I didn’t.
God help me, I didn’t.
The longer I worked, the more his body relaxed. Breathing steadied. Slowed to the point where it felt like the room itself was breathing with him. I registered the tiny drop in weight as he drifted off, and softened my touch to glide my palms over the natural curve of the muscles in his back.
I kept moving to avoid startling him out of his sleep, easing off in increments until my hands fell to my sides. His frame slackened completely, and I stood there for a beat. Just looking at him. At the broad sweep of his shoulders rising and falling, the exhaustion and pain carved into lines that were never on display when he performed for the crowd.
I’d called him an idiot a few times. Said that hiding his injury was a reckless move that could’ve ended his career. But now, standing here like this, I was beginning to wonder what it said about me that I’d agreed to keep his secret. Complicit? Selfish?
His future on the ice. My job. Our problems were tangled so tightly I couldn’t undo one without unraveling the other.
Which didn’t make my actions any better than his.
The room felt too warm all of a sudden. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that made it impossible to pretend the stakes weren’t shifting under our feet.
His phone buzzed, reality barging back in. Theo startled awake with a small inhale that tightened his shoulders.
He blinked a few times, voice coming out all gravely and thick with sleep. “Did I—?”
“You did.”
He pushed himself upright, palms braced on the table as he took a second to get his bearings. His hair was a mess, flattened on one side, sticking up on the other, and damp from the heat of the massage. The flush that clung to his cheekbones made me look away.
I remembered my half-packed kit bag and went back over to it now, urgently rearranging the contents in a random pouch. “How, uh, how does it feel?”
He pulled his shirt on, carefully rolling the joint as if to test it. “It’s the first time in I don’t know how long that it doesn’t feel like I have a searing hot blade stuck in me.”
“Good.”
Another buzz, and this time he groaned as he reached for it. “Probably Hunter, wondering why I’m late for the movie.”
I watched him shoot through a quick text, and slide his phone back into his pocket as he slid off the table.
“What did you tell him?” I asked, already nervous about this whole ass lie we were gonna have to keep covering up.
“The truth. That I fell asleep taking my dog to the vet.” This time when he shrugged, both shoulders came to the party. A spark of pride fluttered in my chest at that.
“You need to leave before your stupid jokes send me into a coma,” I said with a laugh. Relieved. But a little bummed to watch him do exactly as I said.
This was it. There would be no backtracking or coming clean. Not without ruining everything we’d both worked for.
So later, when I handed van der Berg my report for the upcoming match, it marked all players fit to play.
7
Theo
Ear-splitting yips and howls met me in the locker room in the moments before our first playoff game. The guys were practically chomping at the bit to get out there and strangely enough, I wasn’t filled with the same dread that had followed me all season.
“You know what I love most about coyotes?” Landon threw his arm around my shoulder like we were old friends. I only flinched a little, the painkillers already doing their job.
“They’re fluffy?”
“They haul ass when they see a surge coming.” He threw his head back and let rip with another howl that shook the locker room.
The guys upped the racket, banging sticks on lockers and stomping until it felt like my pulse had been hijacked. It had been so long, I didn’t think I could get swept up in the pre-game adrenaline anymore. Yet, here I was.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Hunter said, coming over to me at my locker. “But the kid’s growing on me.”
