Chapter Eighteen
Remy
The day after Owen returns to Las Vegas, I show up at the arena with a file of materials for our next check-in with Dante.
There’s no morning skate today, and I showed up early in case Owen has time for an in-person debrief.
Not that I need an excuse to see Owen anymore, which is probably its own separate problem.
I don’t even make it to the elevators when Renee intercepts me. “Good morning, Remy! Are you here to review footage with Owen?”
“Oh. Sure?” I glance around for any sign of Owen. “Is he here already?”
“He’s in the film room. Down that hall, fourth door on the right.”
Renee seems to think nothing of these directions. She has no idea, and can never know, that my heart is pounding at the thought of being in a room with Owen again. I hurry toward the film room before my expression can give me away.
Yesterday, when I was watching him play, I felt something.
Not arousal, not guilt, but a warm radiance in my chest every time Owen blocked a puck.
He played well, and more importantly, he looked like a man in the flow.
I’d love to tell myself that this is professional pride, but I’ve never been a very good liar.
Professional pride doesn’t usually make my chest ache when somebody smiles.
The room Renee directed me to is dark, with only a small sliver of light snaking across the floor.
I peek inside, confused by the lack of sound.
Owen is standing in front of a large screen, arms crossed, face much too close to the display, squinting at an image of himself.
The ridiculous part is that he still looks good squinting at grainy sports footage.
“Hey!” I squeak. Sneaking up on him might be a bad idea, but the pitch of my voice is anything but reassuring.
Owen turns to me. “Oh. Remy.” His slow smile is sweet enough to make me lightheaded. I’m starting to think Owen smiles so rarely because the effect would probably be dangerous if he did it all the time. “I was just watching the replay. Do you want to…?” He gestures the remote toward the TV.
“Sure.” I scurry inside and dump my things on one of the small tables. Breathe, Remy. Spending time in a dark room with him in the arena only feels illicit because of what we’ve been doing in our free time.
Owen sits on one end of the long sofa, and I join him, though I squeeze myself against the opposite arm. There’s room for at least two, maybe three of his teammates to sit between us, though I haven’t seen any signs that they’re in the building.
Owen hits play, and the game resumes. It plays for a while with the volume on low. Then, for no reason I can discern, he hits pause and scrolls back a few frames.
“What are we looking at, exactly?” I’m studying on-screen Owen, who doesn’t appear to be doing anything noteworthy in this clip.
“Watching Haggerty.” He points at the screen with his remote.
I’m not sure which one Haggerty is, but I assume he’s one of the guys in red.
“He switched strategies mid-game. For the first period, he was focused on Viktor. He kept fucking with his stick, blocking passes, knocking him into the glass… But partway through the second period, he changed tactics.” He points to the screen again.
“What am I looking for?”
“He started focusing on his passes. I think he figured out that long passes weren’t doing them any favors because we kept intercepting the puck.
They have a couple of rookies on the team this season, and we were focused on their more established players because we know their style of play.
So in the second period, Haggerty stopped trying to fuck with our defense and instead made sure that his guys were passing to their rookies.
It didn’t work, but they closed our lead a little with that strategy. ”
I stare at him, open-mouthed. Competence should not be this attractive. Unfortunately for me, it absolutely is.
Owen dips his head. “What?”
“You can talk!” I try to infuse some humor into the accusation, though truthfully, I’m floored. He sounds completely different when he forgets to guard himself. I’ve never heard Owen say that many words in a stretch.
“Sure. About stuff I understand.” He hits play again.
“See, here, I would expect him to pass to Matthews, because he’s closer to the net.
It’s a clean shot, too, but there’s no way in hell it would have gotten through.
So he takes it to Yu instead. But then—” On-screen, Owen drops into that weird crab-legged goalie pose that makes me fear for the future of his hip flexors and slaps his glove down on the puck.
“Oh.” I sit forward, trying to understand the connections that Owen’s making. “And you’re sure he didn’t do that because, um, Yu, you said? Because Yu was open?”
“Nah, he was doing it all night.” Owen lets the recording play in the background while we talk.
“Haggerty pisses me off, but he’s a good captain.
