Chapter 4 #2
Nobody moves.
The silence that pours into the rink is enormous and total, the kind of quiet that has texture, that presses on the ears. Twenty-some men frozen mid-stride. The clock blinking down its meaningless final seconds.
And me, I become aware, gawking at her in open horror with my jaw somewhere down around my collarbone, in the precise pose as half the team, because every cell I own is screaming a single useless question, which is how is she still standing.
She’s still standing there, apparently, made of something the rest of us are not.
She must feel the staring, because she lets out a sigh that I can see more than hear, a long-suffering rise and fall of her shoulder pads, and then she reaches up and pulls off her helmet.
The face underneath it stops the rest of my brain cold.
Sweat has plastered loose pink strands flat against her temple and her jaw, gone dark rose where they cling, and her cheeks are flushed that wind-scrubbed color.
She looks tired, damp, and faintly disgusted with all of us, and she is, somehow, in that exact unglamorous state, the most stunning thing I have seen in a building full of expensive things.
The scent of her lifts off the heat of her, frosted strawberry and clean cold ice and something sugar-pink underneath, and even drowned in the rink’s sweat-and-rubber fog, it walks straight up to me and knocks politely on a door I did not know I had left unlocked.
“Relax, men.” Her voice carries the full width of the ice without trying, dry as a struck match.
“I’m a woman, remember? A pussy can take a puck or two and walk it off.
Which is more than I can say for those precious crown jewels of yours, which would’ve been out of commission until roughly the heat death of the universe. ”
There is a beat.
And then the coaches laugh.
The two other men barking it out before they can think better of it, making me realize they not only arrived but had watched that last segment, probably holding their breath in wait. Even Coach Declan’s mouth does something at one corner that on a lesser man would be the start of a grin.
He shakes his head instead, lifts the whistle, and blows it sharply, signalling the finale.
“No points,” he announces, flat. “Which means all of you just lost.”
That snaps the rink out of its trance like a slap.
The unified groan goes up at once, curses and boos, and somebody’s stick slapping the ice in protest. The wounded chorus of grown men informed that an hour of effort has bought them nothing.
Hargrove says something unprintable about the geometry of the net.
Two of the opposing sectors start relitigating the bad pass that started it all.
I do not join the noise.
I am still watching O’Shea.
Because the helmet is off and the performance has dropped with it, just slightly, at the edges, and underneath, I can see how tired she actually is.
A bone-deep, low-burning tired that the chirping and the swagger were built to cover.
It tugs at that idiot standing order in my gut, the one I never signed, and before I have decided to do it, I am skating, cutting across the ice toward her crease, and I skid to a hard stop a single inch off her, close enough that a spray of my edges dusts the toe of her pad.
She has to tip her head back to look at me.
And that, right there, is its own small earthquake.
Because with the gear, attitude, the way she takes up a doorway with her whole spine, I had filed her, somewhere in the back of the cabinet, as bigger than she is.
Standing this close, looking down at her, looking up at me, I get the truth of it.
She is small. Petite, even, under all that armor, the top of her damp pink head landing well below my chin.
It is a mind-bending little contradiction, this slight woman who plays the net like a fortress and chirps a room full of Alphas like she owns the deed to it, and I do not entirely know what to do with the way it lands in my chest.
“You good?” I ask.
Quiet. Pitched for her and not the rink.
“I’m fine.” She rolls one shoulder, a shrug in gear. “Puck happens.”
I frown.
I do not plan on frowning; it simply installs itself, and I hear myself ask the next thing the way a person asks a question he already dreads the answer to.
“Did you eat?”
Her brow knits.
“Why on earth would I have eaten?”
“Because it’s the afternoon, O’Shea.” The frown deepens, takes root. “It is past noon. You don’t eat before a game?”
“So I can redecorate the ice with it?” She pulls a face, genuine revulsion. “Hard pass.”
