13. Enemy Territory #2
No. Too soon for that word. Even in my head.
The look of a man watching someone he ‘ insert alternative word that doesn’t fit nearly as well’ do the thing he’s always known she could do. The shared, private, incandescent moment of I told you so and I know and God, you’re incredible.
Then I skate back to center ice, because there’s a game to win.
The rest of the game is mine .
Not in the highlight-reel way that gets you on SportsCenter.
More in the grinding, relentless, I-am-not-leaving-this-ice way that separates the players who want to win from the ones who refuse to lose.
I’m everywhere. Forechecking like I’m trying to skate through the boards.
Backchecking—yes, Luke, actually backchecking—with a fury that surprises even me.
4-2.
Final.
I score two goals. Against my former team.
The Liz thing happens in the handshake line.
This is something non-hockey people don’t understand about the sport: after you’ve spent sixty minutes trying to destroy each other, you line up and shake hands.
It’s tradition. It’s sportsmanship. It’s also the most emotionally chaotic thirty seconds in athletics, because you’re exhausted and amped and standing face-to-face with people you’ve just been at war with, and everyone’s supposed to behave.
Most of the line is fine. Gloved handshakes, mumbled “good games,” the choreography of mutual respect. Some of my former teammates linger—a squeeze of the hand from McKenna Park, my old defense partner, that says I miss you without words. A nod from their goalie that says nice shooting.
Then Liz Brennan.
She takes my hand. Squeezes harder than necessary. Leans in under the guise of the typical passing-of-bodies in a handshake line.
“Nice game, Cole.” Her voice is low. A knife dressed as small talk. “Drew says hi, by the way. Wanted me to ask if your coach knows about the ink on your hip? Or if that’s still your little secret?”
The world narrows.
She knows .
Drew told her. Of course he told her. Because Drew Markham couldn’t let a single thing go unexplained, couldn’t leave a mystery unturned, couldn’t resist the satisfaction of understanding why his ex-girlfriend had another man’s number permanently etched on her body.
And once he figured it out after seeing that damn picture at Mom’s last Easter (the same photo Luke has on his mantle with number nineteen prominently displayed) there was no way he was keeping that to himself.
Especially not from the girl he started dating three days after I told him we were done.
My hand is still in hers. Her eyes are bright with the specific cruelty of someone who knows she’s landed a hit and wants to watch it register.
I don’t give her the satisfaction.
“Tell Drew,” I say, voice steady, smile razor-sharp, “that if he spent as much time worrying about his own love life as he does worrying about mine, you’d be a hell of a lot more satisfied.”
I release her hand. Move on. Next handshake, next face, next meaningless “good game” delivered on autopilot while my heart hammers against my ribs.
Sloane’s beside me when we finally break from the line. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” The lie is automatic. Self-protective. The kind I’ve been telling since I was old enough to learn that vulnerability in a locker room is blood in the water.
Sloane doesn’t push. But she stays close, her shoulder against mine as we step off the ice, and I’m grateful for the contact in a way I don’t have the energy to articulate.
Remind myself that we just won. Against a team ranked eight spots ahead of us in the national polls.
I sit at my stall and try to let the joy of this win override the ice that Liz’s words left in my veins.
Does your coach know about the ink on your hip?
No. He doesn’t.
Luke doesn’t know that I walked into a shop in New Bristol a month after turning eighteen with a certainty that bordered on religious conviction and asked a woman named Kristie to put something permanent on my skin. That I marked the moment the person I loved proved he was unbreakable.
Drew saw it the first time we slept together. Didn’t ask about it then. Didn’t put two and two together until I did the dumbest thing ever and invited him to moms. To prove a fucking point to the one guy I couldn’t actually get over.
Still haven’t.
“Em.” Sloane’s crouched in front of me. “Hey. Where’d you go? ”
“I’m here.”
“You’re not.” Her hand finds my knee. “But you don’t have to tell me. Just... come back. We won. You were incredible. Be here for this.”
I look around the locker room. At this team I chose. At Becca, who acknowledged my goal with a raised stick and a nod. At Emery, who’s now being lifted onto Jordan’s shoulders. At Katya and Maya, the Pine Ridge girls who understand what it means to play in a building that used to be yours.
“You’re right.” I stand. Pull Sloane into a hug she pretends to resist and then melts into. “We won. And I need to shower before I start smelling like a boys’ locker room.”
“Too late.”
“Shut up.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too, menace.”
The locker room is already emptied when I’m finally ready to go.
I’d taken longer in the shower. Let the hot water work on the bruise forming on my shin and the knot in my chest that won’t quite dissolve.
Changed into leggings and a Silver Pine hoodie, my new normal.
Took my time because there’s something about the ritual of it, stripping off gear, washing away the game, and putting on regular clothes that helps me transition.
Between who I am on the ice and who I am after.
Tonight, I’m not sure who that is.
I push through the door into the corridor and nearly collide with Luke.
He’s leaning against the opposite wall like he’s been there a while. Jacket on. Bag slung over one shoulder.
He’s…waiting. For me.
The realization settles into my bones alongside the steam from the shower and the residual adrenaline and the low, constant vibration of wanting that has been my baseline state for three months. Longer.
“Hey,” I say. Eloquent. Devastating. A masterclass in verbal seduction .
“Hey.” His arms are crossed. It's a stance that makes his shoulders look broader and his jaw look sharper and my self-control look like a joke. “Hell of a game.”
