22. Breathing
Chapter twenty-two
Breathing
Emma
February
“ Y ou brought me to a hill .”
“I brought you to the best sledding hill in the tri-state area.”
“You brought me to a hill. With snow on it. And you expect me to go down it. On a piece of plastic.”
“That’s the idea.” He holds up the sleds he rented from a guy at the base who looked at two adults requesting children’s sledding equipment and decided, correctly, not to ask questions. “I got the good ones. With handles.”
“Luke. I am an elite athlete. I have a game tomorrow. A game where Olympic scouts will be evaluating my physical capabilities. And you want me to hurl myself down a frozen slope on a glorified trash can lid.”
“Yes.”
“What if I get hurt?”
“You won’t.”
Luke Anderson not being safe? Have I woken up in an alternate universe?
“What if I break something? ”
“The only thing you’re going to break is my ego when you beat me to the bottom.”
“Obviously I’ll beat you to the bottom. Your knee—”
“Don’t bring the knee into this.”
“Your knee is always in this. Your knee is the main character of every physical activity we—”
“Emma.”
“—engage in, including several that I won’t name in public because there are children present.”
He looks around the hill. There are, in fact, children present.
When Luke turns back to me, his expression is caught somewhere between exasperation and adoration.
“You demanded a day with no hockey,” he reminds me. “This is no hockey.”
“This is potential injury disguised as recreation.”
“It’s sledding. You get body-checked into boards for fun.”
“That’s controlled violence. This is gravity-assisted chaos with no padding.”
“Emma Cole.” He steps closer. Takes my face in his gloved hands. Tilts it up until I’m looking directly into those gray-blue eyes that have been ruining my life since before I understood what ruining meant. “Trust me.”
And here’s the thing: Luke’s spent five months saying those words on the ice, in the film room, from behind a clipboard. Trust me with your stance, your breakout, your career. Trust me with the scouting package, the Olympic call, the path I’m building to your future.
And now he’s asking me to trust him with fun …
“If I die,” I tell him, taking the sled, “I’m haunting you. Loudly . With commentary.”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
We climb the hill. His hand finds mine halfway up like it can’t help itself, like it’s a reflex rather than a decision.
At the top, he positions his sled beside mine. “On three?”
“On three.”
“One—”
“Wait, I need to—”
“Two—”
“Luke, my sled isn’t—”
“Three!”
He pushes off and I follow because my competitive nature has never once consulted my survival instinct before acting.
And then we’re flying, cold air burning my lungs, snow spraying, the world a white blur of speed and sound.
I’m screaming, the no-filter screaming, the kind I haven’t done since I was a kid on a backyard sled run with Grayson daring me to go faster.
He beats me to the bottom by three sled-lengths.
“You cheated!” I shout from the snow pile I’ve landed in.
“How do you cheat at sledding?”
“I don’t know, but you definitely did something suspicious with your launch angle.”
“My launch angle was textbook.”
He’s lying in the snow beside me, grinning, cheeks red, hat askew. Looking nothing like a Division I hockey coach and everything like a twenty-five-year-old on the best day he’s had in months.
“But next time, I’m letting you win,” he teases. “Like the view from behind you better.”
“Luke… Fine. Okay, that’s actually smooth.”
“Occasionally I manage.”
“Once a season, maybe.”
He throws a handful of snow at me. I retaliate by tackling him into the drift, rolling in the snow. Two people being stupid and young and in love in broad daylight.
He pins me against the snowbank. His face above mine, blocking the winter sun, breath visible in the cold air between us.
“Hey,” he says quietly. “You’re smiling.”
“I’m freezing and covered in snow and you just dragged me down a mountain—”
“It’s a hill.”
“—on a piece of plastic, and yes, I’m smiling. Happy?”
“You have no idea.” He kisses me. Right there.
In front of the families and the teenagers and the guy with the phone.
Kisses me like we’re not hiding. Like we’re not thirty miles from the campus where this would end both our careers.
Like we’re just two people in the snow who are allowed to do this.
I kiss him back. Grab the front of his jacket and hold on.
A woman walks past with her kids. I hear her murmur to her husband: “Young love. Remember when we were like that?”
And I want to always be like this.
