You matter to me. That’s the problem. You’ve always been the thing that matters, and I’ve been too much of a coward to act like it.
The words stayed behind my teeth where they belonged—because saying them now, in this rink, after five years of earned distrust, would have been the verbal equivalent ofthrowing a Hail Mary with no receivers on the field. Ambitious. Doomed. Slightly pathetic.
She reached the backboard. Stepped off the ice. And then—with the kind of tactical precision that suggested she’d mapped this maneuver in her head before executing it—she turned her body so that she was facing me as she bent to collect her bag from the bench, denying me the view with the deliberate, surgical cruelty of a woman who knew exactly what she was withholding and derived genuine satisfaction from the deprivation.
She grabbed her gear. Straightened. Bag on shoulder. Eyes forward.
I groaned. Loudly. The acoustics of the empty rink carried the sound with humiliating fidelity.
“That’s fucking cruel, Moreau.”
She didn’t turn around. “Good.” Her voice echoed off the boards, sharp and clear and carrying the faintest undercurrent of satisfaction that I felt in my molars. “Now you’ll learn to appreciate what’s yours next time you score lucky.”
Yours.
She said yours. As in—past tense. As in, I had her, and I fumbled the possession with both hands.
I bit my lip. Harder this time. Hard enough to taste the faint, coppery edge of consequence.
“So no second dibs?” I called out, my voice carrying across the rink with the reckless bravado of a man who knew he was losing but hadn’t yet located the grace to stop trying.
She paused at the tunnel entrance. Looked over her shoulder—one final, devastating glance from those storm-gray eyes—and raised her hand.
Middle finger. Extended with the elegance of a womanwho had been trained to express emotion through the precise positioning of her fingers and had decided thatthisparticular emotion required only one.
Then she was gone.
I stood on the ice in the silence she’d left behind, her scent still hanging in the cold air like a haunting, and laughed.
A real laugh. Full and rough and startled out of me by the sheer, magnificent audacity of a woman who’d just flipped me off with the poise of a prima ballerina. Because that move—the middle finger, the over-the-shoulder delivery, the exit without a backward glance—wasmine. I’d perfected that exact gesture during a playoff series three years ago when a ref had blown a call so egregiously that I’d expressed my professional opinion from the crease with a single raised digit and a smile. The clip had gone viral. And she’d clearly taken notes.
She copied me. She saw that, cataloged it, and deployed it back at me with better execution than the original.
That’s my girl.
Except she’s not my girl. She’s not my anything. She’s a woman I once had the privilege of holding, and I opened my hands and let her fall through—the same way everyone else in her life has let her fall—and she walked out of this rink with her middle finger in the air and her chin up and her scent clinging to every surface like a promise I don’t deserve a second chance at keeping.
I scraped the ice with the edge of my blade. A slow, absent drag that carved a single line into the surface—a mark among the hundreds she’d already left. Hers were elegant. Looping. Precise. Mine was a straight, blunt slash that cut through her patterns without matching them.
Story of my life.
The rink hummed around me. Empty, cold, still fragrant with the ghost of her presence. I could feel the outline of a plan forming in the analytical sector of my brain—the goaltender’s mind, always two plays ahead, always reading the angles and anticipating the trajectory before the puck left the shooter’s blade.
She was at Olympia. I was at Olympia. The tryouts ran six weeks. The rinks were shared. The campus was three hundred acres of unavoidable proximity, and if there was one thing I’d learned in fifteen years of guarding a net, it was that patience and positioning won more games than speed.
She was furious. Rightfully. She’d earned every ounce of that anger, and I’d handed her the kindling and the match. But she’d also laughed. For two seconds, in the middle of her fury, she’dlaughed. And she’d looked at me. Reallylooked—with those cataloging, evaluating,choosingeyes that didn’t waste their attention on anything that didn’t matter.
I still matter.
Somewhere, beneath the damage and the distance, I still register.
I inhaled one final breath of her lingering scent, let it burn through my lungs and settle into the marrow of my resolve, and tapped my stick against the ice twice. A goaltender’s habit. The reset. The centering motion performed before every face-off, every penalty kill, every moment that demanded absolute clarity of purpose.
Fucking hell.
I need to win her back.
CHAPTER 4
