Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Hooking - Using the stick to impede or pull back an opponent.
Taz
The bed was cold when I woke up.
Not my kind of cold—not the deep, bone-settled chill that lived under my skin like a second heartbeat. This was the ordinary kind. The absence of warmth. The ghost of someone who'd been pressed against me and wasn't anymore.
I reached across the mattress before I was fully conscious, my hand finding nothing but cool sheets and the faint impression where his body had been. My dragon stirred, a low, uneasy hum beneath my ribs, but I quieted it with a breath.
He'd left early. Of course he had.
I stared at the ceiling for a moment, letting the disappointment settle without feeding it. Cinder wasn't running—not from me, not from us. He was protecting what we had the only way he knew how: carefully. Quietly. With the same meticulous attention he brought to everything else.
If someone on the staff saw him leaving my room at six in the morning, the questions would start. And after the reporters, after the article, after Gavin's threats—he couldn't afford questions. Neither could I, really, but I'd spent twenty years hiding. One more secret barely registered.
Still, waking up alone after falling asleep with him felt like having something warm taken away before I'd finished memorizing the shape of it.
I rolled over and pressed my face into the pillow he'd used. It smelled like eucalyptus and skin and something faintly sweet that I couldn't name. My dragon rumbled—not in distress, but in recognition. His.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
I grabbed it too fast, nearly knocking the Shackleton book to the floor, and squinted at the screen.
Cinder: Sorry I disappeared. You looked too peaceful to wake up. Also you were doing this thing where you curled around the pillow like a very large, very cold cat and I didn't have the heart to disturb it.
A grin spread across my face before I could stop it. I typed back immediately.
Me: I do not curl.
Cinder: You absolutely curl. I have a medical professional's observational authority on this.
Me: That's not a real credential.
Cinder: It is now. I'm adding it to my résumé. "Certified Goaltender Curl Specialist."
I laughed—actually laughed, alone in a hotel room at seven in the morning—and the sound startled me. When had that gotten so easy?
Me: Thank you for staying last night.
A pause. The typing indicator appeared, disappeared, appeared again. Then:
Cinder: Thank you for asking me to.
I held the phone against my chest like an idiot and stared at the ceiling. My dragon purred.
The morning was the usual road-game routine: breakfast in the hotel restaurant, a light optional skate at the arena, video review with the coaching staff. I moved through all of it on autopilot, my body in one place and my mind circling back to Cinder every few minutes like a compass finding north.
We texted between everything.
During breakfast, while Max argued with Keegan about whether Vancouver's coffee was superior to Denver's (it wasn't, and I told him so):
Cinder: Nancy says your save percentage last night was .978. She also says, and I quote, "Tell your boyfriend to stop being so good, it's making the rest of the league look bad."
Me: Tell Nancy I'm flattered and terrified of her in equal measure.
Cinder: That's not the correct ratio. I'd lean more terrified.
During the optional skate, while I worked through light stretching in the crease and tried not to scan the stands for a face I knew wouldn't be there:
Me: How's your morning?
Cinder: Reviewing player files. One of the rookies has a hamstring thing that's been bugging me. Also, I found a vending machine that sells those weird Japanese Kit Kats and I bought six.
Me: What flavors?
Cinder: Matcha, strawberry cheesecake, and something that claims to be "sake" which feels like a liability for a medical professional to consume.
Me: Save me the matcha one.
Cinder: Already did.
Something warm bloomed behind my sternum—not the cold retreating, but something existing alongside it. Coexisting. Like maybe there was room for both.
During video review, while Coach Kinkaid broke down L.A.'s power play entries and I pretended to take notes:
Cinder: Can I ask you something?
My stomach tightened.
Me: Always.
Cinder: Last night. When you were sleeping. Your skin temperature actually rose. Not a lot—maybe a degree. But I noticed because I had my hand on your chest, and it was warmer than I've ever felt you. Comfortable.
I stared at the message, my throat constricting.
Cinder: You don't have to explain. I just wanted you to know I noticed. And that it made me happy, unrealistically, like I was responsible for it.
I closed my eyes. The cold inside me pressed against my ribs, curious, almost tentative—like it was testing boundaries it had held for decades.
