Chapter 9
Nola POV
The smell of dried blood and wintergreen hit me the second I pushed past the heavy fire door.
It was twenty past nine. The arena above us had gone silent an hour ago after the closed-door intrasquad scrimmage—an ugly, full-contact session Hastings had ordered to test the defensive pairings before Friday's road trip.
I had spent the last sixty minutes in the laundry bay trying to shake the ghost of Chase's breath from my jawline, the phantom weight of his hand against my cheek still burning beneath the surface of my skin like an allergic flare.
I turned into the narrow corridor of the Vault, holding the night’s compliance sheets against my stomach.
The overhead fluorescent fixture was switched off. Only the goose-neck desk lamp on the stainless steel cart was lit, throwing a cone of amber glare across the vinyl examination table.
Chase was sitting on the edge of the platform.
He was stripped to his black compression shorts, his bare chest glistening with cold tap water and sweat.
His head hung low between his shoulders, his dark hair plastered to his forehead in wet spikes.
In his right hand, he clutched a wad of brown industrial paper towels, pressing them clumsily against his right cheekbone.
The towels were soaked through with dark, spreading crimson.
A fresh, two-inch laceration cut straight across the bone beneath his eye, its edges ragged from the impact of a visor or a composite stick.
Dark plum hematomas bloomed across his left intercostal space—deep, spreading contusions where the ribs met the serratus.
Every breath he took was short, shallow, and hitched with a sharp, involuntary catch at the bottom of his diaphragm.
His left arm hung dead at his side, the deltoid visibly spasming in tiny, erratic ripples.
He was trying to twist the cap off a plastic bottle of antiseptic with his teeth, his jaw clamped hard on the plastic seal.
My feet moved before my lungs could draw in air.
The binder slipped from my fingers, landing with a muted thud on the rolling stool. My boots made no sound on the rubber matting as I crossed the four feet of concrete separating us.
I reached down, my bare fingers wrapping around the cold plastic bottle, pulling it gently out from between his clenched teeth.
"Let go, Chase," I whispered.
His head snapped up.
The sudden movement sent a violent wince cutting through his features. The scar across his brow pulled into a white line, his left eye swollen half-shut, the gray iris dark as wet slate in the amber pool of light.
He looked at me with the stunned, unblinking focus of an animal caught in a trap, his knuckles frozen against the bloody paper towels.
"I've got it," he rasped, the words thick with the metallic taste of blood.
"You don't have it," I said, my voice steady even as a hard knot of panic tightened behind my ribs. "Take your hand down."
He held my gaze for three seconds, his jaw clenched so tight the tendon in his throat stood out like wire. Then, with a slow, shuddering exhalation that smelled of iron and mint, his fingers relaxed. He dropped the sodden paper into the trash bin by his sneaker.
* * *
I didn't step back to grab the latex gloves.
There was no time for barriers, no space for the clinical distance I had spent weeks using to keep myself upright. I soaked a thick square of sterile gauze in chlorhexidine and stepped straight into the notch between his parted knees.
The proximity was immediate and overwhelming.
His bare thighs, thick and corded with muscle, brushed against the outside of my jeans.
The furnace of heat pouring off his bare torso washed over my chest, cutting through the thin cotton of my long-sleeve tee.
Up close, the damage was horrifying: purple-black bruising stained the skin over his fourth and fifth ribs, and the ragged skin on his cheek was still welling dark blood down into the stubble on his jaw.
"This is going to sting," I murmured.
"Just do it."
I raised my left hand, resting my bare fingertips against his left temple to anchor his head. His skin was fever-hot, the temporal artery thudding against my index finger in a rapid, heavy cadence that sent a tremor straight down my forearm.
I pressed the soaked gauze against the open cut.
Chase didn't flinch. He didn't hiss. He didn't pull away by a fraction of an inch.
His hands came up.
His thick, calloused palms settled heavily on the curve of my hips, right over the waistband of my denim.
My breath locked in my throat.
