Chapter 17
KIERAN
I'd made a mistake, and the evidence was everywhere.
Nico's toothbrush was back in the other bathroom.
His charger was back on the guest room nightstand.
The hoodie that had lived on my desk chair for weeks was folded on the guest room bed.
The Kalevala was gone from my nightstand, and the empty space where it had been was an accusation I couldn't answer.
Three days of this. Three days of watching Nico retreat into the version of himself I'd met on day one, contained and silent, impeccably professional. He was sleeping on the floor again.
I'd done this. I'd said be careful at the facility and he'd heard I'm ashamed of you, and I hadn't been fast enough to close the gap between what I meant and what he felt.
On the third day, practice went wrong.
Reeves called a full-contact scrimmage, first team versus second, game intensity. I settled into my crease with the familiar rituals—stretch, test the posts, calibrate. The whistle blew. Play started.
Nico was playing like a man with nothing to lose.
Not reckless in a showy way—he wasn't throwing wild hits or taking stupid penalties.
His recklessness was subtler and more dangerous.
He was putting his body in places it didn't need to be, blocking shot lanes with his torso instead of his stick, finishing checks against guys who outweighed him by forty pounds.
Staying in contact zones a beat too long, inviting the punishment instead of avoiding it.
I watched from sixty feet away and felt my hands tighten on my stick.
The play developed in the neutral zone. Nico carried the puck through the center lane. Bishop's territory. Bishop read the play, stepped up, planted his feet. Nico saw him and didn't change course. He lowered his shoulder and drove into Bishop's check.
The collision was enormous. Two bodies meeting at full speed, the sound of it carrying across the ice. Nico's stick flew from his hands. His helmet shifted. He hit the ice hard, his shoulder taking the impact, and slid into the boards with a force that made the glass rattle.
The whistle blew.
He didn't get up immediately. He lay on his side, one arm tucked against his chest, his face pressed to the ice. The trainer was already skating over. Guys were pulling up, forming the loose circle that happens when someone goes down hard.
I was moving before I'd decided to move.
The crease, my crease, the space I'd occupied for seventeen years, the six-by-four sanctuary where nothing touched me and nothing got through, was behind me.
I was skating toward the far boards, past the hash marks, past the face-off dots, past every boundary that separated my position from the rest of the ice.
Abbott caught my arm at the blue line. "Walsh. He's okay. The trainer's got him."
"Let go."
"Kieran." Abbott's grip tightened. His voice was low and urgent. "Don't. Not in front of the whole team."
I stopped. The rational part of my brain, my goalie brain, the one that calculated angles and controlled impulses, reasserted itself with the grinding reluctance of a machine being forced back into gear.
Abbott was right. Skating across the ice to cradle an injured teammate was not something goalies did.
Not unless they wanted every person in the building to know exactly why.
I went back to my crease. I watched the trainer help Nico to his feet.
I watched him shake off the assistance and skate to the bench under his own power.
I watched him sit down and press a towel to his face—the eyebrow cut had reopened—and stare at the ice with an expression that was more than just the pain.
My hands were shaking. They never shook. Not in overtime. Not on breakaways. Not in game sevens.
I found him in the training room after practice.
He was alone. Declan had finished with him and moved on to Bishop's eternal shoulder maintenance.
Nico sat on the treatment table with a butterfly bandage above his eyebrow and an ice pack strapped to his shoulder.
He looked up when I walked in. His face was a locked door, blank and controlled, the mask firmly in place.
I closed the door behind me.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm here."
"You shouldn't be. If someone—"
"I don't care." I crossed the room and stood in front of him. The treatment table put us at the same height. His eyes, dark and guarded, the eyes of a man who'd been taught that vulnerability was a weapon other people used against you, met mine. "I made a mistake."
"You were being smart."
"I was being a coward." I took his face in my hands.
His skin was cold from the ice pack, the stubble rough against my palms. "I asked you for distance because I was afraid.
Not of the team finding out, not of Park, not of Brue.
I was afraid that if this becomes public, it becomes something other people get to have an opinion about.
And I wanted it to be just ours for a little longer. "
His jaw flexed under my hands. The mask was cracking.
"But keeping it just ours meant asking you to be invisible again," I said. "And you've spent a year being invisible. I promised you that you weren't alone anymore, and then I asked you to act like you were."
"Kieran—"
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the distance. I'm sorry for three days of silence. I'm sorry for every minute you spent on that floor thinking I was ashamed of you."
His breath caught. His hands came up and gripped my wrists, holding on.
"I thought you'd changed your mind," he said. The words were rough, scraped from somewhere he'd been trying to keep sealed. "I thought you decided I wasn't worth it."
"You're worth everything." I pressed my forehead to his. "You're worth the conversation with Park. You're worth whatever Brue writes. You're worth every complication, Nico. All of them."
He kissed me.
Not the desperate, dam-breaking kiss from the kitchen.
Not the tentative first contact from Detroit.
This was something else, slower and deeper, the kiss of a man who'd been holding his breath for three days and was finally letting himself exhale.
His hands moved from my wrists to my face and we stood in the training room of the Storm practice facility with the door closed and his ice pack dripping on the floor, kissing like fools.
That night, his things migrated back—his toothbrush to my bathroom, his charger to my nightstand, and his copy of Kalevala beside my glass of water.
In my bed in the dark, he pressed against me with the desperate closeness of a man who'd spent three nights on a floor after learning what it felt like to sleep beside someone.
We made love—slow and gentle, every touch a communication rather than a discovery.
My hands learned the new bruise on his shoulder.
His mouth found the pulse in my throat and stayed there, pressed against the beat, as if the rhythm of my heart was a sound he needed to carry with him.
The sex was tender in a way that made my chest ache.
Not the urgent, overwhelming collision of the first night, but slower, deliberate and attentive.
He was quieter this time, his sounds more breath than voice.
When he came apart beneath me it was with a shudder that went through his whole body, his face turned into my shoulder and his hands gripping my back hard enough to leave marks I'd feel in the morning.
Afterward, his head rested on my chest, his ear pressed over my heart.
"Don't do that again," he murmured.
"The sex?"
"The distance."
I kissed the top of his head. "Never."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
He slept. No rigid waking at 3 AM, no panicked bolt toward consciousness. He slept through the night with his ear against my heartbeat and his hand on my hip—the trust of a man who'd decided, against all available evidence, that this time was different.