Chapter 10
ten
Luke
I pushed through the locker room door and was met by the rip of tape and equipment thudding into open stalls. Two losses sitting on our chests for two weeks. Tonight we finally got to breathe.
Music was already going before I’d finished unstrapping my pads.
Someone had turned it up loud enough that the bass thumped through the stalls.
Roz was halfway through ordering food for the entire room on his phone, shouting options over the noise.
Finn stood on a bench with coconut water running down his face and both arms spread like he was accepting an award no one had given him yet.
He jumped down in front of my stall, still dripping, still grinning.
“Bennett. You were unreal out there. Unreal.”
“You made it easy,” I said. “That backhand was impossible.”
“I know. I’ve been working on it.” He clapped my shoulder hard enough to rock me sideways. “Three years of watching you eat pine and you go out there and steal a game like you’d been starting all season.”
Eli appeared behind him, toweling off his face. Calmer than Finn, but the same warmth was on his face.
“Told you,” he said simply. "Consistency shows up when it matters. Tonight mattered."
Wyatt passed behind me on his way to the showers and clapped the back of my neck once.
“About damn time,” he said, short and gruff, and kept walking.
I sat there a minute and let the celebration wash over me—the noise, the praise, three years of waiting compressed into one night I still hadn't fully processed.
Then I looked across the room and found Bryan.
He was already dressed, sitting quietly at his stall while the celebration moved around him. A bag of ice still strapped loosely against his shoulder. I crossed the room before I could talk myself out of it and sat down beside him.
“Hey. How’s the head?”
“Better.” He didn’t quite meet my eyes. “Ringing’s mostly gone. Shoulder’s the bigger issue, honestly.”
“You good?”
He was quiet for a second, and I recognized something in his expression I hadn't expected—not resentment, exactly, but something adjacent to it, something guarded.
“You kept the game alive,” he said finally. He patted my shoulder once, stiff. “That’s what matters.”
It wasn’t generous. It wasn’t cold either. I let it sit there without pushing, because I understood better than most people in this room what it cost a goalie to watch someone else stand in his crease and succeed.
“Get some rest,” I told him. “You’ll be back.”
He nodded, not fully convinced. I left him to it and headed for the showers before the moment could stretch longer than either of us wanted.
Coach Greaves caught me on the way out of the building. Gear bag over one shoulder, hair still damp from the shower.
“Bennett. Got a second?”
“Yes, sir.”
He studied me for a beat with the particular look he gave players when he was deciding how much to say out loud.
“That was a hell of a game,” he said. “Not just the saves. The composure. You didn’t look like a guy getting thrown in cold. You looked like a guy who’d been preparing for exactly that moment for a long time.”
“I have been,” I admitted. “Every day.”
“I noticed.” He paused and glanced back toward the training room where the medical staff were still working on Bryan’s shoulder. “Bryan’s getting looked at properly tonight. My guess is he’s out a few games, minimum. Could be longer depending on what they find.”
Something tightened in my chest. Hope and guilt tangled together in a knot, too complicated for me to separate.
“We’re going to need you,” Coach said. “Can you continue holding the net like you did tonight?"
"Yes, sir."
He nodded once, satisfied, and clapped me on the shoulder. The contact landed differently from the one he’d given Bryan earlier. Heavier with expectation instead of consolation.
“Get some sleep,” he said. "Tomorrow's brunch and film at 11, but tonight, just soak it in. You earned it.”
I walked out into the parking lot alone. The night air felt cool against my still-damp skin. My phone buzzed with a dozen unread texts. Teammates. My agent. Even my mother. Three words from her:
So proud, honey.
We hadn't talked much since Dad died. Not about hockey, not about anything real. Just birthdays and holidays, the kind of conversations that skated across the surface and never dug in.
But maybe she'd watched tonight. On TV. My first real ice time in the league that actually mattered.
I read it again and had to look away from the screen.
