She sank back into her chair. Pressed her palms against her eyes.
The silence in the office was suffocating. The room still smelled like Lex's deodorant and the clean soap scent that clung to her skin. The chair where Lex had been sitting was angled toward the desk, still holding the impression of her body, and Mara wanted to throw it through the window.
Goldie padded over and pressed her nose against Mara's knee and whined softly, and Mara reached down and held the dog's face between her hands and stared into those patient brown eyes and felt like the worst version of herself she'd ever been.
She'd done the right thing. The boundary existed for a reason. The power dynamic was real. The potential consequences were career-ending. Everything she'd said to Lex was true.
But the way Lex had looked at her. The sharpness in those dark eyes. The flash of understanding, of recognition that there was a story behind the fortress, a wound that explained the siege mentality. Lex had seen it. Lex always saw everything, and the thought of Lex knowing, even partially, what Mara was carrying made her feel more exposed than the kiss had.
Practice was brutal.
Mara ran the team harder than she had in weeks. Transition drills at full speed, no puck-tracking breaks, minimal water stops. She pushed the defensive cycles faster, demanded sharper reads on the neutral zone entries, called corrections with a volume and intensity that made the assistants exchange glances behind her back. The edge in her own voice was sharp enough to cut, the barely contained fury coloring every instruction, and the players could hear it too. They were working harder to compensate, the way teams always did when they sensed their coach was carrying her own turmoil onto the ice. It wasn't fair to them. She didn't care. The only alternative was stopping, and stopping meant standing still behind the boards with nothing to occupy her brain except the memory of Lex's mouth on hers and the impossible softness of Lex's lips and the sound Mara had made, that helpless, aching sound that had come from a place she'd sealed shut so long ago.
She was punishing herself through the proxy of the team. She knew it. She couldn't stop.
Lex was everywhere. On the ice, in Mara's peripheral vision, in the sharp awareness that tracked Lex's position the way a compass tracked north. Every stride Lex took registered in Mara's consciousness like a pulse. The flex of her thighs on crossovers. The spray of ice when she stopped. Her compression top clinging to the muscles of her back, dark with sweat, the ink on her arms slick and glistening under the arena lights. Mara'sbody remembered the heat of those arms, the strength of those hands, and her brain screamed at her body to shut up.
Lex played within the system for the first twenty minutes with the mechanical obedience of someone following orders they disagreed with. Her positioning was correct. Her coverage was clean. Her passes were crisp and accurate and completely devoid of the creative spark that made her electric. She was a machine. Technically proficient, emotionally vacant. Playing the system because she'd been told to, not because she believed in it.
Then the switch flipped.
Halfway through the second period drill, Lex broke. She abandoned a cycle play, drove through the neutral zone with the explosive speed that made scouts salivate, deked past two defensemen with a move that was half field hockey and half pure inspiration, and ripped a shot that hit the crossbar with a sound like a gunshot. The rink echoed with the impact. Every player on the ice stopped moving.
Mara's whistle stayed in her pocket. She stood behind the boards and watched Lex skate back to her position with her jaw set and her dark eyes blazing, and she understood exactly what Lex was doing. The rogue play wasn't defiance. It wasn't arrogance. It was communication. Lex was sayingYou don't get to shut me down. Not on the ice. Not anywhere.
Lex went rogue twice more. Each play was more brilliant than the last. A no-look backhand pass to Camille that resulted in a goal so beautiful it made Frankie swear in admiration. A defensive read so sharp that Lex intercepted a cross-ice pass and turned it into a breakaway that left Dani no chance. She was playing like a woman on fire, talent unleashed and uncontained, and every play was a message aimed directly at Mara.
You want me in a box? Watch what happens when I get out of it.
Mara ran her extra hard. Extended the drill sets by five minutes, shortened the rest periods, demanded more reps from Lex's line than any other group on the ice. Lex's line ran the neutral zone transition drill eight times while every other group ran four. It was petty. She knew it was petty. She was using her authority as a coach to process an emotional reaction that had nothing to do with coaching, and the shame of it burned in her chest alongside the desire she was trying to smother.
Lex took every punishment without complaint. She skated every extra rep, ran every extended drill, absorbed every correction without a word of argument. When Mara demanded another set of defensive zone breakouts from Lex's line while the rest of the team stretched, Lex's linemates shot looks at each other but Lex just tapped her stick on the ice and said "Let's go" and skated back into position.
Her body was soaked with sweat by the end, her hair stuck to her neck in wet strands, her chest heaving, her face flushed and glistening under the overhead lights. She looked exhausted and defiant and heartbreakingly beautiful, and the combination of all three made Mara's chest ache with a wanting so fierce it frightened her. She wanted to yell at Lex. She wanted to kiss her. She wanted Lex to stop being so beautiful when she was sweating and angry. She wanted to go home and never come back.
Practice ended. The whistle echoed across the empty upper bowl of the arena and died in the high ceiling. The team filed off the ice in the heavy silence that followed sessions where the coach had been too intense and everyone knew it. Camille gave Mara a long look as she passed, those sharp French-Canadian eyes reading Mara with an intelligence that was disconcerting. Lou paused at the boards and said, quietly, "Everything okay, Coach?" and Mara said "Fine" and Lou nodded and said nothing else, because Lou was a captain who knew when not to push.
Mara stood behind the empty bench in the silent arena and gripped the boards and replayed the kiss for the thousandth time. Lex's mouth. Lex's hands. The sound Mara had made when Lex's tongue brushed her lower lip, that desperate, aching gasp that had come from a place inside her she'd locked away so long ago she'd forgotten what it held.
She pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the boards and closed her eyes. The ice was scarred with blade marks from practice, the surface rough and crosshatched, nothing like the pristine sheet that would be laid down for the next game. Damaged. Torn up. But it would be resurfaced. The Zamboni would come and the hot water would fill the cuts and the ice would freeze smooth again and by game time no one would be able to tell it had ever been marred.
She wished she could do the same to herself.
The right thing. She'd done the right thing.
She kept telling herself that all the way home, through the shower that scalded her skin and did nothing to wash away the memory of Lex's mouth, through the microwave dinner she didn't taste, through the hours she spent on the couch with Goldie's head in her lap, staring at the television without processing a single image on the screen.
Her phone sat on the coffee table. She looked at it eleven times. She did not pick it up. She did not text Lex. She picked it up once, found Helen's contact, and set it back down. She didn't have words for this one yet, not even for Helen. She sat in the quiet house with the ocean breathing outside and the dog warm against her thigh and the taste of coffee and surrender lingering on her lips, and she told herself she'd done the right thing. The safe thing. The disciplined, controlled, responsible thing.
The loneliest thing she'd ever done.
She went to bed at midnight. Stared at the ceiling. Pressed her fingers against her own mouth and felt the ghost of Lex's kissand the ghost of her own stupid, desperate response, and she closed her eyes and wished she were someone braver. Someone who could look at what she wanted and reach for it without tallying the cost. Someone who could let go.
She was not that person. She had never been that person.
But for one searing, unguarded minute, she had been. And she could not stop thinking about what it would feel like to be that person again.
14
