Page 66 of The Reckless Rookie

And in the pile, he looks up, into the stands, forty rows of strangers, and he finds me. Straight to me, no searching, the way he did the first night from the ice when I never even knew he’d seen me. He found me then, when I wasn’t looking. Tonight I came so he could find me on purpose. He does, helmet off, grinning at me across the noise, and I stand up in a crowd of eighteen thousand and let him, and the thing we started crooked goes straight.

His place in the city is a bare condo near the arena, nothing on the walls, because a man who keeps everything movable doesn’t hang pictures. The door shuts on the noise and it’s just us and a war and a barn we never finished.

He kisses me before the lock’s even turned, and it’s not the careful thing from the barn. It’s a man who watched me stand up in a crowd for him and knows exactly what it cost. “You came,” he says against my mouth.

“I came.” I get his shirt up over his head, and there he is, a whole winter of work laid down over him, and I put my hands flat on him just to feel him be real.

And then I do the hardest thing I know how to do, harder than the crowd, harder than the drive in. I set the reins down. In the barn a lifetime ago I took them, because taking them was the only way I could let myself have him. Tonight I hand them over. I let him walk me back into the door and I don’t steer his hands, and one of them slides down the front of me, slow, and finds me already soaked through, and he goes still against my throat.

“You watched the whole game like this.” Not a question. There’s something new in his voice, something that wasn’t there in the fall. A man who’s found out he can take his time.

“Shut up.”

“No, I don’t think I will.” He doesn’t stop, and he doesn’t hurry, two fingers working me open against his front door and his thumb finding the spot and staying there, unhurried, and I was already close from forty rows and a whole season of wanting, and I come standing up with my spine against the wood and my hand fisted in his hair and his name breaking in my mouth. First time in my life I’ve come in my own clothes like a girl who couldn’t wait. Because I couldn’t. He undid me from the ice before he ever laid a hand on me.

He gets me to the bed and strips the rest of me slow, like there’s no clock anywhere in the world, and lays me back and looks, the way I once made him look at me, and I let him, bare and undefended, nothing running behind my eyes to hide behind. He opens the nightstand drawer, pulls out a condom, tears the packet, and rolls it on. Then he folds my legs up against his chest and pushes into me like that, deep and slow, and the angle takes the air clean out of me, opened up under him with nowhere to go and nothing to manage and wanting neither.

“Say it again,” he says, buried, watching my face take him. “The thing from the barn.”

“I love you.”

I get a hand flat on his chest and I push, and I roll us, and I come up over him, and his hands land hard on my hips and his eyes go dark and wide all at once.

“We agreed,” he says, but he’s already gone, already gripping me like he’ll die if I stop.

“You agreed. I changed my mind.” I sink down onto him, all the way, and it takes the breath out of both of us. “I want to come. You were taking too long.”

And I ride him the way I want to, exactly the way, my hands braced on his chest and his head going back into the pillow, and this is the thing about surrender: that you can hand a man everything and still be the one who takes what she needs, that they were never opposites. I set the pace, and it climbs fast because I built it fast, and he’s saying my name like a prayer, Catt, Catt, God, and reaching between us to put his thumb right where I need it, and I go over the second time with my head thrown back and my whole body clenched around him and nothing, nothing, managed.

“Now,” I tell him. “With me.”

And he does. Deep and slow and then not slow, folded over me with my legs locked around him and his forehead down on mine. And the whole thing goes serious all at once, the play gone out of it, just the two of us and a whole winter and everything we almost didn’t get to have.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, ragged, moving in me. “Whatever comes. The ranch, Sebastian, any of it. Four minutes out. I’m not going anywhere.”

Then, lower, in the language he almost never uses, the one his grandmother left him. “Fan liom.” The word he handed me in a dance hall two counties from here, the night I went up to the house alone. Stay with me. He’s had it his whole life and never once meant it at anyone. He means it now.

“I know.” First time in my life I believe a man who says he’ll stay. “I’ve got you. Let go.”

And he does, the one thing that was always hardest for him, the whole reason he landed on my doorstep in the fall, he lets go, buried deep with my name in his mouth, and I hold him all the way through it, both arms around all that hard-won weight.

Neither of us moves for a long time after. His face is in my neck and his heart’s going too fast, and the bare little room is dark and ours.

“You’re going to the Conference Final,” I tell him after a while.

“I’m going back to Boerne in three hours.” He says it into my hair, and I feel the grin. “Conference Final’s Tuesday.”

Tonight I stood up in the loud room. I let him find me. I let him drive, and then I took the wheel when I wanted it, and he handed it right over. The roof didn’t come down, and I didn’t stop being myself. I stopped being alone in it.

Tuesday there’s another game.

I haven’t decided whether I’ll be there.

I already know I’ll be there.

Chapter thirty-eight

Catalina