Page 25 of Knottingley Ever After
The scent of her lifts off the heat of her, frosted strawberry and clean cold ice and something sugar-pink underneath, and even drowned in the rink’s sweat-and-rubber fog, it walks straight up to me and knocks politely on a door I did not know I had left unlocked.
“Relax, men.” Her voice carries the full width of the ice without trying, dry as a struck match. “I’m awoman, remember? A pussy can take a puck or two and walk it off. Which is more than I can say for those precious crown jewels of yours, which would’ve been out of commission until roughly the heat death of the universe.”
There is a beat.
And then the coaches laugh.
The two other men barking it out before they can think better of it, making me realize they not only arrived but had watched that last segment, probably holding their breath in wait. Even Coach Declan’s mouth does something at one corner that on a lesser man would be the start of a grin.
He shakes his head instead, lifts the whistle, and blows it sharply, signalling the finale.
“No points,” he announces, flat. “Which means all of you just lost.”
That snaps the rink out of its trance like a slap.
The unified groan goes up at once, curses and boos, and somebody’s stick slapping the ice in protest. The wounded chorus of grown men informed that an hour of effort has bought them nothing. Hargrove says something unprintable about the geometry of the net. Two of the opposing sectors start relitigating the bad pass that started it all.
I do not join the noise.
I am still watching O’Shea.
Because the helmet is off and the performance has dropped with it, just slightly, at the edges, and underneath, I can see howtired she actually is. A bone-deep, low-burning tired that the chirping and the swagger were built to cover. It tugs at that idiot standing order in my gut, the one I never signed, and before I have decided to do it, I am skating, cutting across the ice toward her crease, and I skid to a hard stop a single inch off her, close enough that a spray of my edges dusts the toe of her pad.
She has to tip her head back to look at me.
And that, right there, is its own small earthquake.
Because with the gear, attitude, the way she takes up a doorway with her whole spine, I had filed her, somewhere in the back of the cabinet, as bigger than she is. Standing this close, looking down at her, looking up at me, I get the truth of it. She is small. Petite, even, under all that armor, the top of her damp pink head landing well below my chin. It is a mind-bending little contradiction, this slight woman who plays the net like a fortress and chirps a room full of Alphas like she owns the deed to it, and I do not entirely know what to do with the way it lands in my chest.
“You good?” I ask.
Quiet. Pitched for her and not the rink.
“I’m fine.” She rolls one shoulder, a shrug in gear. “Puck happens.”
I frown.
I do not plan on frowning; it simply installs itself, and I hear myself ask the next thing the way a person asks a question he already dreads the answer to.
“Did you eat?”
Her brow knits.
“Why on earth would I have eaten?”
“Because it’s the afternoon, O’Shea.” The frown deepens, takes root. “It is past noon. You don’t eat before a game?”
“So I can redecorate the ice with it?” She pulls a face, genuine revulsion. “Hard pass.”
“You can have a banana.” It comes out with an edge, flatter and firmer than flirting has any right to be, and I register, somewhere behind my own voice, that I have crossed clean over into scolding her.
A grown woman. A stranger. Scolding her about fruit.
“A banana, O’Shea. One banana. The bar is on the floor.”
She pouts.
And here is where the afternoon truly goes off the rails for me, because the pout is not a weapon she is deploying.
