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His hands.

These were hands that controlled a hockey stick in traffic. Hands that had gripped a Zamboni railing at four years old and never let go. Reliable hands. Hands that had never, as far as I could tell, been uncertain about anything.

They were trembling now.

Not from nerves. From restraint.

I could feel it in the way his fingers spread across my ribs: deliberate, careful, the pressure of a man who knew he was built for impact and was choosing, with every piece of discipline he had, to be gentle.

“Evan.” My voice came out lower than I recognized. “You don’t have to be careful.”

His forehead dropped to my shoulder. A breath shuddered out of him, warm against my collarbone, unsteady in a way I had never heard from him on or off the ice.

“Yeah,” he said roughly. “I do.”

“Why?”

“Because when I stop being careful, I don’t know how much control I’ll have left.”

That was unfairly effective.

I pulled his face up to mine and kissed him in a way that made my position on the matter clear.

His control cracked. Not shattered. Cracked. The hands that had been trembling found a new certainty. One slid into my hair. The other found the hem of my shirt and stopped there, fingertips against bare skin, a question asked without words.

I answered by pulling the shirt over my own head, because waiting for a man who communicated through defensive positioning to ask permission for every escalation would have taken the rest of the evening, and I had plans for the rest of the evening.

His eyes tracked down my body the way they tracked the ice: assessing and memorizing. But there was nothing clinical in his expression. What I saw on his face was the same thing I had seen on the rink at dawn: focus stripped of performance, so direct it made my chest ache.

“Christ, Sam.” The words were barely audible.

“Less talking,” I murmured. “More of this.”

He lifted me. Not dramatically. Efficiently, the way his body did everything, with an economy that should not have been as devastating as it was. My legs wrapped around his waist, and he carried me toward the small training office off the weight room with the focused intent of a man running a breakout drill with no intention of being stopped.

The door clicked shut behind us.

The office was dark except for the light bleeding in from the hallway, a thin stripe across the floor. No camera. I knew because I had spent six weeks learning where this building watched people and where it did not.

My photographer’s brain catalogued the composition automatically: tight frame, low light, two people choosing the part of the building where no one could turn them into evidence.

Then his mouth found the curve of my neck, and my photographer’s brain shut down entirely, replaced by a system with fewer opinions and better priorities.

He set me on the edge of the desk. His hands bracketed my hips, thumbs tracing the line of my waist with a slow precision that made my breath catch.

I pulled at his shirt, still damp from the workout, clinging to muscle my hands had been aching to map for weeks. He helped me, shrugging out of it with a motion that revealed the body underneath by degrees.

I ran my palms across his chest.

Scars I had not seen before. A raised line along his ribs from a skate blade. A faded mark on his shoulder from something he would probably dismiss as nothing. Evidence of a career spent absorbing impact so other people did not have to.

My hand found his and turned it over.

There was a groove worn into the heel of his right palm where his stick tape rolled against it: a permanent ridge in the skin from years of the same grip, the same motion, the same devotion repeated until it had become part of him. The calluses around it had shaped themselves to the stick whether or not the stick was in his hand.

I rested my thumb on the groove.

Read it.