Chapter 2
Locker Room Roulette
~IRIS~
The room they have given me to change in was, until very recently, a place where mops came to die.
The mops have not entirely accepted their eviction.
They lean in the corner like sullen, retired soldiers, four of them, bristled heads crusted stiff, and the whole space still wears their perfume the way a sweater wears the smell of an ex.
Bleach. Wet string.
The sour, mineral cling of standing water.
Somebody has wheeled a folding chair in here and propped a hand-printed sign against it, AUXILIARY – GOALTENDER, in marker that smeared before it dried, and I have been standing in front of that sign for a full ninety seconds, holding my gear bag, performing the small private ceremony of not screaming.
North Star Elite has a recovery center with its own logo.
It has a bronze statue of a man being better than me. It has, I would bet the contents of my duffel, a goaltender’s lounge somewhere in the gleaming belly of this building with heated floors and a smoothie fridge.
And it has put me in the cupboard.
“Charming,” I tell the mops. “Real five-star treatment. I’ll be leaving a review.”
They decline to comment.
I drop my bag onto the chair before the chair can lodge an objection of its own, and I unzip it, and the smell that lifts out is so violently, stupidly mine that something behind my sternum unclenches half a degree.
My gear. My particular catastrophe of leather and foam and sweat that no laundry cycle has ever fully defeated, threaded through with the frosted-strawberry ghost of a hundred protein shakes and the cold-metal note of old ice that lives in the padding like a memory.
Underneath it, fainter, the cotton-candy body mist I spritz on out of pure spite at a sport that would prefer I smelled of nothing at all.
Home doesn’t have a postcode.
For me, Home is a bag that zips and moves where you need to be for the sake of growth.
I peel off the Gatorade-stiff hoodie I have been wearing since the airport, and I do not think about the airport, the corridor, the wire-meshed window, the green eyes on the other side of it.
Compression shorts. Sports bra, the good black one with enough structural engineering to hold a small bridge.
I stand there in the mop-scented dim, breath fogging faintly because nobody has thought to heat the cupboard, and I start the long liturgy of putting myself back together.
Knee pads. The cool slither of base layers.
My chest protector dragged down over my head so my pink hair static-clings to the collar and crackles.
I am bent double, wrestling the left pad’s strap, hair hanging in a damp pink curtain over my face, when the door opens.
Not a knock.
Not a polite throat-clear from the hallway.
The door simply opens, swinging wide on its complaining hinge, a wedge of bright corridor light falling across the concrete, and a voice that has clearly never once considered the concept of a closed door says—
“Okay, so Jimmy swears the spare tape lives in the aux —”
Then nothing.
The “nothing” has a texture. It arrives all at once; the way a held breath arrives, and I straighten up slow, shoving the hair out of my eyes with the back of my wrist. The man in the doorway has stopped speaking the way a record stops when somebody lifts the needle clean off it.
My first, uncharitable thought, is that he is far too well-lit for someone who just barged into a janitorial afterthought.
He is leaning into the doorframe with one hand braced high on the jamb, mid-sentence, mid-stride, caught.
Dark hair styled with the kind of intention that takes either four minutes or forty.
Hazel eyes lit gold at the edges. A jaw built by a committee that was showing off.
He is wearing half his practice gear and a hoodie the precise crimson of a sin you’d commit twice, and he is, objectively, the way a brick to the face is objectively a brick, ridiculously good-looking.
I clock all of that in a second, file it under not my problem, and open my mouth to ask him whether knocking is a cultural practice that simply hasn’t reached Minnesota yet.
And then his scent reaches me, and the question dies somewhere south of my tonsils.
It comes in on the corridor draft, warm against all that bleach-and-mop cold, and it is — God.
It unfolds like something deliberate, like a hand opening one finger at a time.
Blood orange first, bright and bitter-sweet, and a little obscene.
Then cinnamon sugar, the kind that lives on the rim of a thing you shouldn’t have ordered.
Espresso, dark and close. Expensive cologne layered over the simple animal warmth of his skin, and underneath every showy top note of it, steady as a held chord, the deep Alpha base that my body apparently decided, without consulting me, without so much as a memo, is the single best thing it has smelled in twenty-four years of being alive.
My knees do a thing.
