I push inside her in one motion. She doesn’t gasp. She closes her eyes and tilts her head back.
It’s not slow. I don’t make it slow. I fuck her with my forearm beside her head and my hips slamming into hers. The only noise is the bed frame knocking against the wall. She hooks her legs up around my waist. Her nails scratch once down my back.
Jess comes. I can tell because her thighs tighten and she makes a short sound, once, like a caught breath. Then she goes loose again and watches me with half-closed eyes while I chase mine.
Suddenly I think about the correction in front of the whole team. Her hand on my hip. Her palm flat against the bone. I come hard.
After a minute Jess gets up and goes to the bathroom. I hear the tap run. She comes back and lies down on her side of the bed and within maybe three minutes her breathing goes even.
Afterward, I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and think about skating.
About Zane in whatever city he’s in right now, in a development program, in a real locker room. About scouts who came once and may or may not come back.
Jess is asleep beside me, unbothered, entirely uninterested in any of this.
ELIDA
The apartment is dark and the heating has settled into a lowhum and I’m almost asleep when the thought arrives, the way unwanted thoughts always do, right at the exact moment your defenses are down.
Mateo Russo, with his hand on the small of someone’s back.
I turn over and pull the duvet up.
Of course he’s like that.I could have written it without seeing it. The captain, the carefully controlled fury when someone dares to correct him in front of his team. The easy confidence that he was probably born with.
Of course there’s a girl. Probably more than one. Probably a rotating cast of them, all kept at exactly the right distance, all perfectly managed, all unbothered - or told to be unbothered, which isn’t the same thing but works well enough.
I know that type.
I’ve made the mistake of thinking that type was different.
I close my eyes.
We may be a similar age, but we’re miles apart in experience. I’ve competed on the world stage while he’s still struggling in a college team hoping to get noticed. And at the moment he’s technically my student. Not that he wants to be.
I go to sleep.
I dream about something else entirely, which is a small but definitive victory.
4
Chapter 4
MATEO
The locker room is at the end of the east corridor, which means I walk past the coach’s offices every time, which means I always have to walk past the small room they’ve given Elida Eriksson every time.
The door is open.
I’m not looking inside. I’m walking past with my kit bag and my mind on the afternoon practice and I’m absolutely not slowing down, except that I am, slightly, because there’s a sound coming from inside that stops me without my permission.
She’s humming.
It’s a low, absent sound while she’s doing something at her desk. It sounds vaguely classical and completely out of place in this corridor that smells like rubber matting.
I stop.
I don’t know why I stop. I should keep walking.
