She turned the phone over in her hands, staring at the dark screen, and thought about what it would feel like to peel that armor away, layer by layer, until Mara stood in front of her unprotected and trusting and wanted. The image filled her with a heat that was equal parts desire and tenderness, and the combination was so far from anything she'd felt before that it scared her almost as much as it excited her.
She set the phone on the coffee table. Closed her eyes. Listened to Elise moving around the kitchen and the distant sound of the ocean through the open window.
She could wait. She'd never been good at it. Patience had never been part of her skill set. She attacked, she pushed, she charged forward with the same explosive energy that made her unstoppable on the ice. But this wasn't the ice. This was Mara. And Mara was worth learning a new way of moving.
She could wait. For Mara, she could learn.
15
The gym was empty at eleven o'clock at night.
Mara liked it this way. The arena was locked down, the maintenance staff gone, the corridors dark except for the emergency strips along the baseboards. The gym lights were on their dim setting, casting a warm amber glow over the equipment. She was alone with the weights and the cable machines and the rubber smell of mats and the distant hum of the ice plant running its overnight cycle, and for the first time all day, she could breathe.
She'd changed into workout clothes she kept in her office. Leggings, a fitted long-sleeve compression top, running shoes. Her hair was down, loose around her shoulders, the ponytail abandoned along with the pretense that she was here for any reason other than exhaustion and the inability to sit still in her empty house with Lex's kiss burning on her lips for the fourth consecutive night.
Four nights since the kiss. Four nights of not sleeping. Four nights of replaying the way Lex had leaned down and whisperedTell me to stopand the way Mara's body had chosen silenceover refusal, chosen want over safety, chosen the worst possible answer by giving no answer at all.
She'd told Lex it was a mistake. She'd delivered the speech. She'd run Lex into the ground at practice and maintained professional distance through two more sessions and a game day where she'd spent three periods behind the bench conscious of Lex's every movement, every stride, every explosive burst of speed that sent her ponytail flying and her muscles working under the jersey in ways that made Mara's hands tighten on the boards until her knuckles went white.
The professional distance was holding. On the surface.
Underneath, she was coming apart.
She loaded the barbell and started deadlifts. The weight was heavy enough to demand focus, heavy enough to fill her head with anything other than the memory of Lex's mouth. The bar bit into her palms and her hamstrings burned and her core engaged with the familiar, grounding discipline of a body working against gravity. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth and counted reps and felt the sweat begin to prick along her hairline. The mirror on the far wall reflected her form back to her, and she checked her form with the critical eye she brought to everything, checking her posture, her spine alignment, her hip hinge. Good form. Controlled movement. At least her body still listened to her even when her mind had gone rogue.
Eight reps. Rest. Eight more. Rest. The rhythm sank into her bones, mechanical and meditative. The gym carried rubber, cold metal, the faint cedar of the new building's construction. She could hear her own breathing and the clink of the barbell in its cradle and nothing else. The silence was enormous. Peaceful. Safe.
The "mistake" speech had been the right call. She'd stood in her office and said the words and meant them, and everyday since she'd reinforced them with punishing practices and a schedule packed tight enough that there was no room to think. The strategy was sound. The problem was her body, which had stopped cooperating around day two and decided that replaying the office kiss was more productive than sleep. The problem was that after four nights, the word "mistake" no longer felt like a fact. It felt like a lie she was telling herself on repeat, and she was running out of conviction.
She was finishing her third set when the gym door opened.
The sound was quiet. The soft click of a latch, the whisper of the door swinging on its hinges. Mara straightened from the bar and turned, and the air left her lungs.
Lex stood in the doorway.
She was in workout clothes. Black joggers low on her hips, a cropped tank that showed her stomach and the ink that wrapped around her left ribcage, bare feet in slides. Her dark hair was loose, falling past her shoulders in the thick, slightly wavy mess that meant she'd showered after practice and let it dry naturally. The amber gym lights caught the tattoos on her arms, the definition of her collarbones, the flat crop. None of it was new. Mara had watched all of it at a hundred practices.
But four days of locked-down distance collapsed the moment Lex crossed that threshold, and Mara's body responded with a violence that erased every rational argument she'd assembled.
"What are you doing here?" Mara's voice came out rough. Not angry. Wrecked.
Lex stepped into the gym. The door closed behind her. "Same thing you are. Can't sleep."
"It's eleven o'clock at night." Mara's grip tightened on the barbell behind her.
"Is there a curfew?" Lex walked toward her, slowly, each step deliberate, her dark eyes locked on Mara's face with an intensity that made the gym feel very small. She stopped six feet away.Close enough to see. Not close enough to touch. The distance felt calculated.
"Mara." Lex's voice was low and serious, stripped of the cockiness she wore during the day. "We need to talk about what's happening between us."
"Nothing is happening between us." The lie tasted sour on her tongue.
"You're lying. You know you're lying. I know you're lying. You kissed me back in your office with everything you had and then you spent four days punishing me for it because you're scared of what it means."
"I'm not scared."
"You're terrified. And I understand why. I know there's a history you haven't told me everything about, something that happened before, something that made you build every wall you have twice as high. I know the power dynamic scares you. I know you think this will destroy your career and everything you've worked for and everything the team has built. But I need you to hear me." Lex took another step. Five feet now. Four. The amber light caught the angles of her face and the dark ink on her arms and the determined set of her jaw, and she looked like a woman who had thought about this, who had chosen her words, who was standing in this gym at eleven o'clock at night because she couldn't stay away any more than Mara could quit wanting her to show up. "This isn't a game to me. This isn't a conquest. I'm not chasing you because you're hard to get or because the tension is exciting or because I want to prove I can break through your walls. I want you because of who you are. Because you're brilliant and fierce and you care about your players and your sport more than anyone I've ever met. Because you told me about how scared you were years ago fighting to prove yourself and I want to go back all those years and sit with you and tell you that you were going to be magnificent."
Mara's throat closed. Her eyes burned. The barbell was forgotten, the workout abandoned, and she was standing in the amber light of an empty gym at eleven o'clock at night listening to a woman she wanted so badly it hurt tell her exactly what she needed to hear in exactly the words she needed to hear it.
