“Who in this hotel do you want to know you’re here, Mack?” he asks, his voice a low, rough murmur.
“No one will know it’s me,” I manage to gasp out, my fingers curling into the blanket. “They’ll just think one of the other guys has a girl over.”
“We’re not supposed to have anyone over. That’s the point.”
He shifts his weight, his hand coming up to cover my mouth. I bite down playfully on the pad of his thumb. He retaliatesinstantly with a gentle bite against the inside of my thigh that makes my hips buck violently upward. The sound I make against his palm would have absolutely carried through the wall if he hadn’t smothered it. His fingers find me, and I forget how to breathe.
He doesn’t let up—his hand firmly over my mouth, his fingers working me until I’m fisting the sheets and gripping his wrist to hold him tighter. Everything inside me pulls tight, bowing upward, and then the tension snaps.
“You’re insane,” he says as he crawls up my body and settles between my thighs. “How much was the ticket?”
“Like a thousand dollars, almost.”
He laughs quietly, but I would buy that ticket a million times over if it meant getting back to this bed.
When he pushes into me, the world stops. We both go completely still, his forehead dropping against mine. I feel the sudden catch of his breath, as if the reality of us being together finally hit him all at once.
“Fuck,” he breathes out. It’s barely a word, just an exhale of relief. I wrap my legs around his waist, anchoring him to me, and pull him closer.
It’s fast at first. It has to be. It’s the desperate, messy collision of four days apart, a three-game losing streak, and the crushing weight of a secret that’s suffocating us both. I don’t care about the consequences anymore. The entire universe is trying to keep us in separate orbits, and right now, it’s failing spectacularly.
I don’t know which one of us slows down first. Maybe it’s him. He catches my wrist to press my hand into the pillow beside my head, threading his larger fingers through mine. He pulls back just enough to look at me, and the intensity in his eyes overwhelms me. I can’t deflect. I can’t make a joke. He’s looking at me like I’m the center of his world.
“Ilove you, Mackie,” he says softly. And my breath catches in my throat. My eyes fill with tears.
“I love you too,” I whisper.
He buries his face in my neck and shakes apart inside me, muffling a groan into my hair.
This is the version of us that I want to remember. The one that no one will ever see that only exists in hotel rooms and is worth every dollar and every lie and every risk I will ever take to get here.
We stay tangledup for a while. I never want to move from this bed, but my stomach has other plans. It growls loud enough that Zach lifts his head off the pillow and looks at me.
“I’ve been awake since four in the morning,” I say. “I had a coffee and half a bag of pretzels. I am running on fumes and adrenaline. If you don’t feed me, I’m going to eatyou.”
“We can’t leave the room.”
“I know we can’t leave the room. That’s why God invented room service.” I sit up and grab the menu off the nightstand and flip it open. “Also I brought you something but you can’t have it until I eat.”
He orders us both burgers and fries. I eat half of mine in about ninety seconds. He watches me with this expression that’s somewhere between amused and horrified. I point a fry at him and say, “Don’t judge me, I earned this.” Then I place the box on his lap.
“Is it a cake?” he asks.
“It’s not a cake.” I laugh. “Open it.”
He pulls the lid off and goes still.
The mask is white with blue and green, team colors in the base design, but that’s not what he’s looking at. The helmet artist worked all of them in—fifteen kids’ drawingsfrom the youth center painted onto the mask in bright colors. He picks it up and turns it in his hands, tracing the artwork with his thumb.
“I called the youth center where you learned to play,” I say. “And asked if the kids in the program could draw some hockey pictures. Barrett got them to your helmet artist. I wanted you to have something from before. From where it started.”
He sets the mask down carefully on the bed next to him and pulls me against his chest. His breathing catches once. His hand comes up to the back of my head and stays there. I don’t move. After a while he pulls back. I don’t say anything about how he’s definitely tearing up. I have good instincts about exactly one thing in my life, and it’s this.
“I’m wearing this tomorrow,” he says.
“That’s the idea.”
I wakeup to him lacing his shoes in the dark. 6:35. The mask is already in his bag.
