Chapter 4
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is a special kind of hell this morning.
Fluorescent lights that make everyone look like corpses, overpriced coffee that tastes like battery acid, and the general misery of people who’d rather be anywhere else.
I pull my hood up and keep my head down as I make my way through the terminal, hoping to avoid conversation with teammates, fans, or anyone else who thinks they deserve a piece of my morning.
Rochelle fucking Winters occupies the third category.
The team is scattered across the departure gate area, some guys already asleep in uncomfortable airport chairs, others scrolling through their phones or playing cards. Normal road trip energy––tired but focused, ready for two games in Vancouver that could determine our playoff seeding.
What’s not normal is the reporter sitting three rows away, typing furiously on her laptop like she’s writing the next great American novel instead of whatever hit piece she’s planning.
It’s been two days since our last encounter, and I still can’t get the memory of her defiant voice out of my head. Try me, hockey boy. The way her voice washed down places it had no business being.
Fuck. Forget about the sexy reporter.
But it’s hard to forget about someone when they’re sitting close enough that I can see the concentration on her face as she types. Hard to ignore the way she’s dressed in that white oversized sweater and blue shorts, comfortable for travels and still so fucking sexy.
Jake drops into the seat next to me, grinning like he knows something I don’t. Fucking bastard. “Morning, pretty bird. Looking forward to the flight?”
“It’s a flight to Vancouver. Nothing to look forward to.”
“Right. And I’m sure the fact that our embedded reporter is on the same plane has nothing to do with your sunny disposition.”
“My disposition is always like this.” I deadpan.
“True. But usually, you’re not radiating quite this much sexual frustration.”
Sexual frustration?? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t. That’s why you’ve been avoiding looking in her direction for the past twenty minutes, despite the fact that she’s wearing those shorts that makes her legs look incredible.”
I make the mistake of glancing over at Rochelle, and Jake’s right - the fucking shorts is doing things for her figure that shouldn’t be legal in public spaces.
She’s got one leg crossed over the other, and when she shifts position to reach for her coffee, the movement draws my attention to the curve of her hip.
Don’t look. Don’t think about it. Don’t wonder what she’d feel like under your hands.
“You’re an idiot,” I slap the back of his head.
“And you’re attracted to someone who’s probably going to write an article about how you eat puppies for breakfast. This should be entertaining.”
Before I can tell Jake exactly where he can shove his entertainment, the gate agent calls for boarding. The team shuffles toward the gate, and I make sure to position myself as far from Rochelle as possible in the boarding line.
Distance is good. Distance is professional. Distance means I won’t do something stupid.
We board the chartered plane in groups, and I claim an aisle seat toward the back, figuring I can stretch out and maybe catch some sleep during the two-hour flight. Jake slides into the seat across the aisle, already pulling out his tablet for whatever game he’s obsessed with this week.
“Alright, everybody listen up.” Coach Williams stands at the front of the plane, holding a clipboard. “I’ve got seat assignments for this flight, and before anyone complains, remember that I don’t care about your preferences.”
Seat assignments. We haven’t had assigned seating since junior hockey. The fuck?
Coach starts reading names and seat numbers, and I tune out until I hear my own name called.
“Morrison, 12A. Winters, 12B.”
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
I look up to find Rochelle staring at Coach Williams with the same expression of horror that’s probably on my face. She looks like someone just told her she’ll be spending the next two hours locked in a cage with a rabid bear.
At least the feeling is mutual.
Jake catches my eye and grins. “Have fun, kids.”
I’ll hurt my best friend.
There’s no point arguing with Coach Williams about seating arrangements, so I grab my bag and make my way to row twelve. Rochelle is already there, sliding her laptop bag under the seat in front of her with movements that are just a little too sharp.
“This is ridiculous,” she mutters as I approach.
“Something we can agree on.”
I drop into the aisle seat, and immediately the space feels smaller.
Rochelle smells like that same clean perfume from our interview, something light that shouldn’t be noticeable but manages to fill my entire awareness.
When she reaches up to adjust the air vent, her sweater pulls slightly above her stomach, and I force myself to look out the window instead.
Soft. Her skin looks so soft, and my hands itch to touch them.
Two hours. I can handle two hours of sitting next to someone without doing something stupid.
The plane starts taxiing, and both of us maintain rigid silence. Rochelle pulls out her laptop and opens what looks like a research document, while I grab my headphones and try to find music loud enough to drown out the sound of her typing.
But I can still see her screen from the corner of my eye, and what I see makes my jaw clench.
She’s got a document open titled, “Kai Morrison Background Research,” and from what I can glimpse, it’s full of notes about my penalty record, my suspension history, speculation about my “anger management issues.” One section header reads “Potential Psychological Factors.”
Psychological factors. Like I’m some kind of case study instead of a person.
“Enjoying your research?” I ask, not bothering to hide the edge in my voice.
Rochelle doesn’t look up from her screen. “Just doing my job.”
“Your job involves psychoanalyzing people you’ve known for three days?”
“My job involves understanding the subjects I write about. If you have a problem with that, maybe you shouldn’t have agreed to the embedded coverage.”
I didn’t agree to anything. Management agreed for me.
“If I had a choice in this matter, we would never have met.”
She finally looks at me, those green eyes sharp with irritation. “Everyone has choices, Kai. You choose how to present yourself to the media. You choose how to respond to questions. You choose whether to cooperate or be hostile for no reason.”
“No reason? You’re sitting there writing about my psychological factors like I’m some kind of lab rat, and you think my hostility is unreasonable?”
