Page 47

“What, you want to work on your time?” I ask, hearing the joke in my own voice, the deflection, the attempt to put this back into the training framework where it's safe. "Maybe try to crack single digits."

She doesn't laugh. Her brown eyes hold mine. Studies me for a long beat. "What if I said yeah?”

The room goes still.

"What if it wasn't training," she says. "Or practice. Or coaching. What if it was just ... us?" Her thumb moves along my wrist. "The real thing."

The cage door shudders. I feel it in my chest — the lock straining, the bars bending, everything I've kept contained for years pressing against the structure I built to hold it back.

"Briar." My voice is rough. "If we do this, it won’t be —"

"I know. I want it. I want you.”

I swallow hard, not prepared for the actuality of dating. Of being with someone like her.

Her hand tightens around my wrist. "I don't want it to feel fake. I'm so tired of fake."

My eyelids drift shut for a moment. When I open them, she's still looking at me with the same steady, brave expression she wears on the ice when she's about to take a hit she knows is coming.

"I should tell you something," she says, sitting up. "I have an IUD. And I've been tested since my ex. I'm clear.”

The practicality of it — the athlete's directness, the checkbox efficiency — sends all the blood straight to my groin. "I'm healthy, too. Haven't been with anyone since Lisa. Team physical every season." I rub the back of my neck. "I feel like we should be filling out a form or something."

She laughs. "It's like a pre-game exam.”

"Cleared for contact."

"Full contact." She smiles up at me, shy and brave at the same time, and I don't know how a woman who just negotiated safe sex like a waiver form can make me feel like I'm about to jump out of a plane.

I pull my shirt over my head. Her eyes drop to my chest — the tattoos, the ink — and darken. She reaches up and presses her fingertips to the pulley on my ribs.

"For the longshoremen," I tell her. "My grandfather. My uncles."

Her fingers trace the circle near my collarbone. "And this?"

“A token for the T. For my mother. And me, really.”

She touches the bale hook on my forearm. The crane on my shoulder. Each one I name reveals a piece of the blue-collar boy from South Boston. But Briar doesn’t wrinkle her nose or look at me like I’m dirty.

"They're beautiful," she says instead. "You're so thoughtful.”

Something snaps inside me. Something old and calcified and built out of years of being told differently.

I lean down and kiss her. Not a forehead kiss. Not practice. I kiss her the way I've wanted to since the night at the club, when she pressed her body against mine, and I stepped back like a coward. I put my hand behind her neck. My mouth opens against hers, and she gasps. Then her arms wrap around me, and she pulls me down.

I brace my weight over her. She wraps her legs around mine — those thighs, god, those thighs — and her grip sends a shock through my whole body. She's not fragile.

And she doesn’t seem interested in dignified. Not when she moans, hooks her heels behind my calves, and pulls me closer. I feel the length of her body against mine, and a sound escapes me that she swallows with a groan.

"Take these off," she says, tugging at my sweats. I oblige. She peels off her leggings — my shirt stays on her, which glitches my brain — and we're skin-to-skin from the waist down. I'm so hard it aches.

I run my hand up her thigh, and she shivers. I grip the muscle — not gently, but firmly, possessively, testing the way I actually want to — and she arches into it.

She wants this.

"Harder," she whispers.

The cage door opens.