Chapter 37
TWO YEARS LATER
ZANE
There are eight thousand people on their feet as number nineteen carries the puck through the neutral zone.
I’m in the stands with my hood pulled up, trying not to be recognized.
It’s harder now. My face has been on enough sports sites that people stop me in airports sometimes. But tonight, no one’s looking at me. They’re looking at her.
Leonora Shaw.
Two years since the championship. Two years since the helmet came off. Two years since she walked into a PWHL tryout and earned a spot.
Now she’s here. Starting left wing. Her name on the back of her jersey. Her face on the program.
She’s not hiding anymore.
The puck drops.
She’s everywhere. Not the fastest player on the ice - she never was - but the smartest. The way she reads the play. The way she waits, one heartbeat longer than anyone else, and then slips the puck through a seam that shouldn’t exist. I can see how much her teammates trust her.
I’ve watched her play a hundred times. Through a helmet cage when she was someone else. On a laptop screen in hotel rooms during road games.
This is different.
Midway through the second period, the puck comes to her along the boards. Two defenders close in. A year ago, they would have crushed her. Now they hesitate.
She doesn’t.
She cuts inside, pulls the puck across her body, and snaps a shot low and hard. The goalie doesn’t even see it.
She skates past the bench, taps her stick against the boards, and then glances up at the stands.
At me.
I raise my hand. Just a little. Just enough.
She grins. I can see it even from here.
Then the puck drops again and she’s gone.
After the game, I wait in the parking lot by my rental car. Not at the player entrance - there’s way too many fans.
Finally, she comes outside. She’s still in her gear, hair wet from the shower. Her bag is slung over her shoulder. She grins when she sees me.
“You came,” she says.
“Yeah… You think I’d miss this?”
“You drove?? You have a game tomorrow.”
“I got traded. New team.” I shrug. “And… the new team is only two hours from here.”
“That’s very close.” She leans into me, her face against my chest.
“You were incredible tonight,” I say.
“I know.”
I laugh. “Modest.”
“Learned from the best.”
I tip her chin up and look at her face. The girl who showed up to an open tryout with a skullcap and lying through her teeth. The woman who just scored the game-winning goal in a professional hockey game.
I kiss her. Soft at first, then harder. The kind of kiss that says everything we haven’t said in two years of phone calls and stolen weekends and her never quite believing she deserved this.
When we break apart, she’s smiling.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She shakes her head. “Just - I used to watch you from the stands. Before everything. You were just this player. This guy I didn’t know.”
“And now?”
She touches my face. Traces the line of my jaw.
“Now you’re here watching me.”
I grin. “Best view in the house.”
She kisses me again.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For being there. For-” She gestures vaguely, encompassing everything.
I touch her face. “You don’t thank someone for watching you become exactly what you were supposed to be.”
I think about the first time I saw her - in the stands, shouting at a game, her voice cutting through the noise like she already knew what was going to happen before any of us did.
She was right.
She always was.
“Come on,” she says. “I’ll introduce you to my team. Just - maybe don’t mention the part where you used to think I was a guy.”
“Can I mention the part where I was obsessed with you anyway?”
“Shut up, Blake.”
“Never.”
I take her hand and we walk towards the arena door together.
LEONORA
The apartment is small - the kind of place a professional just starting out can afford in a city that doesn’t make anything cheap. But it’s mine. My gear in the corner. My medals on the shelf.
Zane stands in the middle of the living room, turning in a slow circle, taking it in the same way he took in my childhood bedroom two years ago.
“This is nice,” he says.
I lean against the doorframe, watching him.
He crosses the room, stops in front of me, and takes my face in his hands.
I kiss him.
“I missed you,” I say against his mouth. “I’m tired of sharing you with the NHL.”
He pulls back, something changing in his expression. “What are you saying?”
I take a breath. “I want to wake up and know you’re here. I want to fight about whose turn it is to do the dishes. I want to watch you play on TV from our couch.”
“Are you asking me to move in with you, Shaw?”
“I’m telling you that you’re an idiot if you think I’m going to keep doing long-distance when you’re two hours away.”
He grins. That reckless, impossible grin.
“You’re very bossy.”
“You like it.”
“I love it.”
He picks me up - my legs wrapping around his waist, his hands under my thighs - and carries me toward the bedroom.
“The tour,” I say.
“What?”
“You didn’t get the tour.”
“I’ve seen the living room.” He kicks the bedroom door open. “I’ll see the rest later.”
He lays me down on the bed and for a moment he just looks at me. The way he looked at me in his apartment that first night. The way he looked at me on the ice when he didn’t know who I was.
“You’re staring,” I whisper.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Leonora Shaw. And I’m not letting you go.”
I pull him down, roll us over, the same way I did in my childhood bedroom two years ago. His hands find my hips. His breath catches.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
“I’m not going anywhere either.”
Then I kiss him, and the world falls away.