39. Championship Nights
Chapter thirty-nine
Championship Nights
Atticus POV
The buzzer sounds and I don't hear it.
I mean I hear it. The sound hits. But it doesn't land the way it should, like fireworks going off three blocks away, loud and bright and belonging to someone else's party.
What lands is her.
She's in the fourth row, center ice, exactly where I knew she'd be, and she's laughing and crying at the same time.
Both at once. Her face completely open and her hands pressed over her mouth and tears cutting straight lines through whatever makeup she put on tonight, and it is the most Sienna thing I have ever seen in my life.
Like she's furious at herself for crying and can't stop and doesn't care.
The ice around me detonates. Jonah hits me from the left so hard I stumble. Razor is somewhere on the far end of the bench and I don't look at him. Hale is already halfway to center ice and the noise in this building is physical, a wall of sound that presses in from every direction.
I find her eyes again.
She drops her hands from her mouth. Her lips are doing something. Not a smile, exactly. More like relief. Like something she'd been holding finally set down.
I skate one full rotation around center ice because the team needs it from me right now. I lift the C on my chest twice. I hold Jonah's helmet and yell something I won't remember later.
The next forty-one minutes: trophy photo, right words to cameras, Jonah pulled into the frame when a reporter tries to crop him out.
Three teammates thanked by name in the corner where the mics can't reach.
Half a beer. Razor catches my eye across the room.
He looks away first. Grant Calder says something about a great season.
I nod and think about a back corner table and a beer that hasn't been touched.
Forty-one minutes.
I leave.
I don't tell anyone. Strip my gear, shower in four minutes, pull on street clothes with my hair still damp. Delia catches my arm in the hallway and starts a sentence about optics. I tell her she can reach me tomorrow. She knows my face well enough to let me go.
The city is celebrating in the way cities do, horns and voices and flags out of windows. Someone recognizes the car two blocks out and shouts my name. I drive past. I know where she'll be.
O'Malley's is dark except for the amber glow above the back corner, the kind of half-light Sienna leaves on when she's closing and doesn't want to be alone in the full dark but also doesn't want to be found.
I know that about her now.
The back door is unlocked. I push it open and she's there, exactly where I knew she'd be: back corner table, legs folded under her, a beer on the wood in front of her that she hasn't touched. Her eyes come up when she hears the door.
She's still in what she wore to the arena, jacket on, mascara lines dried on her face. Looking at me with the expression I've spent months learning, the one that comes right before she drops the armor.
"You left the party," she says.
"I know where the party is."
Something shifts in her face. She looks down at the beer, looks back up.
"You won," she says. Like she needs to say it out loud. Like it still doesn't feel real.
"Yeah."
I cross the bar. The city outside is a low hum. The floors creak the way they always do, and the place smells like her, woodsmoke and citrus. I know every corner of this room. Every corner of it held something between us before we were brave enough to name it.
I stop in front of her table.
She tilts her head up.
Her eyes are red at the rims from earlier. Her hair has slipped loose from whatever she did with it. She looks like herself, the real version, the one she saves for after the crowd clears, and the look on her face right now is the one I'd do anything to keep earning.
"Hi," she says, soft.
"Hi."
I hold out my hand.
She takes it.
We don't make it past the hallway.
I'm walking her back toward the office, her hand in mine, and then her fingers tighten and she turns and I turn with her and then I have her against the wall of the back corridor and my hands are in her hair and her hands are at my jacket and neither of us planned it exactly like this, but here we are.
The kiss starts hungry. She makes a small sound against my mouth and I feel it the whole way down.
I walk her back one more step, crowd her into the wall, and her heel hooks behind my calf, pulling me in rather than pushing me back, and I laugh.
Actually laugh.
It comes out before I can stop it, a short, rough sound against her mouth, surprised out of me by the specific, undeniable fact of her pulling me closer while I'm already close.
She pulls back, eyes narrowed.
"Did you just laugh?"
"No."
"You absolutely just laughed."
I kiss her again to stop the conversation and she laughs too, a real one, bright and startled, against my mouth.
It turns into both of us trying to kiss each other while smiling and making a terrible job of it, and she gets her hands on either side of my face like she's correcting my form, which makes it worse, which makes it better.
"You never laugh," she manages.
"I laugh."
"Not like that."
She's right. I don't. I lean my forehead against hers and look at her in the dark of the hallway, both of us still catching our breath, and she's flushed and her hair is completely destroyed and her eyes are doing the thing they do when she's about to say something she actually means.
"Come here," I say.
The back office is small and lit by a single lamp in the corner that she left on, throwing the room in low amber. I sit on the edge of the narrow desk. She stands in front of me and works the buttons of my shirt with steady hands and I watch her face while she does it.
