Chapter 2 #2
Furious in a low, glittering, full-body way that has gotten its wires badly crossed with something that is not fury at all, and his thumb moves, a small slow arc across my cheekbone, and my eyes do the thing romance novels are always banging on about, the thing I have eye-rolled at in four hundred Goodreads reviews.
They drop to his mouth.
His mouth, which I now see is also doing the thing.
We are both, apparently, doing the thing.
This is a terrible idea, reports the part of my brain still filing paperwork. You don’t know his name. You have known him for the length of a decent song. Tomorrow you have to prove to an entire institution that you are a serious athlete—
And he tilts his head, and I tilt mine.
The universe’s oldest and stupidest choreography: the warmth of him eclipses the cold, and his breath ghosts over my lips, blood orange, espresso, and every objection I have ever filed gets quietly, comprehensively overruled until…
Voices in the corridor.
Two of them, maybe three, loud and male and getting louder, the lazy bark-and-rumble of men who own every hallway they walk through, and one of them says a word that detonates in my chest like a slapshot off the crossbar.
“—Voss says the figure-skating freak got lost, swears she’s still wandering the hockey wing like a sad little —”
And I freeze, while the crimson man does not.
It is the single fastest thing I have witnessed off a sheet of ice.
One heartbeat he is leaning into me with his thumb on my cheek and the slow gold burn in his eyes, and the next, he has both hands on my shoulders and is steering me backward, firm and quiet and absolutely without ceremony, three steps into the deep corner of the cupboard where the mops keep their grim vigil and the overhead light gives up entirely.
He puts me in the dark. He puts his own body between me and the door, a wall of crimson hoodie and warm Alpha, and he does it so smoothly that I am tucked into the shadow with my back to cold concrete before my brain has finished forming the question.
“Stay,” he breathes, not even a whole word, just shaped air against my hairline.
I should bite him.
I want it on the record that biting him is my first instinct, because being told to stay like a retriever is the kind of thing that usually buys an Alpha a bruise from me on principle.
I don’t bite him…
Because — and I hate this, I will be unpacking this for weeks — some animalistic, scent-deep, older-than-language part of me has taken one read of the situation and concluded that this particular Alpha, this stranger, is not standing in front of me as a cage.
He is standing there as a door I get to choose whether to open.
So I stay.
I press flat into the corner, into the bleach and the dark, and I breathe him instead of panic, and the door swings wide a second later and floods the room with corridor light that stops a clean yard short of where he’s hidden me.
“Santori.” A new voice. Bored, broad, faintly contemptuous. “The hell are you doing in the mop closet?”
Santori, I file, on pure reflex, because I am a goalie and a goalie always learns the names. All right. Santori.
“Tape,” Santori says, and the transformation in him is instant, total, and frankly unsettling to witness from eighteen inches away.
The low burnt-sugar voice he was using on me is gone.
This one is bright and loose and bored right back at them, the conversational equivalent of a man inspecting his own nails.
“Jimmy swore on his mother that it was stashed in the aux. Jimmy is a fucking liar, and his mother should be ashamed. There is no tape,” he huffs and proceeds to add, “There is, however, a truly upsetting number of mops, if either of you has finally decided to pursue a trade.”
A snort.
“Weird flex, hiding in here.”
“It’s called peace and quiet. You should try it, Hargrove, your whole personality is a smoke alarm.
” He shifts his weight, casual, and the move slides another half-inch of crimson between the light and me.
“Were you actually after something, or is this just the part of the day where you follow me around hoping my taste rubs off?”
They bicker. He is good at it, fluent, the words coming easy and barbed and amused, and the whole time his back stays an unbroken line across the doorway, his heels planted, his shoulders squared in a way that has nothing in common with the loose performing slouch he wore walking in.
He is laughing. He is mocking a man named Hargrove’s haircut. He is also, with his entire body, quietly refusing to let anyone past him, and I stand in the dark behind that refusal with my heart going like a snare drum and a feeling rising in my chest that I decline, on principle, to examine.
“Whatever, man.” Hargrove, losing interest the way the well-armored always do. “Coach wants the room in ten.”
“Can’t wait. Tell Voss his cologne entered the building before he did. Again.”
Footsteps. Retreating. The corridor reabsorbing them.
And then the door wheezes shut, and the dark folds back over us, and Santori turns around in the small bleach-scented universe of the mop closet, looks at me with both eyebrows up, and a grin unspooling slowly across his face like he has just been handed me a present and dare in the same envelope.
“So,” he says.
“Don’t.” I am already moving, peeling myself off the wall, snatching up the abandoned left pad like it personally witnessed my shame. “Whatever sentence is loading behind that face, kill it. Mercy killing. I’ll hold your hand.”
“I hid you,” Matteo says, delighted, leaning back against the door now that it is his to lean on, arms folding, the picture of a man settling in. “In the dark. Like a contraband shipment. Like a French film.”
“No one asked you to.”
“You didn’t un-ask me either. I noticed. You went very still, very quiet, and you let me, which, given the threat assessment I’ve been running on you since I walked in, I’m genuinely touched.”
