Page 151 of Slashed Bonds

The third floor’s the Omega wing. A Beta at a desk looked at the card, looked at me, and said, “He said you might come,” and buzzed me through, and I stood in a room full of bags with nobody in it and understood that somebody had built this floor for a reason, and the reason had my shape.

Then I heard him.

Two floors down. Through the slab. A sound I’d know anywhere, a man hitting something that can’t hit back, and I took my trainers off and went down the stairs toward it.

Toward. I know what that means. I’m choosing not to look at it until after the game.

Knox came with me. He always comes with me. He stood at the top of the stairs while I went down them, which he’s never done, which is him deciding that the man at the bottom is a known quantity and the building is the thing that needs watching.

He’s reassigned himself. Nine days. I’d be offended if it weren’t the most intelligent thing anyone in my life has done in five years.

The first game. The one everyone’s waiting on. The team of rejects that the whole county has been invited to watch fail on the ice in a building where their season ended in April.

I’ve got a ritual for game days. I had one at fourteen and I kept it through everything, through the barns, through two hundred dollars on the line in a building with a compressor problem.

Red. True red, the one tube I don’t open for anything else. It goes on in the afternoon and it stays on through the drive, the lot, the tunnel, and it comes off on the bench with the back of my wrist in one pass, and then I skate bare-faced, because the face I use to walk through the world doesn’t belong on a sheet.

War paint, then no paint. The red’s for the walk in. The ice gets the real thing.

Tonight’s walk-in has a mask over it. Maddie’s idea, twenty-two of them in a row on the lounge table with a slashed viper across the mouth, and I’ve already decided the red goes on under the mask where nobody sees it, because the ritual’s for me and not for a camera.

And under the red, under the mask, there’s a page in my head I’ve been writing since Cash handed me a tablet.

Brandt sits deep. Ashford pinches on the left. Their forecheck is built to make you hurry on the wall, and Roz’s 1-3-1 is built to make you wait, and the whole game is going to be decided by which team’s nerve breaks first in the neutral zone.

Ours won’t. I’ve watched these men for nine days. Nerve isn’t the thing they’re short of.

What they’re short of is a center who wins backhand draws in her own end. Cash told me that in the bath, more or less, without using those words. April was a draw. The season was a draw. And tonight there’ll be a draw in the last minute of something, in our end, on his weak side, and Roz will tap my shoulder, and I’ll go over the boards knowing that the whole reason I’m on this roster is the next four seconds.

I’ve been waiting five years for a reason to be on a roster. Four seconds is plenty.

We break.

Both of us breathless. His hand’s still at the back of my neck, where I let it stay, where I planted my feet and held, and now it moves. Slowly. Down. The length of my spine, one vertebra at a time, as if he’s reminding me that whatever tried to paralyze me on a loading dock didn’t finish the job.

My spine’s intact. He’s checking. Or he’s telling me. I’ll take either.

His hand reaches the small of my back. He pulls me against him, and we share a look, and then he leans down and kisses me again.

Softer, this time.

Which is worse, and I can’t say why. The sloppy one I can handle. The soft one goes in under my ribs where I keep the things I don’t look at.

He presses me closer. I can feel him, hard against my hip through the thin fabric of his shorts, and the sound he makes into my mouth is a groan that comes from somewhere low. Then he seals it, deep, with the whole of him in it, and I lose track of the gym for a while.

Because if I don’t, I’ll forget there’s a floor. That’s what the soft one does. It takes the floor away and leaves you standing on him, and I’ve stood on a man before and found out what happens when he steps back.

Not him. Not this one. But the body remembers, and the body breaks the kiss before the mind’s voted.

I’m the one who breaks it.

He pouts. Full lip, the one I bit bloody in a lobby, and the pout makes me smirk, and I lean in until my mouth’s against his.

“Does Daddy deserve a bit of a reward,” I whisper, “for being so loving to Mommy lately?”

The smirk he gives back is wicked.

“Daddy needs to be loving to Mommy every fucking day.”