“You can have a banana.” It comes out with an edge, flatter and firmer than flirting has any right to be, and I register, somewhere behind my own voice, that I have crossed clean over into scolding her.
A grown woman. A stranger. Scolding her about fruit.
“A banana, O’Shea. One banana. The bar is on the floor.”
She pouts.
And here is where the afternoon truly goes off the rails for me, because the pout is not a weapon she is deploying.
That is the lethal part.
It is just her face, doing a small involuntary thing, mouth pushing out, brow gone soft and put-upon, and it is hot, unbearably cute, and it is, against every shred of good sense I have ever owned, turning me on.
Here, on a sheet of ice, in front of my entire team and a man who could cut me from the roster with a flick of his pen.
Get it together, Santori. It is a banana negotiation.
“I like it better when you call me Pinky,” she says.
My mouth pulls into a smirk before I can stop it.
Her eyes go wide.
“I didn’t—that’s not…I did not say that.”
“You absolutely said that.”
I let the smirk run loose, and I lean down, dropping my voice into the low register I know does things, close enough now that the strawberry-and-ice of her threads warms through the cold between us.
“For the record, Pinky, there’s a long and colorful list of things I could be calling you instead. I just doubt a single one of them clears the conduct policy.”
“Huff.” She actually says the word, or nearly enough. “Shoo. Go away. You’re standing here making your entire team think you’re flirting with the goalie because you’re a sore loser.”
I shrug, easy, and steal a glance over my shoulder, and she is not wrong.
Half the rink has us under open surveillance.
And worse, Jude and Rémi are watching me with two very different but equally pointed expressions, Jude’s a slow narrowing assessment, Rémi’s a single quiet lifted eyebrow that somehow contains an entire interrogation.
They are too far off to catch a word of this, which is the only genuinely funny thing about my current situation, and I find I do not particularly want to pull away regardless.
So I do not.
I bring my focus back down to her, all of it, the whole rink narrowing to one damp pink-haired point.
“Lunch,” I say. “You and me.”
She gawks.
It is a deeply satisfying gawk, lips parting, head tipping slowly to one side like a confused and dangerous bird.
“You’re asking me out. On day one. When we met this morning. In a closet.”
“With mops,” I supply helpfully.
“With mops,” she repeats, like the detail is the load-bearing wall of her objection.
“Yes. I am asking you out.” I spread my hands, the picture of a reasonable man.
“Because the alternative is that you don’t eat at all, on account of the fact that you apparently consider lunch a fringe theory, and you just spent an hour blocking pucks with your skull and reproductive future after a forty-five-minute warmup and a drill set.
Your body is running a marathon on an empty tank, O’Shea, and I refuse to be a passive bystander to the crime. ”
“Whatever.” She rolls her eyes, but it is a soft roll with no real weight behind it. “Who needs protein?”
“I do, personally. Big fan.” I let the grin sharpen by a degree, let it get a little dangerous at the edges. “Though I’ll confess, I can be persuaded to source protein through a number of channels, if it earns me the right to ask one very particular question.”
Her eyebrow arches.
She attempts to cross her arms, and the gear mostly defeats the gesture, leaving her with something that reads more like a disgruntled penguin, which she would hate to know and which I am keeping forever.
“What question?”
I let the moment stretch.
I am, above most other things, a man who understands timing.
“Pierced,” I say. “Yes or no.”
She stares at me.
For a full, magnificent ten seconds, she just stares, brow creased, genuinely lost, and I get to watch in real time as the question travels the distance as it lands; comprehension breaks across her face like a slow sunrise.
And right behind the comprehension comes the thing she is too late to lock down.
A flash of pure, undiluted mischief, lighting those storm-grey eyes from somewhere deep, there and bright and unmistakable before she manages to wrestle her expression back to neutral.
“Observant Motherfucker,” she says.
I fucking knew it. I am a genius, and a martyr, and the universe is real.
