Chapter 13
KIERAN
I sat in my usual seat, three rows from the front, and watched my save footage on my tablet. Or tried to. My eyes kept drifting to the reflection in the dark window, specifically, to the seat eleven rows back where Nico sat with his earbuds in and his head against the glass.
We hadn't touched since Detroit. Four days of games and bus rides and hotel rooms where we'd kept the space that daylight required.
But every time I looked at him, across the locker room, through the glass during warm-ups, in the mirror of our shared hotel bathroom, the memory of the kiss reassembled itself.
The sound he'd made against my mouth. The heat of his fingers through my shirt.
The word home sitting between us like a fuse waiting for a match.
Abbott shifted beside me, adjusting his neck pillow. "You're not watching film," he observed.
"I'm watching film."
"You've been on the same save for eleven minutes. It's a routine glove catch."
I locked the tablet. "Go to sleep, Abbott."
He gave me a look that said he knew exactly what I wasn't watching. He settled back against the headrest with his eyes closed and a small, knowing smile that I chose to ignore.
The bus pulled into the Storm facility lot at 1:47 AM.
The team dispersed into the cold November night, cars starting and headlights sweeping the empty lot, the muffled thump of trunks closing over gear bags.
Nico and I walked to my car in silence. The drive home was ten minutes of dark streets and traffic lights, neither of us speaking—the air between us so charged it pressed against my skin.
I pulled into the garage. We rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor. I unlocked the door and we walked into the apartment, and the familiar scent of the place, tea and wood, settled around us like a held breath.
Nico set his bag by the door. He stood in the entrance to the kitchen, backlit by the glow of the stove hood I always left on, and looked at me.
I looked at him.
The distance between us was eight feet. The counter was to his left, the hallway to my right.
We'd stood in this exact configuration a hundred times, coming home from practice, from games, from the road.
We'd made tea in this kitchen, eaten dill eggs at this counter, built a quiet, careful routine that never quite crossed the line.
"Kieran," he said. Just my name. Nothing else.
I crossed the eight feet in four steps and kissed him.
It wasn't like Detroit. That kiss had been tentative at its core, a question asked in the dark, still shaped by doubt. This was the answer. This was six weeks of 3 AM conversations and shared floors and the slow erosion of every wall I'd spent eleven years constructing.
Nico's hands found my waist and pulled me against him.
The counter pressed into his lower back as I crowded him into it, my hands on either side of his body, caging him.
He didn't feel caged, he felt claimed. The difference was in the way his body softened against mine instead of bracing.
His mouth opened under mine and I tasted him, really tasted him, the urgency of it burning through the careful restraint I'd maintained for too long.
His fingers slid under my shirt. The contact of his skin against mine was a detonation, my entire nervous system on fire under the sensation of his palms mapping my ribs and my abdomen, the line of muscle along my hip.
He was hard, his touch rough and deliberate, reading me with his hands and his eyes.
"Not the kitchen," I managed against his mouth.
"Then where?"
I pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were dark and his breathing wrecked, his lips swollen from mine. He looked undone in a way I'd never seen, the constant guard gone, the defenses offline, the walls leveled. Just Nico. Wanting.
I took his hand and led him down the hall past the guest room into my room.
My bedroom was the one space in the apartment he'd never entered.
It was mine the way the crease was mine, private and controlled, the place where I was most myself.
The bed was made with the precision of someone who needed order to function.
The nightstand held a book, a glass of water, and a phone charger.
The window looked out over Lincoln Park, the trees bare against the city lights.
Nico stood in the doorway and looked at the room and then at me. Something passed across his face that was more devastating than desire. Recognition. He was seeing the most private version of me and deciding to step inside.
He stepped inside.
We were desperate and graceless, the collision of two men who'd spent too long denying the pull between us.
My shirt came off. His came off. The bruise on his shoulder had faded to yellow and green, and I pressed my mouth to it gently, a contrast to the urgency of everything else between us.
The tenderness interrupted the heat because I needed him to know that this wasn't just want.
It was care and attention. It was every observation I'd cataloged from the crease, the way he moved, the way he held himself, the way his body told a story his words refused to—all translated into touch.
Nico made a sound when my mouth found his shoulder that I would remember for the rest of my life. Low and broken, a surrender that came from somewhere deep inside him. His hands tightened in my hair.
"Kieran—"
"I know."
"I need—"
"I know."
I did know. I knew because I'd spent six weeks reading him, learning his tells, mapping the geography of his defenses. He told me. Not in words, but in the way his body moved against mine, the angle of his hips, the grip of his hands in my hair. I read him the way I read the ice.
When I took him into my mouth, his back arched off the bed and his hand found the back of my head. He said something in Finnish that I didn't understand. The sound of it, low and fractured, was its own translation.
And then his hands were pulling me up, pulling me over him, and his mouth found mine.
We were skin to skin with nothing between us, the full contact of two bodies that had spent weeks orbiting each other, finally colliding.
