up to my face. Something moves in his expression that he doesn't bother hiding from me, the same thing that's always been there, quiet and steady and entirely Carnage. ‘How are you feeling?”

“Like I'm thirty-four weeks pregnant and sitting on a hard plastic seat.”

“Want me to go get you something softer to sit on?”

“I want you to watch the game.”

“I can do both.”

“Carn.”

He looks at me. I look at him. The silent conversation we have been having in one form or another since the night he drove to Colorado and sat on the end of my bed at two in the morning, the one where he makes sure I'm okay and I make sure he knows I see him and we don't embarrass either of us by saying any of it out loud.

“I'm okay,” I tell him. Quietly. Meaning it.

He nods once. Looks back at the ice. “Your man better not lose.”

“He's not going to lose.”

“Hope not, darlin’.”

“He's not going to lose, Carn.”

Harper leans across me. “Hi, Carnage.”

“Harper.” He nods. Then, to me, “I still think the jersey's ridiculous.”

“I think you're going to be a wonderful godfather,” I say.

He does the thing where he very deliberately does not react but the corner of his jaw tightens in a way I have learned means he's deeply moved and will never admit it. I pat his arm, face forward and think about how strange and specific and entirely right it is that this is my life now.

The teams come out.

I feel him before I see him. Old habit now, the particular way my whole body orients toward him in a room the moment he enters it. He skates out with Cas at his shoulder and the crowd does what crowds always do when Xaden Devlin steps onto the ice, which is take a collective breath, because even here, even in a city that doesn't know his name the way Stormsend does, there is something about the way he moves that makes people stop and look.

He scans the front row.

He finds me.

His eyes drop to the number five on my chest, then come back up to my face and something in the hard lines of him shifts, just for a second, before he looks away and drops into warm-up and I press my hand flat over the jersey and breathe.

Game day. My game day tradition.

The game is brutal and gorgeous and entirely them. Cas sets up two of the first three goals with the kind of passing that makes the scouts in the upper tier lean forward in their seats. I know the scouts are there, Xaden told me last week, flat and certain.

“The NHL offer is coming. Cas has one too.” He said it without celebration, just fact, then he went back to reviewing the footage from their last game and I sat with it for a long time afterwards, that sentence and what it meant. The life that is opening up ahead of us that is nothing like the life either of us expected to be living.

Xaden is everywhere on the ice. Faster than everyone else. Hungrier. He plays the way I know he feels things, completely, no half-measures, every shift like it might be the last one. He scores twice in the second period and the third goal is the kind that makes the building detach from its foundations entirely, a move so fast and precise that the goalie doesn't even move because he doesn't have time to register that it's already over.

The crowd loses its mind.

I lose my mind. I'm on my feet, or as close to on my feet as I can get at thirty-four weeks with my hand braced on Harper's shoulder whooping in a way that my eighteen-year-old self would find completely unrecognizable and my current self finds entirely appropriate.