"You were being smart."
"I was being a coward." I took his face in my hands. His skin was cold from the ice pack, the stubble rough against my palms. "I asked you for distance because I was afraid. Not of the team finding out, not of Park, not of Brue. I was afraid that if this becomes public, it becomes something other people get to have an opinion about. And I wanted it to be just ours for a little longer."
His jaw flexed under my hands. The mask was cracking.
"But keeping it just ours meant asking you to be invisible again," I said. "And you've spent a year being invisible. I promised you that you weren't alone anymore, and then I asked you to act like you were."
"Kieran—"
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the distance. I'm sorry for three days of silence. I'm sorry for every minute you spent on that floor thinking I was ashamed of you."
His breath caught. His hands came up and gripped my wrists, holding on.
"I thought you'd changed your mind," he said. The words were rough, scraped from somewhere he'd been trying to keep sealed. "I thought you decided I wasn't worth it."
"You're worth everything." I pressed my forehead to his. "You're worth the conversation with Park. You're worth whatever Brue writes. You're worth every complication, Nico. All of them."
He kissed me.
Not the desperate, dam-breaking kiss from the kitchen. Not the tentative first contact from Detroit. This was something else, slower and deeper, the kiss of a man who'd been holding his breath for three days and was finally letting himself exhale. Hishands moved from my wrists to my face and we stood in the training room of the Storm practice facility with the door closed and his ice pack dripping on the floor, kissing like fools.
That night, his things migrated back—his toothbrush to my bathroom, his charger to my nightstand, and his copy ofKalevalabeside my glass of water.
In my bed in the dark, he pressed against me with the desperate closeness of a man who'd spent three nights on a floor after learning what it felt like to sleep beside someone. We made love—slow and gentle, every touch a communication rather than a discovery. My hands learned the new bruise on his shoulder. His mouth found the pulse in my throat and stayed there, pressed against the beat, as if the rhythm of my heart was a sound he needed to carry with him.
The sex was tender in a way that made my chest ache. Not the urgent, overwhelming collision of the first night, but slower, deliberate and attentive. He was quieter this time, his sounds more breath than voice. When he came apart beneath me it was with a shudder that went through his whole body, his face turned into my shoulder and his hands gripping my back hard enough to leave marks I'd feel in the morning.
Afterward, his head rested on my chest, his ear pressed over my heart.
"Don't do that again," he murmured.
"The sex?"
"The distance."
I kissed the top of his head. "Never."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
He slept. No rigid waking at 3 AM, no panicked bolt toward consciousness. He slept through the night with his ear against my heartbeat and his hand on my hip—the trust of a manwho'd decided, against all available evidence, that this time was different.
18
NICO
I was in the locker room before morning skate, lacing my skates with the methodical focus that had become my pre-practice meditation. The TV mounted in the corner was tuned to SportsCenter. It was always tuned to SportsCenter; someone had lost the remote years ago and nobody had cared enough to find it.
I heard his name before I looked up.
"...joined today by Jake Petrov, the former NHL forward at the center of the league's gambling investigation. Jake, thanks for being here."
My fingers stopped on the laces.
Petrov's face filled the screen. He looked good—rested and tanned, composed in the way that came from professional media coaching. His hair was shorter than the last time I'd seen him. He was wearing a suit. The last time I'd seen him in person, he'd been in a Minnesota polo, holding his daughter on his hip, telling me about a restaurant he wanted to try downtown.
"Thanks for having me, Mike. It's been a difficult period, and I appreciate the chance to tell my side."
