CHAPTER 8 — ICE HANGOVER #3
I approached with the wrap in my hands, focused on the shoulder, the protocol, the right sequence.
The towel made everything harder. Not because it revealed too much, but because it turned every attempt not to look into a visible effort.
Damon sat on the edge of the bed, and I stood in front of him, between his open knees, exactly where I shouldn't want to be.
The room felt small. The yellow light from the lamp touched his skin, and the smell of warm soap mixed with freshly washed skin hit me with an intimacy the arena would never have allowed.
“Lift your arm a little,” I said, my voice too low for my liking.
“Like this?” he asked, obeying just enough to make his chest muscles shift under my gaze.
“Don't turn instruction into performance.”
“Don't turn performance into instruction.”
“Damon.”
“Noah.”
My name in his mouth undid me in a brutal way.
I started positioning the wrap, looping it around the shoulder, across the chest, adjusting without pulling too tight.
My fingers touched wet skin once, twice—inevitable—and each contact seemed to crack something open in the night.
Damon stayed quiet, but not relaxed. His body was tense, his breathing too slow, his eyes fixed on me as if I were both remedy and threat.
“You're trembling,” he said.
“I'm cold.”
“Liar.”
“Stay quiet.”
“Also a lie. You don't want me to stay quiet.”
The wrap slipped from my fingers. Damon raised his right hand and caught my wrist before I could pull away.
The touch wasn't rough—it was firm, warm, full of intention.
My gaze rose to his, and the entire room seemed to stop in that absurd distance between a decision and a consequence.
His towel brushed my thigh when he leaned forward, and I hated how my body responded before any thought could take hold.
“If you want me to stop, say so,” he said, and the words hit me because there was more respect in them than I'd expected from him in that state, more control than I maybe had in that moment. “But say it because you want to, not because you're afraid.”
“I'm responsible for your recovery,” I replied, trying to turn the words into a wall, but my voice came out too low, too heated. “You're an athlete under my care. My boss's son. Team captain. A professional disaster waiting to happen.”
“None of that's an answer.”
“You hate me.”
“That's not an answer either.”
His hand moved from my wrist to my waist, stopping there with light pressure, giving time, leaving space.
I should have pulled away. Instead, I rested my hands on his shoulders to keep distance, only to touch warm skin, and the excuse died in my palm.
Damon tilted his face. I felt his breath before his mouth.
The kiss came slower than the one in the corridor, and that made it more dangerous.
There was no Elias, no public anger, no footsteps about to interrupt.
There was only the bed behind him, the towel, my hand on his good shoulder, the care with the injured side, and the hunger we were both pretending still obeyed rules.
His mouth opened mine with cruel patience.
I responded before I could convince myself otherwise, hands rising to the back of his neck, fingers finding wet hair, my body giving half a step between his knees.
Damon made a low sound against my mouth, and the hand on my waist tightened as if he too was measuring the line between touching and losing control.
The kiss had less anger than the last one, more recognition, and that scared me more.
Anger I knew how to return. Recognition left me defenseless.
He pulled me carefully, mindful of his own shoulder even in the middle of the urgency, and I ended up with one knee on the edge of the bed before I could recover my senses.
His towel stayed in place, but the proximity turned every detail into a threat: skin against fabric, breath against face, my body leaning over his, Damon's hand sliding down my back without crossing any explicit boundary yet setting fire to all of them.
When his mouth dropped to my jaw, I closed my eyes for a second and almost forgot my name.
Almost.
The pain came from him before it came from me.
A wrong movement, small—the left shoulder tensing when Damon tried to pull me closer.
He held his breath. I felt it immediately.
The physical therapist in me woke with enough force to tear through the rest of the fog.
I pulled my face back, bracing against his good shoulder and the side of the bed to keep from falling against him.
“Stop,” I said, voice hoarse, not knowing if I was commanding him or myself. “Damon, stop.”
He opened his eyes—dark, mouth wet, body still leaning toward me. For a second, I saw frustration hit him almost like pain. Then reason returned, or at least the part of him that could understand I wasn't rejecting the desire but preventing a worse injury. That didn't make the retreat any easier.
“Noah.”
“No,” I replied, getting off the bed carefully and forcing myself to stand before I crawled back of my own free will. “You felt pain. Don't try to lie. And I'm not doing this with you injured, under my responsibility, in a room where I should be evaluating your shoulder.”
“You think this is just responsibility?” he asked, voice low, almost wounded beneath the anger. “Because I was here. I felt you.”
“That's exactly why I'm stopping,” I said, picking up the wrap that had fallen on the bed, though my hands didn't seem as steady as I wanted. “If I stay, I won't be able to pretend it's control. And I need control right now, for both of us.”
The words landed in silence. Damon ran his right hand through his wet hair, breathing deeply, and I saw his effort not to turn frustration into cruelty.
It was new, that. Small, maybe. But new.
I replaced the wrap without looking at his mouth, adjusted it with careful fingers, and stepped back as soon as I finished.
He didn't try to pull me back. That obedience hurt almost as much as it would have if he'd tried.
When we finally turned off the main light, each of us in our own bed, the room didn’t feel any safer.
The darkness blurred the shapes but amplified everything else: Damon’s breathing, the soft creak of the mattress as he tried to find a comfortable position for his shoulder, the heat that still seemed trapped in my mouth.
I lay on my back, staring at the invisible ceiling, too aware of the small distance between the beds and the fact that none of this had ended—only been postponed.
“Noah,” Damon said in the dark, after long minutes when neither of us could sleep.
“Sleep, Damon.”
“I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
I heard him move, turning slightly toward me, careful with the injury. I couldn’t see him clearly, just the shadow of his body against the faint light from the window. Still, I felt his gaze as if the room were bright.
“You can sleep easy,” he said, his voice low, rough, without the cruelty from before. “If I cross that line again, it’ll be because we both asked for it.”