The air in here is its own quiet confession of disuse.
Cedar block and floor wax laid on thick by a cleaning crew with nothing to clean, the faint chlorine sweetness of pipes that rarely run, a powdery floral ghost baked into the grout from some long-discontinued soap.
No sweat. No tape. No leather gone feral. None of the honest, living reek that means a room gets bled in.
It smells, frankly, like a hotel suite nobody books…
Versus me having spent my whole life in changerooms that smell like polite war, so the daintiness of it sits wrong against myskin, one more way this kingdom has found to remind me I am a guest and not a resident.
I peel the jersey up over my head, and the smell of myself comes with it.
An hour of game rounds soaked clean through the fabric.
Frosted strawberry gone sharp and salt-edged at the seams. The cold-metal ghost of ice in the weave. Sweat, plain and honest, the kind that means I worked. Under all of it, faint and infuriating, a top note that does not belong to me at all, blood orange and burnt sugar, pressed into my collar from the exact moment Matteo Santori skidded to a stop one inch off my body and leaned down to scold me about abanana.
I drop the jersey on the bench like it personally betrayed me.
Because here is the situation, laid out flat for inspection.
Matteo Santori asked me to lunch.
Matteo Santori then skated to the middle of a rink full of Alphas who would happily watch me fail, and he told all of them, and his coach, that I was on their team. He spent something on me. In public. With witnesses. And my body, my stupid, traitorous, scent-drunk body, has decided that this is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to it, and it would like to do something about that,now.
I trip getting my leg out of my hockey pants.
One skate-sock foot tangling in the shell, a graceless little hop across the cherrywood before I catch the bench and swear at the room.
The room, like the mops before it, declines to comment.
Get a grip, O’Shea.
I sit down hard on the pew and make myself breathe. In for four.Hold.Out for eight. The drill Declan taught me at seventeen for the long bad minutes before a faceoff, when a young goalie’s heart wants to climb out through her ribs and sprint for the exit.
His voice still lives inside the count, low, even and Irish, and I refuse, on principle, to think about the fact that I am using the breathing exercise of one man to talk myself down off a cliff built entirely by another.
The irony is not lost on me.
Five years apart and the man still has his hooks in the basic operating instructions of my nervous system.
Filed. Closed museum.
Move on…
The trouble is that the breathing leaves room to think, and thinking is where this falls apart.
Because I do not actually know what Matteo wants, and the not-knowing has teeth.
Men do not look at me the way he looked at me. That is not self-pity, it is fieldwork. I have been the only Omega in every locker room I have ever stood in. The pink-haired novelty, the girl who isone of the ladsright up until the precise second she is not.
I have been a mascot. I have been a punchline. I have, on memorable occasion, been a bet.
What I have never been, not once, not for anyone, is the thing a man crosses a room for.
So the cynic in me, the one who has kept me upright through every cold rink in Yorkshire, files the obvious theory.This is a setup.A prank with a long fuse. Be nice to the goalie, make her soft, make her hope, and harvest the wreck of her face when the joke finally lands.
It would not even be original. I have seen that play run before.
And yet…
