Chapter 9
Nylah POV
The auxiliary physiotherapy room smelled of povidone-iodine, rubbing alcohol, and melting freezer ice.
It was nearly nine on a Friday night, forty minutes after the varsity intrasquad scrimmage had ended. The main training room down the hall was already dark, the whirlpools drained, the industrial washers thumping heavily against the concrete subfloor.
I carried my leather binder and the evening’s telemetry printouts under one arm, intending only to drop the signed clearance slips into the trainer’s wall slot before catching the final campus shuttle.
I pushed the frosted-glass door open, and my boots caught on the rubber threshold.
The room was lit by a single, flickering fluorescent tube over the far stainless-steel examination table.
Ryan was sitting on the edge of the metal slab.
His grey practice jersey and compression top were balled up on the floor between his bare feet, soaked with sweat and stained with dark rust-colored smears of drying blood.
His left arm was pressed hard against his flank, guarding his bruised ribs, while his right hand fumbled clumsily with a sterile foil packet of gauze.
His fingers were shaking with a fine, rapid tremor of sheer physical exhaustion.
Along the crest of his right cheekbone, stretching up into the silver scar across his eyebrow, the skin was split wide open. A sluggish ribbon of crimson was tracking down through the dark stubble on his jawline, dripping onto the white cotton towel draped across his thigh.
He was breathing in shallow, hitching gasps, his broad chest rising and falling unevenly as he tried to keep his diaphragm from pulling against the damaged intercostal muscles on his left side.
My throat went instantly dry.
Every rehearsed argument, every clinical rule I had spent the day reciting to keep him at arm's length, evaporated into thin air.
I dropped my binder onto the rolling stool by the door.
The plastic thudded against the vinyl, but Ryan didn't even flinch; his head hung low, his dark hair falling forward in sweat-matted spikes, his teeth clamped around the corner of the gauze packet as he tried to rip the packaging with one hand.
I crossed the concrete floor before my brain could calculate the danger.
I reached out, catching the foil packet between my thumb and forefinger, and pulled it gently from his mouth. With my other hand, I slipped the small brown bottle of antiseptic from his numb, scarred fingers.
Ryan’s head snapped up.
His pale grey eyes were clouded with pain, the pupils dilated wide under the harsh fluorescent glare. He looked at me through the tangled dark hair falling into his eyes, his chest hitching on a sharp, ragged inhale.
"Collins," he rasped, his voice thick with dust and cold air. "What are you doing here?"
"Shut up, Owen," I whispered, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to keep it steady. "Just shut up."
* * *
The examination table was high, putting his battered face level with my collarbone.
I didn't step back to give him room. Instead, I stepped straight into the narrow space between his parted knees, my boots settling onto the black rubber matting between his feet.
The physical heat rolling off his bare torso was overwhelming, a suffocating wall of thermal energy that smelled of crushed cedar, iron, and the sharp, medicinal bite of the arena.
Up close, the damage was worse than I had anticipated.
A deep, purpling hematoma stretched from his floating ribs down toward his hip, the tissue swollen and hot to the touch.
I tore open the sterile gauze, saturating the pad with the brown antiseptic solution.
"Hold still," I commanded softly.
My left hand came up, my fingertips settling against the warm, rough skin of his left temple to steady his head. The moment my skin made contact with his, a violent shudder ran through his neck, his jaw clamping shut until his molars clicked together.
Beneath my fingertips, the temporal artery was hammering a frantic, punishing rhythm against his skull.
I pressed the soaked gauze to the split above his cheekbone.
The sting of the alcohol must have been searing, but Ryan didn't flinch.
He didn't make a sound. His dark grey eyes locked onto my face with a terrifying, unblinking intensity, tracking the parted line of my lips, the rapid flutter of my pulse at the base of my throat, the micro-tremors running through my fingers as I worked.
His hands moved.
His large, calloused palms came up, settling heavily on the outer curves of my hips, his long fingers curling into the thick denim of my jeans.
The heat of his hands burned straight through the fabric, pinning me between his thighs. He wasn't shoving me away; he was anchoring himself to me, his grip tightening until his knuckles pressed hard against the bone of my pelvis.