He was being aggressive, and when that didn’t work, he figured out how to use our own history on the ice against us.
Give it a couple of years, and Yu’s going to be a hall-of-famer, I guarantee it.
Their coach must see that potential, too. ”
“Wow.” I try to follow the next few plays, but it’s hard to keep track. I can see what people are doing, but to me, it looks like a bunch of fit men relying on muscle memory and training. I’ve never spent much time thinking about the metagaming and psychology that goes into a game.
Owen falls silent. I’m used to his silences, but this one feels different. “Sorry,” he says. “You probably don’t want to hear about this stuff.”
“What?” I twist on the cushions until I face him. “Why do you say that?”
He fiddles with the remote for a while. “You’re not a hockey fan, right?”
“Not really. But I think that’s partly because I underestimated how complex the game is. I’ve enjoyed watching your games.”
He smiles to himself, and oh, no, I melt at that smile. That tiny reaction feels embarrassingly rewarding. Owen isn’t very expressive, and every reaction I get from him feels like a personal victory. “Yeah?”
I think back to the plays I remember from last night’s game. “Okay, so you remember near the end of the second period, when Knight got sent to the penalty box…”
“Oh, yeah.” Owen laughs. The wall of silence he was building around himself dissipates slightly.
“He was so mad. That wasn’t really his fault; that was all on Ivers.
” He fast forwards to the moment I’m referring to and talks me through the play, including some colorful commentary on the referee who called the play.
I’m not sure which one of us moves first. Owen gets a little closer so that he can point out something that got cut off by the camera frame.
I have to shift to see what he’s talking about, and before I know it, our shoulders are touching.
We both scoot back, but not by much. Apparently, both of us are pretending we still possess self-control.
It takes a chime from my phone for me to remember where we are, and that we would be wise to keep our surroundings in mind. It’s a message from Renee, letting me know that today’s meeting with Dante has been canceled.
“What?” I open the screen and read the longer message. “But we’re already here.”
“What’s up?” Owen cranes his neck to try to get a look at my screen. His shoulder rests against mine, warm and solid. A moment later, he pulls back. “Sorry, I shouldn’t pry. Don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I don’t know what Dante’s thinking, either.” I turn my phone so that he can see the email. “Apparently, our meeting today is canceled over, and I quote, a ‘caviar-related emergency.’ What does that even mean?”
“Probably a supply chain issue at the Mona Lisa. It happens.” Owen shrugs.
“Sounds suspicious.”
“Mm.” Owen’s lips twitch. “I agree. Seems fishy.”
I groan and smack his shoulder. His sense of humor sneaks up on me every single time. “Now you’re into dad jokes, too?”
His smile immediately vanishes. Right. Somehow, I forgot that any mention of fathers sends Owen into emotional lockdown. The shift is small enough that most people probably wouldn’t notice it. I do.
This time, his flattened expression only lasts for a few seconds. “Since we’re off the hook with Dante, there’s something I’d like to show you. If, you know. You have time.”
I tuck my phone into my bag. “My schedule just opened up. What did you have in mind?”
Owen rolls to his feet, then offers me his hand to help me up. “Let me show you.”
The way he says it sends a strange little flutter through my stomach, like he’s inviting me into something personal instead of just onto the ice.
As nice as it felt to have his shoulder against mine, the direct contact of our palms is even better.
He pulls me up, then lets the contact linger.
Long enough that it stops feeling accidental.
I’m filled with the sudden desire to curl up beside him and just let him hold me.
The emotions that accompany this fantasy bring tears to my eyes, which I choose to blame on hormones rather than affection.
It’s just a mood swing. It’s just the fact that he smells like pine soap, mint, and musk.
Actually, scratch that, I am not sniffing my client.
But I am holding his hand.
I am in so much trouble when it comes to this man. The terrifying part is that I’m not entirely sure I want to be rescued from it anymore.
Owen steers me into the hall, where he releases me with obvious reluctance. “Do you know how to skate?”
I tuck my hair behind my ear. “Sort of. Not well, not like what you do, but I can keep my skates under me while I’m on the rink, if that’s what you mean.”
“Cool. Follow me.”
