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“Theo —” Barely audible. “Don’t stop, don’t —”

I didn’t. I kept going until she was shaking, until she’d stopped forming sentences, until she came with her thighs locked around my head and my name a broken thing in the dark of her room that she’d never have let herself say anywhere with walls that weren’t hers.

I came up her body after. She was already reaching for me.

“Come here,” she said. “Right now.”

And I came.

I went slow. Slower than I’ve ever been with her, which is saying something. I had nowhere to be until morning and I didn’t waste a second of it. I learned her all over again at this distance — the catch of her breath when I hit a particular depth, the way her hands moved from my shoulders to my hair when she was getting close, the sounds she makes that are different from the sounds she manages, the real ones, the ones that come out when she’s stopped keeping score.

I worked my mouth down her throat while I moved. Felt her pulse against my lips. The warmth of her pussy around my cock, that specific warmth, the closest I’ve ever been to anyone in my life and the feeling isn’t one I have a name for yet. I got a hand between us and rubbed her clit — felt her hips rise to chase my fingers — and I didn’t stop, just built it, long and slow, watching her face go real and unmanaged and open in a way it only goes in these rooms with me.

“Don’t stop,” she breathed. “Don’t — Theo —”

“I’ve got you.” Into her neck. “I’ve got you. Let go.”

She did. Both hands fisted in my hair, her whole body arching off the bed, the sound she made muffled against my shoulder — and the clench of her pussy around my cock, tight and shaking, dragged me right to the edge and held me there. I held on. Barely. I stayed in it. I wanted to stay in this as long as I could, in this specific dark, in this specific warmth, in the intimacy of her room and her smell and her letting me be here, in her house, in her life, without a single term covering it.

“Your turn,” she said, wrecked, when she came back down. Half a smile. Reaching up to my jaw. “I’ve got you.”

My own words. She handed them back and I felt them land.

I let go then. Drove my cock deep and came apart in her arms with her name against her skin, the whole weight of the coin and the draft and the debt and the door dissolving for one long suspended minute. Just her. Just this. Just the terrifying rightness of it.

After, she lay against my chest in the dark. Her hand over my heart. Her breathing going slow. I held her and looked at her ceiling and felt the whole terrifying weight of the thing I’m not calling anything.

I left before dawn. I didn’t want to. That’s the part I’m still carrying.

I get back on the ice.

The whistle goes and I come off the bench and I find the gap and I do my job. I’m good at this — at putting the non-hockey things somewhere they can’t get at me during the forty minutes I’m out here. My father texts from a rink and I put it away. The scout’s empty seat sits in the upper bowl of my memory and I put it away. The draft, the coin, the spreadsheet — away, for forty minutes, every time.

Her I cannot put away. That’s new. That’s the most recent thing I’ve found out about myself.

She’s in section four. She’s watching with the same focus she’s had since the first line rotation. I don’t look at her during the drill — I’m here, I’m in it — but there’s a part of my peripheral attention that knows exactly where she is in the building the way it knows where the puck is. Automatic. Calibrated without trying.

Coach blows the whistle for a full-line rush. I take the ice and I play the next twenty minutes the best I’ve played all week, and I know exactly why, and I’m not examining it, and I’m getting worse at not examining it. Practice ends. I come off the ice and there she is, down at the boards. She waited the whole session. The coffee’s gone and the ponytail has a few pieces coming loose and she’s got her phone out, but she’s been watching the last twenty minutes with the same focused attention she had at the start.

The team clears off the ice. Cash catches my eye and gives me the retriever look one more time, and I give him the look that means I will end you, and he grins like that’s the funniest possible response and keeps walking. Wyatt, coming off behind him, doesn’t say a word. He just gives me the mild, I-see-everything-and-will-not-be-a-problem-about-it look and keeps moving. Somehow worse.

I pull my helmet off and go to the boards.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey.” She holds up the phone. “Tickets confirmed. Logan, six p.m., direct to Charleston. We land at eight-thirty.”

I take the phone. Look at the screen.

Two seats. My name on one.

I stay there a second longer than I need to. There’s something about seeing your name on a flight to someone else’s city that makes a thing real in a way that agreeing to it didn’t. We agreed to it in a glass room at midnight over a class project. That was language. This is a boarding pass. This is concrete. This is tomorrow.

Tomorrow I get on a plane. Tomorrow I walk into whatever Charleston is — the place she performs for, the place that built the earn-love machine, the house with the sister and the news and the careful warmth of a mother who loves her in a way that leaves marks. I said yes to all of that the moment she said I don’t want to go alone, and I meant it, and this is what it looks like in practice. My name next to hers. Six p.m.

I hand the phone back.

“Okay,” I say.