We sled six more times. I win four.
By then we’re both soaked and frozen and I can’t feel my fingers. Luke remedies this by taking both my hands and breathing warm air onto them while maintaining eye contact.
“Better?” he murmurs against my knuckles.
“Getting there.” My voice comes out breathier than the cold warrants. “You could also just take me somewhere with central heating.”
“Funny you should mention that.”
He drives us to a hotel twenty minutes from the hill. Not some luxury suite with champagne on ice. Just a clean, warm room with a massive shower and a bed and a door that locks and no neighbors named Mrs. Patterson who have opinions about furniture rearrangement.
“You planned this,” I accuse, dropping my wet jacket on the chair.
“It’s been weeks, Emma. Yeah, I planned this. Even if I know we can’t stay all night.”
Because of routine. Because tomorrow’s game day.
Luke pulls off his jacket, the navy pullover underneath damp and clinging. And I need it off his body immediately if not sooner.
“Shower,” I announce, already heading for the bathroom. “I’m hypothermic.”
“You’re dramatic.”
The shower is one of those oversized rainfall setups that exist specifically to make you forget how much you’re paying per night. The steam fills the room in seconds. I strip off my wet layers, step under the spray and make a sound that is, objectively, obscene.
“That sound.” Luke’s voice from behind me. The voice of a man who just heard a woman he’s been careful to avoid touching, moan under hot water and is now having a crisis about it. “You’re doing that on purpose.”
I look over my shoulder. He’s standing in the doorway, already shirtless, jeans unbuttoned, watching me with eyes that have gone midnight.
“Maybe.” I tilt my head. Let the water run down my neck, my shoulders, my back. Let him look. “You going to stand there all day, or are you going to warm me up? ”
He doesn’t stand there all day.
Instead, he gets in. And immediately steals the hot water.
I shove him—actually shove him, palms flat against his wet chest—and he catches my wrists and pulls me under the spray with him.
We’re both laughing, water streaming down our faces, slippery skin and tangled limbs and the giddy recklessness of two people who’ve finally been given a room with a lock.
“You’re hogging the spray.”
“I’m bigger. I need more water.”
“That’s not how thermodynamics works.”
“You have a chemistry class, not a physics degree.”
“I have a body that’s cold and you’re being—”
He lifts me. Hands under my thighs, my back against the tile, legs around his waist. The laughter dies in my throat because the shift from comedy to intensity is instant.
One second we’re bickering about water distribution and the next his mouth is on my neck and his hands are gripping my thighs and the hot water is hitting both of us and I can’t remember what cold feels like.
“Still cold?” he murmurs against my collarbone.
“Shut up and—”
He shifts his hips, thrusting into me, and I forget the rest of the sentence.
“God, you feel—” He presses his forehead against mine. Water in his eyelashes. Pupils blown. “Em.”
“I know.”
“Every time. Every time it’s—”
“I know.”
“Damn, baby, I missed you.”
He moves, and I stop being able to narrate. Just feel. The tile against my back, the water, his hands, the sounds we make that get swallowed by steam. His mouth finding mine in the spray. My name in his throat like a war he’s given up fighting.
When I come, it’s with my face pressed into his neck and his arms tight around me and the kind of full-body shudder that makes my legs useless for a solid two minutes afterward, during which Luke holds me up against the tile with the calm strength of a man who considers this a core workout.
“Show-off,” I mumble into his shoulder.
“Athlete. ”
“Retired athlete.”
“Functional athlete. There’s a—”
“If you say ‘distinction,’ I’m drowning you in this shower.”
He laughs. Sets me down gently. Kisses the top of my head.
We wash each other’s hair. That might sound mundane, but having Luke's fingers in my hair is its own kind of intimate. Gentle and focused and revering.
I wash his. He closes his eyes and tips his head back and the vulnerability on the face of man who’s typically so careful, so controlled, so armored makes my heart do something that I’m going to need a minute to recover from.
We’re building something here that’s bigger than sex. Bigger than secrecy. Something that looks like a life, if you squint past the obstacles.
I'm choosing to squint.
“You eat pizza like a barbarian.”
“I eat pizza like someone who understands that toppings should be consumed in reverse order,” he responds.