I yank the pad strap tight with more violence than the strap has earned.
“I let you because shoving you off would’ve made noise. Tactical. Don’t get sentimental about it.”
“Mm.”
He doesn’t believe me.
It is written all over the insufferable golden warmth of his face that he does not believe me, and worse, that he is far too kind to say so, which is somehow more annoying than if he’d just called me a liar outright.
“Here’s the thing, though. Whoever that was, Voss, his charming little congregation, they’ve apparently spent their whole morning hunting the lost figure skater.
And if they’d found her half-dressed in a closet with me?
With me?” He shakes his head, mournful, theatrical.
“That is not a headline that helps you, sweetheart. New girl, day one, caught playing tonsil hockey with a winger in the supply room. They’d have it stitched on a banner by Thursday. ”
And the worst of it, the genuine worst, is that he is right.
I know exactly what that looks like. I have spent my entire life being looked at by people hunting for the precise frame that proves I don’t belong on the ice, and a closet, with a stranger, and a mouth I very nearly locked with on my own free will— that is not a frame.
That is the whole film. That is the thing they would play on a loop until it became the only true thing anyone here ever knew about me.
He just deleted that film.
Without being asked.
Without making me ask, which is somehow the part that gets under my ribs and stays.
I straighten up.
I look at him properly, the loose-limbed ease, the crimson, the hazel eyes that I am now fairly sure hide considerably more than they advertise, and I find, to my deep displeasure, that the cold-blooded threat assessment I run on every Alpha who gets within scenting distance of me has come back with a verdict I did not order.
Not dangerous. Not to you. Not like the rest of them.
It is not trust.
Let us be extremely clear. It has been one conversation, one near-miss, and I trust him roughly as far as I could throw his sneaker collection.
But it is a strange, grudging certainty that this one, unlike the matched set of men who laughed me down a corridor an hour ago, is not running an angle that ends with me being smaller.
He hid me to spare me, not to own the favor.
Even if he is absolutely, transparently, about to try to own the favor.
“So,” Matteo says again, brightening, right on cue. “The way I see it.”
“Here it comes.”
“The way I see it, I have just performed a heroic act of reputation management, entirely free of charge, for a woman who has not even told me her name.” He pushes off the door, ambling closer, hands lifting in a little gesture of wide-eyed reason.
“Which means…and I want you to follow the logic, because it is airtight…you owe me.”
“I owe you,” I repeat, flat as a frozen pond.
“One favor. My choice. To be redeemed,” he adds graciously, “at a time of maximum inconvenience to you. That’s just good business.”
“You understand I could have handled three hockey players,” I tell him, hauling my mask out of the bag, turning it in my hands so the cage catches what little light there is. “I’ve handled worse with less. You didn’t rescue me. You inserted yourself into a situation, and now you’d like a receipt.”
“God, yes. An itemized one. Possibly laminated.” He is grinning so hard now that it has to hurt. “Come on. One favor. You’re a goalie, you live and die by the rebound, you know there’s no such thing as a free save. What’s your name?”
I have a whole policy about this.
The policy is robust.
“Iris,” I say. “O’Shea.”
Something moves across his face when I say it, quick, there and gone, a flicker I almost miss, and for half a second the performance thins and I get a clean look straight through it to whatever the actual man is doing back there.
He files my name.
He files it the way I filed his, careful, like it matters, like he is the kind of person who keeps things.
Then the grin slams back down over it, bright as a stage light, and the moment is gone before I can decide whether I imagined it.
“Iris,” he says, tasting it. “Matteo Santori. Teo for short, if you’re ever feeling generous, which I’m told happens to people occasionally.” He sketches a bow, absurd, courtly, in a janitorial closet, in half his gear. “Winger. Number twenty-one. Possessor of one I.O.U., redeemable upon—”
“Maximum inconvenience, yes, you said.” I sling the bag’s strap over my shoulder, tuck the mask under my arm, and reach past him for the door handle, which puts us close again, blood orange and cold ice.
I watch him notice, with what is visibly enormous effort, choose to behave.
“Move, Santori. Some of us have a practice to get insulted at.”
He moves — but only enough so that getting past him is a deliberate negotiation of warmth and shoulder, and as I cross the threshold into the merciful blank cold of the corridor, he says, light, lazy, pitched to follow me out the door and lodge somewhere I can’t get at it.
“Welcome to North Star, Pinky.”
I do not turn around. I will not give him the turn.
But I feel my own mouth go crooked, and I am viciously grateful he can’t see it, since I am three strides down the corridor before I let myself process that he has handed me a nickname I never agreed to — and that the truly damning thing that I’ll be furious about straight through warmups, is this:
I don’t hate it.
My jaw still remembers the exact weight of his thumb.
I scrub it with the heel of my glove hand, hard, the way you’d scrub off a smudge, and it does not come off. Somewhere ahead of me, the corridor opens its mouth onto the cold mineral roar of the rink.
I square my shoulders. I lift my chin and remind myself that it’s time to be a serious athlete at an institution that has stashed me in a cupboard.
One favor, my choice, maximum inconvenience.
We’ll see about that, Twenty-One.