Chapter 7
Nola POV
Outside the high arched windows of the third-floor biomechanics lab, freezing rain had turned to heavy, wet sleet, battering the glass with the sound of thrown gravel.
My eyeballs felt coated in fine grit, the blue-white glare of the twin screens searing into my optic nerves.
An empty paper cup from the library coffee cart sat beside my keyboard, crushed flat where my thumb had dug through the cardboard rim.
The email from Athletic Director Miller was pinned to the left monitor, highlighted in bright administrative crimson:
My chest felt bound in baling wire.
Four hundred discrete data points. Two weeks of high-frequency telemetry. Every acceleration curve, every heart-rate spike, and every neuromuscular recovery coefficient had to be cross-referenced against the varsity game clock and manually verified for sensor-impedance noise.
If I missed the three o'clock deadline, the pilot study was disqualified for protocol irregularities. The forty-five-thousand-dollar grant would vanish back into the general athletic fund, and Miller’s recommendation letter for the Olympic Training Center fellowship would remain unsigned.
My mother’s outstanding balance with the spinal rehabilitation network would go to collections by Friday.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, shaking so hard I struck the wrong command key twice. A dull, throbbing knot pulsed behind my temples.
The heavy fire door at the end of the lab groaned open.
Heavy, unhurried boot heels clicked across the linoleum.
I didn't need to turn around. The temperature in the room didn't rise, but the space seemed to contract instantly, filled by the low, steady cadence of his respiration and the faint, unmistakable scent of crushed cedar, cold rain, and ice wax.
Chase Guzman stopped three feet from my chair.
He had dropped his duffel bag by the coat rack.
He was wearing a dark gray long-sleeve thermal with the sleeves pushed up to the middle of his forearms, revealing thick, corded veins mapping the dense muscle beneath his skin.
His dark hair was still wet from the locker room showers, curling slightly at the nape of his neck.
He looked down at my face, his obsidian-gray eyes tracking the blue light reflecting off my skin, then cut to the crimson banner across the left monitor.
"Hastings just texted the leadership group," he said. His voice was a low, steady rumble that cut straight through the buzzing fluorescent ballast overhead. "Miller moved the board review up ten hours."
My hands dropped into my lap, my fingernails digging into the denim of my jeans to stop the tremor in my fingers.
"The data isn't clean yet. The telemetry hub on the home bench glitched during Tuesday's second period.
None of the shift timestamps match the official game clock.
If I can't manually verify the time stamps before three, the system locks me out. "
My voice hitched on the last syllable, a dry, ragged catch that gave away the panic clawing up my throat.
Chase didn't offer empty reassurance. He didn't tell me to relax.
He reached out, caught the back of an empty swivel chair two desks down, and dragged it across the floor with a sharp scrape. He shoved it into the narrow gap beside mine, dropping his massive frame into the seat until his shoulder was three inches from mine.
"Pull up the raw shift logs," he said.
I stared at him, my throat tight. "You don't know the diagnostic coding—"
"I know where I was on that sheet every second the clock was running," he cut in, his voice dropping into that quiet, absolute command that made my lungs expand on an involuntary inhale. "You run the math. I give you the timestamps. Sit down, Wagner. We finish this tonight."
* * *
By midnight, the only sound in the lab was the rhythmic clatter of our keystrokes and the hiss of the radiator in the corner.
The hostility that had choked the air between us for weeks didn't vanish, but it folded into something else—a fierce, narrow focus that locked us into the same frequency.
The desk was three feet wide, built for a single researcher.
Every time Chase leaned forward to scan the video timeline on the secondary monitor, his broad bicep brushed against the heavy knit of my oversized sweater.
The contact was solid, unyielding, radiating a steady wall of physical heat that kept the draft from the frosted windows from reaching my neck.
He didn't need the game sheet.
His recall of the ice was terrifying, almost surgical.
"November fifth," I muttered, my voice hoarse from hours of silence.
My pointer hovered over a massive red spike in his heart-rate line.
"Timestamp fourteen-twenty in the second period.
Your monitor pegged at one-eighty-eight beats per minute for seventy seconds, but the official box score says the fourth line was on the ice. "
Chase didn't hesitate. His eyes stayed glued to the timeline.
"Silas broke his stick on the defensive blue line during the penalty kill.
The referee didn't blow the whistle. I jumped the boards on an illegal change, stripped the puck along the boards, and pinned it behind their net until Hastings could cycle the defensemen.
