Page 26 of Knottingley Ever After
That is the lethal part.
It is just her face, doing a small involuntary thing, mouth pushing out, brow gone soft and put-upon, and it is hot, unbearably cute, and it is, against every shred of good sense I have ever owned, turning me on.
Here, on a sheet of ice, in front of my entire team and a man who could cut me from the roster with a flick of his pen.
Get it together, Santori. It is a banana negotiation.
“I like it better when you call me Pinky,” she says.
My mouth pulls into a smirk before I can stop it.
Her eyes go wide.
“I didn’t—that’s not…I did not say that.”
“You absolutely said that.”
I let the smirk run loose, and I lean down, dropping my voice into the low register I know does things, close enough now that the strawberry-and-ice of her threads warms through the cold between us.
“For the record, Pinky, there’s a long and colorful list of things I could be calling you instead. I just doubt a single one of them clears the conduct policy.”
“Huff.” She actually says the word, or nearly enough. “Shoo. Go away. You’re standing here making your entire team think you’re flirting with the goalie because you’re a sore loser.”
I shrug, easy, and steal a glance over my shoulder, and she is not wrong.
Half the rink has us under open surveillance.
And worse, Jude and Rémi are watching me with two very different but equally pointed expressions, Jude’s a slow narrowing assessment, Rémi’s a single quiet lifted eyebrow that somehow contains an entire interrogation.
They are too far off to catch a word of this, which is the only genuinely funny thing about my current situation, and I find I do not particularly want to pull away regardless.
So I do not.
I bring my focus back down to her, all of it, the whole rink narrowing to one damp pink-haired point.
“Lunch,” I say. “You and me.”
She gawks.
It is a deeply satisfying gawk, lips parting, head tipping slowly to one side like a confused and dangerous bird.
“You’re asking me out. On day one. When we met this morning. In a closet.”
“With mops,” I supply helpfully.
“Withmops,” she repeats, like the detail is the load-bearing wall of her objection.
“Yes. I am asking you out.” I spread my hands, the picture of a reasonable man. “Because the alternative is that you don’t eat at all, on account of the fact that you apparently consider lunch a fringe theory, and you just spent an hour blocking pucks with your skull and reproductive future after a forty-five-minute warmup and a drill set. Your body is running a marathon on an empty tank, O’Shea, and I refuse to be a passive bystander to the crime.”
“Whatever.” She rolls her eyes, but it is a soft roll with no real weight behind it. “Who needs protein?”
“I do, personally. Big fan.” I let the grin sharpen by a degree, let it get a little dangerous at the edges. “Though I’ll confess, I can be persuaded to source protein through a number of channels, if it earns me the right to ask one very particular question.”
Her eyebrow arches.
She attempts to cross her arms, and the gear mostly defeats the gesture, leaving her with something that reads more like a disgruntled penguin, which she would hate to know and which I am keeping forever.
“What question?”