His fingers didn't just rest there; they clamped down with an intense, grounding pressure, pulling me half an inch closer until the soft wool of my shirt brushed the bare, burning skin of his uninjured shoulder. The heat of his palms burned through the denim, sinking into my pelvic bones.
"Hastings would have pulled you from the road trip," I said, my voice barely carrying over the hum of the transformer behind the wall.
I wiped away the excess blood with meticulous, light strokes, watching the skin pull clean under the iodine.
"If the team physician saw those ribs, you'd be in a radiology tube in Duluth before midnight. "
"Nobody looks at the ribs," he rasped.
His eyes never left my face. They tracked the movement of my lips, the furrow of concentration between my eyebrows, the rapid, betraying flutter of the pulse point exposed at the open collar of my shirt.
"They're cracked, Chase." My fingers trembled as I reached for the packet of sterile butterfly closures, peeling the paper backing with my teeth. "Or severely bruised. You shouldn't be skating forty minutes on Friday."
"I skate," he said. His voice was a low, rough rumble that vibrated straight through his hands into my hips. "I don't sit. Not for Hastings. Not for my father."
"You sat for me."
The words slipped out into the small room, quiet and dangerous.
His fingers tightened against my hips, his thumbs pressing into the small hollows beside my hip bones with a possessive, bruised urgency that made the blood rush to the surface of my neck.
"You aren't them, Nola."
* * *
The air vanished from the space between us.
My fingers were unsteady as I placed the first butterfly strip across the split skin of his cheek, pulling the edges together until the bleeding stopped. I laid a second strip parallel to the first, smoothing the medical tape down with the pad of my thumb.
His skin was soft beneath the stubble, burning hot against my cool fingers.
"Done," I whispered, the word catching against a dry throat.
I let my hands fall away from his face. I shifted my weight, preparing to step back out from between his thighs, to break the suffocating gravity before my knees gave out beneath me.
Chase’s right hand moved like a striking snake.
His fingers snapped around my right wrist, his grip an unbreakable band of muscle and heat.
He didn't let me take the step.
With a slow, inexorable pull, he hauled my arm down, flattening my bare palm flush against the bare center of his chest.
The contact was a shockwave.
My palm pressed directly over his sternum, feeling the dense, fevered wall of his pectorals. Beneath my hand, his heart wasn't beating with the steady, mechanical rhythm of an elite athlete.
It was violently hammering against his ribs, a frantic, runaway pulse that slammed into my palm with enough force to shake my arm.
"Chase—"
"Feel that," he rasped, his voice dropping into a register so low, so stripped of armor, it sounded like tearing metal.
He didn't release my wrist. He pressed my hand harder into his flesh, forcing my fingers to spread across his skin, right over the wild cadence of his blood.
"Look at what you do to me," he whispered.
He leaned forward, his massive shoulders slumping until his forehead dropped against the hollow of my shoulder, his face burying into the curve where my neck met my collarbone.
His breath was a scalding mist against my skin, soaking through the fabric, making the hair on my arms stand straight up. The weight of his head against my chest was immense—an admission of total, exhausted surrender from a man who had never bent a knee in his life.
My free hand rose on pure instinct.
My fingers sank into the thick, damp hair at the back of his neck, curling into the dark strands, holding his head against me.
"Chase," I breathed, my ribs constricting so tightly I couldn't draw a full lungful of air.
"The ribs don't hurt," he mumbled against my skin, his lips moving against the hollow of my throat, sending an autonomic shudder rippling down to the small of my back.
"The cut doesn't hurt. Having you touch me...
having you look at me like you see straight through the pads... it's tearing me to pieces."
My eyes stung with a sudden, overwhelming heat.
I didn't push him away. I pressed my palm flat against his hammering heart, feeling every concussive beat, and let my forehead rest against the crown of his head.
The clinical detachment was dead. The academic armor had shattered against the floorboards.
I was standing in a locked basement in the dead of night, holding a broken giant against my ribs, and I knew with sickening certainty that I was never going to walk away from him again.