“Because heis!” Connor insists.
“Jesus Christ.” Coach rubs his temple. “Anyway: clean it up.”
Then he turns to Beau.
“And you,” Coach says, voice softening by a molecule. “Good minutes. No heroics. Proud of you.”
Coming from Coach, that’s the equivalent of a damn gold medal, and Beau nods once.
That’s all he gives, and my shoulders sag in relief. He doesn't call me out for the fighting. That's... something.
Marco pounds his fists against his thighs like a drum.
“Come on, boys: next stop,playoffs.”
“Easy,” I say. “Let’s win four in a row first.”
“Let me believe, Theo!”
Someone throws a towel at him, and the room dissolves again into the same tangled collage of laughter and swearing and steam and noise.
I bend down to unlace my skates, letting my breathing settle, and letting the high from the game come down slowly. Beau sits at the end of the bench tying off the last piece of tape around his wrist, and for once, it looks as though his shoulders aren’t carrying the whole world.
We’re loud, we’re lucky, and we’re whole.
And, most importantly:we won.
.
Chapter Sixteen
Emery
The house is dark when we get in.
Not silent—Beau’s boots thud, and my pulse is doing its own Olympic routine—but it’s still dark enough that it feels softer than the arena, the bus, the tunnel, the crowd. Softer than the fifty-eight minutes spent packed elbow-to-rib with a group of hyped-up alphas in an enclosed metal tube, and certainly softer than the fifteen minutes spent in the truck afterward, where neither of us talked much.
It wasn’t necessarily abadsilence, though.
Beau unlocks the door and steps inside first, shaking off a thin sheet of frost from the walk to the porch. The truck had been frozen stiff when we left the Icebox, and he’d scraped the windshield with the edge of a credit card because the scraper was missing. We’d sat in the cab breathing clouds of our own heat until the vents finally wheezed to life, and though we didn’t say much, I kind of felt like we didn’t need to.
Something in him had been humming, loud and alpha and bright from the win, and every instinct in me said:do not poke this.
Even if the air between usdidfeel electric.
He flicks on the main light, filling the entryway with warm orange glow. It’s a huge relief after hours of fluorescent misery, and I close the door behind us and toe off my boots.
“Good game,” I say, because anything louder feels like it might break the moment.
“Yeah,” Beau answers.
That’s all he says, but I swear, his tone is almost warm.
He’s still riding the high from the win. I can see it on him: the way his shoulders sit lower and his jaw is less set. Even his scent is different; not sharp steel or cold air, but having deepened into something heavier and steadier, something borderline dangerous.
And something an omega shouldnotbreathe too much of if she wants to remain upright.
It coils around me anyway as he pulls off his beanie, his dark curls rumpled from the heat of the game, frost melting at his temples.