A small, traitorous, structural thing, but I dare to realize what this possibly can be…
Scent-matched.
Oh, you absolute disaster.
Because I know what this is. I read enough of the spicy stuff on my Kindle at two in the morning to have a working vocabulary, and I have read it described as gravity, as a key in a lock, and I always thought that was florid romance-novel rubbish manufactured to sell paperbacks to women like me.
Turns out it is florid romance-novel rubbish and it is real, and it has just walked into my mop cupboard looking for tape.
“Huh,” the man says.
It is not a word so much as an exhale that got ambitious.
His pupils have gone wide and dark, swallowing the gold, and the easy lean has left his shoulders — he has come fully off the doorframe, standing square in the entrance like someone who has forgotten what his feet were originally hired to do.
He breathes in once, slow, and I watch the precise moment it lands behind his eyes, and I think, with the last cold scrap of my dignity.
Don’t you dare lean toward me, I will end you.
The universe loves to make a fool out of me, because what does this Alpha of a man do?
He leans toward me.
Not far. Half a step. Just enough that the crimson hoodie crosses the threshold and the door drifts shut behind him on its lazy hinge, sealing us into the bleach and the dark and the appalling new physics of the room, and I should step back.
There is a folding chair behind me, a wall behind the chair, and nothing stopping me from putting all of it between us.
I do not step back.
I would like the record to show that I notice myself not doing it. That is the humiliating part.
I am fully present for my own betrayal, standing there in a chest protector with my arms half-strapped and my pink hair full of static, and the part of my brain that has kept me alive in a sport that wants me dead is screaming through a megaphone, while the rest of me is just …
tipping my chin up. A degree. Maybe two.
“You,” he says, and his voice has dropped into something low and frankly unfair, faintly accented, the consonants rounded soft, “smell like —”
“Finish that sentence,” I manage, “and I will fold you into this folding chair.”
He wouldn’t possibly finis—
“—Strawberries,” he finishes, undeterred, because he is clearly a man who has never met a threat he respected. “And cold. And something pink. Is there a pink smell? There shouldn’t be. You’ve broken a rule.”
The cute thing about this is how genuinely confused he sounds.
If an emotion can actually have a “sound” to it.
“I break loads of rules. It’s a personality.”
“Clearly.” He is closer. I do not know how he got closer.
I did not authorize for him to get any closer.
Up near enough now that I can see the flecks of bronze in the hazel eyes, the small pale scar riding his collarbone above the hoodie’s neckline, the way his mouth tilts when it is deciding to be a problem.
“I came in here for tape.”
“Congratulations. There’s the mops. Knock yourself out.”
“I have completely forgotten about the tape.”
“I can tell. It’s very moving. A grown man, undone by adhesive.”
He laughs, and that is its own catastrophe, because it is a real one — startled out of him, bright, unguarded, nothing like the showroom smile he wore in the doorway — and the laugh ships another wave of him across the not-distance between us.
My body is staging a coup. I can feel it gathering its little troops.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Why? Are you writing a complaint?”
“Might be. Depends on how it goes.” His head tips. A piece of dark hair falls, and he doesn’t fix it, which I suspect he knows, which I suspect is half the point. “Come on. You’ve got the prettiest scowl I’ve seen since I crossed an ocean, and I don’t even know what to call it.”
“It’s called ‘leave,’” I say. “Two syllables. You can do it.”
But it comes out wrong.
It comes out warm. It comes out with the corner of my own stupid mouth, lifting, traitor, and he sees it.
Something in his expression goes soft with a pinch of delight, and dangerous all at once, and the half-step becomes most of a step, and now there is genuinely very little air left to share, and what there is, is on fire.
His hand comes up.
Slow. Telegraphed, the way you’d move toward something you didn’t want to spook, and the absurd, mortifying truth is that I watch it come — the goalie who has built an entire identity on stopping things letting this one sail straight in — and his knuckles graze the line of my jaw.
Then his thumb settles just below my cheekbone, his palm warm, and it smells of orange, sugar, and trouble.
The whole left side of my face decides that this, this, is what it was built for.
“There it is,” he murmurs.
“There what is?” I say, and it barely sounds.
“You stopped scowling.”
I have. I am furious about it.