Mara didn't stop. She gripped Lex's thighs and held on and kept her mouth moving and felt Lex's body tighten above her like a bowstring drawn to its limit.
Lex came hard. Her whole body seized, her back arching, a raw, broken sound tearing from her throat as the orgasm ripped through her. She ground down against Mara's mouth and Mara tasted her release, warm and salt-sweet, and kept her mouth gentle through the aftershocks, easing Lex down with soft, slow strokes until the trembling subsided.
Lex collapsed beside her on the bed, boneless and gasping, her dark hair splayed across the pillow, her body still shaking with aftershocks. They lay there in the tangle of soaked sheets, both breathing hard, both flushed and trembling and spent. Goldie, who had slept through the entire thing from the other bed, raised her head and yawned and settled back down with the serene indifference of a creature unburdened by human complications. The morning light had shifted from gold to white, the sun climbing higher beyond the curtains, and the room was thick with sex, sweat, the warm clean scent of Lex's skin.
Lex's arm came around Mara's waist and pulled her close. Mara turned into the embrace, pressing her face against Lex's chest, feeling the rapid thud of Lex's heart gradually slowing beneath her cheek. Lex's hand found her hair and stroked it, slow and gentle, and the tenderness of the gesture undid the last knot in Mara's chest, the one she'd been holding together with force of will.
The weight of it anchored her to the present, and the steady beat of Lex's heart beneath her ear was the most comforting sound she'd heard in twenty years. Maybe ever. She'd spent her entire adult life being the strong one, the steady one, the person who held everyone else together and never asked to be held. And here was Lex, who was strong enough to lead on the ice and strong enough to lead in bed and strong enough, astonishingly,to hold Mara Ellison without asking her to be anything other than exactly who she was.
“Hey,” Lex said. Her fingers were tracing idle patterns on Mara's shoulder blade.
"Mm."
“I liked it when you told me you wanted my fingers inside you. When you asked me to fuck you in your bedroom voice.”
"I don't have a bedroom voice."
"You absolutely have a bedroom voice. It's your coaching voice but lower and slower and it does things to me that would get you a technical foul in any other sport."
"Hockey doesn't have technical fouls."
"See, there it is. You just corrected me about hockey rules while naked. That's the most Mara Ellison thing that has ever happened."
Mara bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. She failed. The laugh escaped against Lex's chest, warm and muffled and entirely undignified, and Lex's arm tightened around her with a satisfied squeeze.
"We have a game today," Mara murmured.
Lex's chest vibrated with a quiet laugh. "We have a game today."
"I should probably get up." She made no effort to move. Her hand lay flat against Lex's sternum.
"Probably."
Neither of them moved. Lex's arm tightened around her waist, and Mara closed her eyes and listened to the heartbeat against her ear and the muffled sounds of Boston waking up beyond the window, and she let herself have this. Just for a few more minutes. The warmth. The weight. The soft morning light painting the hotel room gold. The smell of sex and sheets and Lex's skin, already becoming the most familiar scent in theworld. The staggering, terrifying feeling of being exactly where she belonged.
She didn't know what came next. She didn't know how to navigate a secret relationship with her own player in the middle of a playoff push, or how to reconcile the woman lying in this bed with the coach who stood behind the boards. She didn't know any of it.
But she knew she didn't want this feeling to end. And for now, in the golden Boston morning with Lex's heartbeat under her cheek, that was enough.
18
Lex played the game of her life.
She knew it while it was happening, which almost never occurred. Usually the best performances only revealed themselves in retrospect, in the video review the next morning, when the adrenaline had drained and the body had cooled and the footage showed brilliance that the player had been too deep inside to recognize. But tonight, skating in front of the Boston crowd in the arena where she'd grown up watching hockey as a kid, Lex could feel herself operating at a level she'd never reached before.
Everything was fast. Her reads were a half-step ahead of the opposition, her feet a stride faster, her hands a touch quicker. She intercepted passes before the passer had finished committing to the lane. She hit crossovers at speeds that bent the defensive coverage like a wind bending grass. She combined with Camille on plays that the crowd saw as telepathy but were, in truth, the product of weeks of system work and one-on-one sessions and the rigorous tactical education that Mara had been pounding into her since day one.
The first goal came in the opening period. A breakaway off a stolen puck in the neutral zone, Lex deking the goaltender so cleanly the poor woman was still sliding to her left when the puck hit the back of the net on her right. The arena erupted. The Boston fans, who remembered Lex from her field hockey days, from the tabloid controversy, from the Sports Illustrated shoot that had made her famous, roared their approval with a ferocity that rattled the glass. Lex's teammates mobbed her at center ice and she grinned through the pile but her eyes found the bench. Found Mara. Found the small, private nod that Mara gave her, professional and restrained and carrying underneath it a warmth that only Lex could read.
The second goal was a thing of beauty. A give-and-go with Camille that involved three touches, two head fakes, and a one-timer from the slot that beat the goalie clean. Lex heard the horn and skated past the bench and this time she let herself look directly at Mara, and the expression on Mara's face, pride and hunger and the ache of wanting to celebrate with someone you couldn't touch in public, burned into her memory like a brand.
Mara's system. Mara's architecture. Mara's coaching in every play she made, and the knowledge that Mara was behind the bench watching her execute it perfectly was a drug more potent than anything she'd ever put in her body. This win would push the Valkyries into playoff contention. The team that everyone had written off at the start of the season, the expansion franchise with the controversial rookie and the coach nobody wanted to hire, was going to the postseason. A collective certainty hummed through the bench like current through a wire.
The Valkyries won 4-1. Lex had two goals and an assist and had been on the ice for three of the four scores. The Boston crowd, her hometown crowd, gave her a standing ovation when the final horn sounded, and the sound of it vibrated throughher chest and sank into her bones like an inheritance she'd been waiting her whole life to claim.
But it was Mara she wanted.
The post-game media swarm was intense. Cameras and microphones and reporters shouting questions about the performance, the goals, the career trajectory, the switch from field hockey, the controversy, the photo shoot. Pretty women in the press corps leaned in with their recorders and their smiles, and autograph seekers pressed against the barriers with markers and jerseys, and a girl of maybe nineteen with short hair and a flannel shirt held up a sign that readLEX YOU'RE MY HEROwith a rainbow heart, and Lex signed the sign and took a selfie with her and felt the warm rush of visibility mattering.