Me: There are things I need to tell you. About why that happens. About all of it.
Cinder: I know.
Me: When we get home. I want to do it properly. Not in a hotel corridor between games.
Cinder: Whenever you're ready, Taz. I'm not going anywhere.
I read that last line four times. Then I locked my phone and sat in the dark of the video room while Kinkaid's voice washed over me, and I let myself believe—for the first time in thirty years—that maybe I could tell someone the truth and they wouldn't run.
The afternoon dragged. Game-day naps were mandatory, and I lay in my hotel room with the curtains drawn, staring at the ceiling while my body refused to cooperate with rest. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Cinder's face—his expression when he'd kissed me last night, soft and certain, like I was something worth choosing.
The way he'd traced patterns on my back until I fell asleep.
The careful, deliberate way he'd slipped out before dawn, protecting both of us without being asked.
My phone buzzed again.
Cinder: Pre-game question: on a scale of 1 to "Shackleton trapped in Antarctic ice," how nervous are you?
Me: About 4. Maybe a 5. I’m trying to nap and it isn’t working.
Cinder: Sorry, but you'll stop them. Because that's what you do.
Me: Your confidence in me is medically unsupported.
Cinder: Most of what you do is medically unsupported. I've learned to adapt.
I grinned at the ceiling.
Me: Are you saying I'm beyond medical explanation?
A longer pause this time. Then:
Cinder: I'm saying you're beyond anything I've encountered. And I've encountered a lot.
The words sat in my chest like a coal that wouldn't cool. I wanted to type something back—something honest, something that matched the weight of what he'd given me. But everything I thought of felt too small or too large, and in the end I just sent:
Me: I'll look for you behind the bench tonight.
Cinder: I'll be there. I'm always there.
I set the phone down and pressed both hands over my face, breathing slowly, feeling the cold settle into something manageable. Something almost calm.
He didn't know what I was. Not yet. Didn't know about the dragon coiled beneath my ribs, about ice that could kill, about a father who walked into the snow and never came back.
He didn't know that what he felt when he touched my skin—that impossible chill, that frequency he couldn't name—was the dormant power of something ancient and dangerous and desperately, terribly lonely.
But he would. Soon. And when I told him, when I finally opened the last frozen door and let him see everything—
He'd either stay or he wouldn't.
My dragon pressed against my ribs, certain in a way I envied. It had already decided. Had decided the moment Cinder's warm hands first touched my cold skin and didn't flinch.
Mate, it hummed. Ours.
"Not yet," I whispered to the empty room. "But maybe. If he'll have us."
Cinder – two days later
The apartment was cold and the smell was wrong.
Not obviously wrong. Just not my apartment, and I glanced over to the small window over the sink. It was open, and I knew I'd left it closed.
I stood in the entrance, key still in the lock, and felt the floor tilt beneath me.
My pulse kicked up—not gradually, not the slow climb of anxiety I'd learned to manage with breathing exercises and grounding techniques.
This was instant. Full-body. The kind of adrenaline dump that flooded your system when something primal in your brain recognized danger before the rest of you caught up.
The apartment looked the same. Same cramped studio layout, same medical textbooks on the shelf, same worn couch facing the ancient television. Nothing overturned. Nothing missing that I could see from the doorway.
But the air was wrong.
I couldn't explain it better than that. It smelled like someone else had been breathing in my space.
A faint trace of cologne—woody, expensive, nothing I owned.
And something had shifted on the kitchen counter.
My medication organizer, the large one, not the travel one I kept aligned with the edge of the counter because I was particular about things like that, had been moved. Not far. Maybe an inch. But enough.
My hands started shaking.
I stepped inside, leaving the door open behind me because the thought of closing myself in made my chest seize.
My eyes swept the room methodically—training kicking in even through the panic, cataloging details the way I'd catalog symptoms. Kitchen: had I left the mug dirty?
It didn't sound like me. Bathroom door: closed, not open the way I'd left it.
Bed: made, sheets tucked tight, hospital corners.
Except the book on my nightstand had been turned over.
I'd left it face-down, open to my page. Now it was face-up, closed, the bookmark sitting on top like someone had picked it up, looked at it, and set it back down without caring that I'd notice.
Or wanting me to notice.