25. Evie
EVIE
Iwake up in Charlotte with a hockey player’s heavy arm anchored across my waist and no concept of the time.
The room is still dark, and Briggs is a radiator. His breath comes in a slow, steady wave of heat against my neck, the entire solid weight of him tiered around me like I’m something valuable he’s afraid might slip away.
I lie still and allow myself to exist in the bubble. Usually, I’d be running the numbers on the day—Murphy’s schedule, my bill rotation, whatever disaster is currently unfolding at Sutton & Sons. Instead, I match his breathing as the light changes from charcoal to lead.
Briggs surfaces gradually. His arm tightens around me, followed by a rough, low sound against my hair, his mouth finding the junction of my shoulder before his eyes are even open.
“What’s the time?” he asks, his voice wrecked with sleep.
“Early. Go back to bed.”
“Can’t.” He doesn’t move to get up, though. If anything, he hauls me in closer. “Game day. My body’s a traitor.”
“Your body seems pretty committed to staying right here.”
“He’s confused by the very pretty girl in his bed.” He presses a dry kiss behind my ear. “Sleep okay?”
“Better than I have in months.” The truth is out before I can polish it, and I tense as he goes still against me.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t make it a thing.”
“I’m not.” His hand spreads flat over my ribs, warm and possessive. “I’m just filing it away.”
We stay pinned together longer than we should, morning light climbing the walls. Somewhere down the block, a garbage truck does its slow, grinding work. His thumb traces an idle line back and forth across my hip bone.
It’s nice—he’s a mountain of a man, perfectly content to lie in the dark with his hand on me, going nowhere.
But I’m more than ready for it to. I turn in his arms, fisting my hands in his undershirt, pulling him in until the shape of his mouth is the only thing I can think about. Desperately, I nip at his lower lip, and he opens for me with a groan that I feel in my teeth.
His hands are everywhere—my waist, my hair, the small of my back—hauling me against him until there’s no space left between us. He rolls his hips heavily into mine, the drag of his erection forcing me to arch up off the mattress.
I hook a leg over his as I chase the friction. He gives it to me, grinding down in a steady press that makes my breath stutter against his mouth. By the time he’s hovering over me, his eyes are dark with hunger.
I’m slick already, the ridge of him through his sweats catching my clit on every pass. He bites my lip and holds it between his teeth.
When he pulls back, I ask, “Do you think we have enough time to . . .”
His eyes go dark, and then he drops his forehead to mine and exhales a laugh. “Probably not.” He grunts, rolling onto his back as he drags a palm down his face. “I have to feed you and get to the rink.”
“You have to feed me?”
“I promised you a cortado. Food’s extra.” He’s already sitting up, all that hard-earned muscle on display. “I don’t break coffee promises.”
The coffee shop lives up to the reputation he’s been building for it. Briggs handles the order, rattling off mine before I can even open my mouth.
We make the return trip through his neighborhood with the cups warming our palms. He narrates our surroundings—a house with solid bones, a golden retriever he’s on nodding terms with, and the precise patch of concrete where he ate it on black ice last winter.
On the corner, a restaurant has a chalkboard parked out front, little hearts encircling a prix fixe menu. Valentine Specials. I stop in my tracks.
“Maxwell.”
He’s three strides ahead before he realizes the gap. “Yeah?”
“What’s the date today?”
He pivots, dragging a hand through his hair. “The fourteenth.”
“You flew me out here on Valentine’s weekend.” I aim my cup at his chest. “This was the play all along, wasn’t it?”
A small, stubborn grin fights its way out. “It’s a coincidence of the schedule.”
“Briggs.”
“Fine.” He rubs the back of his neck, looking properly caught. “I circled the date on the calendar last month.”
I lose whatever I was about to say, heart clenching. “Wow.”
“Don’t make it a thing, Evie.”
I wave a dismissive hand. “It’s my civic duty.”
He takes my empty cup out of my hand at his passenger door, and neither of us mentions it again. By the time we get to the arena, there are still hours to puck drop. The lot is mostly empty, and he badges us through a side entrance.
“Come on,” he says, holding the heavy door. “It’s the only time it’s actually quiet in here.”
Our boots are the loudest things on the concourse, and the ice is a flat, blue mirror behind the glass with nobody on it to ruin the finish. He guides me down a rear corridor, past a bunch of sticks and a laundry cart left in the hall, pushing into the room.
His stall has thirteen stitched into the wood, his skates positioned neatly underneath. A photo is taped inside the door—his mother holding him when he was small—and he doesn’t say a single word about it.
When we leave the room, he walks me up to the glass with a hand resting at the small of my back, close enough that I can see the black scuffs on the boards from the morning skate. He hooks an arm around my shoulders and pulls me into his side.
We stand there a minute without saying anything, until his phone starts vibrating against his hip. He pulls it out, and I catch his thumb hitting Decline before I can read the name. It buzzes again immediately.
“Ted,” he mutters. “Christ, the man is relentless.”
“You could just answer it.”
“I could.” He shoves it back into his pocket without a glance. “But that would involve talking to Ted.”
He gets me settled in my seat, low in the bowl. I’d stay in the empty quiet with him another hour if I could, but he has a game to play.
“I have to go get armored up,” he says. “I’ll look for you.”
