24. Mackie #2
“Your father isn’t coming home tonight,” she finally says, her voice tight, her eyes fixed straight ahead on the brake lights in front of us. “He’s staying at the hotel near the practice facility. He needs... space.”
“I know. I figured.”
Space is a nice word for it. Damage control is probably more accurate.
“I’m going to go stay at Kara’s tonight,” I tell my mom as she pulls into the driveway, my voice casual even though my heart is already racing ahead to Zach’s apartment. “I need to study more for my exam and Kara knows this forward and backward. I’ll go straight there. I promise.”
She lets out an exhausted sigh that encompasses everything, Dad and the mess the team is dealing with, and I know I’ve won. “Just text me and let me know you’re safe.”
The drive to Zach’s apartment takes twenty-two minutes from my parents’ house.
I can make it in eighteen when traffic cooperates, or when I speed a bit and race the yellow lights.
Tonight I’m replaying the third period in my head.
Two goals. He let in two goals after coming in cold off the bench and we still lost and none of that is his fault.
Luca’s the one who lost his mind and jumped a guy, Luca’s the one who got ejected and left Zach scrambling with no warmup.
But Zach doesn’t think like that. Zach thinks in angles and inches.
Right now he’s going frame by frame through the footage, measuring the exact distance between where his glove was and where it should have been, and turning that gap into proof that he doesn’t belong.
I pull into visitor parking and cut the engine.
One text from Kara: cover story locked in.
you owe me. I send back a string of heart emojis and grab my overnight bag from the backseat—change of clothes, toothbrush, and the jersey I snatched from under my pillow, the one that still smells like him even after I’ve slept in it a dozen times.
He doesn’t answer the first knock. Or the second. I dig out the key he gave me in March, the one he pressed into my palm while staring at the floor instead of my face, mumbling something about emergencies like he couldn’t quite say I want you to be able to get to me whenever you need to.
The apartment is dark except for the glow of his laptop screen. He’s on the couch in his sweats, watching the game footage on loop. Deflection. Goal. Reset. Deflection. Goal. Reset.
“Hey,” I say softly, dropping my keys on the counter and toeing off my shoes.
He doesn’t look up. “How’d you get in?”
“Key. Remember?”
“Right.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “You should go home. I’m not—I’m not good company tonight.”
I cross the room and sit on the couch beside him, close enough that my knee presses against his thigh.
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“Not hungry.”
“That’s not what I asked you, baby.”
He finally looks at me and his eyes are bloodshot, red-rimmed and there’s a flatness behind them that scares me. He went through the upset part and came out the other side into something quieter and worse.
“I cost us the game,” he says.
“Luca cost us the game.”
“Luca made a mistake. I had a chance to fix it and I didn’t.”
“You kept us in it.”
“Two goals.”
“On nineteen shots. That’s a .895 save percentage.” The stats roll off my tongue before I can stop them. Years of growing up in rinks and watching film with my father makes the math automatic. “Most backup goalies would’ve given up four.”
“I should have had the deflection. I was too deep in the paint. If I’d been six inches forward—”
“Stop.” I take his chin between my fingers and turn his face toward mine. He tries to pull away and I don’t let him. “I didn’t come here to talk about the deflection.”
He exhales, shaky, and closes the laptop. The room drops into almost-dark.
“I don’t want to talk about the game,” he says.
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to think about the game.”
“Okay.”
“I want—” He stops and swallows. His jaw flexes under my fingers. “I just want it to be quiet. In my head. For five fucking minutes.”
I take his hand. His fingers are cold and locked up, stiff from hours of clenching.
“Hey,” I whisper, shifting closer. “I know what you need.”
His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there a beat too long before flicking back up. His breathing changes and I take that as permission.
I swing one leg over his lap, knees sinking into the couch cushions on either side of his hips, and his hands come up to grip my thighs through my jeans. His fingers press in hard, like if he loosens his grip on anything right now he’ll come apart completely.
“I couldn’t see you before the game today,” I say, close enough that my lips almost brush his. “I think that’s what went wrong.”
