Chapter 5 #2
I clutch at the tile and the pulse hits in waves, unspeakably good and also so humiliating that I want to dissolve through the drain.
I make a noise, a real out-loud noise, which is the first rule-breaker, and the sound of it—raw, too loud, and dare to admit is mine—makes the orgasm snap and then keep cresting, like some tide I cannot call back.
My body craves for this to be reality…no matter how desperate it seems.
It is over, after, in a ragged heartbeat, and I am left with my cheek on freezing tile and my entire skeleton gone soft.
Above the sound of the shower, I can just make out the thin, disbelieving laugh I let out.
The kind of laugh you give a car crash you walked away from.
“Jesus Fucking Christ, O’Shea. Get a grip.”
I rinse my hand under the water, bracing myself for the sting of cold, and breathe in slow, then out. It is not only my body that is shaking; my head is a snowglobe, all the pieces of me knocked out of their neat rows.
Blockers, right.
I am going to need blockers that work on my own goddamn brain, not just eighty-mile-per-hour slapshots.
I exhale, shaky, forehead still to the tile, and mutter the verdict to the drain.
The locker room door opens.
My eyes snap wide.
I have the shower off before I have finished registering the sound, palm slapping the knob, the arctic stream cutting to a drip, and then I am standing dead still behind a pool-blue curtain, dripping, naked, my own release still slick on my fingers, listening to male voices pour into a room that is supposed to be the one place in this building they cannot follow me.
“Bruh, she should still be in here.”
“Her stuff’s not on the benches.” A second voice, lazier. “She probably left already.”
“Still smells like her, though.” A third, and this one drops lower, into something that turns my stomach over. “Fuck. Say what you want, hate her guts all you like, you can’t exactly argue she doesn’t smell good.”
Every muscle I own goes to wire.
Here is the precise, humiliating math of my situation. I am behind a curtain that ends a generous foot above the floor. My gear is in the auxiliary closet, not on these benches, which is the only reason they have not yet clocked that the room is occupied.
My clothes, my towel, my dignity, all of it is a full naked dash away. And there are at least three of them, in the doorway of the girls’ locker room, where they have absolutely no business being, narrating my scent to one another like I am a wine they are deciding whether to send back.
If that curtain gets pulled, they find me.
Bare, wet, and freshly wrecked by my own hand, and there is no version of that frame that does not become the only thing anyone at North Star ever says about me again.
I do not breathe.
I press my spine to the cold wet tile and I think, with a flat and furious clarity, that I will not give them a sound, I will not give them a flinch, I will stand here and be a wall, the same wall I was on the ice, and if they pull the curtain I will deal with it the way I deal with a breakaway, on instinct and with both gloves up.
The footsteps come closer.
“Now why,” says a fourth voice, easy and unhurried and arriving from the doorway, “are you three in here?”
The relief that floods me is so total it nearly takes my knees.
I am instantly, separately furious at myself for it, because I have known the owner of that voice for one single day.
Matteo.
“Last I checked,” he goes on, conversational, a man with all the time in the world, “Coach sent exactly one person to confirm the hot water was running on the girls’ side.
Me. On account of the fact that we have not had a girl playing anything in this changeroom in roughly a decade, so nobody actually knows if the plumbing works. ”
A scuffle of excuses. Three men talking over one another, the particular stammer of boys caught with a hand in something.
“We heard the shower running,” one of them manages.
“Yeah.” Matteo’s voice does not change at all, and somehow that is the most dangerous thing about it. “Because I was checking whether it ran. That tends to involve turning it on. Why else would I be standing here in my bare feet?”
A pause.
I can hear the doubt in it.
“We don’t buy it,” another says.
Matteo chuckles, low, and then there are feet. His feet, bare on the wet tile, crossing the room, and they come to a stop directly in front of my curtain, close enough that I can see the shape of them through the gap at the bottom, and my heart climbs straight into my throat and sits there.
The curtain twitches.
It does not fly open. It moves a careful few inches, just enough for one person on the outside and one person on the inside.
Matteo’s body fills the gap so completely that there is no angle, none, that any man behind him could use to see past. He has put himself in the breach again.
The mop closet, the shooting lane, and now this.