“Pinky.” I clasp a hand over my chest, mortally wounded, delighted, gone. “You are going to have me on my knees. Begging. Today. This is what you’ve done.” I am a shameless creature, and I have made peace with it. “I hope you understand that.”
It is, statistically, the kind of line that turns a woman off, far too fast, an Alpha showing every card in his hand. I brace for the eye-roll, the cold front, or the polite little wall.
Instead, she fights a smirk.
I watch her lose the fight. The corner of her mouth wins, tugging upward against her clear and stated wishes, and she tilts her head and looks up at me through those damp pink strands, and she says, with a slow, lazy, devastating evenness:
“I happen to like a man who isn’t afraid to get on his knees.”
The ice does not literally open and take me.
It only feels that way.
I tell myself I hallucinated it. I tell myself my pickled, piercing-obsessed brain manufactured the line and fed it to me as a kindness. But she is still looking at me, and there is a taunt fighting to live at the edge of her mouth, and her eyes have that bright, wicked spark turned all the way up.
I know, with a certainty that arrives low and hot and absolute, that Iris O’Shea was not joking.
Not even slightly.
She said exactly what she meant, and she is watching me cope with it.
Oh, I am in a staggering amount of trouble.
A whistle splits the rink in half.
“SANTORI.” Coach Declan’s voice rides the blast straight to me, and there is gravel in it now, the patience worn through. “Unless you are flirting with our goalie in some desperate bid to mine her for sympathy points after that loss, I strongly suggest you bring your bulk over here.”
And I should let it go.
Skate over. Take the laps. Be a professional, briefly, as a treat for everyone.
I do not do that.
I turn, and I grin at him across the ice, and I say it loud enough for the cheap seats.
“Oh, I was definitely flirting, Coach.” A beat, while I enjoy myself far too much. “And I genuinely don’t care what the other sector has to say about it. O’Shea’s on our team.”
“WHAT?”
The word goes off in roughly nine throats at once, a ragged, shocked chord, and it is not only the men.
Coach Declan himself stalls.
Whatever instruction was loaded behind his teeth visibly loses its footing, and for one rare unguarded second, the most controlled man in the building just looks at me, recalibrating.
Rémi’s eyebrow climbs.
He turns his head, slow and deliberate, and aims the question of it at Jude instead of me, because Rémi has always understood that I am a lost cause and Jude is the better address for sense.
And Jude.
Jude is giving me a look I have been on the receiving end of for the better part of two decades, the one that says he does not understand one single thing I am currently doing, that I am behaving like a lovesick fool in front of the worst possible audience, and that I had better have a reason.
So I give him the other look.
The only one that matters.
It is a look we built somewhere around the fifth grade and have never once had to explain to each other, a whole sealed language compressed into a single steady meeting of the eyes, and it says, plainly, with no room left for debate: trust me.
He holds it. Long, hard, and searching, the captain in him running every angle while the friend in him decides whether the friendship is worth the gamble. The rink hangs there in the balance with him, every man waiting, the cold pressing in close.
Then Jude lifts his chin.
That small, certain, authoritative tilt of his that I have watched settle a hundred arguments before they were finished being arguments.
“O’Shea will be on our sector team,” he says, and his voice does not invite a response. “No discussion.”
And that is the gavel coming down.
Nobody says a word. There is no appeal to make, because the captain has spoken, and the captain does not waste breath on things he intends to lose.
The decision registers over the whole rink and sets, hard and final, like water turning to ice.
I look back at her.
Iris is not even trying to hide it now.
The shock is written plain across her flushed, sweat-damp face, her lips parted, her storm-grey eyes finding mine and holding, asking a hundred questions she has too much pride to say aloud.
The swagger has slipped clean off her.
For one unguarded breath, she is just a girl who crossed an ocean alone and got told, on her first brutal day, that she has a team.
I smile at her.
A real one. Not the showroom model.
“Welcome to the team, Pinky.” I let it land, and then I let the grin tip back toward trouble, because I am still me. “Now go shower up for our date.”