We filed out. I went through the tunnel and the crowd came up loud and immediate and enormous, fifteen thousand people in one voice, and I stepped onto the ice and the cold hit me the way it always did.
The stone was gone.
Something else was in its place, louder and more complicated and considerably more dangerous, but the stone was gone, and I didn't know yet if that was better or worse.
The game was starting.
I skated.
13
We won.
I think?
I was there. I was on the ice, I knew that much. My body did the things it knew how to do and the crowd did the Morr Roar and at some point the buzzer went. People were hitting me on the back and I was grinning and saying the right things and I have absolutely no memory of any of it in any detail.
I showered.
I know I showered because my hair was wet and I was in different clothes.
No matter what had happened during the game or after the game, I wasn’t thinking about any of it.
Because all I could think about was that sound.
Not the kiss, although the kiss with Cross was—that was its own category of information I was going to need significant time and possibly a longer couch to fully process. But specifically thatsound, the small sharp inhale when I'd gotten past Cross’s guard before he'd made the decision, before anything was decided, the one he hadn't chosen to make.
The most honest thing Cross had ever done in front of me.
His thumb against my jaw.
That's not what I see.
The wall coming back. His face before the wall came back.
You should go warm up.
Someone knocked on my door.
I didn’t move.
They knocked again.
I got up.
Cross was in the hallway.
Cross was in the hallway.
He still had his coat on, which meant he'd come straight here, no intermediate stops. But the coat was unbuttoned, which was not how Cross wore a coat. His tie was loosened. Not dramatically, just half an inch, the collar open one button, and on anyone else that would be nothing and on Cross it was the equivalent of showing up in pieces.
He looked like hell.
Not literally. He looked like Nathan Cross, which meant he looked unfairly good, but there was something around his eyes that hadn't been there this morning.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