The man has a pattern, and the pattern is standing between me and the room.
His eyes find mine.
And they hold.
Hazel gone dark and stunned at the edges, dropping down the length of me, slow, helpless, taking in the wet hair plastered to my throat, the bare shoulders, the water still beading and sliding down my skin, before they climb back to my face like the return trip physically cost him something.
Five seconds, easily.
Five long seconds of nothing but his stare and my pulse and the fat slow drip of the showerhead, and the air behind that curtain stops being air at all and becomes something thicker, something I have to consciously decide to breathe.
His scent has changed.
That is the detail that undoes me.
In the closet this morning it was bright and showy, a citrus performance, but here, now, with three feet of curtain and the shape of my naked body between him and his own composure, it has gone low and dark and unguarded.
Blood orange burnt down to its rind. The cinnamon turned to something closer to smoke.
It pours into the cramped wet stall and lays itself over the bleach and the cold tile until the entire room smells like him, like an Alpha who is holding very, very still on purpose, and my own body answers it with a fresh, humiliating ache that the cold water did absolutely nothing to earn.
Then, without breaking the look, he reaches past me.
His arm crosses my body, near enough that the heat of it raises every fine hair on my skin, and his hand closes over the knob and turns it. Water crashes back to life, ice cold, hammering the tile beside us, loud enough to fill the room.
“See?” he says, over his shoulder, and his voice is bright and bored and pitched for them while his eyes stay locked, locked, on me.
“On. Cold as the grave. Which would explain why our new goalie isn’t in here, gentlemen, because who in their right mind takes a freezing shower?
Women like it scalding. Boiling. Hot enough to strip paint. ”
He turns the water off.
The room rings with the sudden quiet.
And still he does not look away from me, and I can see, plainly, what it is costing him to keep up the performance; the small muscle working in his jaw, the effort stitched into the corner of his eye.
He draws the curtain closed.
Gentle. Final.
“So,” he says to the room, and the warmth drops clean out of it, “are the three of you leaving on your own, or would you rather Coach O’Rourke find you looting the girls’ changeroom, trying to corner the Omega who just shut out every shot you took at her?”
That works with remarkable speed.
“Fine.” A chorus of grumbling, the wounded retreat of men who have done the math and disliked the answer. “We’re going. And don’t say a word to Coach. We already got humiliated once today. We do not need five a.m. runs on top of it.”
Footsteps. The door.
The heavy, blessed click of it shutting.
And still I do not move.
I stand behind the curtain, dripping and silent, and I count out a full minute against the hammer of my own pulse, because I have learned the hard way that a quiet room is not always an empty one.
Then, from the other side of the pool-blue curtain, mild as anything:
“So. Are you planning to finish your shower, or have you decided to simply live in there now? Set up a forwarding address. Receive your mail.”
Heat floods up my neck and into my face, and I am savagely glad the curtain hides it.
“I got distracted,” I mutter.
“Distracted.” He turns the word over like he is checking it for counterfeit.
“By what, precisely? It is an empty room with a tile wall. Riveting company, granted, but I struggle to see the hook.” A beat, and then, far too pleased with himself: “And I would strongly advise you against lying to me and claiming you were running it cold. I happen to be a leading authority on the subject. Women want their showers hot enough to file a formal complaint about. Hot enough to leave a building structurally compromised.”
“You are a leading authority,” I say, “on women’s shower preferences.”
“Decorated. There are medals.”
“Mm. I’ll alert the committee that their data set is compromised, because I run mine cold.”
“You do not.” Genuine offense, now, like I have insulted his mother. “Nobody runs it cold. That is not a preference, Pinky, that is a cry for help.”
I catch my lip between my teeth to kill the smile, because the smile is not on my side here.
There is a fork in the road here, and I can feel both branches of it.
There is the safe one, the one where I tell him to wait outside, get dressed in private, walk to lunch like a sane professional, keep the closed museum closed. And there is the other one.
The water has worn something down in me.
The cold, the adrenaline, the hour of being a wall, the release that took the edge off nothing at all and somehow honed it. My guard, the one I keep welded into place around every Alpha alive, has slipped its bolts, and underneath it is the version of me that does not wait to be offered things.