The heat of him against me took my breath away.
I braced my weight on my forearms and looked down at his face.
His expression, open and fierce, terrified and wanting, cracked something open in my chest.
This was the thing I hadn't expected—my own terror.
I'd spent so long being the steady one, the controlled one, that I'd forgotten what it felt like to be vulnerable.
And here, with his legs wrapped around me and his eyes locked on mine and his body opening to me with a trust that felt like a gift I didn't deserve, I was terrified.
Not of the physical act but of how much it meant.
Of how completely this man had dismantled my own isolation without either of us noticing until the walls were already down.
He saw it. He saw my hands shaking where they gripped the sheets. He reached up and cupped my face, his palms warm against my jaw.
"I see you," he said. The words I'd given him, returned.
I pressed into him and we both stopped breathing. The sensation was overwhelming, the intimacy of it beyond anything I'd felt before. This was not just sex. This was the moment where every wall came down simultaneously, where we surrendered to each other.
We moved together. It was urgent and graceless, perfect in the way that first times are perfect, imperfect but real.
His hands gripped my back hard enough to bruise.
My face was pressed into his neck, breathing him, tasting the salt of his skin.
He came apart beneath me, my name on his lips, and when I followed him, it was with his face between my hands and his eyes on mine.
The last coherent thought I had was, this changes everything.
Because it did.
My analytical mind didn't go offline. It sharpened.
Every detail registered—the texture of his skin, the sound of his breathing, the way his back arched when I found the place that made the last of his defenses dissolve.
I memorized him the way I memorized a game.
Not to control the moment but to remember it.
And Nico. Nico, who'd spent a year keeping himself small and contained, invisible, filled every inch of the space I gave him.
His watchfulness transformed into something else—an awareness that was all focus and no fear, his attention locked on me with intensity.
He wasn't guarding himself. He was giving himself away, piece by piece, and trusting me to hold every part of him.
Afterward, we lay in my bed. The silence between us was different from before—the silence of two people who had stopped pretending and hadn't yet started to worry about what they'd been holding back.
"I don't know how to do this," Nico said, his voice rough.
He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling the way he used to stare at the guest room ceiling.
But his other hand was on my chest, palm flat, fingers spread, anchoring himself to something real.
"The relationship thing. I've never, not like this. "
"Me either."
"You've dated."
"I've gone on dates. There's a difference." I turned my head to look at him. In the dim light, his profile was sharp, the straight nose, the strong jaw, the mouth I'd just spent an hour learning. "I've never had someone in this room before."
He turned to face me. The surprise was genuine. "Never?"
"Eleven years in this apartment. You're the first person who's been in this bed."
He stared at me for a long moment. Then his hand pressed harder against my chest—not pushing, but claiming, feeling the heartbeat underneath.
"What's different about this?" he asked.
"Everything."
He closed his eyes. I watched his face, his capacity to process overwhelmed—the brief stillness, his held breath, the gradual release as the information settled into a place he could carry it.
"Okay," he said. "Everything."
He fell asleep in my bed. The first time he'd slept in a bed since arriving in Chicago, seven weeks of sleeping on the floor, broken by the simple, seismic act of someone making him feel safe enough to rise.
I lay awake beside him, watching the city lights paint shadows on the ceiling. This is going to change everything. This is going to be complicated and dangerous. And probably the best decision I've ever made.
At 3:17 AM, Nico went rigid.
His entire body locked, every muscle tensing simultaneously, the way a man braces for impact in the half-second before a hit. His breathing spiked, shallow and fast. His hand, which had been resting on my chest, clenched into a fist.
I didn't move. I didn't reach for him or shake him or say his name too loudly. I understood this, the goalie's instinct, the way the body processed threat even in sleep. You didn't startle someone out of a crisis. You created a perimeter and waited.
"Nico." Quiet and even. The same voice I used to talk to myself in the crease during a penalty kill, calm under pressure, because calm was contagious.
His eyes opened. For a disorienting second, they were wild, the hypervigilance at full power, scanning the unfamiliar room, the unfamiliar bed, the body beside him that his sleeping brain had registered as a threat.
Then he saw me. The wildness faded and recognition settled in.
"You're in my room," I said. "You're in my bed. You're safe."
He stared at me. His breathing was still fast, his fist still clenched. The war was visible behind his eyes, the instinct that said run, this isn't yours, you don't get to keep this fighting against the part of him that wanted to stay.
I didn't reach for him. I waited.
Slowly, deliberately, Nico unclenched his fist. He spread his fingers flat against my chest again. He pressed down until he could feel my heartbeat, fifty-two beats per minute, steady—the resting rate of a man who'd trained his body to stay calm when everything was chaos.
"I'm okay," he said. His voice was rough. "I'm staying."
He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. His body softened against the mattress, the tension draining out of him in stages, shoulders first, then spine, then the fist that became a palm that became fingers laced through mine.