Page 120 of Her Player

The crowd was still screaming.

All of them. Both sides. Even the Canadian Dynamites fans had their phones out, recording, because some moments were too complete to let politics get in the way of them.

I stepped onto the ice.

Jett saw me first.

His face did something complicated for about half a second, relief and fury and joy all tangled up together, and then he was crossing the ice at full speed and I braced myself just before he crashed into me, his arms wrapping around my good shoulder as I caught him with my free arm.

“You absolute asshole,” he said into my shoulder. “Don’t you ever do that again.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“I swear to God, Stone⁠—”

“Jets.” I gripped the back of his neck the way I always did. “We won.”

He pulled back. His eyes were red. He pointed a finger at me. “We’re talking about this later.”

“Fine.”

“About how you scared ten years off my life.”

“Fine.”

“And about Miss C, because three years, Stone, three years and you never said a word⁠—”

“Jett.”

“What?”

“Go celebrate.”

He stared at me for one more second. Then that grin split his face wide open, the biggest one I’d ever seen on him, and he turned back toward the chaos with his arms raised and his voice carrying over the top of everything.

Coach Mercer found me next. He didn’t say anything. He just put his hand on my good shoulder and squeezed once, hard, and nodded. That was the whole conversation. That was everything it needed to be.

I nodded back.

Then I looked up toward the boards.

She was still there.

Victoria stood exactly where Brynn said she’d be, at the boards, perfectly still, arms folded, face composed in that way she had that showed nothing to the world and everything to anyone who had been paying attention long enough to learn the difference. Her glasses were slightly crooked. Her hair had come partially loose from whatever she’d put it in this morning.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life.

I skated toward her slowly. The chaos continued around me, the guys celebrating and confetti falling and the announcer’s voice booming something I couldn’t parse, and all of it went quiet the way it always went quiet when Victoria was the thing my eyes found in a room.

I stopped at the boards in front of her.

She looked at me for a long moment. Her gray eyes moved over my face the way they did when she was cataloguing damage. The cut on my chin. The way I held my left shoulder. The fact that I was upright and breathing and looking back at her.

“You walked off,” she said.

“I came back.”

“Your shoulder⁠—”