Page 100 of Playing Dirty
I have to find an exit before my composure shatters completely, but I can already feel the cold, frantic pulse of a panic attack climbing my throat. And I actually thought I was handling this week well. How stupid of me.
"I have to go." The words barely make it out before I'm spinning on my heel and cutting through the crowd.
Somewhere behind me Dot calls my name, but my feet keep moving, the weight of the entire week landing all at once. Panic climbs my throat, cold and fast, and there's no stopping it now.
Celeste is by the door, alarm taking over her face as I approach. "Margot? Margot, wait—are you okay?"
She reaches for me and I wave her off, bolting through the entryway and making a run for the parking lot. My keys refuse to cooperate, and by the time the car door slams shut behind me, I'm gasping like I sprinted a mile.
Tears are threatening to spill over, and I honestly couldn't say whether it's the fury or the overwhelm driving them. Both, probably. When I pull down the visor, the woman staring back from the mirror looks like a stranger.
Mascara has started to run, so I dig my kit out of my bag and dab at my eyes, reapplying concealer with unsteady hands whileI drag in one jagged breath after another, trying to regulate. My phone pings with a notification from the group chat with Isabelle and Celeste, then another from Dot.
I manage a fractured reply, my fingers trembling as I fight the mounting static in my mind. Then, like a fresh bruise, a news alert pings at the top of my screen—the same one I'd been obsessing over, that breathless piece about Cillian and his scandalous new romance.Is the NHL's most notorious bachelor finally settling down?
The ghost of Jason's betrayal, the vicious public scrutiny, and the crushing weight of expectation are all bleeding into a single, suffocating spiral. I force the engine to life, my breath coming in shallow hitches.
I know Cillian is nothing like my ex, but the rational part of my brain is currently losing the war. Why can't I just shut these thoughts out? I want to beg my own mind to stop, to keep from dragging me back into the dark.
The terror of Cillian seeing me this unraveled hits next, a spike of adrenaline that makes my head spin.
What if he leaves too? What if you’re just too much work for a man like him? Hide it; tuck the panic away if you want any hope of keeping him.
Poison, that's all it is, poison in my head filling me with doubt. Relationships aren't built on hiding your struggles, I know that. But what if Idoneed to get a better handle on it? Clearly I've been lax, letting it build all week instead of dealing with it, and now it's dealing with me at the worst possible moment. I glance at the clock.
Cillian's game starts in an hour, the opening night of the Final and his first chance to face Brennan, the beginning of the two hardest weeks of his career. Ihaveto be there. I need to fucking get myself together. The drive to the city takes sixty minutes, which gives me exactly one hour to find my center and pull the mask back into place.
The charming, cottage-lined streets of Solstice Ridge are a blur of color through my windshield. Ahead, the junction for the highway looms—a right turn toward the city, the flashing cameras, and the man who has completely remade my world.
I take the left instead.
28
Cillian
Game one of the Stanley Cup Final, on our home ice, and the building is already a vibrating sea of black and gold before the warmups even wrap. I do my laps and take my shots, but my gaze keeps drifting near the net, toward the third row.
Her seat is empty.
Traffic, I tell myself, circling back to the dot for another puck. The Solstice fundraiser likely ran late, the bridge is always a car park on game nights, and she'll probably come rushing in during the middle of the first period. I fire another shot and skate another lap and look again, but the space is still vacant. The anthem comes and goes. Still nothing.
Then the puck hits the ice, and there's no more room in my head for anything else, because Liam Brennan spends the entire first period showing our building exactly why he's been running his mouth all spring.
He's good. I've been tracking his game all season and I knew he'd improved, but he's even more elite than when I played himlast year. The man is pure speed. He weaves past our defense, finding lanes that shouldn't exist.
An early goal from them silences the crowd, but we punch back and find one of our own a few minutes later. We're trading hits and chances over and over, the game turning into a proper knife fight. By the time we head for the room, we're exhausted. Jonesy looks wrecked, but Brennan and his squad are clearly struggling just as much as we are.
The crowd thumps and roars throughout the second, the energy in the building nearly tactile as we grind through every shift. Betts shoots me a look as we skate past the bench, an unspokenwhat the hellpassing between us, but at least we're giving as good as we're getting.
I circle back toward the neutral zone during a whistle, and I steal one more glance up at the stands. Her seat is still empty.
Worry begins to bleed through me, a cold spike of anxiety that hits harder than any check I've taken all night. She said an act of God couldn't keep her away. So either something's happened to her, or something's happened to us, and there is not one thing I can do about either option from inside this glass bowl for the next hour.
Brennan reads it on me. Of course he does. Men like him hunt for soft spots the way the rest of us hunt for open ice.
We line up for a faceoff late in the period, tied game, and he settles in across from me with that grin already working.
"Rough night, O'Rourke." Low, just for me. "Whole city shows up for you, and your own girl doesn't bother. She figure out what you are before the rest of?—"
