Page 64 of The Grumpy Defenseman
I leaned into him. He held me.
The weight room hummed around us, dim and quiet and ours for as long as the cameras allowed us to pretend it was.
We stood there holding each other in a building that smelled like rubber mats, iron, and the faint ghost of ice, and I felt, for the first time in longer than I couldcalculate, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Not at the edge of the frame.
In it.
And for once in my life, I did not reach for the camera.
Samantha
The kiss changed shape.
One moment, we were standing in the weight room with the hum of the HVAC, the smell of rubber mats, and his forehead resting against mine. The next, his mouth was on my neck, my back was against the wall, and the very professional, very controlled version of Samantha Cole was being dismantled by a man whose hands shook when they touched her.
That was the part I could not stop noticing.
His hands.
These were hands that controlled a hockey stick in traffic. Hands that had gripped a Zamboni railing at four years old and never let go. Reliable hands. Hands that had never, as far as I could tell, been uncertain about anything.
They were trembling now.
Not from nerves. From restraint.
I could feel it in the way his fingers spread across my ribs: deliberate, careful, the pressure of a man who knew he was built for impact and was choosing, with every piece of discipline he had, to be gentle.
“Evan.” My voice came out lower than I recognized. “You don’t have to be careful.”
His forehead dropped to my shoulder. A breath shuddered out of him, warm against my collarbone, unsteady in a way I had never heard from him on or off the ice.
“Yeah,” he saidroughly. “I do.”
“Why?”
“Because when I stop being careful, I don’t know how much control I’ll have left.”
That was unfairly effective.
I pulled his face up to mine and kissed him in a way that made my position on the matter clear.
His control cracked. Not shattered. Cracked. The hands that had been trembling found a new certainty. One slid into my hair. The other found the hem of my shirt and stopped there, fingertips against bare skin, a question asked without words.
I answered by pulling the shirt over my own head, because waiting for a man who communicated through defensive positioning to ask permission for every escalation would have taken the rest of the evening, and I had plans for the rest of the evening.
His eyes tracked down my body the way they tracked the ice: assessing and memorizing. But there was nothing clinical in his expression. What I saw on his face was the same thing I had seen on the rink atdawn: focus stripped of performance, so direct it made my chest ache.
“Christ, Sam.” The words were barely audible.
“Less talking,” I murmured. “More of this.”
He lifted me. Not dramatically. Efficiently, the way his body did everything, with an economy that should not have been as devastating as it was. My legs wrapped around his waist, and he carried me toward the small training office off the weight room with the focused intent of a man running a breakout drill with no intention of being stopped.
The door clicked shut behind us.
The office was dark except for the light bleeding in from the hallway, a thin stripe across the floor. No camera. I knew because I had spent six weeks learning where this building watched people and where it did not.
