Chapter 5
Tallulah POV
My head pounded in time with the thrum of the chiller units.
After eight hours of senior-level kinetic modeling lectures, a clinical neuro-trauma exam, and sixty-four pages of freshman biomechanics lab reports graded in the library basement, my vision felt grainy, like someone had rubbed fine slate dust across my corneas.
I clutched my heavy leather-bound research binder against my ribs, using the thick cardboard covers as a shield against the subterranean draft.
The heavy steel fire door to the Neuromuscular Isolation Lab was unlatched, resting half an inch open.
I slowed my pace on the rubber runner, my boots making no sound on the wet matting. I had reached for the handle when a voice cut through the gap—rough, stripped of all arrogance, cracking at the register.
"I told you he gets the transfer on the fifteenth, Arthur."
I stopped. The breath caught behind my breastbone.
Through the vertical slit between the door and the steel frame, Coast Stuart was sitting on the edge of the black vinyl treatment table.
He had stripped off his team jacket and compression shirt.
An elastic neoprene wrap bound a heavy gel ice pack tight against the left side of his ribcage, where a massive, mottled purple hematoma spread across his intercostals.
His right leg was propped on a wooden balance block, the carbon-fiber boot unbuckled on the floor beside him.
He was holding his phone flat against his ear with a taped hand, his head bowed so low his forehead rested in his other palm.
"Julian doesn't need to know where the money comes from," Coast rasped into the receiver.
His voice wasn't the commanding growl he used in the rink; it was hollow, scraped raw, vibrating with a strain that sounded like tearing metal.
"He needs thirty-six hours of aquatic therapy a week, and he needs the accessible van.
The clinic in Rochester isn't cutting his sessions. I'll cover the six thousand."
A harsh, tinny voice barked through the phone's speaker—loud enough to bleed through the crack in the door, bitter and mocking.
"Don't threaten me with the draft," Coast whispered.
His back arched, the heavy slabs of muscle along his spine locking into rigid, trembling ridges.
"Boston knows what they bought. Don't call Julian again.
You call him, and I swear to God I will drive to Montreal and put you through a wall. You talk to me."
He hung up without waiting for a reply.
Coast didn't move. He dropped the phone onto the vinyl mat, both hands coming up to clutch his dark hair.
His elbows rested on his knees, his broad chest rising and falling in violent, uneven hitches.
For five seconds, the undisputed captain of Garrison hockey sat alone in the dim, yellow fluorescent light, his head bowed, looking like a man who had been dragged through five miles of barbed wire and didn't have the strength to stand back up.
My fingers tightened around the edges of my binder until the cardboard creased.
A sharp, unfamiliar ache constricted the center of my chest, squeezing tight around my trachea.
Contempt was safe. Contempt was a clean, clinical calculation that kept twenty thousand dollars of tuition separate from my pride.
Seeing him broken like this was dangerous.
I shifted my weight to back up—to give him the illusion of privacy—but the wet rubber sole of my right boot caught the salt crust on the concrete with a sharp, squeaking scrape.
Inside the room, Coast's head snapped up.
The change was instantaneous. In the time it took my heart to register two rapid, panicked beats, the hollow exhaustion vanished from his face.
His jaw slammed shut, the masseter muscle bulging against his stubble.
His shoulders went back, squaring into that broad, impenetrable wall of athletic hostility, his pale green eyes locking onto the gap in the door with lethal focus.
"Come in or get out, Barry," he growled.
* * *
I pushed the door open, the steel hinges groaning in the quiet basement.
The air in the room was suffocatingly cold. The secondary baseboard radiator was clicking and hissing, but it was losing the battle against the Adirondack frost outside. A light vapor rose from our mouths every time we exhaled.
Coast was already reaching for a dark gray fleece long-sleeve, hauling it roughly over his head.
He winced as his left arm cleared the collar, his teeth clicking together on a sharp intake of air as the fabric dragged across his bruised ribs, but he didn't slow down.
By the time he pulled the hem down over his waistband, his expression was carved from Adirondack granite.
"Session five," I said. My voice sounded too loud in the cramped box of a room, too sterile. "Fifty hours remaining. Dynamic balance platform and eccentric dorsiflexion."
I set my binder on the stainless rolling cart, pulling out the foil electrode packets with hands that felt suddenly stiff. I didn't look at his phone, which lay face-down on the treatment table between us.
Coast didn't move to the balance platform. He leaned back against the edge of the high table, crossing his arms over his chest, his boots planted wide. His knuckles were raw, the scabs from Saturday's scrimmage torn open again.
"You're late," he said, his voice flat and abrasive.
"I had an exam," I replied, booting the diagnostic software on the laptop. "And you're not wrapped properly. That ice pack is compressing your serratus anterior, not your intercostals. You're numbing the wrong nerve cluster."
"I don't need an anatomy lecture from you."
"You need someone to tell you the truth, because clearly Coach Hayes is too worried about his win record to notice you're skating with cracked ribs." I turned from the laptop, holding a pair of medical shears and a roll of heavy adhesive foam. "Take the shirt off."
Coast let out a short, harsh breath through his nose. His eyes narrowed, tracking me as I walked toward the table. "You're getting bold, Barry. What happened to keeping your distance?"
