"The new Omega just swayed Captain into giving her modified shit!"
"One pout! ONE POUT and he folded! We're all getting modified drills by next week!"
"Bro, she didn't even ask. She just LOOKED at him!"
The laughter and the bickering fill the rink with the chaotic warmth of a team that is bonding through the shared experience of watching its leadership structure reveal a structural weakness in its first five minutes of operation.
I groan. The sound carrying the specific frequency of a man who has accepted his fate and is now calculating the reputational damage of the next six weeks while the source of that damage stands beside him adjusting her helmet with thecasual innocence of a woman who does not fully comprehend the magnitude of the precedent she just set.
I take her hand.
The motion is automatic. My gloved fingers closing around her gloved fingers with the specific, non-negotiable grip of a captain who needs his player to move and has selected the most direct method of achieving locomotion.
"Come on." I pull her toward the boards where the lap route begins. "I don't want to get in any more trouble with you."
She matches my stride, her shorter legs working double-time to keep pace with my longer ones, her voice arriving at my ear with the defensive, blame-redistributing cadence that I am learning is her default response to consequences.
"Well, it's YOUR fault."
"How is this my fault?"
"You started the cuddling conversation!"
"I started the cuddling conversation?! You announced it to the entire team!"
"Because you DENIED it! And the denial was so bad it needed correcting!"
"Correcting?! You described our sleeping arrangement in forensic detail to fifteen Alphas who now think their captain is a spooning specialist!"
"Aww," the twins call from behind us, their voices arriving in stereo with the specific, weaponized sweetness of two men who are enjoying the chaos they helped create. "They're holding hands. How romantic."
We look down.
Our gloved hands. Still interlocked. The grip that I initiated as a practical measure for locomotion and that neither of us released during the twenty-second argument that followed, our fingers maintaining contact through an exchange that should have prompted separation but instead reinforced it, as if ourhands decided to opt out of the conflict their mouths were conducting.
We drop the grip simultaneously.
Both hands retracting to their respective owners with the frantic velocity of two people who have been caught in a physical arrangement they were not aware they were maintaining and are now overcorrecting with the subtlety of a building demolition.
Sage skates ahead.
Her stride aggressive, her arms swinging, her posture communicating the rigid determination of a woman who is going to complete these twenty laps at a pace that leaves her captain behind and proves that she does not need his hand to navigate a rink she has been skating since before he learned her name.
I let her go.
Watch her from behind as she rounds the first turn, her blades carving the ice with the rough, powerful edge work that Coach Mercer praised in his office and that my analytical brain praised in the scrimmage and that my hindbrain is currently praising for reasons that have nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the way her uniform moves when she skates and the way HOLLOWAY stretches across her shoulder blades and the way the number 55 sits on her back like a marker that tells the rest of the world this player is on my roster.
My roster.
Because I am the captain.
Of a Division Two hockey team that includes an Omega who sleepwalks into my bed and eats my pasta and makes me cereal and bickers with me at volumes that earn punishment drills and pouts at me with a lower lip that converts my discipline into a structural liability.
I lost Ronan's bet. The team did not need to vote. Coach Mercer appointed me directly, which means the conditions were technically met through administrative action ratherthan democratic process, but Ronan will argue that the outcome is what matters and the mechanism is irrelevant and he will be right because he is always right about the bets he designs and I am always wrong about the ones I accept.
Which means I owe Sage a date.
A date. With the woman who is currently skating her punishment laps twenty feet ahead of me, her navy-and-emerald hair streaming behind her beneath a helmet that does not fit, her jersey billowing in the self-generated wind, her legs pumping with the furious, beautiful, relentless energy of a competitor who converts every obstacle into fuel and every setback into velocity.
