CHAPTER 8 — ICE HANGOVER
POV: Noah Bennett
The restricted corridor still felt too warm when I left Damon behind, even though Hartwell’s arena was cold, poorly lit, and filled with that stale ice smell that clung to clothes like it wanted to rat out everyone who passed through.
My mouth still burned from the kiss, the skin at my nape still felt his fingers in my hair, and every step I took away felt like a lie I couldn’t sell.
I should’ve been thinking about post-game protocol, the shoulder evaluation, reports for Marjorie, the trip back with the team, and the urgent need to keep my distance—but my body had reduced the world to Damon’s taste, the pressure of him against me, and the sound of my own breathing trying to pass for normal.
I walked into the staff locker room with the equipment bag slung over my shoulder and stopped at the sink, bracing my hands on the cold edge for a few seconds.
The mirror showed me a version of myself that didn’t look professional enough to get through the night without raising suspicions: disheveled hair, dark eyes, lips too red, shirt slightly wrinkled where Damon had pinned me against the wall.
I splashed water on my face, but it didn’t erase the sensation of him.
His mouth had been rage, question, accusation, and memory all in one blow, and I hated that part of me still wanted to go back to that corridor and finish the answer my body had started.
The sound of the team approaching forced me to straighten up before anyone walked in.
I closed the bag, took a deep breath, and arranged my face into the version of Noah Bennett that survived better in public: calm, technical, functional, slightly insolent if necessary.
When Mason appeared in the doorway, hair still wet and wearing a smile that didn’t match the hour, I knew this version might not be enough.
“You look like someone who just won an argument or lost a bet,” Mason said, leaning against the doorframe and eyeing my mouth with offensively little subtlety. “With Damon, sometimes it’s hard to tell which.”
“If you came for ice, sit down. If you came to psychoanalyze me, go find sports psych,” I replied, stowing the tape and checking that the tablet was in the side pocket of the bag, because any manual task was better than facing the possibility that Mason had seen more than he should have.
“I came to tell you the bus leaves in twenty minutes and that Damon’s standing in the players’ corridor looking like a clenched-jaw tragedy.
Considering you two were MIA long enough for either a serious conversation or a bad decision, I figured I should check if I still have a captain and a physical therapist for the trip. ”
The word choice hit me with ridiculous force.
Mason didn’t need to know anything to know too much; it was one of his most irritating qualities.
I closed the bag with a sharp click and walked past him, forcing him to step aside.
The corridor was packed now—players hauling bags, assistants collecting equipment, people laughing too loud on the high of a tight victory.
Damon was near the side exit, talking to Coach Bennett, or pretending to, because his gaze found mine the instant I appeared.
Looking back was a mistake. His mouth looked normal from a distance, but I knew what it had done minutes before.
I knew the weight of his hand on my waist, the way he’d given me time to pull back, and the silent violence of my not pulling back.
He wore his jacket open, thermal shirt clinging to his chest, shoulder protected under layers of tape and pride, and still his body seemed to fill the entire corridor.
When my father turned to me, I had to tear my eyes from Damon with an effort that left me pissed at myself.
“Noah, on the bus you’ll sit near the athletes under evaluation,” my father said, his coach voice drowning out any trace of dad, though his eyes lingered half a second on my expression.
“I want a verbal report before we reach the hotel. Damon will have a reevaluation in his room—basic documentation, nothing prolonged. Tomorrow morning we head back to Northaven.”
Damon looked at my father when he heard “in his room,” and then at me.
The air between us thickened with a new layer of tension, so obvious I wanted to kick his shin just to drag the situation back into absurdity.
My father didn’t notice—or pretended not to, which was an old Bennett skill.
I just nodded, because arguing logistics in that corridor, with my mouth still remembering the team captain, would be a terrible way to fake control.
“Right,” I replied, adjusting the bag strap on my shoulder. “But he needs to ice it as soon as he gets on the bus, and if his pain spikes, I’m documenting that the minute limit was exceeded in the third period.”
