“Which is why you should sleep.”
He huffs out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “You’re very bossy.”
“But I know you like it.”
His arm tightens around me and I press a kiss to his chest, right over his heart, and feel it thump against my lips. He doesn’t know what he’s worth. That’s the thing about Zach—he can calculate angles and percentages in his sleep but he cannot do the basic math of understanding that he’s good, that he earned this, that people choose him on purpose and not by accident.
“You’re going to be good.” I prop myself up on one elbow to look at him. I can barely see his face in the dark but I can see the crease between his eyebrows, the one that’s always there, like worry is his resting state. “You know that, right?”
He’s quiet.
“I’ll tell my dad about us.” He goes very still and I keep talking. “I’ll walk right into my living room tomorrow morning and?—”
“Okay.” The corner of his mouth twitches. The closest thing I’ve seen to a smile from him all night. “Okay, you win.”
It’s an empty threat and we both know it. But I’ll take the almost-smile. I’ll take whatever I can get.
“How long were you watching me?” he asks, quiet. “Before we started... this.”
The question catches me off guard. I buy time by tracing his collarbone.
“A while,” I admit. “Since you got called up. Maybe before.”
“Before?”
“I might have watched some of your AHL tape. A few times.” A lot of times. An embarrassing number of times.
“That’s a little creepy, Mackie.”
“I prefer thorough.”
“You were stalking me.”
“I was conducting research.” I press my face back into his chest. “You should be flattered.”
He wraps both arms around me and holds on, and neither of us says anything for a while. I listen to him breathe and try not to think about all the ways this could go wrong.
We’re seven months into this. Seven months of sneaking, lying, holding my breath every time my dad mentions Zach’s name at dinner. Seven months of Kara covering for me and watching the man I love sit on the same bench as my father and pretending I don’t know what his mouth tastes like.
I press closer. His heartbeat is slow and steady under my ear, finally calm, and I match my breathing to his and try to hold onto this—the warmth, the quiet, the feeling of his arms around me. In a few hours he’ll be at the rink watching himself fail on a screen in a room full of teammates, and I’ll be driving home pretending I slept at Kara’s, and we’ll go back to being two people who aren’t allowed to matter to each other.
“Stay,” he says. “Tonight. Stay.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I close my eyes and listen to his breathing even out. Tomorrow he has a video session at nine and then the team flies out for Game 6 and I won’t be on that plane. I’ll be here, in this apartment or at Kara’s or in my childhood bedroom, watching on a screen like every other fan while he plays the biggest game of his life so farand I can’t even text him good luck without checking over my shoulder first.
Kara told me in October—before any of this started, when I first admitted I had a crush on a hockey player—you are going to burn your whole life down for this boy. And I said probably. And she said at least make sure he’s worth it.
And the worst part is I’m not scared of getting caught, or what my dad thinks, or what it will do to the team. If Zach asked me to burn my whole life down right now, I’d ask him for the match.
He’s worth it. He’s worth all of it.
25
ZACH
I’ve gotheadphones on over my baseball hat, hood pulled up over that which should definitely be the universal sign for “leave me the fuck alone” but apparently not to the Puckaneers’ social media coordinator, who appears out of nowhere with her phone already recoding and a smile that’s way too bright for a day like this.
