Nico made a sound against my mouth, low and rough and involuntary. His hands fisted in my shirt and pulled me closer. I went willingly. My hand slid from his jaw to the back of his neck, fingers threading into his hair. His mouth opened under mine and I tasted him.
He kissed the way he played hockey. Intense. Focused. His hand found the hem of my shirt and slipped beneath it, fingers tracing the line of my ribs. The contact lit up every nerve in my body at the touch of his skin on mine, the heat of his palm mapping the contours of my torso.
I broke the kiss to breathe. My forehead rested against his. His eyes were dark, his chest heaving, his mouth swollen.
"Tell me to stop," I said. My voice was wrecked.
"No."
"The team is down the hall. If someone—"
"I don't care."
"You should."
"I should do a lot of things." His fingers tightened in my shirt. His eyes held mine, raw and unguarded, the wall completely down. "I should sleep in the bed. I should stop falling for the man who's supposed to be monitoring me. I'm tired ofshould."
My thumb found the pulse in his neck. Racing. I pressed against it gently and felt his whole body shudder.
"Not here," I said. The words cost me. "Not in a hotel with the team thirty feet away."
"Then where?"
"Home."
The word settled between us like an anchor dropping.Home.Not my apartment. Not the monitoring arrangement.Home.
He searched my face, looking for the exit strategy, the regret, the morning-after retreat. He wouldn't find them. I was past all of that. I'd been past it since the night I sat on his floor and felt his shoulder settle against mine.
"Home," he repeated. A confirmation, not a question.
I pulled back. The loss of his heat was physical, a cold that settled into my skin and stayed. I sat on the edge of his bed for a moment longer, my breathing wrecked, my hands shaking in a way they never did in the crease.
Then I stood and crossed back to my own bed. The six feet of carpet felt like a canyon.
We lay in the dark, ten feet apart, and didn't sleep. But the silence wasn't empty. It was full, charged with the memory of his mouth on mine, the sound he'd made when I touched him, the wordhomesitting between us, a promise neither of us could take back.
12
NICO
When the alarm went off at six, I was already awake. I'd been awake for hours, lying in the dark, tracing the memory of his hands on my face.
My shoulder throbbed. The bruise had deepened overnight, spreading in a stain of purple and black that I could feel when I breathed. But the shoulder wasn't what kept me awake.
Kieran sat up in the opposite bed in one fluid motion, instantly alert. He looked at me across the gap between the beds.
For a long beat, we just stared.
The Detroit morning light was grey and flat, filtering through curtains that weren't quite closed. In it, Kieran looked different, softer and younger, the sharp angles of his face blurred by sleep. His hair was flattened on one side. His T-shirt was twisted. He looked real, not the immovable wall of composure I'd been living with for six weeks.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning."
"How's the shoulder?"
I rotated the joint. It throbbed, but it worked. "Functional."