We walk in silence to the PT room. Bowen’s wife, Violet, is sitting at her computer. She pops her head over the monitor when we enter. “Oh! Hello, Remy!” She lifts her hand all the way up in the air in an enthusiastic wave. “What’s up?”
“Can we borrow some skates? Mine are all huge.” Owen tilts his head toward me. “They won’t fit.”
“Sure! Help yourself.” She indicates the display of skates along the far wall.
I find a pair in my size, and we take the side door out to the rink.
I’m dressed for Vegas weather, not for ice skating, but the chilly air is a novelty I don’t experience often.
Besides, twenty-two Boston winters have prepared me for worse.
Owen kneels to help me tie my skates, and the brush of his fingers across my ankle makes me shiver with delight.
Being cared for this gently feels dangerously addictive.
It takes Owen no time at all to retrieve his own skates and pull them on, though I shouldn’t be surprised, given that all this is second nature to him. By contrast, I’m a lot more shaky.
“You can breathe,” Owen teases. He takes my hand again, ostensibly for support this time.
“I’m literally walking on knives,” I point out. “Some of us are used to solid ground, thank you very much.” Emotionally and physically, honestly.
“I thought you knew how to skate?”
I narrow my eyes. He’s smiling again, which makes me smile, so I suspect that the effect of my glare is somewhat lost on him.
We take a few slow turns around the outside of the rink, where I can have one hand in Owen’s and the other on the glass.
“Sorry for being boring,” I say, somewhat breathlessly. I tend to laugh when I’m nervous, and at the moment, I’m downright giggly.
“You’re slow. That’s fine. Once you relax a little, it’ll get easier.” The fact that he says it so sincerely somehow makes the accidental innuendo even worse.
The innuendo isn’t lost on me, but amazingly, Owen doesn’t seem to register the double entendre. That wasn’t a line. He’s just…
Nice. Owen Rourke is nice. And smart. And analytical. And really good at what he does. God, why is competence so hot?
Somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing him as intimidating and started seeing him as safe. That realization should probably concern me more than it does.
He’s right about relaxing, too. Once I finally stop fretting about what my feet are doing, I’m able to glide. I manage to feel peaceful. Almost weightless.
Owen must sense it, because he swings around to take my other hand, skating backward so that he can watch my face. The attention in his eyes is almost unnervingly focused, like once Owen decides somebody matters, he doesn’t know how to hold anything back. “Want to move away from the wall?”
No, actually, I’d like you to press me against the glass and kiss me until I can’t breathe. “Sure.”
Truly inspirational restraint on my part there.
“Come on. You can see the crease up close.”
Without the net in place, we have only the marks on the rink to go by. Even though it’s just a flat expanse of ice, the shift in perspective is interesting. Still clinging to Owen, I contemplate the stands.
“It’s weird. Like being in a fishbowl. Do you mind having all those people watching you?”
Owen hums. “Not really. I guess I’m used to it.”
“Being the center of attention is normal for you, I guess.”
“Not that.” Owen doesn’t elaborate right away, but I’m learning to give him time.
To let him think, because I have a feeling that whatever he does finally say will be worth hearing.
Once again, this turns out to be the case.
“I think, you know, they’re not here for me.
Sure, they know my name, but if I got traded, they’d still be Venom fans, not Rourke fans.
They’re looking at the jersey, not at me. ”
The quiet certainty in his voice hurts more than self-pity would have.
I frown. “People really like you, Owen.”
“I don’t mean it in a bad way. I just… don’t usually like being…” He releases my hand long enough to wave a palm in front of his face. “Perceived. It’s weird being under a microscope all the time, but mostly, I try not to think about it.”
Something twists in my gut at the way he says it, like being truly seen has never felt safe for him.
It’s true, he’s never been much of a showoff. Other players, like Viktor, Knight, and Adler, like to show off to get their fans riled up. Owen’s more about the game, which is a selling point of its own, I suppose. Even the WAGs were joking about the “grumpy goalie.”
That wasn’t the only thing they were right about. When they said I was into Owen, they recognized something I’m still reluctant to admit to myself.
I’m not just managing this man anymore. I’m falling for him, too.
And judging by the way my heart keeps reaching for him, I’m already a lot further gone than I want to admit.