The version that takes.
I swallow the lump in my throat, and I choose the other branch.
“You could always come and check the temperature yourself.”
The silence that follows is so complete I can hear the showerhead drip.
“Pinky.” When his voice comes back it has lost every ounce of its lazy polish; low, rough, and warning. “Don’t start something we can’t finish.”
“And who,” I say, and I am astonished at how even it comes out, how much it sounds like a woman holding a winning hand, “ever said anything about not finishing?”
Another silence. Longer. Heavier.
The kind that has a decision being made inside it.
Then the curtain moves.
He has lost the crimson hoodie somewhere, and the shirt under it, because when the pool-blue fabric slides back he is bare to the waist, and the sight of him rearranges my breathing entirely.
Lean and cut and warm-skinned, a dark spill of ink running down one side of his ribs that I file instantly to be examined later, the small pale scar at his collarbone I clocked in the closet now part of a much larger and more interesting picture.
His eyes come up the length of me and lock on mine, and the scent of him pours into the small wet space and erases the bleach and the cold tile and the entire rest of the world.
“Iris.”
My name, this time. Not the nickname. He gives it to me deliberately, sets it down between us like a marker on a table, and I understand the message threaded through it perfectly.
This is not the bait.
I am not joking.
Be certain.
And the discovery that lands in my chest, warm and absolute, is that I am.
“Matteo,” I answer.
I say it slowly.
I let it roll, give it the full length, every syllable, and I watch what it does to him. Watch his jaw go tight.
Watch his teeth catch his own bottom lip and bite down on it, hard, the way a man bites down on a sound he is not ready to make yet.
Two steps and he is inside the curtain with me, and the pool-blue fabric falls shut at his back, and the tiled stall shrinks to the exact dimensions of the two of us and the inch of charged air I am no longer sure how to breathe.
He does not crowd me against the wall.
That is the thing I notice, even now, even with my pulse going like a slapshot. For all the bulk of him, all the bare warm breadth filling the stall, he leaves the choice in my hands, plants himself close enough to feel and not one degree closer, and waits.
His scent has spiked past anything the morning hinted at.
There is no filing it under adrenaline now, no kind story left to tell.
Blood orange gone to dark rind, burnt sugar gone to woodsmoke, and beneath both the deep Alpha base of him climbing and climbing until the air has actual weight to it, until breathing him in feels less like a choice and more like a tide coming in over my head.
His hand lifts. His fingers settle along the line of my jaw and still my chin, tilting my face up to meet his, and when he speaks the words land as a rough warm whisper directly against my mouth.
“If I start this,” he says, “I have no intention of stopping. So you had best be a very good girl for me, and stay quiet enough that the entire team doesn’t learn precisely what you sound like.”
The good girl should make me bristle.
By every rule I have ever lived by, it should.
Instead it lands somewhere low and molten and turns over, slow, and the part of me that surfaces to meet it is not the wall and not the prickly one with both gloves up.
It is the other one.
The one who only ever gets out when my guard is on the floor.
The one who does not wait to be given things, who sets the terms, who takes a dare and lifts it clean off the table.
“So what I’m hearing,” I murmur, deliberately tipping my face deeper into his hand instead of away from it, watching his pupils blow wide at the surrender that is not a surrender at all, “is that I’m permitted to be just a little bit loud.”
He groans, low, the sound dragged up out of somewhere deep in his chest, and his fingers tighten a fraction against my jaw.
“If a little bit loud is the toll for getting my mouth on those perky little piercings and feeling you gasp for more,” he breathes, “then yes. Fuck. Be as loud as you dare, Pinky.”
A laugh slips out of me, bright and wicked and wholly unrepentant.
“Challenge accept—”
He seals his mouth over mine before I can land the word.
And the kiss takes the rest of the sentence.
A heartbeat after that it takes the rest of my sense, and as it does, one last coherent thought drifts loose through the wreckage of my better judgment, almost fond, almost amused at myself.
And yet here I stand.
Soaking wet, walls down, every bolt of my guard sprung loose on the tile, in a locker room built for women who do not exist, about to fuck Matteo Santori.
This is, without contest, the most reckless thing I have ever done.