Before she can speak, I push through the nearest door, one of the unused storage rooms. It’s dark, quiet, walls lined with spare equipment. I kick the door shut, the sound echoing finality.
And then it’s just us.
I press her back against the wall, my hands bracing on either side of her head. Her breath comes fast, her chest rising and falling beneath my number. For a long moment, I just look at her, the flush on her cheeks, the way her lips part, the way she trembles and doesn’t pull away.
When I finally move, it’s slow, deliberate. My forehead rests against hers, my breath mixing with hers. My voice is rough when I whisper. “You wore me tonight.”
She nods, barely, her lips brushing mine as she exhales. “I did.”
That’s all I need.
My mouth claims hers, not with violence but with hunger. It’s a kiss that’s been building since the first time I caught her watching me, since the first time I touched her in the shadows. It’s deep, aching, and when she moans softly into me, it’s like gasoline on fire.
Her hands clutch at my jersey, pulling me closer, as if there’s any space left between us. Every kiss is a vow, every brush of her lips a promise. This isn’t just an obsession anymore. It’s the beginning of something neither of us can walk away from.
When I finally pull back, our lips barely part, I whisper against her mouth. “You belong to me.”
And this time, she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t argue. She whispers back, soft but certain. “I know.”
Chapter Ten
Sammie
The door to the storage room clicked shut behind me with the softest sound, and somehow it felt louder than the horn that ended the game. I walked the back hall with my fingertips grazing the cinderblock because my body needed something solid to argue with. Every nerve still hums where Triston’s mouth had found mine—as if he’d written his name on the inside of my lips and the ink hadn’t dried.
I kept my head down, kept moving, but the world had tilted a few degrees. The hall lights were too bright, the air too thin. I caught a flash of my reflection in a trophy case as I cut past the lobby. My hair mussed, cheeks high with color, jersey hangingon me like it had always fit.Hisnumber stretched across my back. My face was a secret I could barely look in the eye.
Wayne’s voice rolled from somewhere near the main doors, low, familiar. Speaking with a trainer about a tight hamstring and a bus schedule. I pause behind a pillar until the conversation moves. I can’t walk straight into my father with this heat still burning along my mouth.
My phone vibrates once. I don’t have to check to know it is him. The buzz slides through me like a spark finding kindling.
You should have let me keep you.
Just words. Just shapes on a screen. But my breath staggers. For a second, the corridor fades and only the press of him existed. The wall against my spine, the rough scrape of paint, the steady bracket of his hands caging my head and somehow holding me together. The kiss had been a claim and a benediction at once. He hadn’t rushed; he’d taken his time like I was the only clock he intended to consult.
I type with my thumb, my hand stupidly unsteady.
We can’t.
The dots came up and vanished. Then:
We will.
It should have made me angry, the confidence, the certainty he wore like a second skin. Instead the conviction steadied something that has been trembling since last Halloween. It wasn’t that my fear vanished; it was organized. It put its back against the door and crossed its arms and said:Then if this happens, it happens in light you can stand in. It happens with your eyes open.
I tuck the phone away, cross the lobby slowly, and slip out past a cluster of fans waiting by the rail for autographs. A couple of rookies trot by in suits and damp hair, laughing, oblivious. An usher props the outer door with his hip and whistles tunelessly at the night. I hug myself and feel the stitched letters of KNIGHT press into my palm through the fabric. It was like being branded in reverse: not skin seared, but heart marked.
Outside, the cold has teeth. Frost twines along the handrail and laces the cars in the lot like spider-work. The breath in my chest comes out white and visible, proof I exist in this world. The parking lot lamps throw long cones onto the asphalt. In the far cone, a figure leans in the shadow between two trucks.
He doesn’t call my name. He doesn’t have to. There’s a pressure to the air when Triston is near, a subtle shift like weather. I could pretend not to see. But I move toward him anyway, drawn like a tide to the moon, annoyed at myself for being a body that obeys old laws.
He stayed put until I reached the edge of the light. Then he steps forward without hurry, like a man who never doubts that the ground will rise to meet him. His eyes skim my face and pause at my mouth. The corner of his own lifts as if memory was a taste.
“You should be inside.” I said, because normal sentences were all I had left to hold onto.
“I am inside.” He said, tipping his head toward the building behind me, as if the rink and I were the same thing.
It was nothing. It was everything. I swallowed and looked at the glow spilling from the glass doors. If Wayne turned and saw me here, jersey half-hidden under my coat, hair a little wrecked with victory that had nothing to do with the scoreboard.
