Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
Hat Trick - When a player scores three goals in a single game.
Cinder
The tunnel was chaos.
Equipment staff dodging around each other with armfuls of tape and towels.
A camera crew backing up against the wall to let players through.
The particular post-victory electricity that turned concrete corridors into something almost alive, voices bouncing off every surface, sticks clattering, someone's music already blaring from the locker room.
I walked straight into it.
Not the measured, careful walk of a medical professional maintaining composure.
Not the tentative approach of a man who'd spent four days convincing himself he wasn't wanted.
I walked like someone who'd just watched the person they loved score a goal from two hundred feet away and realized, with the force of revelation, that distance was not a treatment plan.
It was a disease. And I was done being sick with it.
The locker room door was propped open. The noise hit me like a wall.
Eighteen guys in various states of undress, shouting over each other, replaying the goal from every conceivable angle, Ember doing what appeared to be a reenactment using a water bottle as the puck and his shoe as the stick.
Max was filming it on his phone. Cole was leaning against his stall with his arms crossed, grinning in that quiet, private way he had when he was genuinely happy and didn't want to make a spectacle of it.
Taz was in the far corner.
He'd gotten his helmet off but nothing else.
Still in full pads, chest protector, the works.
His dark hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, his beard damp, his eyes that impossible gray-blue that shifted depending on the light and his mood.
Right now, they were somewhere between storm and silver, and they found me the instant I crossed the threshold.
The room didn't go quiet. That would have been too neat, too cinematic. Ember kept talking. Max kept filming. The music kept pounding from someone's speaker. The world didn't pause for us.
But Taz went still. The particular stillness I'd learned to read over months of mapping his body, the one that meant his dragon had locked onto something and the rest of him was catching up.
His gloves were off. His hands hung at his sides, bare and pale, and I could see the faint shimmer of frost still clinging to his knuckles.
I didn't stop walking.
I crossed the room. Past Ember's reenactment. Past Ash, who glanced up and then very deliberately looked away. Past Cole, who straightened slightly and then smiled, small and knowing, and shifted to give me a clear path.
Taz watched me come. He didn't move. Didn't reach for me. Didn't do any of the things I'd spent four days wishing he would do and hating myself for wanting. He just stood there, chest still heaving from the game, and let me close the distance he'd created.
I stopped in front of him. Close enough to feel the cold radiating off his skin.
Close enough to see the red rims of his eyes and the way his jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek.
Close enough to catalogue every sign of exhaustion and pain and something raw and desperate underneath it all that he was trying, even now, to hold behind the goaltender's mask.
"You scored a goal," I said.
His voice came out rough, scraped bare. "I did."
"From your own crease."
"Apparently."
"That's not a normal thing goalies do."
"No." Something cracked in his expression. A fissure, thin and bright, running through the composure like light through ice. "Cinder—"
"Shut up," I said, and I grabbed the front of his chest protector with both hands and kissed him.
Not carefully. Not tentatively. Not the way you kissed someone when you were testing whether they still wanted you.
I kissed him the way I'd wanted to since the night he'd pressed his cold mouth to my spine and whispered I'm counting now.
I kissed him like I was drowning and he was the surface.
I kissed him with four days of silence and grief and kitchen floors and cold tea and the sound of his name in an empty apartment behind it.
He made a sound against my mouth. Low, wrecked, almost pained.
His bare hands came up and gripped my face, fingers freezing against my jaw, and the cold bloomed through me like a homecoming.
Not sharp. Not painful. Just his. The clean, bright, living cold that had bent around me the first time I'd touched him and never stopped recognizing me since.
He kissed me back like a man who'd been holding his breath for days and had finally been given permission to exhale.
His thumbs traced my cheekbones. His forehead pressed against mine.
I could feel him shaking, fine tremors running through his hands and his arms and the massive frame still encased in goaltending pads, and I realized he was crying.
Not sobbing. Not falling apart. Just leaking, silently, the way ice melted when warmth finally reached it.