“I didn’t exceed it,” Damon said before my father could respond.
“You almost jumped in early on the last shift,” I said, looking at him with the calm I used when I wanted to hide the urge to shake someone. “The fact that Mason grabbed your sleeve before you went through the gate doesn’t count as following medical orders.”
Mason, who’d just joined us with his bag over his shoulder, pointed at me like I’d scored a goal.
Damon shot the goalie a look that could wilt houseplants, but Mason just smiled and headed for the exit, humming something about reports, jealousy, and athletic tragedies.
My father asked me to accompany the medical equipment, and the group moved outside the arena toward the bus parked in the cold.
The trip to the hotel should’ve been short, but the night stretched inside the bus like every mile had decided to punish me.
I sat two rows behind Damon out of practical necessity—close enough to watch whether he was favoring his shoulder too much, far enough that it wouldn’t look like I’d chosen that proximity.
He stayed by the window, his profile carved out by the yellow light from the road, earbuds in with no music playing, because the phone screen in the reflection stayed still.
Mason took the seat next to him for five minutes before switching with a rookie defenseman, claiming he needed to break up a card game fight at the back of the bus, though the look he shot me said he was just clearing the blast radius.
I tried to review records on the tablet.
I couldn’t. Every time I typed “moderate pain,” I remembered Damon’s hand on my waist. Every time I read “contact restriction,” I thought about the cruel irony of the word contact.
As we passed through the parking area, I spotted Elias Ward boarding Hartwell’s bus parked alongside ours—and I felt Damon turn his head before I saw it.
The rival captain raised two fingers in a lazy wave through the window, looking first at me and then at Damon, with the smile of someone who knew exactly what kind of chaos he’d left behind.
“Ignore him,” I said quietly, without thinking, leaning forward just enough for Damon to hear over the engine noise.
He turned, and the light coming through the window cut across his eyes in a way that made me hold my breath. Damon didn't take off his earbuds, but he answered anyway, because there were things between us that didn't need volume.
“Are you talking as a physical therapist or as someone who already knows Ward likes to provoke?”
“I'm talking as the person responsible for keeping you from turning jealousy into aggravated injury,” I replied, and only realized too late that I'd used the forbidden word.
His mouth curved into a small, dangerous smile, almost invisible in the dim light of the bus.
He removed one earbud slowly, as if this conversation deserved an official opening, and leaned slightly in his seat, closing the distance between us without getting up.
I could feel the stares of two players sitting too close, so I kept my face neutral, even though my skin seemed to have learned to react to any attention from him.
“So you admit it was jealousy,” Damon said quietly, with that post-game rasp that seemed designed to destroy judgment in tight spaces.
“I admit you need ice,” I replied, grabbing the small ice pack from the compartment beside me and holding it out to him over the seatback. “The rest is dramatic interpretation from an athlete with a bruised ego.”
His fingers touched mine as he took the bag.
It was quick, almost nothing, a perfectly avoidable lapse in coordination.
Still, my body reacted as if the kiss had started again in that restricted corridor.
Damon noticed. I noticed that he noticed.
The whole bus stayed loud, full of athletes, music leaking from earbuds, laughter and comments about the game, but that brief touch opened a quiet space between us.
He held the ice pack against his shoulder and rested his head on the seatback, his eyes still on mine long enough to make my pulse betray the truth I was trying to hide.
“You're flushed, Bennett,” he said.
“The bus is hot.”
“It's cold.”
“Then it must be irritation.”
“Must be.”
The exchange ended there because Mason, from the back of the bus, shouted that anyone flirting in medical code should remember that injured athletes had priority over romantic tragedies.
The team laughed, I threatened to throw a bandage at him, and Damon turned toward the window, but I caught the reflection of his smile in the dark glass.
It wasn't a happy smile. It was worse. It was that almost-smile I remembered from the old winter, the one that appeared when I managed to slip through the wall via a gap too small for him to patch in time.