"You've been on the same save for eleven minutes. It's a routine glove catch."
I locked the tablet. "Go to sleep, Abbott."
He gave me a look that said he knew exactly what I wasn't watching. He settled back against the headrest with his eyes closed and a small, knowing smile that I chose to ignore.
The bus pulled into the Storm facility lot at 1:47 AM. The team dispersed into the cold November night, cars starting and headlights sweeping the empty lot, the muffled thump of trunks closing over gear bags. Nico and I walked to my car in silence. The drive home was ten minutes of dark streets and traffic lights, neither of us speaking—the air between us so charged it pressed against my skin.
I pulled into the garage. We rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor. I unlocked the door and we walked into the apartment, and the familiar scent of the place, tea and wood, settled around us like a held breath.
Nico set his bag by the door. He stood in the entrance to the kitchen, backlit by the glow of the stove hood I always left on, and looked at me.
I looked at him.
The distance between us was eight feet. The counter was to his left, the hallway to my right. We'd stood in this exact configuration a hundred times, coming home from practice, from games, from the road. We'd made tea in this kitchen, eatendill eggs at this counter, built a quiet, careful routine that never quite crossed the line.
"Kieran," he said. Just my name. Nothing else.
I crossed the eight feet in four steps and kissed him.
It wasn't like Detroit. That kiss had been tentative at its core, a question asked in the dark, still shaped by doubt. This was the answer. This was six weeks of 3 AM conversations and shared floors and the slow erosion of every wall I'd spent eleven years constructing.
Nico's hands found my waist and pulled me against him. The counter pressed into his lower back as I crowded him into it, my hands on either side of his body, caging him. He didn't feel caged, he felt claimed. The difference was in the way his body softened against mine instead of bracing. His mouth opened under mine and I tasted him, really tasted him, the urgency of it burning through the careful restraint I'd maintained for too long.
His fingers slid under my shirt. The contact of his skin against mine was a detonation, my entire nervous system on fire under the sensation of his palms mapping my ribs and my abdomen, the line of muscle along my hip. He was hard, his touch rough and deliberate, reading me with his hands and his eyes.
"Not the kitchen," I managed against his mouth.
"Then where?"
I pulled back enough to look at him. His eyes were dark and his breathing wrecked, his lips swollen from mine. He looked undone in a way I'd never seen, the constant guard gone, the defenses offline, the walls leveled. Just Nico. Wanting.
I took his hand and led him down the hall past the guest room into my room.
My bedroom was the one space in the apartment he'd never entered. It was mine the way the crease was mine, private and controlled, the place where I was most myself. The bedwas made with the precision of someone who needed order to function. The nightstand held a book, a glass of water, and a phone charger. The window looked out over Lincoln Park, the trees bare against the city lights.
Nico stood in the doorway and looked at the room and then at me. Something passed across his face that was more devastating than desire. Recognition. He was seeing the most private version of me and deciding to step inside.
He stepped inside.
We were desperate and graceless, the collision of two men who'd spent too long denying the pull between us. My shirt came off. His came off. The bruise on his shoulder had faded to yellow and green, and I pressed my mouth to it gently, a contrast to the urgency of everything else between us. The tenderness interrupted the heat because I needed him to know that this wasn't just want. It was care and attention. It was every observation I'd cataloged from the crease, the way he moved, the way he held himself, the way his body told a story his words refused to—all translated into touch.
Nico made a sound when my mouth found his shoulder that I would remember for the rest of my life. Low and broken, a surrender that came from somewhere deep inside him. His hands tightened in my hair.
"Kieran—"
"I know."
"I need—"
"I know."
I did know. I knew because I'd spent six weeks reading him, learning his tells, mapping the geography of his defenses. He told me. Not in words, but in the way his body moved against mine, the angle of his hips, the grip of his hands in my hair. I read him the way I read the ice.
When I took him into my mouth, his back arched off the bed and his hand found the back of my head. He said something in Finnish that I didn't understand. The sound of it, low and fractured, was its own translation.
And then his hands were pulling me up, pulling me over him, and his mouth found mine. We were skin to skin with nothing between us, the full contact of two bodies that had spent weeks orbiting each other, finally colliding. The heat of him against me took my breath away. I braced my weight on my forearms and looked down at his face. His expression, open and fierce, terrified and wanting, cracked something open in my chest.
This was the thing I hadn't expected—my own terror. I'd spent so long being the steady one, the controlled one, that I'd forgotten what it felt like to be vulnerable. And here, with his legs wrapped around me and his eyes locked on mine and his body opening to me with a trust that felt like a gift I didn't deserve, I was terrified. Not of the physical act but of how much it meant. Of how completely this man had dismantled my own isolation without either of us noticing until the walls were already down.