“That’s not a thing.”
“It’s my thing.”
We’re sprawled on the hotel bed in matching white robes eating delivery pizza with our fingers. Luke’s back is against the headboard. My feet are in his lap, naturally.
The TV’s on. Neither of us is watching it.
“Torres sent the camp logistics,” Luke says. Casually. “Lake Placid. Housing provided. Full training schedule starts June first.”
Lake Placid. I’ve been there once, for a tournament when I was sixteen. I remember the mountains and the old Olympic facilities and the feeling of standing where greatness happened and wondering if I’d ever be good enough to stand there for real.
“Eight weeks?” I ask, even though I already know.
“Minimum. If you’re selected for the extended roster, it goes through the fall. International exhibition schedule. Europe, mostly.” He pauses. “Then competition through the Olympics in February. ”
The specificity of it lands differently than the abstract version we discussed weeks ago in his bed. Now it’s an actual itinerary for an actual departure from an actual person I just started actually having.
“That’s a long time,” I say, aiming for neutral.
“It is.”
“We’d be doing long distance. Real long distance. Not the ‘you’re in Chicago’ and ignoring me version.”
He frowns, hand pausing on my ankle. “I’m not going to tell you that it won’t suck.
That I’m not going to hate every second of it.
That most of it I’ll be sitting in my apartment watching your games on streams with bad connections and terrible commentary.
That I’ll miss you so much it’ll feel like the injury all over again. ”
“Luke—”
“But.” He holds up a finger. “I’m also going to be the proudest person alive. Because the woman I love is going to be representing her country at the highest level of women’s hockey. And I’m going to know—I’m going to know —that there will be an after, Em. For us.”
An after. A life. Together.
I pull my feet from his lap and crawl up the bed until I’m straddling him, robe falling open, his hands finding my waist automatically.
“If I play well tomorrow,” I say quietly, “I get my dream.”
“You will.”
“And my dream takes me away from you.”
His hands tighten on my waist. “Em—”
“And you’re the one who made it possible.” I frame his face with my hands. Make him look at me. “How is that not the most fucked-up love story ever written?”
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t deploy the humor he uses as a shield when things get too real. Just holds my gaze with those storm-gray eyes and lets the question land.
“It's fucked up,” he agrees. “But I’d do it again. Every scouting package. Every call. Every hour of footage.” His thumbs press into my hipbones. “Because your dream isn’t the thing that takes you away from me. It’s the thing that proves we’re going to make it.”
“How?”
“Because if we survive this, then we survive everything.” He pulls me closer. “And I intend to survive everything with you. Including Finland.”
“You hate the cold.”
“I’m a hockey coach in the Northeast. I live in the cold. ”
“Finnish cold is different.”
“I’ll buy a coat.”
“A Finnish coat?”
“The Finnishest coat available.” He kisses me, and it tastes like pizza and cheap wine and promise. “I’ll visit. As often as the schedule allows. And between visits, I’ll be here. Building the program. Making sure you have something to come home to.”
Something to come home to.
The phrase settles into my bones like warmth.
Because that’s what Luke’s been doing all along, isn’t it? Not just building a hockey program. Building a home. A place that exists beyond the ice—in his apartment, in his truck, in the space between our bodies when we’re too close and not close enough. A home that isn’t a location but a person.
“I’ll come home,” I whisper. “Every time. To you. Even from Finland.”
“You better.”
I kiss him. Slowly. Storing it for later. For the days when the distance feels impossible and the time zones are wrong and the only thing holding us together is the knowledge that somewhere, in a faculty apartment in New York, there’s a man who waited seven years and would wait seven more.
His hands slide from my hips to my sides, pushing the robe off my shoulders, and the kiss deepens into something that doesn’t need a hotel room to exist but is very glad to have one.
“Tomorrow, Em,” he tells me between kisses, “I need you to play for you.” His fingers trace over my tattoo. “For the girl who got this. The one who walked into a tattoo shop at eighteen and put someone else’s number on her body because she believed he was unbreakable.”
He lifts his head. Looks at me with eyes that hold everything. “Be brave. Be permanent. The rest is just hockey.”
Just hockey.
And somehow it is. When he’s part of it with me.