He shakes his head, a tiny movement that bumps his nose against mine. “Superstition doesn’t actually—”
I kiss him before he can finish the sentence, before he can logic his way out of this and build another wall and retreat into that fortress inside his head where I can’t reach him.
He kisses me back like he’s angry about it, like he’s furious that I can walk in here and short-circuit everything just by climbing into his lap.
Good. Be angry. I don’t care as long as he stops watching that goddamn footage.
His hands drag me forward and I can feel him hard against me through his sweats. I grind down once, deliberate, and he breaks the kiss with a choked-off sound.
“Bedroom,” I breathe against his jaw.
“Mackie—”
“Take me to bed, Zach.”
He surges up off the couch so fast I have to grab his shoulders to keep from falling. My legs lock around his waist and the laptop slides off the cushion and hits the floor but neither of us flinch.
He drops me on the bed and I pull him down with me. Clothes come off fast, my fingers yanking his shirt over his head, his hands fumbling with the clasp of my bra with fingers that shake against my skin. He’s usually so precise. So controlled. I love watching that fall apart.
His boxers hit the floor and I have to press my thighs together at the sight of him, thick and hard and already leaking at the tip. I’ve seen him naked dozens of times and it still makes my mouth water.
“Now,” I whisper against his mouth. “Stop thinking.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. Almost a smile. “I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
He pushes in slowly and my eyes flutter shut because this part never gets old—the stretch of him, the way my body has to open up to take him, the way he exhales against my neck like he’s been holding his breath for years and finally remembers how to let go.
This is what he needs. Not game film. Not a mental catalog of every mistake he’s ever made.
He needs my nails dragging down his back hard enough to leave marks, my voice in his ear telling him yes, harder, right there.
He needs to lose himself in me, in something that feels good instead of crushing.
He speeds up and I arch into him, chasing the friction. He shifts his angle and hits that spot deep inside and I cry out, too loud for his paper-thin walls.
“Neighbors,” he mutters against my neck and brings up his hand to cover my mouth, but there’s a smile in his voice now, a hint of the Zach I fell for underneath all the anxiety and self-destruction.
I lick his palm and he jerks his hand back, startled, and I use the moment to shove at his shoulder and roll us. He stares up at me, eyes wide and dark and hungry, and I start to move.
“Mackie—” A warning.
“I can take it.”
His grip tightens on my hips, pulling me down while he drives up.
The sound I make is deafening, but I don’t give a shit about his neighbors.
He does it again, harder, and I brace my hands on his chest because this isn’t about me right now.
This is him getting out of his own head, burning off everything he’s been swallowing since that third period.
His hand catches both my wrists and pins them flat against his chest. I try to grind down and his grip tightens and he says “not yet” in a voice I don’t recognize—low and certain and coming from somewhere deeper than the anxious boy who calculates save percentages in his sleep.
I am technically on top of him. I am technically in charge.
And I have never felt less in control of anything in my life and I don’t want it back.
He sits up without warning, one arm banding around my waist, his face in my neck, teeth scraping my shoulder, hips snapping up at a rhythm that’s punishing and relentless. I’m making sounds I’d be embarrassed about if I had any higher brain function left. I don’t. He’s fucked it right out of me.
“Take it,” I whisper into his ear when he starts to shake. “Whatever you need. Take it.”
He flips me onto my back so fast the room spins and pins my hands above my head and this time he isn’t careful about it.
His fingers press into the insides of my wrists where my pulse is slamming and I test the grip and he holds tighter and something hot spreads through my chest that I want more of before I even know what it is.
“Look at me,” he says, and I couldn’t look anywhere else if I tried.
He’s checking—I can see it. But underneath the checking there’s something else, something that knows exactly what his hands on my wrists are doing to me and isn’t sorry about it.
I arch up and kiss him, open-mouthed, letting our tongues tangle together, and that’s the last permission he needs.
He drives into me and I wrap my legs around him and he hits a spot that makes my vision blur, again and again until it crashes through me and I’m gone.
He lets go of my wrists and fucks me through it, hard and desperate, and I’m still shaking when he slams in deep and goes rigid above me.
The sound he makes against my neck is broken and raw, and I hold onto his shoulders and feel him shake apart.