Page 32 of Knottingley Ever After
Every muscle I own goes to wire.
Here is the precise, humiliating math of my situation. I am behind a curtain that ends a generous foot above the floor. My gear is in the auxiliary closet, not on these benches, which is the only reason they have not yet clocked that the room is occupied.
My clothes, my towel, my dignity, all of it is a full naked dash away. And there are at least three of them, in the doorway of the girls’ locker room, where they have absolutely no business being, narrating my scent to one another like I am a wine they are deciding whether to send back.
If that curtain gets pulled, they find me.
Bare, wet, and freshly wrecked by my own hand, and there is no version of that frame that does not become the only thing anyone at North Star ever says about me again.
I do not breathe.
I press my spine to the cold wet tile and I think, with a flat and furious clarity, that I will not give them a sound, I will not give them a flinch, I will stand here and be a wall, the same wall I was on the ice, and if they pull the curtain I will deal with it the way I deal with a breakaway, on instinct and with both gloves up.
The footsteps come closer.
“Now why,” says a fourth voice, easy and unhurried and arriving from the doorway, “are you three in here?”
The relief that floods me is so total it nearly takes my knees.
I am instantly, separately furious at myself for it, because I have known the owner of that voice for one single day.
Matteo.
“Last I checked,” he goes on, conversational, a man with all the time in the world, “Coach sent exactly one person to confirm the hot water was running on the girls’ side. Me. On account of the fact that we have not had a girl playing anything in this changeroom in roughly a decade, so nobody actually knows if the plumbing works.”
A scuffle of excuses. Three men talking over one another, the particular stammer of boys caught with a hand in something.
“We heard the shower running,” one of them manages.
“Yeah.” Matteo’s voice does not change at all, and somehow that is the most dangerous thing about it. “Because I was checking whether it ran. That tends to involve turning it on. Why else would I be standing here in my bare feet?”
A pause.
I can hear the doubt in it.
“We don’t buy it,” another says.
Matteo chuckles, low, and then there are feet. His feet, bare on the wet tile, crossing the room, and they come to a stop directly in front of my curtain, close enough that I can see the shape of them through the gap at the bottom, and my heart climbs straight into my throat and sits there.
The curtain twitches.
It does not fly open. It moves a careful few inches, just enough for one person on the outside and one person on the inside.
Matteo’s body fills the gap so completely that there is no angle, none, that any man behind him could use to see past. He has put himself in the breach again.
The mop closet, the shooting lane, and now this.
The man has a pattern, and the pattern is standing between me and the room.
His eyes find mine.
And they hold.
Hazel gone dark and stunned at the edges, dropping down the length of me, slow, helpless, taking in the wet hair plastered to my throat, the bare shoulders, the water still beading and sliding down my skin, before they climb back to my face like the return trip physically cost him something.
Five seconds, easily.
Five long seconds of nothing but his stare and my pulse and the fat slow drip of the showerhead, and the air behind that curtain stops being air at all and becomes something thicker, something I have to consciously decide to breathe.