"I am trying to keep you from puncturing a lung before Friday's game," I said, stopping three feet from his knees. "Take it off, Coast."
He didn't move. He stared down at me, his gaze dropping to my lips, then to the rapid pulse fluttering at the base of my throat, before returning to my eyes. The hostility rolling off him was an invisible furnace, pushing against my chest.
"Who was on the phone?" I asked quietly.
The silence that followed was absolute. The radiator hissed; the chiller pipes hummed upstairs; my own pulse pounded in my ears like a muffled hammer.
Coast's jaw clenched until the skin over his jawbone went white. "None of your business."
"Six thousand dollars a month for a clinic in Rochester isn't minor," I said, keeping my tone level, refusing to let the tremor in my fingers show. "And Julian doesn't sound like an agent."
A dark, dangerous fire flared in his eyes. He unfolded his arms, pushing himself off the table. He didn't limp; he drove his weight forward, closing the distance between us until the toes of his heavy training shoes were touching the tips of my boots.
"You think because you're holding a clipboard, you have a right to dig into my life?" he whispered. The gravel in his voice was thick with venom. "You think you know what happens to my family because you listened at a door?"
"I know what it looks like when someone is drowning," I said, holding his glare, my chin coming up to meet his height. "My mother spent two years taking phone calls like that before the bank took our house. I know the tone of a collector who thinks he owns you."
"Arthur Cross doesn't own me," Coast rasped, his face inches from mine, his breath hot against my forehead. "And neither do you."
"I never said I did."
"Then shut your mouth and stick to the protocol," he snapped, his voice vibrating with suppressed violence. "You want your tuition waiver? Take your measurements, log your hours, and leave the rest of it alone. You don't know anything about Julian. You don't know what I owe him."
"You don't owe anyone your life, Coast."
* * *
The words struck a nerve that detonated his control.
Coast moved so fast my eyes barely tracked the shift in mass. His hand shot out, catching the rolling stool and shoving it hard across the room. The metal legs slammed into the stainless-steel plunge tank with a concussive clang that rang through the concrete walls like an explosion.
Before the sound could fade, he stepped forward, crowding me back three paces until the small of my spine hit the rigid edge of the diagnostic console.
He didn't stop. He planted his palms flat against the stainless steel on either side of my hips, trapping me in the narrow space between his massive arms.
He bent down, bringing his face level with mine.
The scent of cold cedar shavings, wintergreen liniment, and the sharp, metallic tang of his sweat slammed into my senses, thick and intoxicating.
His chest, dense and heavy beneath the gray fleece, was barely an inch from the front of my hoodie.
Every time he drew air, the fabric of his shirt brushed against mine.
"Don't ever say that name again," he whispered.
His voice was a low, ragged rasp that seemed to bypass my ears and rattle straight against the bones of my sternum. His eyes were dilated, the green irises reduced to a thin, dangerous rim around wide black pupils.
My breath locked in my throat. My hands were flat against the cold steel counter behind me, my fingernails scraping the metal as my autonomic system fired in all directions.
The air in my lungs was hot, thin, insufficient.
My carotid artery was hammering so hard against the side of my neck that I could see the pulse reflected in the dark focus of his stare.
"You think you're safe because we're in a university basement, Barry?" he murmured, leaning another fraction of an inch closer.
His lips were bare, bruised at the left corner, parted just enough that his warm, humid breath washed over my mouth with every word.
"You think that little badge on your lanyard protects you from the mess I am?" he rasped. "I am an enforcer. I get paid to hit people until they don't get back up. That’s all I am to Hayes, that’s all I am to Boston, and that’s all I’ve ever been to my old man."
"That's a lie," I whispered, the words trembling against his lips.
I couldn't pull back. The steel console was biting into my lower back, but even if the space behind me had been wide open, my boots were glued to the floor.
The physical reality of him—the sheer size, the suffocating heat, the raw, unprotected agony bleeding through his arrogant mask—paralyzed every survival instinct I owned.
"Coast," I breathed.
His gaze dropped to my mouth.
The hostility between us didn't vanish; it shifted, twisting into something heavy, dark, and suffocating.
The distance between our lips had shrunk to less than two inches.
I could see the tiny gold flecks in his green eyes, the tension pulling the skin tight over his cheekbones, the faint tremor in his hands where they gripped the edge of the steel table.
He wanted to kiss me. The realization hit my bloodstream like an injection of cold salt water, making my extremities tingle and my ribs ache with a sudden, sharp ache. He wanted to crush his mouth against mine just to stop the words coming out of me.
And I wanted him to do it.
My chest rose in a shallow, ragged hitch, my sweater brushing the rough fleece over his ribs. Coast’s jaw jumped. His eyes flicked back to mine, dark and ruined, a low groan catching in the back of his throat.
"You need to step back, Barry," he rasped, his voice breaking on my name. He didn't move an inch. "Step back, or I swear to God I'm not going to remember why I'm supposed to leave you alone."
"Then don't," I whispered, my voice barely audible over the hum of the chiller pipes.
Neither of us moved. We stood locked together in the cold, fluorescent glare of the basement, our breaths mingling in the freezing air, poised on the razor's edge of a line that once crossed, could never be drawn again.