"Good hit." Camille's voice was carefully neutral now, all the earlier challenge stripped away. "I'll adjust."
"See that you do."
The whistle blew again, and they separated—Lou to her position on the blue line, Camille to reform with the forwards. The distance between them felt simultaneously too far and not nearly far enough.
Practice continued for another forty-five minutes, but Lou barely registered the drills. Her body moved on autopilot, years of muscle memory carrying her through defensive positioning and puck battles while her mind circled back again and again to those few seconds on the ice.
The weight of Camille's body against hers. The way her thigh had pressed between Lou's legs. The blue of her eyes, so close Lou could have counted every shade of color in them. The heat that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with a reaction Lou desperately didn't want to have.
She missed a pass from Elise—something that hadn't happened in years—and had to chase it down while Mara's disapproving stare burned into her back. She was distracted. Unfocused. Exactly the kind of player she'd spent her career refusing to be.
This was a disaster.
She couldn't be attracted to Camille Laurent-Dubois. Not to the tabloid princess who'd spent two years dating an NBA superstar for the cameras. Not to the high-profile signing who'd turned their locker room into a potential media circus. Not to anyone, really—Lou had learned years ago that wanting people was a vulnerability she couldn't afford.
The lesson had come early and often. Her first girlfriend in college, who'd left when the pressure of hiding got too heavy. The teammate she'd kissed at a championship party, who'd pretended the next day that nothing had happened.The slow, grinding realization that being visible as a queer woman in professional sports meant either performing straightness or accepting a kind of isolation that made intimacy feel impossible. She knew it didn’t have to be like that in Phoenix Ridge, yet somehow, for her, it was still like that.
So Lou had stopped wanting. Stopped noticing. Stopped letting herself feel anything that might crack open the careful armor she'd built around her heart.
And now Camille Laurent-Dubois had crashed into her life, literally, physically crashed into her, and all that careful control felt ready to crumble.
Wanting people meant giving them power over you, and power meant the possibility of being broken.
But her body wasn't listening to reason.
Every time Camille skated past, Lou's pulse kicked up. Every time their eyes met across the rink, something hot and dangerous flickered in her chest. She catalogued it all—the way Camille's jersey shifted against her body during crossovers, the flex of her thighs as she decelerated, the unconscious grace of movements that came from a lifetime of elite athletics.
By the time Mara called an end to practice, Lou's jaw ached from clenching.
"Good session." Frankie appeared at her elbow, stick balanced across her shoulders in that easy way she had. "That hit on Laurent-Dubois was clean. She didn't seem to mind."
"It was a standard check."
"Uh-huh." Frankie's tone carried a note of amusement that Lou didn't appreciate. "You always stare at players you've standard-checked for ten seconds after you've both gotten up?"
Lou's face heated. "I wasn't staring."
"Sure." Frankie's grin widened. "My mistake."
She skated off toward the tunnel, leaving Lou alone on the ice with the echo of her own heartbeat and the uncomfortable certainty that nothing about this situation was going to be simple.
The arena felt too quiet suddenly. Most of the team had already filtered into the locker room, their voices fading into the concrete corridors. Lou stood on the ice she'd called home for nine years, surrounded by boards that bore the scars of a thousand practices, and let herself feel the full weight of what she was afraid was happening.
Camille was a distraction. A complication. Exactly the kind of problem Lou had spent her entire career avoiding. She was tabloid headlines and paparazzi cameras and the kind of high-profile disaster that could destroy not just Lou's focus but the entire team's chances at qualification.
And she was also soft skin and defiant beauty and a competitive fire that matched Lou's own. She was the way her body had pressed against Lou's in those frozen seconds on the ice. She was the unexpected sharpness in her voice when she'd pushed back against Lou's dismissal, refusing to be cowed.
Lou pressed her gloved hand against the cool surface of the boards, letting the familiar texture ground her. This was her rink. Her team. Her shot at something she'd spent nine years earning the right to dream about.
She couldn't afford to want Camille Laurent-Dubois.
But as she finally turned and skated toward the tunnel, her muscles aching and her mind still circling back to those blue eyes, she was terrified that wanting wasn't something she could simply choose.
6
The rink was quiet in a way it rarely was during daylight hours.
Lou sat on the bench in front of her locker, methodically working tape off her stick blade while the last echoes of practice faded into silence. The smell of the locker room was different at this hour—less sweat and effort, more cleaning solution and the mineral scent of arena ice drifting through the vents. The fluorescent lights cast their familiar harsh glare over worn benches and scarred lockers, shadows pooling in corners where the bulbs had burned out months ago and no one had bothered to replace them.