He presses a quick kiss to my temple. Then he’s gone toward the tunnel, met at the mouth by a woman in a Kings quarter-zip who starts talking low at his shoulder.
As the clock bleeds down, the doors open, and the stands fill in a slow, noisy tide, navy and brick red flooding the bowl until the quiet is gone. Around me, the family section settles in—wives, girlfriends, a few parents, everyone exchanging news by name.
Lily Hartwell finds me with two beers. “Drink one of these. The first game is always a lot.”
“It’s very loud.”
“It gets louder.” She settles in. “You’ll want these good seats to spoil you now. Sam’s first two years, we were up in the three-hundreds—the club buries the young guys. I couldn’t tell which small man was mine for an entire season.”
She’s right, we are close. Close enough that when the Kings pour over the boards for warm-ups, I feel the cold coming off the ice. Close enough to find Briggs in the huddle without trying.
Number thirteen. Navy jersey, red on the shoulders. He skates a loose loop, taps his stick against Augie’s shin pads, and I lose track of my own breathing for a second.
“There he is,” Lily says, catching me looking. “You’ve got the face.”
I turn to her. “Ew, should I wipe it off?”
“Keep it.” She sips her beer, looking smug. “It’s a good face. Don’t fight it.”
Briggs finds me during warm-ups, and I’m not fully prepared for it. He’s mid-lap, gliding backward along the far boards. His head comes up to sweep the lower bowl once, twice, and then stops. On me.
He doesn’t wave or do anything obscene that a camera might catch. He just holds the look, the same way he held it at the table last night, then taps his stick twice against the glass and skates on.
My entire chest goes helium-light.
For weeks, I was the one watching from Murphy’s couch, hunting for a jersey through a screen with two thousand miles between us. Now, I’m ten feet from the glass, and he’s the one looking for me. That’s a dangerous place to be.
The lights drop for the introductions and come back up, and then they’re playing.
I’m still working past the basics, but even I can tell it’s ugly. The puck won’t settle. Chicago clogs up the middle, and the Kings keep flinging it down the ice and chasing after it, and the man behind us groans every time they give it away.
Lily narrates for me in a low, dry stream.
“That’s icing. That’s a bad change. Bellan’s going to lose his mind on the bench—watch.
” Two seconds later, a red-faced man in a suit is indeed screaming something at the boys as they file past him.
“There he goes. He hates this. Sloppy. He’d rather lose clean than win like this. ”
The horn ends the first with nobody ahead, and Lily uses the intermission to teach me about the shift chart, which I retain for roughly the length of the Zamboni’s first lap.
Duval stands on his head in the second, throwing himself across the front of the net to rob a Chicago player with a pad I don’t see move until it’s already there, and the whole building comes up off its seats.
I come up with them, screaming into the noise. Lily grabs my arm, laughing. For a stretch, I forget I’m a stranger here. I forget the plane tomorrow. I forget Vegas waiting for me at the other end of it.
Briggs hits a post in the third that has me on my feet before it clangs wide. He’s spent most of the night down in the corners with his shoulder into somebody, digging the puck out and skating it back the other way.
“That’s the version Bellan wants,” Lily says, nodding at him. “No flash. He’s playing scared tonight, though. Look how tight he’s holding his stick.”
I file it away without knowing what to do with it.
They win it 2–1 on a goal from Augie with four minutes left. I have a wonderful time, though Lily argues it was closer to a heart attack than a game, and that Bellan will make them pay for the sloppiness in Monday’s video review.
“Come on.” Lily’s already up, gathering coats. “I’ll get you back toward the family room. They take forever, but he’ll come find you when he’s done.”
She walks me through the guts of the building, down a cinder-block hall that smells of rubber and cold. When the noise thins behind us, we find a cluster of people waiting—wives, a couple of kids gone boneless with sleep on their parents’ shoulders.
There’s a TV bolted high in the corner running the post-game feed, sound turned low, a panel of suited men breaking down the third period.
I’m still floating, all lit up, half rehearsing how I’ll describe Duval’s save to Murphy when I get home. It was so much more intense in person.
Then the feed cuts from the desk to a live shot of the hallway I came from—the scrum, the shuffle, a PR voice off camera saying two more, guys, two more. And there’s Briggs at the center of it all.
There’s a towel slung around his neck, sweat tracking down his jaw. Yesterday, he’d had me bent over his bathroom counter, my palms flat on the cold stone. I’d watched the same slick trail run down his throat in the mirror while he drove into me from behind.
Even now, I can’t seem to get the image out of my head.
“What was working against Chicago’s forecheck in the third?” a reporter asks.
“Uh, yeah, I think we just simplified. First forty, we’re trying to make a play at our own blue line, and they’re eating us alive on it.
” He shifts the towel on his neck. “Third period, we got pucks behind their D and made them turn around, and that’s a lot less fun for them.
Credit Duval, though. He keeps us in that game in the second. ”
“Can you comment on the reports about your late brother and your former fiancée, Ophelia Andrews?”
Every part of me goes cold at once.
I don’t hear his answer. I don’t need to. I know exactly what his face is doing right now on the other side of that wall—the stillness I’ve learned to read across a hundred phone calls, the door swinging shut behind his eyes.
The thing he told me on my porch in the dark, the thing he’s been carrying in secret for so long. It isn’t his anymore. It’s out there now, and I have no idea what happens next.