Chapter 5
Cold Water
~IRIS~
The girls’ locker room at North Star Elite has the specific, museum-quiet stillness of a place nobody uses.
It is enormous, which is the joke of it. Three full walls of cherrywood stalls, brass hooks polished to a shine, a bench that runs the length of the room like a church pew.
Built for a roster of women who do not exist here, maintained on a budget for a ghost, and currently occupied by exactly one damp, unraveling Omega who is, against every plan she made on the plane, beginning to lose it.
The air in here is its own quiet confession of disuse.
Cedar block and floor wax laid on thick by a cleaning crew with nothing to clean, the faint chlorine sweetness of pipes that rarely run, a powdery floral ghost baked into the grout from some long-discontinued soap.
No sweat. No tape. No leather gone feral. None of the honest, living reek that means a room gets bled in.
It smells, frankly, like a hotel suite nobody books…
Versus me having spent my whole life in changerooms that smell like polite war, so the daintiness of it sits wrong against my skin, one more way this kingdom has found to remind me I am a guest and not a resident.
I peel the jersey up over my head, and the smell of myself comes with it.
An hour of game rounds soaked clean through the fabric.
Frosted strawberry gone sharp and salt-edged at the seams. The cold-metal ghost of ice in the weave.
Sweat, plain and honest, the kind that means I worked.
Under all of it, faint and infuriating, a top note that does not belong to me at all, blood orange and burnt sugar, pressed into my collar from the exact moment Matteo Santori skidded to a stop one inch off my body and leaned down to scold me about a banana.
I drop the jersey on the bench like it personally betrayed me.
Because here is the situation, laid out flat for inspection.
Matteo Santori asked me to lunch.
Matteo Santori then skated to the middle of a rink full of Alphas who would happily watch me fail, and he told all of them, and his coach, that I was on their team.
He spent something on me. In public. With witnesses.
And my body, my stupid, traitorous, scent-drunk body, has decided that this is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to it, and it would like to do something about that, now.
I trip getting my leg out of my hockey pants.
One skate-sock foot tangling in the shell, a graceless little hop across the cherrywood before I catch the bench and swear at the room.
The room, like the mops before it, declines to comment.
Get a grip, O’Shea.
I sit down hard on the pew and make myself breathe. In for four. Hold. Out for eight. The drill Declan taught me at seventeen for the long bad minutes before a faceoff, when a young goalie’s heart wants to climb out through her ribs and sprint for the exit.
His voice still lives inside the count, low, even and Irish, and I refuse, on principle, to think about the fact that I am using the breathing exercise of one man to talk myself down off a cliff built entirely by another.
The irony is not lost on me.
Five years apart and the man still has his hooks in the basic operating instructions of my nervous system.
Filed. Closed museum.
Move on…
The trouble is that the breathing leaves room to think, and thinking is where this falls apart.
Because I do not actually know what Matteo wants, and the not-knowing has teeth.
Men do not look at me the way he looked at me. That is not self-pity, it is fieldwork. I have been the only Omega in every locker room I have ever stood in. The pink-haired novelty, the girl who is one of the lads right up until the precise second she is not.
I have been a mascot. I have been a punchline. I have, on memorable occasion, been a bet.
What I have never been, not once, not for anyone, is the thing a man crosses a room for.
So the cynic in me, the one who has kept me upright through every cold rink in Yorkshire, files the obvious theory. This is a setup. A prank with a long fuse. Be nice to the goalie, make her soft, make her hope, and harvest the wreck of her face when the joke finally lands.
It would not even be original. I have seen that play run before.
And yet…
He hid me in a closet when there was no audience to perform the kindness for.
He stood in a live shooting lane and let his own teammates think less of him for it.
A con man does not pay upfront, in private, with no camera running.
Stop it. You met him this morning.
It does not help that my track record in the wanting department is a small, mortifying museum with exactly one exhibit, and the exhibit is a man I will not name even inside the privacy of my own skull.
The biggest, stupidest, most carefully buried crush of my life. Six foot four of disciplined Irish granite who built me into a goalie and then walked out of my life without so much as a note, and who is now, as of this morning, my coach again, breathing the same overpriced air.
