Careful, Rosedale. Your actual personality is showing.
Coach Mercer skates to center ice.
"You three ready?"
We nod.
Mae turns to Archie. "Do you want to lead? You have the hockey IQ. You know the formations better than either of us."
He considers it. His sports goggles reflect the overhead lights, the lenses creating a barrier between his green eyes and the world that is watching. Then his hands rise. His fingers grip the elastic strap. And in a single, decisive motion, he slides thegoggles off his face and perches them on top of his disheveled ginger hair.
"Nah," he says. "You lead."
The goggles are off.
And the man behind them is not the one this arena was prepared for.
"HOLY FUCKING SHIT, ARCHIE!"
Mae and I produce the exclamation simultaneously, our voices fusing into a single detonation of shock that carries enough volume to momentarily silence the ambient arena noise. The synchronization is involuntary, the reaction genuine, because even though I have seen Archie's face without glasses in private, seeing it uncovered in public, under fluorescent lights, surrounded by people who have only ever encountered the masked version, transforms the experience from familiar to revelatory.
His cheekbones are sharp enough to file legal documents on. The freckles that scatter across his nose and jaw carry a distinction that corrective lenses somehow dimmed into harmlessness. His green eyes, unobstructed and fully visible, radiate an intensity that converts "quiet nerd in the back row" into "Alpha who has been hiding a weapon behind academic accessories for his entire adult life."
"You've got a handsome face?!" Mae blurts, gawking without the slightest pretense of subtlety.
And I lose my composure entirely.
"Holy shit!" I skate a full circle around him, my mouth open, my brain struggling to reconcile the private Archie I have been kissing with the public Archie who just revealed himself to an audience that includes his classmates, two hockey teams, and a coaching staff. "When did you get hot? When did this happen? Were you always this good-looking and just hiding it behind academic accessories?"
I know the answer to every one of these questions.
Yes. He was always this. The face I am currently performing shock at is the same face that hovered inches from mine in my bedroom and whispered Wildcard against my ear and grinned with dimples I wanted to press my thumbs into.
But the performance must continue. Because pretend you don't know me is a pact, and I honor my pacts even when they require me to fake surprise at a jawline I have already memorized from three angles and one very compromising distance.
His entire face turns the color of his hair. The blush spreads from his cheekbones to his ears to the freckled column of his neck with the comprehensive coverage of a man whose blood has redirected itself to his skin's surface in response to the attention of two Omegas who are openly cataloguing his bone structure.
"I'm putting these glasses back on and walking off the ice," he mutters, reaching for the goggles.
"NO!" Mae and I lunge simultaneously, each grabbing a wrist.
The contact is brief. My fingers close around the bones of his forearm, the tendons beneath his skin taut with the impulse to retreat, and the warmth that transfers from his body to my palm through the thin layer of his practice gear is so immediate and so loaded with associative memory that my hindbrain files an urgent request to hold on longer that my conscious mind firmly denies.
"Be our ally!" Mae insists. "Keep them off! The world deserves to see that face!"
And then she says it.
"In fact, be Sage's Alpha at this point, because damn. This dynamic is incredible."
I whip toward her so fast my skates carve a spray of ice shavings that peppers Archie's shins.
"MAE! Do not go setting me up! I am not in the market! I am closed for business! The shop is shuttered!"
The shop is not shuttered. The shop has been conducting extremely active business with this specific customer in private for the past two weeks. But the shop's public-facing signage reads CLOSED because the shop's proprietor made a pact with the customer to pretend they have never met, and the shop is honoring that pact with the desperate commitment of a woman whose blush is currently threatening to betray everything.
Mae shrugs, unfazed. "Somebody has to do it in Jace's absence. He would approve. He's probably manifesting this exact scenario from your flooded dorm right now."
Archie looks like he wants the ice to split open and consume him.