The locker room had gone quiet.
I didn't care. I kissed him harder, pulling him closer, my fingers twisting in the straps of his chest protector because I needed something to hold onto and he was the only solid thing left in my world.
When we finally broke apart, breathing hard, foreheads still touching, the silence lasted exactly two and a half seconds.
Then Ember said, very clearly, "FINALLY."
The room exploded. Not with shock. Not with discomfort. With the particular, raucous, overwhelming joy of a team that had apparently been waiting for this moment with considerably less patience than either of us had given them credit for.
Max whooped. Actually whooped, like a teenager at a concert, and started clapping with a rhythm that the rest of the room picked up.
Cole was laughing, his head tipped back against his stall, the sound warm and genuine and relieved.
Ash nodded once from across the room, which from Ash was the equivalent of a standing ovation. Declan punched the air. Sorin whistled.
Ember vaulted over a bench, skidded to a stop beside us, and threw his arms around both of us simultaneously, which was impressive given that Taz was still in full goaltending gear and roughly the size of a refrigerator.
"I knew it," he announced to no one in particular.
"I called it three months ago. Ask Max. I literally called it. "
"He did," Max confirmed, still filming. "He was insufferable about it."
"I was RIGHT about it," Ember corrected. "There's a difference."
Taz hadn't let go of my face. His thumbs were still moving, slow arcs across my cheekbones, and his eyes were locked on mine with an intensity that made my chest feel like it was being rebuilt from the inside out.
"I'm sorry," he said. Quiet enough that it was just for me, even in the noise. "I'm so sorry, Cinder. I was wrong. About all of it."
"I know," I said. My voice cracked, and I didn't try to fix it. "We're going to talk about it. All of it. Every single thing you've been hiding. But not now."
"Not now," he agreed.
"Now you're going to let your team celebrate.
And you're going to let me sit next to you.
And you're not going to create any more distance, not an inch, not for any reason, because I swear to God, Taz, if you pull away from me one more time, I will document it in your medical file as a psychiatric event. "
The laugh that burst out of him was raw and startled and real, the kind of laugh I'd only heard from him a handful of times, the kind that meant I'd gotten past every wall he'd built and found the actual person underneath.
"Understood," he said.
"Good." I kissed him again, softer this time, just a press of warmth against his cold mouth. "Now take off your pads. You smell horrific."
Max's camera caught the whole thing. I found out later he'd posted it to the team group chat with the caption: our goalie scored a goal and got a boyfriend in the same night.
I didn't even mind.
Taz sat on the edge of the hotel room mattress in sweats and a worn t-shirt, hair still damp from the shower, and he looked smaller without the pads.
Not physically—he was still enormous, broad-shouldered and built like something designed to stop things—but stripped of the armor, the mask, the goaltender's composure, he looked like a man who'd been carrying something too heavy for too long and had only just set it down.
I sat across from him, cross-legged on the other bed, close enough that our knees almost touched. The flight was at six-thirty in the morning. We had maybe five hours before the alarm went off, and neither of us was going to waste them sleeping.
"Talk," I said.
He exhaled through his nose. Rubbed his palms against his thighs, a gesture I'd seen him make exactly twice before, both times when he was working up to something he didn't want to say.
"After the playoff clinch," he started. "At the bar. I went to the restroom."
I waited.
"There was a man in the hallway when I came out.
Blocking the corridor. No name. No identification.
The kind of face you forget while you're still looking at it.
" He paused, and the temperature in the room dropped by a degree.
Not enough to see your breath, but enough to feel it settle against exposed skin like a warning. "He had your notes, Cinder."
My stomach dropped. "My notes."
"Your medical documentation. Every anomalous reading you'd ever flagged on me. My cardiac output, my core temperatures." His jaw worked. "He had a draft article ready to send to three media outlets and the league's Department of Player Safety."
Gavin.
"What did he want?" I asked, even though some part of me already knew.