She's concentrating. Not nervous. Sienna doesn't do nervous, exactly. She does focused. Like everything she decides to give her attention to gets her full attention.
She gives everything full attention.
"Hey." I put a hand under her chin. Tilt it up.
Her eyes come to mine.
"There's no cameras," I say. "No contract. No reason to be here except the one that's actually true."
She holds my gaze for a beat. Then she pushes my shirt back off my shoulders and says: "I know."
Like she's been waiting for me to catch up.
I pull her in.
The first time we did this it was desperate, all that stored pressure finally finding a release valve, half-surprised at itself.
This time is different. This time we both know exactly what we're doing and we're choosing it clean, and there's something in that, in the choosing, that opens a space between us that the other times didn't have.
She presses her mouth to my collarbone, the scar there, and I feel it everywhere.
I take my time. I have time. I left the party for this, I drove across the city for this, and I am not rushing any of it. I get her out of the jacket first, then the rest, slow enough that she makes a frustrated sound and tries to move things along and I stop her hands.
"Atticus."
"Yeah."
"Stop being so—" She breaks off.
"So what."
"Deliberate."
"I'm getting it right."
She laughs, breathless, and says "I hate you" in the specific fond way that means exactly the opposite.
I take her apart the way I've been thinking about since the last time.
My mouth on her throat, her collarbone, dragging slow down her stomach while she twists her fingers into my hair and stops trying to rush me.
I get her legs over my shoulders and I don't come back up until she's said my name three times and stopped making sense between them, her back arched off the couch cushions and her thighs shaking against the sides of my face.
She's still catching her breath when I work my way back up her body.
"You're insufferable," she manages.
"You're welcome."
She laughs and pulls me down by the back of the neck and kisses me like she's making a point. Her hands work my belt open and I let her, and when she wraps her fingers around me and strokes once, slow and deliberate, I make a sound against her mouth that I'd be embarrassed about with anyone else.
Not with her.
"Fair," I say.
She grins against my lips. "I'm getting it right."
I tip her back onto the cushions and settle between her thighs and when I push into her she goes still.
Eyes open. Looking at me.
Like she's taking it in. Like she doesn't want to miss a second of it.
I hold there. Let her feel it. Let myself feel it. The heat of her. The way she breathes out slow when I'm fully seated, like her body is deciding what to do with all of me at once.
"Okay?" I ask.
"More than." Her voice has gone rough at the edges in a way that undoes me completely.
I move.
Slow at first. Deliberate. She makes a low sound and her hips roll up to meet me and I feel her adjust, taking more, and I give her more.
Her hands slide down my back and pull. Not a suggestion.
A demand. I drop my weight into it, deeper, and she arches and exhales my name on a sharp breath that I feel in my spine.
We find the rhythm fast. It's not careful.
She wraps her legs around me and I brace on one arm and get my hand between us, my thumb finding the place that makes her gasp, and she swears once — short and sharp and entirely pleased — and I don't let up.
I watch her face. I want to see every second of it.
She talks to me. Not performance. Just truth — what she wants, how it feels, how good, more of that, right there. And once, breathlessly, almost accidental, that she loves me. Like it slipped out before she could think about it. Like she said it to the ceiling and then realized I heard it.
I press my forehead to hers. Tell her I know. Tell her I've known.
Tell her I'm not going anywhere.
Her hips stutter and she clenches tight around me and I feel her break, and I follow, and we both stop holding anything back.
There's joy in it.
That's the part that's new. Not just the honesty, we had that before, but the joy underneath it, this lightness, like something that used to be braced can finally be easy.
She laughs once when we nearly lose our balance and have to catch ourselves on the armrest, and I don't even try to recover any dignity about it. I just laugh with her.
She talks to me. I talk back. The things we say are true.
Afterward, she slides off the couch and down to the floor and I follow her, because that's apparently what we do now, and she puts her head on my chest and her fingers find the scar at my collarbone and trace along it slowly, like she's remapping something she already has memorized.
The building is quiet. The city outside is still going, distant noise, celebration, the world carrying on, but in here it's just the lamp and the old wood floors and her breathing evening out against me.
I stare at the ceiling.
I think: this is it. This is the thing I spent so many years deciding I couldn't have. Deciding I'd wreck. Deciding was better as a rule than a reality.
And here it is. In the back office of a bar that smells like her, on the floor, after the best night of my professional life, and my hands are shaking.
They're shaking right now.
She notices.
She lifts her head and looks at me, searching, unhurried, and I hold her eyes and don't hide it.
Then I reach into the inside pocket of my team jacket.
My hands are still shaking. It's probably visible. I don't care.
"Sienna."
My voice comes out rougher than I planned.
She goes very still.
"I have a question."