Page 30 of Knottingley Ever After
He hid me in a closet when there was no audience to perform the kindness for.
He stood in a live shooting lane and let his own teammates think less of him for it.
A con man does not pay upfront, in private, with no camera running.
Stop it. You met him this morning.
It does not help that my track record in the wanting department is a small, mortifying museum with exactly one exhibit, and the exhibit is a man I will not name even inside the privacy of my own skull.
The biggest, stupidest, most carefully buried crush of my life. Six foot four of disciplined Irish granite who built me into a goalie and then walked out of my life without so much as a note, and who is now, as of this morning, my coach again, breathing the same overpriced air.
We are not going to examine that exhibit today.
The museum has been closed for five years and the locks are excellent.
I drag both hands down my face and arrive at the only clear-headed conclusion available to me.
I need a cold shower. Immediately. Possibly two.
The showers run down the far wall behind a row of curtains the color of a swimming pool, and the water, when I crank it, comes out arctic.
That is the entire point.
I step under it before it has any chance to warm and let the cold hit me like a check into the boards, a full-body shock that punches the air clean out of my lungs and drags a hiss through my teeth. Water sluices the sweat off me, the salt, the ghost of citrus from my collar, all of it swirling pale toward the drain.
The locker room’s perfume goes thin and watery, bleach and old cherrywood and wet tile, the honest dull smell of a room being rinsed.
I press my forehead to the cold tile and order my pulse to behave.
It does not.
This is the part I have been refusing to look at directly, so I look at it now, since the freezing water has bought me the nerve. The wired feeling under my skin did not come from fear and it did not come from the cold. I know its name.
I have just been hoping that if I did not say it, it would have the decency to leave on its own.
It is want.
Plain, hot, inconvenient want, and it has been building since a crimson hoodie filled a doorway this morning, and it spiked, hard, every single time one of those three men drifted into my air on the ice.
Maybe it is the adrenaline.
That is the kind story, and I try it on for size. An hour of proving every smirking Alpha in that building wrong, an hour of standing on my head between two pipes and watching their faces curdle when nothing got past me, that is a drug, and a drug leaves a body humming.
Triumph and arousal have always rented rooms suspiciously close together.
Perhaps that is all this is.
My body, listening to none of it, presses my thighs together.
The ache that answers is low and insistent and entirely unimpressed with my reasoning, and pressing my thighs together does not tame it, it does the opposite, it strikes a match. I bite down on my lip and stand there in the freezing spray, caught between the woman who has a date to get to and the woman who has a very specific problem and a curtain for privacy.
Touching yourself in a public shower is not, technically, a crime.
I have always been good at building a case. A quick, quiet thing. Two minutes. The room is empty, has been empty, will stay empty, because no woman has played anything in this department in years and the boys would not dare. Surely a small private mercy is not a moral catastrophe.
I huff out a breath, and I lose the argument, and my hand slides down between my thighs.
And the second it does, the cold water and the tile all blur out, because my mind does not reach for a fantasy so much as it simply hands me one, fully built, no assembly required.
