Chapter 5
CARTER
Igot back to the hotel very late and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling until the room went gray.
The weekend had gone — well. Better than well. Better than anything I could remember in a long time, which was saying something for a guy who'd just won the Stanley Cup.
I thought about the hallway. Her hands in my shirt. The low sound she made when I kissed her throat. The way she'd said my name — unsteady, like it surprised her — and the way every rational thought I had left my head for approximately thirty seconds.
I lay there in the dark replaying all of it — her mouth, her hands, the way she'd arched into me on that couch like she couldn't help it — and felt my body respond with an urgency that was not going to be reasoned with.
I was rock hard and she was two blocks away and none of that was going to change tonight.
I got in the shower.
Hot water, steam, one hand braced against the tile.
I wrapped my other hand around my cock and stroked slow at first, building, letting myself think about exactly what I'd been trying not to think about all evening — the way her shirt had ridden up under my hands, the warmth of her skin, the catch in her breath when I found the right spot on her throat.
I dragged my thumb over the head on every pass, rolled my balls in my other hand, and thought about what I wanted to do to her, all of it, in specific and unhurried detail.
I picked up the pace until I was breathing hard and the water was running cold and I finally, finally came with her name in my head like a prayer.
I stood under the water afterward until it ran cold, forehead against the tile.
Oh Jess, I thought. If only you knew what you're doing to me.
I wasn't going to push her. I wasn't going to be the guy who made her feel like that was the point of any of this, because it wasn't. Or rather — it was, eventually, something I wanted very much, but it wasn't the thing I was here for.
It wasn't even close to the most important thing about this weekend.
The most important thing about this weekend was watching Jess and spending time with Justin — which had been, by any measure, a success.
Specifically, I kept coming back to Justin in the backyard Sunday morning, Carter Junior tucked under one arm, demonstrating the Flip with complete conviction.
The wrist snap was there. The weight transfer was almost right.
He'd watched me do it once on YouTube, apparently, and had been practicing with his stuffed bear ever since.
I hadn't realized how much he'd been paying attention. I hadn't realized how much it would matter to me that he had.
I lay there thinking about that for a while, which was considerably less useful for sleep but considerably better for my general sense of what was actually happening here.
I'd dated a lot of women. I knew that was an understatement.
I'd dated models and actresses and the kind of women who showed up at charity events in red dresses specifically to be noticed, and most of it had been — fine.
Good, even, in the uncomplicated way that things could be good when you didn't let them get complicated.
Plenty of women had wanted more from me. That was never the problem.
The problem was that once the physical part settled, I'd look across the room at whoever I was with and realize there wasn't much else there — no real conversation, no genuine curiosity about each other, nothing that made me want to stay past the point where staying was convenient.
Sex was never going to be the foundation of anything worth having.
I'd figured that out early and spent years not knowing what to do with the information.
Jess hadn't asked me to stay either. But I'd wanted to. That was the difference.
I'd sat on her couch until well after the neighborhood went quiet talking about nothing — her job, my training schedule, a delivery she'd done last week that had scared her more than she wanted to admit, a game I'd watched film on earlier in the week — and I hadn't wanted to leave.
I'd kept finding reasons to say one more thing, ask one more question, stay one more hour.
Not because of what might happen if I stayed. Because of what was already happening, which was that I liked her more every time I was around her and wasn't sure yet what to do about that.
She was the kind of woman who remembered what she said and meant it.
The kind who told you true things even when the easy thing would be to keep it vague.
The kind who watched her son with a hockey player she'd met twice and clearly felt something complicated about it and didn't try to pretend she didn't.
I'd dated women who looked through me to the jersey number. Jess looked at me like she was still figuring out what she saw and intended to take her time about it.
That, it turned out, was far more interesting than anyone else I’d ever met.
I flew back to St. Louis Sunday afternoon and called her from the gate.
"I had a good weekend," I said, when she picked up.