We are not going to examine that exhibit today.
The museum has been closed for five years and the locks are excellent.
I drag both hands down my face and arrive at the only clear-headed conclusion available to me.
I need a cold shower. Immediately. Possibly two.
The showers run down the far wall behind a row of curtains the color of a swimming pool, and the water, when I crank it, comes out arctic.
That is the entire point.
I step under it before it has any chance to warm and let the cold hit me like a check into the boards, a full-body shock that punches the air clean out of my lungs and drags a hiss through my teeth.
Water sluices the sweat off me, the salt, the ghost of citrus from my collar, all of it swirling pale toward the drain.
The locker room’s perfume goes thin and watery, bleach and old cherrywood and wet tile, the honest dull smell of a room being rinsed.
I press my forehead to the cold tile and order my pulse to behave.
It does not.
This is the part I have been refusing to look at directly, so I look at it now, since the freezing water has bought me the nerve. The wired feeling under my skin did not come from fear and it did not come from the cold. I know its name.
I have just been hoping that if I did not say it, it would have the decency to leave on its own.
It is want.
Plain, hot, inconvenient want, and it has been building since a crimson hoodie filled a doorway this morning, and it spiked, hard, every single time one of those three men drifted into my air on the ice.
Maybe it is the adrenaline.
That is the kind story, and I try it on for size. An hour of proving every smirking Alpha in that building wrong, an hour of standing on my head between two pipes and watching their faces curdle when nothing got past me, that is a drug, and a drug leaves a body humming.
Triumph and arousal have always rented rooms suspiciously close together.
Perhaps that is all this is.
My body, listening to none of it, presses my thighs together.
The ache that answers is low and insistent and entirely unimpressed with my reasoning, and pressing my thighs together does not tame it, it does the opposite, it strikes a match.
I bite down on my lip and stand there in the freezing spray, caught between the woman who has a date to get to and the woman who has a very specific problem and a curtain for privacy.
Touching yourself in a public shower is not, technically, a crime.
I have always been good at building a case. A quick, quiet thing. Two minutes. The room is empty, has been empty, will stay empty, because no woman has played anything in this department in years and the boys would not dare. Surely a small private mercy is not a moral catastrophe.
I huff out a breath, and I lose the argument, and my hand slides down between my thighs.
And the second it does, the cold water and the tile all blur out, because my mind does not reach for a fantasy so much as it simply hands me one, fully built, no assembly required.
Matteo.
I can smell him, too. Sweat and citrus rind and the deep churned-ice sharpness I had not noticed until he was right up on me, close enough that I could count the gold flecks in his irises. It hits me with a surge, the memory, so vivid it makes me lightheaded.
My hand works rough and desperate, nails scoring my own skin, and I chase the feeling like it is a game I can win.
“You’re going to have me on my knees,” he says, but not on a hockey rink.
It’s somewhere undefined, a liminal hallway of sweat and steam and whatever molecules linger in the air between two people when neither is backing down.
“Begging.” His voice goes low, velvet and threat all at once, and the noise shivers up my spine and gets buried somewhere behind my teeth, a coin dropped in a well.
He pushes me, in the replay—the way he did in the hall, but this time there is a wall at my back and his hand is braced next to my head, not caging but inviting.
His mouth finds the line of my neck, not soft, not gentle, teeth grazing the skin in a way that says hunger and only hunger. The hood is up, shadowing his face, but I know those eyes are on me, always.
Just before he bites down, he says my name.
It is a neat trick of the mind, how nothing about the scenario is real and still my hips jerk, a full-body spasm I can’t contain, and my own voice starts to rise, shredded and higher than I ever let it get.
I cover my mouth with one hand and keep going, because the fantasy is relentless, it always has been, and if I am going to lose I want to lose all the way.
In the fantasy, he is the one to say it first.
“I want you. Not a show on the ice…for the crowd...or mere logstics. I simply want you.”
And that is what does it, the honesty of it, the brutal lack of performance.