Page 194 of Slashed Bonds

Practice has been its own thing. Nine days of it before the crash, and Halloran ran us like a man who’d read the sponsor list and wanted to earn it. The 1-3-1 rebuilt for Westmere, with the high forward told to hold the lane and let their seniors cycle until they got bored and coughed it up. Hold. Don’t chase. Cassian said it so often it stopped being words.

And after every practice, twenty minutes with Nikolai in the near net and a bucket of pucks at the hash marks, shooting blocker-side low until my wrists ached. Not at him. At the hole Westmere’s goalie leaves when he cheats to his glove. Nikolai would set up the way the Alpha does, big, glove high, daring me, and I’d go low and away from it, and he’d stop six of ten the first night and two of ten the last.

“You hold it too long.” He hasn’t said it. He’s let the pucks say it. I release a half beat faster now and he knows why.

Nikolai found me there first. Climbed in without a word and put his head on my stomach and fell asleep in four minutes. Then Cassian, with Knox, which is a lot of bodies for one beanbag and we made it work. Killian hasn’t. Killian isn’t a cuddler, not in daylight, not in a room with the door open.

He’s slipped into my bed twice, though. After midnight. Not for sex. He’s gotten in behind me and put an arm over my ribs and held me while I slept, like something that needed holding down, and he’s been gone before the light.

Sleep. I’ve been sleeping. That’s the strange one.

Two and a half weeks of it. More than I’ve slept in five years, maybe since Halbrook. Could be the withdrawal. Probably is, partly. But every night, somewhere in it, I surface for a second and there’s a man against me, one of three, different nights, different sides, and I go back down. And on the mornings all three are gone, out early for ice or the gym or whatever errand buys a woman a desk, they leave things.

Notes. Short ones, in three handwritings I’ve learned to tell apart. Eat. — K. Cassian’s square capitals: Tape on the lounge. Blocker side. Nikolai’s, in Russian, which I can’t read and haven’t asked him to translate because I like having a thing I don’t understand.

Stuffed animals. Four so far. A fox, a frog, a snake, which was Killian being funny, and a thing that might be a bat.

And food. Finger food, always, left on the desk in a bowl. Cut fruit. Cheese. The dried apricots. An appetizer, I’ve realized, a thing to get me chewing so I’ll go downstairs and eat the real thing, and the gesture has become something I look for when I wake up.

The old fuckers never did that. Not once. Not a note, not a plate. I was the one who left the plates.

And the sex.

I can’t deny that either. I’ve tried. It’s been as addicting as the sleep, and it’s a different kind of addiction than the one I’m tapering off, because this one’s giving me things back instead of taking them.

I get to explore. That’s the piece I didn’t have words for until this month. I get to find out what I want, in a bed or a shower or a car, and say so, and have it heard. And each of them is different, in stamina and in what they’ll try, and I’ve been keeping notes in my head like a scout.

Cassian is practical. That’s the word. Efficient, direct, a man who knows what he’s doing and does it. But he has the stamina of a cheetah, and the speed of one too, and he’ll go until I’m the one asking for mercy.

Killian is the explorer. He wants to try things. New rooms, new angles, a blindfold, a rule broken on purpose. He doesn’t mind being sneaky about it either. Twice in a hallway where anyone could’ve come.

And Nikolai.

All bets are off with him. With Nik, there aren’t any bets.

He doesn’t care where we are. He’ll find a way to make a quickie happen in a locker room with the team outside the door, in his truck in a parking lot, in the kitchen at two in the morning with Knox watching, and I love it. I can say that now. I fucking love it.

Trying out for this team has made the last two and a half weeks a fever dream, and I’d like it not to end, and I’m not used to wanting things to continue.

“OUR GIRL GOT MAIL!”

Maddie’s dancing. There’s no other word for what she’s doing in the middle of my rug in her pink corduroy, a two-step with her hands clapping over her head.

“What is it, what is it, what IS it?”

I look at the envelope on the lounge.

Black. Heavy. Unopened. I’d been avoiding it since I came out of the shower, because black envelopes in my life have never contained anything I wanted to read, and because I know how this goes. I open it and it’s a threat and the day’s over.

Get it done. Then they can take you outside. Then you’ll have done the thing.

I reach over and pick it up.

The paper’s thick, cream inside the black, and there’s a letter folded in thirds and something stiffer behind it. I open the letter first. I brace. My shoulders come up without permission, the way they do before a check.

Blackridge letterhead.

Dear Ms. Crowe. Enclosed please find your disbursement for the first-round victory over Ashford, inclusive of the performance allocation approved by the coaching staff and the sponsorship share as outlined in…