Page 74 of Playing Dirty
Outside, the rain's still lashing the window, the wind still howling in off the sea, but it all feels a long way off. There's just this. The warm dark of the room, her heartbeat against mine, and the strange, settled certainty that I'd follow this woman under any faerie hill in Ireland, hundred years and all.
19
Cillian
Las Vegas, Nevada.
THE RENEGADE RETURNS.
The headline's been everywhere for three days, scrolling across my phone in a dozen fonts above a dozen photos of me celebrating.
We played game five a few nights ago, my first game back, home ice, and I put two goals past Vegas in a building that started the night undecided about me and finished it chanting my name. Now we're in the visitors' room under their arena, suiting up for game six. Win tonight and the series is ours. Lose, and we drag it home for a game seven nobody wants.
And past all of it, Brennan is looming. New York is carving through the East while we grind through the West, and if we both keep winning, the Final is only weeks away.Good. I'll be fucking ready for him.
My game is back. All of it, the touch, the vision, the cold quiet in my head that went missing for a year. I don't know how much of that is Margot and how much is just a man withnothing left to hide, but I feel alive out there again, and I've stopped interrogating it.
Margot:In our seats! Brittany says hello and has already made friends with an entire bachelorette party. Vegas is A LOT. Can't wait to watch you. Fingers crossed tonight goes as well as the last one!
I'm glad the two of them have hit it off, even if some small part of me is nervous about what my current girlfriend and a woman I've a bit of history with might find to talk about over a few drinks in Vegas. Mostly, though, I'm just so fucking happy Margot's here.
We've been back from Ireland barely a week, keeping things discreet while the media cools off, but we've been essentially glued to each other anyway. She stayed at my apartment a few nights in San Francisco, and when the series shifted here, I flew her out for tonight.
I'm smiling at the screen as I type back something quick, and it settles into me the way it always does now: she's out there. Knowing it anchors me. That calm I used to own under pressure, the thing I never once had to think about until this last year, is finally back, and when she's in the building, the last of the noise just melts away.
Betts laughs from across the row. "Look at that grin. Is your secret girlfriend in her seat then, lover boy?"
I roll my eyes. It wasn't exactly a challenge for the squad to figure out the situation, but thankfully the media hasn't caught a sniff of us yet.
"Aye, she's here. And funnily enough, she's hanging out with Brittany."
"My Brittany?" His whole face lights up.
"The very one."
Brittany and I had a brief, casual thing a few years back. She and Betts had recently begun seeing one another, and he'd actually reached out to confirm I wasn't bothered by it while I was away in Dublin. Which, naturally, I wasn't in the slightest.
The truth is I'd drawn a complete blank on who she even was, and it was Margot, of all people, who had to remind me, sitting up in bed looking scandalized on Brittany's behalf.
Not that I'll be admitting that to Betts.
"Small world." Betts grins, going back to his laces. "I'm telling you, man, there's nothing better than a woman who just goes after what she wants. No games, no guessing. She told me straight out she'd had her eye on me for ages." He points a skate in my direction, looking insufferably smug. "Guess you just weren't enough for her, star boy."
"Aye, I suppose I'll just have to live with the rejection," I say, laughing as I reach for my jersey.
"Thank god you found Margot anyway," he adds. "Though how you convinced a woman that smart to settle for someone like yourself is the real mystery of the season."
"Believe me, I'm well aware I'm punching above my weight class," I grin. "And I'm not about to be the one to remind her."
The lads had officially met her when the Solstice crew came by for the post-game mixer, and she'd had the whole room charmed in minutes, showing up with homemade banana bread and that sharp, sweet wit of hers. Jonesy had spent the entire evening shooting me shit-eating grins and flashing a thumbs-up sign.
"We're going somewhere fancy after the series. Brittany’s pick,” Betts continues. “She knows more about my own zone exits than I do, I swear to god. She’s the real deal."
Jonesy drops onto the bench beside me, already taped up and grinning at my phone. "Look at you two romantics, swapping scouting reports on your love lives."
"You're only sour,” I say, “because your longest relationship this year is with a podcast."
"Bold words from a man whose longest relationship before this month was with his stick tape." He snorts. "Anyway, you'replaying like a man possessed lately. Keep that up and I reckon the city will forgive you for just about anything."
