CHAPTER 8 — ICE HANGOVER #2
At the hotel, the situation got worse before we even reached the rooms. Hartwell had reserved a block for Northaven, but an administrative error had turned single rooms into doubles, doubles into triples, and my father's patience into something thin and about to snap.
Players scattered through the lobby carrying backpacks, sticks, equipment bags, and complaints.
I stayed near the counter with the medical bag, listening to half of a conversation between Coach Bennett and an exhausted manager who kept repeating “I'm so sorry” with her soul already departed from her body.
Damon appeared at my side without making a sound, which was unfair for someone his size.
His shoulder was better after the ice, but he still held his left side too carefully.
His open jacket revealed the dark shirt and the tape underneath, and his hair still had that post-shower dampness that made everything about him dangerously touchable.
I looked at the line at the counter, at the lobby lights, at anything that wasn't the mouth I had kissed.
“You're trying to look busy,” he said.
“I am busy.”
“Holding a bag that's been still for ten minutes.”
“It's a demanding bag.”
“I always liked your talent for lying badly when you were cornered.”
I turned to him slowly, measuring the space between us and how many people were around.
The lobby was full, but none of those bodies seemed like enough to make the conversation safe.
Damon knew how to use a crowd as a curtain; he said impossible things with his mouth barely moving, close enough for me to hear, far enough for anyone else to think we were talking logistics.
“And I always found it impressive how you can turn any hotel line into an arena for provocation,” I said, keeping my voice low. “How's your shoulder?”
“Hurt that you change the subject whenever the conversation gets interesting.”
“Pain, one to ten, Damon.”
“Depends. Are you asking as a physical therapist or as the man who kissed me against a wall and ran before I could respond?”
The question hit me with heat and anger.
I took a smaller step than I should have to the side, pretending to make room for a player to pass, but the truth was I needed to break the straight line between my body and his.
Damon tracked the movement with his eyes, and that was almost worse than if he had followed me.
He knew. I knew. The kiss was in both of us, in the way we avoided the exact distance, in the way our voices had dropped, in the ridiculous care not to let our arms brush.
My father called us before I could respond, holding two key cards with an expression that already had me bracing for disaster. Behind him, Mason looked on the verge of spiritual pleasure.
“There was a booking error,” Coach Bennett said, and for a second the absurd hope that he would announce something different flashed through me too fast to control.
“Noah, you and Damon will be in the same room tonight. Two beds, evaluation supervised by report, door unlocked if necessary. Mason will be in the room next door in case you need anything.”
“No,” I said, at the same instant Damon said the same word.
Mason raised his hand solemnly. “I’d like to go on record that the room next door will be emotionally unavailable but acoustically curious.”
“Reed,” my father and Damon said in unison, and I almost laughed, which only proved the night was destroying my ability to react rationally.
Arguing was pointless. The hotel was full, the team needed sleep, Damon needed evaluation before rest, and my father had already decided that two beds were enough to turn a disaster into an acceptable arrangement.
I took the keycard feeling like I was signing a liability waiver for my own ruin.
Damon took his without looking at me, but the tension in his jaw told me he was just as aware of the irony: after a week of trying to put walls between us, Northaven, Hartwell, and the dorm’s broken plumbing kept conspiring with offensive efficiency.
The room was on the twelfth floor, at the end of a corridor far too quiet.
Damon opened the door, went in first, and flipped on the light.
Two queen beds separated by a nightstand looked like a joke written by someone cruel and unimaginative.
There was a window overlooking the wet parking lot, a beige armchair, a narrow desk, and a bathroom whose door sat too close to the beds.
Damon dropped his bag by the wall and looked at the mattresses as if both had insulted his bloodline.
“Pick a bed,” he said, closing the door behind me. “Before you turn this into a forty-minute ethical debate.”
“Ethics already gave up and went to sleep in Mason’s room,” I replied, setting the medical bag on the desk. “You’re going to sit on the bed by the window so I can check your shoulder. Then take a shower if you want, ice it again, and sleep.”
“Bossy for someone who could barely push me in the hallway.”
“I managed to push when it mattered.”
“You managed because I let you.”
The words hung in the room with indecent weight.
I opened the medical bag and pulled out the tablet, tape, and range-of-motion gauge, using each item like a narrow plank over a flooding river.
Damon sat on the bed by the window, obedient enough to make me suspicious, and started removing his jacket with his right hand.
When the sleeve caught on his left arm, I stepped forward on reflex, but he shot me a look that mixed warning with challenge.
“I can manage.”
“I know,” I replied, stopping a step away from him. “But managing isn’t always the point.”
He didn’t respond. He removed the jacket slowly, with a control that cost more than he wanted to show, until he was down to just his thermal shirt.
The evaluation was quieter than the others, maybe because we both knew any provocation could become a repeat of the hallway.
I asked him to raise his arm, tested rotation, pressure, sensitivity in his fingers.
The shoulder was irritated but not worse than I’d feared.
The tension, on the other hand, was everywhere.
In the way Damon looked at my mouth when I leaned in.
In the way I kept my voice clinical to avoid thinking about the heat of his body under the fabric.
In the way each necessary touch seemed to last longer than it should.
“You’ll survive,” I said, putting away the materials after applying the support wrap for the night. “But I won’t clear you for full practice tomorrow if you wake up stiff.”
“You going to sleep thinking about my stiffness, Bennett?”
I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them, he wore that almost-serious expression he used to fake innocence, and I wanted to throw the roll of tape at his head. Instead, I put away the materials with a calm I didn’t feel.
“I’m going to sleep thinking that accepting this internship might have been an act of self-sabotage,” I replied. “Take a shower. Don’t put weight on your left arm, don’t stretch under the hot water, and don’t try to prove you can wash your hair like it’s a competition.”
Damon stood up with deliberate slowness. “Want to come in with me to supervise?”
“I want you to get in the bathroom before I write ‘patient sexualizes medical instructions to compensate for fear of vulnerability’ in the report.”
His laugh came low and brief, so close to the old Damon that my chest tightened.
He grabbed clothes from his bag and went into the bathroom, letting the door close behind him.
The sound of the shower started a few moments later, and I stood in the middle of the room like an idiot, staring at two beds, a window, and a closed door behind which Damon Blackwood was taking off his clothes.
The universe didn’t just have bad taste. It had spite.
I tried to answer emails on the tablet. Read the same line five times.
The water hitting the shower stall seemed too loud, too intimate, and each variation in sound made me imagine movements I shouldn’t be imagining: Damon tilting his head under the stream, water running down his chest, his right hand running through his hair, the careful way he’d have to favor his shoulder.
I got up to open the window, but it wouldn’t budge.
Of course not. Hotel rooms preferred to trap people in bad decisions.
When the bathroom door opened, I was pretending to organize the medical bag for the third time.
Damon came out wearing only a towel slung low on his hips, hair wet, skin still glistening with water, the temporary wrap gone from the shower.
My brain had the decency to remember I was a professional for about half a second.
Then my eyes registered his chest, the line of his abdomen, the curve of his ribs, the scar near his side, the inflamed shoulder beneath flushed skin, and the memory of the kiss came back so strong I had to grip the bag’s buckle to keep my hands occupied.
“You look like you’re about to give me another lecture,” Damon said, stopping near his bag as if he weren’t half-naked a few feet from me. “Or did you lose your voice from clinical concern?”
“You took the wrap off too early,” I said, choosing the only detail I could name without giving myself away. “Sit. I need to put it back on.”
“Sure,” he said, and his voice had a tone that wasn’t exactly provocation but something worse, because it seemed to know I was using the wrap as an excuse and had decided to let me. “Come do your job, Bennett.”