Page 10
Chapter three
Forecheck - Pressure applied in the offensive zone to disrupt the opposing team and regain possession of the puck.
Max
My building’s parking garage swallowed the truck the way it always did, all clean concrete and recessed lighting, and I sat in the driver’s seat for a minute longer than I needed to, hands still on the wheel, trying to shake the last hour out of my system.
Ash’s face in the video session. That line about women who looked at me like I hung the moon.
He hadn’t been wrong, exactly, and that was what stung—he never was, not about the things that mattered.
The elevator ride up gave me nothing to do but replay it. Fifteen floors of watching numbers climb while I catalogued every version of that night where I’d said something different, done something different, hadn’t orchestrated a stranger’s hand on my arm three weeks ago just so a man I was in love with would stop looking at me like I mattered.
I let myself into the apartment still turning it over, already reaching to loosen my tie before the door had shut behind me, and that was when I registered the lamp on in the living room.
The one I never left on.
Then I saw her.
Melanie was stretched along my couch like she was posing for a photographer who wasn’t there, naked, one arm draped over the back cushion, dark hair fanned out just so. She had the kind of smile that said she’d rehearsed this moment, pictured how it would go, and whatever she’d pictured, my face wasn’t cooperating with the script.
“Surprise,” she said.
“Get out.”
The smile faltered at the edges but didn’t fully collapse. “Max—”
“How did you get in here?”
It wasn’t really a question. My voice had gone very flat, very quiet, the register I reserved for referees who’d made a call I intended to have reversed.
“I never gave you a key.”
She waved it off as if the explanation was beneath her, and I knew if I went downstairs, some poor guy who worked nights for minimum wage would probably lose his job.
“He thinks I’m your girlfriend.”
“You’re not my girlfriend.”
“I could be.” She sat up, drawing her knees together, some instinct finally telling her the seduction angle had run out of road. “Max, we could be good together, if you’d just—”
“Get dressed.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, thumb already moving toward the keypad, and didn’t raise my voice at all when I said it.
“I’m calling building security, and then I’m calling the police, and you’re going to explain to both of them how you got into a locked unit that isn’t yours.”
That did it.
The tears came fast, too fast, the kind that looked more like a tool than a feeling.
“Please, don’t. You don’t understand, I just wanted—”
“I understand plenty.”
I kept the phone in my hand but didn’t dial yet, watching her scramble for her clothes, watching the performance shift gears in real time from seduction to distress.
And I wished for the hundredth time that this was my last season and I could just go home to the farm.
