Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Line Change - Substituting players on and off the ice during play or stoppages.
Taz
His breath hitched. Not surprise. Something deeper. Recognition, maybe. The sound of a man hearing the thing he'd been waiting for without knowing he'd been waiting.
He kissed me, slow and thorough, his free hand sliding up my thigh, and I felt every point of contact like a brand, warmth searing through the frost, melting me from the outside in. When he pulled back, his eyes were dark and certain.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "Turn over."
I did. Rolled onto my stomach and felt the cool sheets press against my chest, felt his weight settle along my back, his mouth finding the knob at the top of my spine, then the one below it, then the next.
Mapping me. Vertebra by vertebra. The way he mapped everything, with that devastating patience that made me feel less like a body being touched and more like a text being read by someone who actually wanted to understand the language.
His hands smoothed down my flanks. I heard him reach for something on the nightstand. The click of a cap. The slick sound of his fingers, and then his hand was between my legs, careful and warm and impossibly gentle for a man with that much quiet steel in him.
The first press of his finger drew a sound out of me that I buried in the pillow.
Not pain. Sensation. The shock of warmth entering a body that ran cold, the intimacy of it so acute that my dragon stirred beneath my ribs and then, for once, went still.
Not asleep. Not agitated. Just present. Watching.
As if it understood that this was something worth being quiet for.
"Okay?" Cinder murmured against the back of my neck.
"Yes." My voice was muffled. Wrecked. "More."
He gave me more. A second finger, slowly, working me open with the same focused attention he brought to every impossible thing he'd ever faced.
I could feel the precision in it, the way he angled and adjusted, reading my responses the way he read vitals, catching every hitch of breath, every involuntary clench, every moment where the cold flared and then smoothed out beneath his touch.
By the time he added a third, I was gripping the pillow with both hands, frost crackling along the cotton, my hips pushing back against him without my permission.
The cold was doing something I'd never felt before, cycling through me in waves that crested and broke against the warmth of his hands, and instead of fighting each other, the two temperatures braided together into something entirely new.
Something that felt like equilibrium. Like the thing I'd spent my whole life searching for without knowing its name.
"Taz." His mouth was against my ear, his body draped along my back, and I could feel him hard against my thigh, could feel the restraint trembling through him. "I need to hear you say it."
"Yes," I said. "God, yes. Now."
He rolled on a condom, added more lube and pressed inside me slowly.
The world narrowed to a single point of contact.
His body entering mine, inch by careful inch, the stretch and burn of it giving way to a fullness so complete that I forgot, briefly, how to breathe.
The cold surged, reflexive, defensive, and I felt it coat the headboard in a fresh layer of frost, felt it crackle along the sheets beneath my hands, felt it reach for the walls and the window and every surface it could find.
But it didn't touch him.
It parted around him the way it always had. As if some ancient, fundamental part of me had already decided that this man was not a threat to be frozen out but a warmth to be preserved at all costs.
He bottomed out and held still. Both of us breathing. Both of us shaking. His forehead pressed between my shoulder blades, and I could feel his heartbeat hammering against my back, rapid and real and alive in a way that made my eyes sting.
"Move," I whispered.
He did. Slow at first. Careful. The rhythm of a man who understood that this wasn't just physical, that every thrust carried the weight of everything we'd said tonight and everything we hadn't.
I felt it in the way he held my hip, firm but not bruising.
In the way his other hand found mine on the pillow and laced our fingers together, squeezing once.
In the way his breath came hot and uneven against my spine, each exhale a confession he couldn't have made with words.
I pushed back against him, meeting his rhythm, and the sound he made at that, quiet, almost wounded, sent a crack running through whatever was left of my composure.
"Harder," I said, and my voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded like someone who'd stopped being afraid.
He gave me what I asked for. The pace shifted, deeper, more urgent, his hips snapping forward with a force that drove the breath out of me and sent frost spiraling across the headboard in patterns so intricate they looked like calligraphy.
His hand tightened on mine. His mouth found the junction of my neck and shoulder and stayed there, open and hot, and I could feel him losing control in the best possible way, the careful clinical precision dissolving into something raw and human and desperate.
"Taz," he gasped. "I can feel it. The cold. It's everywhere."
"It won't hurt you."
"I know." His voice cracked. "It feels like you."
I turned my head, found his mouth, and kissed him while he drove into me, and the angle changed just enough to hit something that whited out my vision and tore a sound from my chest that was barely human.
He felt it, adjusted, hit that spot again, and again, and the world dissolved into a white-hot blur of sensation and cold and warmth and the sound of his name spilling out of me like something I'd been holding back my entire life.
"Let go," Cinder whispered. "I've got you."
I came apart.
Cinder followed me over seconds later. I felt it in the stutter of his hips, the way his fingers crushed mine against the pillow, the shuddered exhale against my shoulder blade that carried my name like a prayer he hadn't meant to say out loud.
His body went rigid against my back, then shook, then slowly, slowly softened, his weight settling over me like a blanket, like gravity, like something I could trust to still be there in the morning.
We lay there. Neither of us moved. The frost on the ceiling glittered above us, already beginning to melt, tiny droplets forming along the patterns and catching the light as they fell.
One landed on my forearm. Another on Cinder's knuckles where they were still laced with mine.
Warm and cold, meeting on our skin, running together in thin rivulets that traced the lines of our joined hands.
"The ceiling," Cinder murmured, his voice hoarse and dazed. "You frosted the ceiling. It’s a good job you’re a hockey star."
I blinked, wondering if, dazed as I was, I’d missed a sentence in the middle of that observation.
“What?”
“Can you imagine how much we’re going to have to tip housekeeping?”
We both laughed at the absurdity, cleaned up, then cuddled on sheets that were a little damp.
"I need to tell you something," I whispered.
He waited. Patient as always.
"The day you put your hands on me in the medical room. The very first time." I swallowed. "The cold recognized you. Before I did. Before I had any idea what was happening, it just bent around you like you'd always been there. Like it had been leaving a space for you and I'd never noticed."
His eyes glistened. He didn't speak.
"I've spent my whole life thinking the cold was the problem.
That it was the thing that killed my father, the thing that made my mother afraid, the thing I had to contain and control and never, ever let anyone see.
And then you walked in and touched me, and it didn't freeze.
It didn't recoil. It just said, oh, there you are. "
A tear slipped down his cheek. I caught it with my thumb before it reached his jaw.
"I should have told you everything from the beginning," I said.
"I should have told you about the man in the hallway.
I should have told you about my father. I should have told you that pushing you away was the hardest thing I've ever done, harder than any game, harder than any shift, harder than watching my dad walk into that blizzard.
Because at least with him I was a child who didn't have a choice.
With you, I chose wrong. I chose distance over trust, and it almost cost me the only person who's ever made the cold feel like something worth having. "
Cinder pressed his forehead to mine. His breath was warm and unsteady against my mouth.
"No more walls," he said. Not a question.
"No more walls," I agreed. "No more hallways. No more strangers deciding what we are to each other. No more three-inch gaps in the mattress."
He laughed. Wet and broken and perfect. "That was the worst part. The three inches."
"I know." I pulled him closer, tucking his head beneath my chin, wrapping both arms around him until there was no space left at all.
“I love you. I’m always going to love you, but loving someone now is easy. I want us to love each other in fifty years.”
I cleared my throat and mumbled, “Five hundred.”
Cinder froze, then joy bubbled out of him, and I decided right then I would spend every day for the next five hundred or so years giving him joy.