"Not bad," Mara said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Not bad at all."
Lex reached over the boards, grabbed Mara by the waist, and lifted her.
It happened so fast that Mara's brain lagged behind her body by a full second. Her feet left the ground. Lex's arms were around her, one beneath her thighs and one around her back, and she was in the air, and Lex was laughing, and the crowd was roaring, and teammates were slamming into themfrom all sides, gloves clapping against Lex's shoulders and sticks tapping the boards. Someone was screaming. Frankie, definitely. Frankie was always screaming. "I BLOCKED A SLAP SHOT WITH MY SHIN AND WE WON! SOMEBODY CALL MY MOM! SOMEBODY CALL EVERYONE'S MOM!"
Mara's hands landed on Lex's shoulders. Through the jersey, through the pads, Lex's body was heat and coiled power, the muscles holding her up without effort. Lex's face was inches from hers, flushed and exhilarated and painfully beautiful, dark eyes burning with a fire that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the woman in her arms. Lex's grin was wide and unguarded and she carried sweat, cold air, the sharp salt of exertion, and Mara's body responded with a violence that stole her breath. Warmth rushing through her core. Pulse slamming against her ribs. A rush of desire so intense it bordered on vertigo.
"Put me down," Mara said. The words were barely audible over the crowd and her voice was shaking and she did not want to be put down. She wanted to stay in Lex's arms with those dark eyes looking up at her and the heat of Lex's body soaking through her coaching jacket and the delirious roar of the crowd filling the air around them.
Lex set her down slowly. The slide of Mara's body against Lex's chest and arms lasted three seconds and each one was seared into Mara's nervous system. When her feet hit the rubber matting behind the bench, her knees buckled slightly and she caught herself on the boards. Her face was burning. Her heart was hammering. Lex was still grinning at her, close enough that the pulse in her throat was visible and the individual drops of sweat on her jaw.
"Go celebrate with your team," Mara said, and pushed her gently toward the ice.
Lex went, skating backward, watching Mara for three strides before turning and joining the mob of players at center ice. Camille crashed into her, wrapping both arms around Lex's neck and screaming in French. Frankie climbed on her back. Lou was standing apart with her arms crossed and a rare smile splitting her face, and even Elise was laughing, her composed exterior cracked open by the sheer weight of the moment. Rowan Pike was jumping up and down near the blue line, her stick raised above her head, looking at Lex with what could only be called adoration. Mara understood the impulse perfectly and was trying very hard not to.
Mara gripped the boards and breathed. Her whole body was thrumming. The ghost of Lex's arms was still imprinted on her waist and back, phantom warmth that wouldn't fade. The press of Lex's chest against hers still lingered, the strength in those shoulders, the casual, effortless way Lex had lifted her like she weighed nothing.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
She excused herself from the bench before the media arrived. Told her assistant coach she had a call to make and retreated to her office, where Goldie greeted her with a tail that recognized distress better than any human ever had. Mara closed the door, sank into her chair, and pressed her palms against her eyes until the afterimages of Lex's face faded.
She pulled out her phone and texted Helen.Can you do a video call tonight?
The response came in forty seconds.I have twenty minutes at nine. Setting up now.
Mara waited. She drank water. She rubbed Goldie's ears. She listened to the muffled sounds of celebration drifting throughthe corridor from the locker room, voices and laughter and someone's speaker blasting music that rattled through the walls. Camille's laugh, musical and carrying. Frankie shouting about champagne. The thud of gloves being thrown against locker stalls. The sounds of a team that was learning what winning felt like, and Mara should have been in there with them, should have been celebrating what they'd built tonight, but she was hiding in her office because a woman had lifted her off her feet and her body had responded as if it had been waiting for exactly that touch for twenty years.
Her hands would not stop trembling.
At nine o'clock she opened her laptop and connected to Helen's link. Helen appeared on screen in her home office, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, a mug of tea in her hands.
"You won," Helen said. "I saw the score."
"We won. Lex scored the winning goal. Well, she set it up. Camille finished it." Mara's hands were restless on the desk, shuffling papers that didn't need shuffling.
"You don't sound like someone who just won a game."
Mara exhaled. "She picked me up." The words came out flat, drained of the panic that had fueled them an hour ago.
Helen's eyebrows rose. "Picked you up?"
"After the goal. She skated to the bench and lifted me off my feet in front of ten thousand people and the entire team and I stood there in her arms and felt like I was going to come apart." The words tumbled out hot and fast. "My body reacted faster than my brain. Everything I've been pushing down for weeks, all the discipline and the walls and the professional distance, it all disappeared the second she put her hands on me. I was three inches from her face and I wanted to kiss her so badly I couldn't breathe."
Helen set her tea down carefully. "What did you do?"
"I told her to put me down. She did. I came back here."
"And how are you feeling now?"
"Terrified." Mara pressed her fist against her sternum. "You know where my head goes. Sara. The power dynamic. All of it."
"I do. And we've covered that ground." Helen leaned forward, closer to the camera. "So tonight I want to try a different question. Not whether you should act on your feelings. Whether you can afford not to."
"That's the same question."
"It isn't. You keep asking what happens if you cross the line. I'm asking what happens if you spend the next twenty years on the other side of it." Helen's voice was careful but direct. "You've built a life that's entirely defined by hockey. That's a remarkable achievement. It's also, Mara, a very lonely one."
The wordlonelylanded in her chest and stayed. She thought about her house. The quiet kitchen. The empty bedroom. Goldie's collar jingling in the hallway at two in the morning, the only sound in a life she'd designed for maximum control and minimum vulnerability.