“I think your hostility is exactly what makes you an interesting story.”
The way she says it––clinical, detached, like I’m nothing more than content for her article makes anger flare in my chest. She doesn’t see me as a person. She sees me as a puzzle to solve, a reputation to exploit, a career advancement opportunity.
Just like every other journalist.
Just then, the plane hits turbulence.
Not the gentle bump-and-sway of normal air currents, but the kind of sudden, violent drop that makes your stomach relocate to somewhere near your ass. The plane shudders and drops what feels like fifty feet in half a second, and several passengers let out startled gasps.
Including Rochelle.
I glance over and see her gripping the armrest so hard her knuckles are white, eyes squeezed shut like she’s trying to will the plane back to stable flight. Her laptop slides to the floor with a crash, but she doesn’t even seem to notice.
She’s terrified. Well, that’s what you get for prying.
“You okay?” I find myself asking even though I am her lab rat to inspect.
“Fine,” she whispers, but her voice is tight, and her breathing is too shallow. “Just not great with flying.”
Another bout of turbulence hits, worse than the first, and the plane drops and shakes like it’s being tossed around by giant hands. Rochelle gasps and instinctively grabs my arm, her nails digging into my forearm through my hoodie.
She’s really scared. Not just uncomfortable, actually frightened.
This is my chance to really scare her off this whole thing.
I may never get another opening.
Without thinking, I reach over and cup her face with my free hand, forcing her to look at me instead of the window where she can see the wing flexing with each gust of wind.
“Look at me, not the window,” I tell her. “The plane’s fine. Turbulence feels worse than it is.”
Her green eyes are wide and panicked, so now I can see every crevasse.
They’re blown wide open, and it’s like staring at the moon, mountains, or the ocean.
I don’t know but they’re beautiful, and I can feel her pulse racing where my thumb rests against her jaw.
She’s trying to be tough, trying to hide her fear behind professional composure, but she can’t quite pull it off.
She’s not as tough as she pretends to be.
The plane lurches again, and Rochelle makes a small, involuntary sound of distress. Before I can think about what I’m doing, before I can consider the consequences or the professional boundaries or the fact that we’re surrounded by my teammates, I lean forward and kiss her.
Hard. Demanding. The kind of kiss that’s designed to drive everything else out of her head, including the fear of the plane falling out of the sky.
I admit I didn’t think about this.
I admit I’ve not really thought about anything logical since I saw Rochelle.
So yeah, I’m kissing her.
For a split second, Rochelle freezes. Then she responds like she’s been thinking about this as much as I have, her mouth opens under mine, her hands fisting in the front of my hoodie.
The kiss tastes like coffee and something sweet, and when she makes a soft sound against my mouth, it goes straight through my groin. I harden so fast it’s painful.
This is insane. This is career suicide. This is exactly what I swore I wouldn’t do.
But I can’t seem to stop. Her lips are soft and responsive, and when I deepen the kiss, she meets me halfway. For a moment that feels like hours, there’s nothing but the heat of her mouth and the way she’s holding onto me like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s spinning out of control.
The turbulence stops as suddenly as it started, and the plane levels out into smooth air. The spell breaks, and we spring apart like we’ve been electrocuted.
Rochelle stares at me, her lips swollen from the kiss, her professional composure completely shattered. I can see her trying to process what just happened, trying to reconcile the clinical interest she had in me five minutes ago with the way she just responded to my mouth on hers.
“That was...” she starts, then stops, like she can’t figure out how to finish the sentence.
“A distraction,” I say, because I need to give us both an excuse for what just happened. “You were panicking.”
She clears her throat and nods in understanding.
The hostile silence that settles between us is different from the professional distance we maintained before. Now it’s charged with awareness, with the memory of how she felt in my hands and the way she kissed me back like she’d been wanting it for days.
We both know that wasn’t just about the turbulence.
Rochelle retrieves her laptop from the floor and closes the research document without looking at it. Her hands are shaking slightly, and I notice she doesn’t open it again for the rest of the flight.
I put my headphones back on and close my eyes, but I can’t stop thinking about the way she tasted, or the soft sound she made when I deepened the kiss. I can’t stop replaying the moment when she grabbed my hoodie and pulled me closer instead of pushing me away.
I also can’t stop thinking of the fact that I need a release, fast.
This is bad. This is very, very bad.
Because now I know she feels it too. This pull between us that has nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with the way she looks at me when she thinks I’m not paying attention.
The way she stands her ground when I try to intimidate her, like she’s not afraid of what I might do but curious about it.
Jake glances over at me from across the aisle, and his expression tells me he saw at least part of what just happened. He raises an eyebrow in a silent question, and I shake my head in a way that hopefully communicates don’t ask, don’t comment, don’t even think about it.
Two hours until we land in Vancouver. Then team meetings, practice, game preparation, enough structure and routine to pretend this never happened.
But when I risk a glance at Rochelle, she’s pressing her lips together absently while staring out the window, and I know we’re both thinking about the same thing.
The turbulence is over, but whatever just started between us is going to be a lot harder to navigate than some rough air.
She’s still a reporter. She’s still here to expose my life for public consumption. And I still can’t trust her.
But now I also can’t stop wanting her.
The plane begins its descent into Vancouver, and I close my eyes and try to prepare for the next few days of pretending I don’t know exactly how Rochelle Winters tastes or how it feels when she kisses me back like her life depends on it.
This trip just got a lot more complicated.