My breath trapped itself high in my throat.
"You should have gone to the team physician," I murmured, my voice barely audible over the hum of the fluorescent light as I dabbed away the drying blood. "This needs three stitches."
"Vance would have flagged the concussion protocol," he muttered, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that resonated straight into my sternum. "He’d sit me for two weeks."
"You're bleeding into your mouth, Ryan."
"I don't care."
His fingers tightened on my hips, pulling me half an inch closer, until the front of my cream knit sweater brushed against the damp, burning skin of his bare chest. The contact was electric, searing, sending a wave of heat rushing up the sides of my neck to settle behind my ears.
I pulled two butterfly bandages from the tray on the cart, carefully peeling the paper backing with fingers that felt thick and clumsy.
"Davies caught you?" I asked, keeping my focus locked on the split skin above his eye, desperate to avoid looking directly into the dark, hungry depths of his pupils.
"He lost his footing on the breakout," Ryan rasped, his breath washing over my chin in warm, cedar-scented bursts. "I took the hit to keep him from going headfirst into the stanchion."
My hands stilled for a fraction of a second against his brow.
He took the hit. He had sacrificed his own battered body, absorbed another bone-crushing blow on an unhealed fracture, just to keep a teammate from breaking.
The terrible, suffocating weight of his guilt—the phantom of his paralyzed brother—was driving him to treat his own flesh like disposable armor.
A dull ache settled behind my breastbone.
I pressed the first adhesive strip down, bridging the cut, then smoothed the second one across the skin with the pad of my thumb. The silver scar through his eyebrow was rough, raised slightly above the smooth skin of his forehead.
"You can't keep doing this," I whispered, my thumb lingering against his temple, unable to pull away from the burning warmth of his skin. "You're going to destroy yourself."
* * *
Ryan didn't answer with words.
As my hand began to drop from his face, his right hand released my hip.
His thick, scarred fingers shot up, wrapping around my wrist with sudden, unyielding force. His grip was an iron band, arresting my retreat before I could take a single step away from the table.
He didn't pull me down. He drew my arm down between us, flattening my bare palm directly against the left side of his chest.
The air left my lungs in a sharp, defensive gasp.
My hand was pressed flat over his bare pectoral muscle, right against the purpling flesh above his heart. His skin was feverishly hot, slick with a fine sheen of sweat, the dark hair on his chest soft against my palm.
Beneath my hand, his heart was detonating.
It was hammering against his ribs with brutal, concussive violence—a wild, frantic rhythm that felt like it was trying to punch straight through the bone and into my palm.
The sheer velocity of his pulse was terrifying, a raw, autonomic explosion that obliterated every trace of the stoic, unbothered captain he played on the ice.
"Feel that, Collins?" he whispered.
His voice was stripped bare, gravelly, rough with a desperation that cracked through his armor.
I tried to pull my hand back, but his fingers tightened, holding my palm glued to the violent pounding of his chest.
"Ryan, let go," I breathed, my throat contracting on a dry swallow, the room spinning slightly as the heat between our bodies reached a suffocating threshold.
"No," he rasped, leaning his head forward until his forehead was inches from mine.
His pale grey eyes were nearly black, his breath coming in ragged, shallow hitches that brushed across my lips.
"You want to talk about destroying myself?
Having you down here... smelling like rain and looking at me like you're the only person who sees me... that's what's tearing me apart."
My heart hammered against my ribs, matching the savage cadence of his.
"You're bleeding," I whispered, my lips trembling as my gaze dropped to his parted mouth, so close I could feel the heat radiating from his lips.
"I don't give a damn about the blood," he growled, his thumb stroking once across the delicate tendons of my inner wrist, a dark, velvet plea buried beneath the command. "Look at me, Nylah."
I lifted my eyes, meeting his unblinking stare.
The last remnant of my professional detachment, the intellectual fortress I had built to survive this semester, shattered into dust. I didn't want to step back. I didn't want to run from the dark, dangerous heat pouring off his bruised skin.
I was trapped in his perimeter, my hand burning against his thudding heart, standing on the absolute precipice of a fire that was about to consume us both.