"So did I." A pause, warm. "Justin asked this morning if you were coming back."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him you'd be back when you could."
"That's true." I watched a family navigate the terminal with approximately fourteen bags and a stroller that was fighting them. "I want to come back, Jess. I just want to say that clearly. Whatever this is, I'm not treating it like a weekend thing."
A silence, shorter than I expected. "I know," she said. "I don't think I would have let you in if I thought you were."
That went straight through me. I let it sit there.
"Call me tonight?" she said.
"Already planning on it."
I boarded the plane feeling lighter than I had in years, which was a strange thing to feel at thirty-thousand feet, but there it was. I pulled out my phone before they made me put it in airplane mode and sent her one text.
Carter Senior says hi.
Three dots. Then: He's been asking about you all day. I'm starting to feel like the third wheel in my own house.
I laughed, out loud, in the middle of a crowded gate, and didn't care even slightly who noticed.
I was at the facility by seven Monday morning.
Liam was already there, the way Liam was always already there, running film on the power play we'd been working on since June.
He looked up when I walked in, took one look at my face, and said nothing — which, with Liam, meant he'd already clocked everything and would bring it up at a time of his choosing.
Ty arrived twenty minutes later with a protein shake and the energy of a man who had slept extremely well and was unreasonably cheerful about it.
"You're smiling," Ty said, dropping onto the bench beside me.
"I'm not smiling."
"Liam says you were smiling when you walked in. He texted me about it on my way here."
I looked at Liam across the room. Liam was very focused on the film monitor.
"It was a good weekend," I said. "Leave it alone."
Ty raised both hands in surrender and went back to his shake, but the grin he was hiding behind it was not particularly well hidden.
Cole came in quietly around eight, the way he always did, and we ran through film together for an hour before the ice opened up. He didn't ask about Chicago.
Cole didn't ask about things like that — not because he didn't care, but because he understood that some things needed time before they could be said out loud.
He was a man who carried the hardest thing there was and came out the other side of it still standing; he knew better than anyone not to rush a person toward words they weren't ready for.
I appreciated that about him more than I'd ever told him.
We hit the ice at nine.
It was an optional skate — no coaches, no drills, just the guys who'd shown up keeping themselves sharp in the off-season. Half the team, roughly, which was more than enough to run some controlled scrimmage and work on the things that got sloppy when you weren't playing sixty games a year.
I don't know exactly what happened out there. Something clicked.
I was faster than I'd been all summer. The puck felt good on my stick — better than good, like an extension of something I was thinking rather than something I was doing. When the lanes opened up I was already moving through them. When the opportunity came I was already in position.
I caught an edge at the blue line that I hadn't been able to hit cleanly since April and felt the old satisfaction of it, pure and physical, like something coming back online after a long rest.
I lit the lamp twice in twenty minutes of scrimmage. The second one was the Flip — tight quarters, right side of the net, exactly where Mark had drilled it into me fifteen years ago on a frozen pond in Ames. Backhand fake, weight shift, forehand to the top corner before the goalie could reset.
Ty, who had been covering me, stopped skating and just looked at me.
"That's disgusting," he said. "That should be illegal."
"It's not illegal."
"It should be." He shook his head. "Whatever you're doing differently, keep doing it."
I thought: this is what it feels like when the stars are aligned. Everything clicking, everything flowing, the game coming to me instead of me chasing it. I'd learned a long time ago not to question it when it happened. Just ride it.
"Working on it," I said.
Liam came up beside me as we came off the ice, and for a moment he just skated with me in silence the way he sometimes did when he had something to say and was choosing his words.
"You played well today," he said finally.
"Good ice time."
"Carter."
I looked at him.
"Whatever's going on," he said, "it looks good on you."
I didn't say anything. I didn't need to. We'd played together long enough that some things didn't require words, and this was one of them.
I just skated off the ice and thought about calling her tonight, and counted the days until I could get back to Chicago.