Gage is back in net.
He got his stick back. Obviously. But he keeps looking down the ice at me with an expression I’ve never seen on a person before—somewhere between outrage and a disbelief so profound it’s looped back around to become almost spiritual.
A goalie’s stick is sacred. I grabbed his sacred object and skated onto the ice with it because I was thinking about lips. Lips on my lips.
I deserve these two minutes.
I deserve every second of them.
I stare straight ahead at the ice and think about absolutely nothing except the game and the penalty and what I’m going to do when I get out of this box.
Her hands in my shirt.
Okay. Almost nothing.
The clock ticks down. Ninety seconds. Sixty. The power play clears without damage, which is more than I deserve. Thirty seconds. Fifteen.
The door opens.
I step back onto the ice and skate to the bench for a line change because I am not capable of looking my teammates in the face right now and playing hockey simultaneously.
I sit down.
Shep drops onto the bench beside me fifteen seconds later, coming off his shift. He doesn’t say anything. Just sits there, breathing hard from the skate, staring out at the ice.
I wait.
“So,” he says finally, voice perfectly conversational. “Your special stick.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.” He takes a water bottle, squirts it into his mouth. “Just sitting here. Thinking about how a man grabs a goalie stick by accident.” Another squirt. “A goalie stick, Cap. It’s four feet long. It has a paddle on it.”
“I’m aware of what a goalie stick looks like.”
“Are you though?” He turns to look at me with genuine curiosity. “Because the evidence suggests—”
“Sawyer.”
“Right.” He faces forward again, nodding slowly. “Right, right, right.”
Ten seconds of silence.
“Shemust be really something,” he says quietly.
It’s not a joke. It doesn’t have the shape of one. It lands somewhere underneath the chirping, underneath the penalty box and the blown passes and the two minutes of staring at the ice wishing I could disappear.
We both watch the play develop up ice, and I do what I’ve been doing since the puck dropped—try to be here, in this arena, in this game.
Try to stop thinking about the way she kissed me back.
I manage it for almost forty-five seconds before Shep leans over one more time.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “Gage is going to be mad about this for a minimum of three years.”
I close my eyes.
“WOOOOO!” he yells, standing up as our guys score on the other end of the ice, using the celebration as cover, arms in the air, grinning at me over his shoulder like he’s won an award.
