Chapter seven
Scrum - Post-whistle pushing or confrontation between players.
Dante
I went very still.
My first coherent thought was that I was pressed against Theron Kincaid’s side like I’d been glued there, and my second coherent thought wasn’t really a thought so much as a full-body inventory of every point of contact between us—my chest against his arm, my stomach against his ribs, my hip against his hip—and the mortifying realization that the extremely obvious problem currently making itself known against the side of his thigh had been making itself known against the side of his thigh for an unknown number of hours.
I kept my breathing even. Didn’t move. Tried to work out whether there was any version of extracting myself from this situation that didn’t require him to not already know.
“Morning,” he said, and his voice had that rough edge it got first thing, lower than usual, and I felt it in my chest before I processed the word.
“Morning,” I managed.
I should have moved. That was the obvious play—acknowledge the awkwardness, apologize, get myself vertical, and deal with the physical situation in the bathroom like an adult.
Instead, I lay there like an idiot, hyperaware of every inch of him, of the way his arm hadn’t moved away when I’d woken up, of the fact that he smelled like hotel soap and something underneath that I couldn’t name but my body seemed to have extremely strong opinions about.
My ribs ached. My face throbbed. My jaw felt like someone had used it for batting practice.
“How’s your head?” he asked, and I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was pretending not to notice or if he was genuinely focused on concussion protocol at six-thirty in the morning while I was having a full-body crisis pressed against his side.
“Fine,” I said. “Better. I mean—it hurts, but not worse.”
“Nausea?”
“No.”
“Vision?”
“Clear.”
He was quiet for a moment. I could feel him breathing, and my brain was doing something extremely unhelpful with that information.
“Good,” he said finally.
Then he moved.
Not away—not yet. He shifted his weight, and his hand came up to the side of my face, thumb brushing just below the bruise on my cheekbone with a gentleness that made my breath catch.
His palm was warm. His fingers were careful, deliberate, checking the swelling the way he’d probably checked a thousand injuries over twenty years of hockey, and there was absolutely nothing unprofessional about it except for the fact that I was losing my mind.
“Swelling’s down,” he said.
I made a sound that might have been agreement. His hand was still on my face. I could feel my pulse in my throat, in my wrists, in every place that blood moved through my body with increased urgency, and I was absolutely certain he could feel it too.
Especially in the place all my blood seemed to be migrating to.
He pulled his hand back.
“I’m going to—” I started, and my voice came out rougher than I’d intended. I cleared my throat. “Bathroom.”
“Okay.”
I extracted myself from the bed with what I hoped looked like normal morning stiffness rather than the careful maneuvering of someone trying to hide a situation.
My back was to him as I stood, which helped, and I made it to the bathroom without looking back, because looking back would have required me to meet his eyes and I was not prepared for whatever I’d find there.
I closed the door. Leaned against it. Stared at my reflection in the mirror—bruised, disheveled, face flushed in a way that had nothing to do with the injuries—and tried to get my body to understand that we were not doing this.
The problem was that my body had apparently spent the last few hours curled up against Theron Kincaid in a hotel bed, and it didn’t seem to be regretting that decision.
I ran cold water. Splashed my face, careful around the bruise. The cold helped, a little. Enough that I could think past the immediate physical situation to the larger, more complicated situation underneath it.
I’d woken up wrapped around my head coach.
The man who controlled my ice time, my career, my entire professional future.
The man who’d spent two months deciding whether I was worth keeping, who’d looked at me in that corridor between periods and said you’re not on trial with a certainty that had rearranged something in my chest.
The man who was in his fifties and had probably seen a thousand kids like me develop inconvenient crushes and knew exactly how to manage them without making it awkward.
Except he’d gotten in the bed.
That was the part I kept coming back to. He’d gotten in the bed. He’d made a choice, at some point in the night, to be that close, and I didn’t know what to do with that information except turn it over in my head like something I’d found and didn’t quite know how to use.
I looked at myself in the mirror. The bruise on my cheekbone had deepened to a purple that was going to be spectacular by afternoon.
My jaw was swollen on the left side. I looked like I’d lost a fight, which was accurate, and felt like I was about to lose another one, which was probably also accurate.