The scorekeeper didn't log the shift because there wasn't a stoppage. "
I clicked into the auxiliary coaching footage, skipping ahead to fourteen-twenty.
There he was. A blur of black and gold jersey vaulting the dasher, slamming his stick into the corner, grinding two opposing forwards into the glass with pure leverage. The play matched his words down to the exact second.
"Verified," I whispered, keying in the correction code.
Without a word, Chase reached into the pocket of his jacket on the adjacent chair, pulled out a cold, condensation-slick bottle of electrolyte water, twisted the cap until the plastic seal cracked, and set it down on the desk directly next to my mouse pad.
He didn't look at me. He didn't make a production out of it. He just slid it into my perimeter, then tapped the next file.
"Next one. Third period, eight-minute mark."
I reached for the bottle. The chilled plastic was cold against my burning fingers, but the liquid soothed the raw scrape in my throat.
When my posture slipped an hour later—my spine curving, my chin dropping toward my chest as exhaustion threatened to shut down my eyes—Chase’s left leg shifted under the small desk. His heavy, denim-clad knee pressed firmly against the outside of mine.
He didn't pull back. The pressure was steady, grounded, an immovable weight anchoring me to the chair when my head felt like it was floating in mist.
"Stay with me, Nola," he murmured, his voice a gravelly scrape in the quiet room. "Three more files."
My chest hitched at the sound of my name on his tongue, but my fingers found the keys again. We moved like two halves of a single mechanism, trading numbers, dates, and shift lengths without a wasted breath.
* * *
At 02:04 AM, the digital upload bar on the portal reached one hundred percent.
The screen flashed once, the red alert dissolving into a clean, pale green banner: COMPLIANCE DOSSIER VERIFIED AND ARCHIVED. ELIGIBILITY CLEARED.
The breath left my body all at once.
It wasn't a sigh; it was a total collapse of muscular tension. My shoulders dropped three inches. My spine hit the back of the chair, my head tilting back until it rested against the headrest, my eyelids fluttering shut against the searing burn of the fluorescent tubes.
The room was dead silent save for the drumming of the sleet on the glass.
My plastic stylus slipped from my limp fingers, rolling off the edge of the laminate desk and hitting the floor with a sharp plastic click.
I exhaled, opening my heavy eyes, and started to lean down to retrieve it from beneath the pedestal.
Chase moved first.
His reach was effortless. He scooped the stylus off the tile in one fluid motion, but as he brought his hand back up to the desk, he didn't drop the pen.
His fingers closed around my right hand where it rested on my thigh.
His skin was calloused, rough from years of heavy composite sticks, and burning with a feverish heat.
He didn't grip me hard; his touch was deliberate, measured.
Slowly, his thumb slid across the back of my hand, tracing the delicate tendons before settling firmly into the soft, pale hollow of my inner wrist.
Under his thumb, my pulse went wild.
It was a frantic, fluttering percussion, leaping against his rough skin with an intensity that stripped the air right out of my lungs.
My eyes snapped to his.
Chase was already looking at me. He hadn't pulled his chair back. He sat inches away, his dark, scarred brow pulled low over eyes that were black in the dim light of the screens.
He didn't move his thumb. He just pressed it slightly deeper into the hollow, feeling the blood hammer against his print, tracking the rapid, betraying rhythm.
The silence between us grew thick, dense enough to choke on. The rain outside seemed to fade into a muffled whisper behind the heavy glass.
He leaned in slowly, closing the narrow gap until the heat coming off his chest washed over my collarbone. His scent—cedar, rain, clean skin, and raw exhaustion—filled my senses until my vision narrowed down to the hard, unyielding line of his jaw.
His gaze dropped to the pulse jumping in my neck, then dragged upward, lingering on my lower lip before locking with my eyes.
"Why are you still looking at me like I'm the enemy, Nola?"
The question was barely a whisper, a low, scraping sound that vibrated against the sensitive skin beneath my ear.
My lips parted on a shallow, ragged breath. The dry, bitter hatred that had armored my ribs for six months had dissolved, leaving behind a raw, terrifying void that his presence filled with suffocating force.
I couldn't look away. I couldn't pull my hand back from his grip.
"Because," I breathed, my voice barely carrying over the hum of the cooling fan, "if you aren't the enemy, I don't know what we're doing."
His grip on my wrist tightened just enough to anchor me, his thumb stroking the leaping vein once, slow and deliberate, before he let out a low, ragged exhalation against my temple.
"We're surviving," he rasped into the dark. "Both of us."