His scent has changed.
That is the detail that undoes me.
In the closet this morning it was bright and showy, a citrus performance, but here, now, with three feet of curtain and the shape of my naked body between him and his own composure, it has gone low and dark and unguarded.
Blood orange burnt down to its rind. The cinnamon turned to something closer to smoke. It pours into the cramped wet stall and lays itself over the bleach and the cold tile until the entire room smells like him, like an Alpha who is holding very, very still on purpose, and my own body answers it with a fresh, humiliating ache that the cold water did absolutely nothing to earn.
Then, without breaking the look, he reaches past me.
His arm crosses my body, near enough that the heat of it raises every fine hair on my skin, and his hand closes over the knob and turns it. Water crashes back to life, ice cold, hammering the tile beside us, loud enough to fill the room.
“See?” he says, over his shoulder, and his voice is bright and bored and pitched for them while his eyes stay locked, locked, on me. “On. Cold as the grave. Which would explain why our new goalie isn’t in here, gentlemen, because who in their right mind takes a freezing shower? Women like it scalding. Boiling. Hot enough to strip paint.”
He turns the water off.
The room rings with the sudden quiet.
And still he does not look away from me, and I can see, plainly, what it is costing him to keep up the performance;the small muscle working in his jaw, the effort stitched into the corner of his eye.
He draws the curtain closed.
Gentle. Final.
“So,” he says to the room, and the warmth drops clean out of it, “are the three of you leaving on your own, or would you rather Coach O’Rourke find you looting the girls’ changeroom, trying to corner the Omega who just shut out every shot you took at her?”
That works with remarkable speed.
“Fine.” A chorus of grumbling, the wounded retreat of men who have done the math and disliked the answer. “We’re going.And don’t say a word to Coach. We already got humiliated once today. We do not need five a.m. runs on top of it.”
Footsteps. The door.
The heavy, blessed click of it shutting.
And still I do not move.
I stand behind the curtain, dripping and silent, and I count out a full minute against the hammer of my own pulse, because I have learned the hard way that a quiet room is not always an empty one.
Then, from the other side of the pool-blue curtain, mild as anything:
“So. Are you planning to finish your shower, or have you decided to simply live in there now? Set up a forwarding address. Receive your mail.”
Heat floods up my neck and into my face, and I am savagely glad the curtain hides it.
“I got distracted,” I mutter.
“Distracted.” He turns the word over like he is checking it for counterfeit. “By what, precisely? It is an empty room with a tile wall. Riveting company, granted, but I struggle to see the hook.” A beat, and then, far too pleased with himself: “And I would strongly advise you against lying to me and claiming you were running it cold. I happen to be a leading authority on the subject. Women want their showers hot enough to file a formal complaint about. Hot enough to leave a building structurally compromised.”
“You are a leading authority,” I say, “on women’s shower preferences.”
“Decorated. There are medals.”
“Mm. I’ll alert the committee that their data set is compromised, because I run mine cold.”
“You do not.” Genuine offense, now, like I have insulted his mother. “Nobody runs it cold. That is not a preference, Pinky, that is a cry for help.”
I catch my lip between my teeth to kill the smile, because the smile is not on my side here.
There is a fork in the road here, and I can feel both branches of it.