Dad used to tell me I'd get there. "You'll play one day, Lukey. And I'll be in the front row."
He never got to see it.
I read that one twice before I put the phone away. Some wounds took longer to heal than others, but those three words made the night complete in a way the win alone hadn't.
My apartment felt too quiet when I got home, the particular quiet that follows adrenaline once it finally starts draining out of your body.
I ate the takeout Roz had ordered for the team without really tasting it and fell into bed feeling like every muscle I owned had been wrung out and hung up to dry.
Sleep came fast, and it pulled me somewhere warm almost immediately.
I was walking down a street I didn't recognize, string lights overhead, the air thick with the smell of salt water even though I couldn't see an ocean yet. And then I saw her.
Dani, in a red dress, walking toward me like she had nowhere else to be and all the time in the world to get there.
Her hair was down, loose around her shoulders in a way I'd only seen once, briefly, at the pool before it got wet and tangled.
She looked lit from somewhere inside, easy and unguarded in a way she rarely let herself be even with me.
"You did it," she said, when she reached me, arms sliding around my neck like we'd already had this conversation a hundred times before.
"We did it," I said, and kissed her before she could argue the point.
Then the street dissolved, the way dreams do, and we were somewhere else entirely—a private balcony, dark water stretching out below us under a sky scattered with more stars than any actual sky over New York ever showed. The air was warm. Her dress caught the breeze.
"Where are we," I asked, laughing, not actually needing an answer.
"Wherever we want," she said, and pulled me in by the collar of my shirt.
The kiss went from soft to something else fast, hungry in a way that matched every bit of adrenaline still humming through me from tonight.
My hands found the zipper at the back of her dress, and she nodded against my mouth, permission and want tangled into one small motion, and I drew it down slowly, the fabric slipping loose from her shoulders.
Underneath, she wore something that left absolutely nothing to my imagination, which felt entirely appropriate, since my imagination had clearly been working overtime lately anyway.
I lifted her into my arms, and she laughed, surprised and delighted, legs wrapping around my waist as I carried her through a door that hadn't been there a second before and into a bed that felt too soft to be real, because it wasn't.
"What do you want," I asked her, laying her back against the pillows, tracing one hand slowly along her thigh.
She just smiled, coy, saying nothing, daring me to figure it out myself.
So I did.
I peeled the last scrap of fabric away from her and settled between her thighs, taking my time, kissing a slow path up one leg and then the other, feeling her breath catch and hitch with every inch I covered.
When my mouth finally found her, she gasped, hands sliding into my hair, hips rising to meet me on instinct.
I took my time there too—nothing hurried, nothing rushed, just patient, deliberate attention until her breathing changed, until her back started to arch, until small broken sounds started slipping out of her that were better than any celebration happening in any locker room tonight.
"Luke—" My name, breathless, half a plea.
"I want you," I murmured against her skin, and felt her whole body tighten in response, felt her getting close, her fingers tightening in my hair?—
Buzz. Buzz.
The phone. My phone. Buzzing on the nightstand, loud and insistent, and the dream dissolving around me all at once, the balcony and the stars and the warm weight of her thigh under my palm all evaporating into the gray dark of my actual bedroom.
I lay there a second, disoriented, chest heaving like I'd actually run somewhere instead of just dreamed it. I reluctantly reached for my phone and groaned when I saw a string of messages from the team group chat.
Team group chat. Eli.
Film study and brunch at the facility at 11. Time to focus on the next win.
I stared at the ceiling for a long moment after reading it, the last threads of the dream still clinging to me, warm and stubborn and entirely unwilling to fully let go.
I thought about texting her. Good morning, or something equally insufficient for what I actually wanted to say, which was some version of I dreamed about you and it wasn't nearly enough, come make it real.
Instead I set the phone down, closed my eyes, and let myself lie there a few minutes longer, chasing the last warm edges of a dream I had no intention of admitting to out loud, wanting nothing more in the world than to fall back into it and find her waiting exactly where I'd left her.