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I’d be a plane ride and a mountain range away from all of it, mucking out stalls at six in the morning with Marguerite and Henri telling me I was doing it wrong, and Ash Thorne would just be someone I used to captain, not someone I used to want so badly it felt like a second heartbeat.

Except even as I thought it, standing there dripping onto the bathmat, I knew it was a lie I’d gotten good enough at telling that it almost sounded true.

Three years was a long time to keep almost telling someone the truth.

Longer still to keep hoping he’d still be standing close enough to hear it whenever I finally worked up the nerve.

Ash

The flight to Vegas was mercifully short, and I spent most of it with my headphones in, pretending to sleep, which was easier than pretending to be fine while sitting three rows back from Max like we weren’t actively avoiding each other.

Cole kept glancing back at me with that careful, measuring look he’d perfected, the one that said he was cataloguing something he planned to ask about later when there was more privacy.

I ignored it the way I ignored everything else that might require me to actually feel something.

The team hotel was supposed to be one of the nicer ones, something with a name that sounded expensive and a lobby that probably impressed people who cared about that kind of thing.

What it was, apparently, was completely full because some gaming convention had decided to descend on Vegas simultaneously, and Kinkaid was standing in the lobby with his phone pressed to his ear and a vein pulsing in his temple that suggested the conversation wasn’t going the way he’d hoped.

“I don’t care if you have to put them in the penthouse,” he was saying, his voice tight. “These are professional athletes, not frat boys, and they need actual beds, not—”

He stopped, listened, his jaw clenching harder.

“Then figure it out.”

He hung up and turned to face us, and I watched the moment he realized there was no good way to deliver whatever he was about to say. Cole was already standing up straighter, like he knew it was coming, and I felt my stomach drop somewhere around my ankles before Kinkaid even opened his mouth.

“The convention’s taken most of our rooms,” he said, cutting right to it the way he did with bad news. “We’re short twelve units.”

“How short?” Baelor asked, quiet as always.

“Partners stay together. Phoenix with Cole, Taz with Cinder. The desk has all your keys, but it leaves the rest of you sharing.”

I could feel everyone looking at me for some reason, and weirdly, Keegan wouldn’t meet my gaze.

But it had only been last season that we’d started getting our own rooms.

At least I wouldn’t be with Max. He would definitely warrant his own room as captain.

The elevator ride up was its own special kind of torture.

I was pressed into the back corner with Max somewhere in the middle of the crowd, close enough that I could feel the particular heat of him, far enough that I could pretend it didn’t matter. Taz got off on the eighth floor with Cole, Keegan on the ninth, and by the time there was only me and Max still inside, I finally understood that the universe hated me.

When the doors slid open on the tenth floor, I let him out first, following behind like I was walking to my own execution.

The room number on the key card was 1047, and when Max unlocked it and pushed the door open, I realized with a sinking feeling that what I thought couldn’t get any worse had one final fuck you to give.

There was one bed.

Not two queens. Not a double double.

One very large, very king-sized bed in the middle of a room that suddenly felt about the size of a shoebox, with Max standing in the doorway staring at it like it might bite him and me standing behind him staring at the back of his head like that was somehow a less complicated problem.

“I’ll call down,” Max said finally, his voice stripped of everything except the bare mechanics of words. “Get them to bring a cot.”

“Right,” I muttered, my voice too small for that room. “A cot. That’s—fine.”

Max froze, thumb over the keypad. “You know as well as I do: one night on a cot wrecks your back, two nights and you can’t skate. We both need actual rest.”