I needed to get in the shower, except I wasn’t looking forward to the water hitting my face. I also needed to call my mom.
I splashed more cold water on my face, wincing as it hit the bruised skin.
The swelling around my jaw made everything feel tight and foreign.
I dried off carefully with the scratchy hotel towel and stared at myself one more time—purple cheekbone, split lip I hadn’t even registered last night, eyes that looked too bright in a way that had nothing to do with the concussion.
I opened the bathroom door.
Kincaid was standing by the window, looking out at Chicago in the early-morning light.
He turned when he heard the door. His eyes did that quick assessment thing they always did, cataloging, measuring. “How do you feel?”
“Sore,” I said honestly. “But okay.”
He nodded. Pulled his phone from his pocket and checked something. “Cinder is on his way up. I told him you were cleared, but as team medic, he’ll want to see for himself.” I nodded, not trusting my voice to be steady.
There was a knock at the door—professional, efficient. Kincaid moved to answer it, and I registered the way in which he’d timed this, the way Cinder’s arrival created a clean exit that didn’t require either of us to acknowledge what had or hadn’t happened in the last eight hours.
Cinder came in with his medical bag and the ease of someone who’d done this a thousand times. He was in his thirties, with kind eyes that missed nothing.
“Morning,” he said to me, then nodded at Kincaid. “Coach.”
“He’s cleared,” Kincaid said, already moving toward the door. “Pupils responsive, no nausea, answers coherent. But he’s yours now.”
And just like that, he was gone.
The door clicked shut behind him, and I stood there in the middle of the hotel room feeling like I’d just watched something significant walk out, except I couldn’t name what it was or why the absence of it made my chest feel hollow.
“Sit,” Cinder said, gesturing at the bed. “Let’s have a look.”
I sat. Let him do his assessment—the same questions Kincaid had asked me three times through the night, the same checks of my pupils and reflexes and coordination. His hands were professional, impersonal, nothing like the careful warmth of Kincaid’s palm on my cheek an hour ago.
“Concussion’s mild,” he confirmed after a few minutes. “You got lucky. The ribs are going to hurt for a week so you won’t be playing, but nothing’s cracked. Keep the ibuprofen on schedule, ice the face, and if you feel nauseous or dizzy, you tell me immediately. Understood?”
“Understood.”
He packed up his bag with the same efficiency he’d unpacked it. “Team breakfast is at eight-thirty. Max wants everyone there—show of solidarity after last night. You up for it?”
I thought about sitting in a room full of teammates while looking like I’d been used as a punching bag. Thought about the questions, the attention, the visibility when I’d spent two months trying to be invisible. Then I thought about them all having my back in the game, and last night in the ER.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m up for it.”
Cinder smiled—brief, approving. “Good. Shower first. You smell like a hospital.” And I guessed he should know.
He left, and I was alone in the room that still smelled faintly like Kincaid’s cologne, or maybe I was imagining that. Probably imagining that.
I stood there for a moment in the quiet hotel room, trying to sort through the last twelve hours.
The game. The bathroom. The hospital. Kincaid’s hand on my face in the lamplight.
The way I’d woken up pressed against him like my body had made a decision my brain hadn’t been consulted about.
That seemed to be a pattern I needed to break.
I needed to shower. I needed to get dressed. I needed to go downstairs and face my teammates and pretend I was fine, which was something I’d gotten extremely good at over the last two months.
What I needed to stop doing was thinking about the way Kincaid’s voice had sounded at six-thirty in the morning, rough and low, and the fact that he’d stayed.
I grabbed clean clothes from my bag and headed for the shower.
The hotel restaurant was one of those places designed to handle large groups efficiently—long tables, buffet setup, staff who knew how to keep coffee flowing without asking.
Most of the team was already there when Max and I walked in having met in the elevator, scattered across three tables that had been pushed together near the windows.
The conversation didn’t stop exactly when we entered, but it shifted. Heads turned. Keegan half-stood from his chair, then seemed to think better of it and sat back down. Morozov said something in Ukrainian that sounded concerned. Varga just stared at my face and whistled low.
“Jesus, Russo,” Ilyin said. “You look like you went through a car wash without the car.”