The corridor is empty. The team is already on the bus. Addison is on the bus. The only sounds are the distant hum of the arena’s circulatory system and the click of my pulse in my own ears.
“Two goals,” he adds with the rough-edged tone that lives in my fantasies. “Both from the left circle. Both high glove side.”
“Almost like someone scouted their goalie and gave me the perfect game plan.”
“Almost like someone had the talent to execute it.”
I lean against the wall opposite him. Mirror image. Four feet of ugly corridor between us.
“I did something tonight,” I start, and I don’t know why I’m saying it now. In this hallway. Except that the dam is cracking and I can feel the pressure behind it and if I don’t let something out, I’m going to break. “Something I didn’t think I could do.”
“You did a lot of things tonight.”
“Not the goals. Not the assists.” I take a breath. “I walked into this building. And I didn’t let it swallow me.”
The post-game analysis fades from his features, replaced by something rawer. Something that looks at me and sees not the player who scored two goals but the woman who almost didn’t.
“You did more than survive it, Em. You thrived.”
“Because of what you said.” I need him to know this.
Need him to understand that the thing that rewired me between the first and second period wasn’t anger alone, that it was his voice in a concrete corridor telling me to play my game.
Telling me I had the courage to choose this.
Telling me he was learning too. “In the intermission. What you said… it changed something.”
“You changed something. I just—”
“Don’t do that.” I push off the wall. One step closer. “Don’t minimize what you did. What you’ve been doing. All season, Luke. You’ve been making me better. Not just at hockey. At this . At being someone who doesn’t run.”
“You never run,” he whispers. “You’re the bravest person I know.”
“Luke.” I should tell him . About the tattoo and what it means. What Liz said. Let him decide if it changes anything. But the words stick in my throat like they always do when the truth feels too big to survive being spoken out loud.
“Emma.”
One step becomes two. The four feet of corridor has become two. I can see the shadow of scruff along his jaw. The small scar above his left eyebrow. The way his chest rises and falls with a breath that isn’t quite steady.
His hand comes up.
I know this gesture. Recognize it from the parking lot. The night of the youth event when his fingers found the line of my jaw and stayed for two seconds before he pulled away.
His fingers reach skin. The same touch. The same feather-light contact that makes my entire body go still.
Except this time, his thumb moves. Traces the line of my cheekbone, slow, deliberate, like he’s memorizing the topography of my face through touch alone.
My lungs just…stop.
His eyes are open, fixed on mine, completely aware of what he’s doing and choosing to do it anyway.
“I should have done this months ago,” he murmurs, and his thumb is still tracing, still mapping. The rough pad of it is doing things to my nervous system that would be clinically fascinating if I weren’t too busy drowning in them.
“You should have done this years ago,” I whisper back.
His other hand finds my hip. Not gripping… Just resting there, warm and steady through the fabric of my hoodie. The same hip he corrects during practice. The same hip that has a tattoo he doesn’t know about, with a number he doesn’t know is his.
He leans in. I can feel his breath against my lips.
Can smell the coffee and the cold and the sandalwood soap that’s been ruining my concentration since September.
His forehead touches mine—not a kiss, not yet, just the pressure of his skin against mine, the two of us sharing air in an ugly concrete corridor with fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like the world’s least romantic soundtrack.
“One of us should stop this,” he breathes against my mouth.
“Probably.”
“It should be me. I’m the coach.”
“So coach me.” My hands find the front of his jacket, fingers curling into the fabric. “Tell me you don’t want this. ”
He doesn’t say anything.
He tilts his head. The angle shifts. His lips are so close that the space between us isn’t distance anymore. It’s a decision.
A door slams open.
“—told you, the weak-side overload is basically their whole playbook, we just need to—”
Voices. BC’s coaching staff, pouring into the corridor from the home side. People who have no idea they’ve just interrupted the detonation of a bomb that’s been building for thirteen chapters of two people’s lives.
Luke’s hand leaves my jaw. His other hand leaves my hip. The space between us goes from inches to feet in the time it takes for the BC coaches to register our presence, nod vaguely, and continue their conversation down the hall.
My heart is trying to evacuate my chest cavity.
Luke’s expression is… God . It’s not regret. It’s not the usual we can’t retreat I’ve memorized over months of near-misses and retreats and noble, infuriating self-sacrifice.
It’s a promise.
His eyes hold mine. Steady. Certain. The blue-gray darkened to something that looks like a decision that’s already been made.
Next time, I won’t stop.
He doesn’t say it. Doesn’t need to. I’ve been reading Luke’s face since I was fifteen years old, and this one is new. Not in the vocabulary of longing and restraint. This is something beyond that. Past the point of resistance. Past the point of return.
“Bus leaves in five,” he says, the words scraping out of his throat like they were forced. Like he can’t quite function the way he’s supposed to.
“I know.”
“Don’t be late.”
“When am I ever late?”
“You’re always last.”
“Last is not late, Coach.” And the title, this time, is not a weapon. It’s a bookmark. A placeholder for the conversation we’re not finished having.
He holds the corridor door open. I walk through.
He didn’t kiss me.
Barely touched me.
But I know with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who’s been waiting for this since she was sixteen years old, who got a boy’s number inked on her hip at eighteen, who transferred colleges and changed her entire life and learned how to want something so fiercely that the wanting became its own kind of faith… that something just shifted.
And despite the fact that Luke’s rebuilding his walls, shutting a door… just like the lock to my bedroom, we both know the code.
Beep beep beep beep.