He guides me into the locker room. The space is emptied, the team having completed their post-practice routines and vacated during the twenty minutes I spent performing wall-based film review in the corridor. The showers are in the rear section, separated from the main locker area by a tiled partition and a row of curtained stalls.
The twins' voices reach us from the corridor. Rowan asking where Archie is. Ronan echoing the inquiry.
"In the lockers," Archie calls back, his voice carrying through the open door. "But wait out there for a sec."
I pause at the shower entrance. "Are you sure it's okay to shower here?"
"Yes, Sage. Go shower."
I nod. Slip behind the curtain. Strip the gear, the jersey, the compression layers, the sports bra that has been performing structural engineering for five hours and has earned its retirement. The hot water arrives with the merciful, full-pressure delivery of institutional plumbing that has not been sabotaged by the dorm-flooding gods, the heat penetrating my muscles with a depth that converts the specific, burning tightness of post-practice fatigue into the looser, more manageable warmth of tissue being coaxed back toward functionality.
I start with my hair.
Bad decision.
The navy-and-emerald strands have absorbed five hours of sweat, arena moisture, and the specific, helmet-compressed styling that converts clean hair into a compacted, tangled mass that requires three rounds of shampoo and the patience of a woman defusing a bomb to work the product through each section without ripping strands from my scalp. The peppermint shampoo fills the shower stall with its cool, familiar fragrance, the scent layering over the steam and providing the olfactory grounding that my overstimulated senses require.
If I don't wash this now, it'll smell rank by the afternoon. And I have endured enough commentary about my scent from the Archer twins today to last a lifetime. I will not give any Alpha on this campus additional ammunition to suggest thatthe first Omega on the hockey team also possesses the hygiene standards of a man who considers deodorant optional.
I am mid-rinse, eyes closed, water cascading over my face, hands buried in the lather at the back of my skull, when the sound reaches me.
A huff. Low. Coming from the locker area beyond the shower partition.
I freeze.
The water continues its descent over my motionless body, but every muscle beneath my skin has engaged the specific, locked-joint tension that my nervous system produces when an unexpected sound occurs in a space I was told was secured.
Archie's voice follows the huff. A curse, quiet and sharp, the compressed profanity of a man who has encountered a situation he did not anticipate and is processing his response in real time.
Then a mutter, barely audible over the water: "These fuckers."
My shower curtain opens.
Not fully. An inch. Two. Just enough for his head to appear in the gap, his ginger hair still damp from his earlier shower, his green eyes finding mine with the focused urgency of a man whose priorities have been rearranged in the last three seconds.
His gaze lands on my face.
Holds there.
I can see the moment his peripheral vision registers the rest of me. The naked rest of me, standing beneath a running shower with soap in my hair and water tracking paths across skin that is now fully, comprehensively visible to a man who has been operating on the other side of a curtain barrier that his hand just breached. His face ignites. Red from the jaw upward, the blush competing with his freckles for coverage, his eyes widening before he forcibly redirects them to the ceiling.
"Fuck." The curse is breathed rather than spoken. He closes the curtain. "Don't say a fucking word for ten seconds."
The captain tone. The specific, command-grade cadence that his voice adopts when his authority is not a performance but a necessity, the register that overrides my natural defiance and converts my mouth from an argument factory into a closed facility.
I obey.
Through the curtain, sounds reach me in fragments. Movement in the locker area. The twins' voices, raised and argumentative, their stereo cadence carrying an edge that I have not heard from them before. Not playful. Tense. The specific, clipped rhythm of men who are handling a situation that requires management rather than banter.
The curtain opens again.
Archie slides in.
He is naked. The clinical fact registering in my brain with the delayed-fuse processing of a woman whose cognitive bandwidth is currently allocated to the more urgent task of understanding why the man who was guarding the locker room door is now standing in her shower stall with an expression that has nothing to do with the body she is seeing for the first time and everything to do with a threat she cannot yet identify.
His lean frame fills the stall with a proximity that eliminates the concept of personal space. The water splits between us, some hitting his shoulders and redirecting down his chest, the rest continuing its path over mine. The steam thickens with the combined heat of two bodies and the merging of two scent profiles, cedarwood and peppermint intertwining in the enclosed space with a density that makes the air feel solid.
"Whatever you do, don't make a fucking noise until I tell you." His eyes are on mine. Green. Steady. Carrying an intensitythat I recognize from the locker room where I found him with bleeding knuckles and a tear on his cheek. "Yes?"
