Chapter 12 #2
Not imagined. Not romanticized. The restless energy that had been scraping against every surface in the room went quiet beneath my hand.
My own control did not survive the silence.
His throat moved against my palm.
“Tell me to leave,” he said, barely audible.
I did not.
His eyes dropped to my mouth.
Mine dropped to his.
There was no accident in what happened next. No stumble. No confusion. I gave him time to move away, and he didn’t. He leaned in half an inch, enough to make it a choice, enough to ruin us both.
I kissed him.
The first touch was rough because neither of us knew how to make it gentle. His mouth opened on a sharp breath, and I took it, stepped into him until his back hit the metal shelving behind him. One of the racks rattled. He made a sound low in his throat that went straight through my spine.
I tightened my hand at his neck. Not choking. Holding. Anchoring.
He grabbed my jacket with both fists and pulled like he wanted the contact more than air.
His mouth was hot, eager, unpracticed in a way that made the hunger worse.
This was not the polished rhythm of someone who had done this a hundred times.
This was discovery under pressure. Teeth catching, breath breaking, his stubble scraping mine, his tongue meeting mine with a stunned, aggressive need that had no room for denial.
I had kissed women my whole adult life.
This was different in every physical detail. The strength of him. The hard line of his chest against mine. The roughness of his jaw. The way he pushed back instead of yielding, then went pliant for one second when my hand slid fully around the back of his neck and held him where I wanted him.
That second nearly ended me.
I pressed my hips forward without thinking.
He felt me. I felt him.
Both of us hard, trapped between layers of practice gear and the last remains of sense.
Jace broke from my mouth with a ragged inhale, then came back immediately, angrier this time, like he resented needing another taste. His hands moved from my jacket to my shoulders, then one shoved into my hair. He pulled too hard. I welcomed the pain.
My free hand found his waist, gripped, dragged him closer. He shuddered. Not delicate. Full body, helpless, honest.
“Fuck,” he breathed against my mouth.
I kissed the word out of him.
For a minute, maybe less, maybe a lifetime, there was no rink outside the door. No team waiting. No wife in Dallas. No girlfriend wearing his shirt in his kitchen. No contract. No title.
Only Jace, shaking under my hand because I was touching him.
Only me, losing the one thing I had always trusted myself to keep.
He was the one who stopped first.
Not far. Just enough to break the kiss. His forehead hovered near mine. His lips were red, wet, parted. His breath came hard. His eyes were unfocused in a way that made satisfaction and fear twist together in my gut.
Then awareness returned.
I saw it arrive.
His face changed before he moved. Coach. Player. Vanessa. Olivia. The season. The room. The door.
He stepped back so abruptly his shoulder hit the shelving again.
I let go.
That mattered. I made myself let go.
Jace looked at my hand like it had left a mark.
Maybe it had.
Neither of us spoke.
Outside, a cart rolled down the hallway. Someone laughed too loudly, distant and normal. The building had continued existing while we committed ourselves to something that could not be undone.
Jace bent and picked up his helmet with hands that were not steady.
“I have to go back,” he said.
His voice was rough.
“Yes.”
He swallowed and looked at me then. Really looked.
There was no triumph in him. No relief that lasted. Want still lived there, unmistakable, but now it had consequences wrapped around it.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said.
The honest answer was that I didn’t either.
But standing there with his taste still on my tongue, I knew I could not give him a lie dressed as certainty.
“Neither do I.”
That seemed to scare him more than any order could have.
He nodded once, too fast, and reached for the door.
“Jace.”
He stopped with his hand on the knob.
I should have said something useful. Something clear. Something that returned us to safe ground.
There was no safe ground.
“Get through practice,” I said.
His shoulders rose and fell on one controlled breath.
“Okay.”
Then he opened the door and left.
I stayed in the equipment room alone.
My mouth burned. My hand remembered the shape of his neck. My body still demanded the door, the hallway, him.
I did not move until the sounds of his skates faded back toward the ice.
Then I braced both hands on the nearest shelf and lowered my head.
I had spent weeks telling myself I was managing a difficult player. Then a complicated attraction. Then a line I could still choose not to cross.
The line was behind me now.
On the other side of the door, Jace returned to practice.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed once.
I did not have to look to know it might be Olivia, or work, or some ordinary piece of the life I had just fractured.
I looked anyway.
A message from my wife lit the screen.
Flight changed. Home Thursday night. Miss you.
I stood there until the screen went dark.
Then I wiped one hand over my mouth, opened the door, and walked back toward the ice like a man who still had a job to do.
We had finally taken what the room had been demanding from us.
Now we had to live with it.