Page 112 of Slashed Bonds

It became the other thing slowly, the way ice becomes water, and by the time either of us could have named it, naming it would have been beside the point.

It’s the only thing I’ve ever had that nobody assigned me.

Not the meds. Not the file. Not the position I play or the face I wear. Him. The one variable in my life that arrived without paperwork.

And Mori’s not taking him. I know that. She’s not here to replace anyone.

She’s here to redistribute.

Three men in an arch with no keystone, and now there’s a keystone, and a keystone doesn’t remove a stone. It changes where the load goes. It changes what every other stone is for.

I’ve spent four years knowing exactly what I’m for. I’d like a minute before it changes.

And I’ve had the minute. I’ve had three days of minutes, sitting on stairs at two in the morning watching a woman alphabetize a spice rack, and stepping over a dog in my doorway at four, and running a give-and-go nine times with a winger who told me I had a wrist shot.

The minute’s over. That’s what I’m learning on my knees on this floor. I don’t want a minute. I want the thing on the other side of it.

Whatever the load looks like when she’s carrying part of it, I want to find out.

He kisses me back.

Hard. All of him in it, hands in my collar, and the chair tips because I’ve got no balance for this and never have. The thump is him going over backward, chair and all, onto the floor, with me already on my knees following him down, still kissing him like my life’s in it.

He laughs.

Into my mouth. As though that wasn’t painful. As though a two-hundred-pound man going over in a desk chair onto hardwood is a joke he’s heard before.

I should be more careful. We have a game in two days and I’m damaging the goalie.

I’m not going to be more careful. I’m hungry for this fucker.

Then he bites.

My bottom lip, and too hard, hard enough that when I pull back to glare at him the blood’s already beading, and he’s looking up at me from the floor with the most cynical smile he owns.

“If you’re going to forget why you came here looking for Monarch,” he says, “I suggest you get back to it.”

A warning in it. A real one.

“You know I don’t like being tempted with a good time if you’re going to stop halfway.”

“Fucking tease.”

“Look who’s talking.”

He tosses it back with a laugh, and licks his lip, and there’s my blood on his tongue.

“She’s with Cash. They’re doing game plans.”

I passed the captain’s door on the way here. Open a hand’s width. Cash at his desk with the glasses on, the ones he’d sooner die than wear in front of the roster, tablet propped, and her in the chair beside him with her boots on his desk and a notebook on her knee.

They were arguing. Low. About her backhand, from what I caught. He said tell, she said strength, he said both, and she said something I didn’t hear that made him take the glasses off and look at her for a long second and put them back on.

He hasn’t looked at anyone like that in four years. Not me. Not Niko.

So it’s three of three. I’d known. I hadn’t seen it.

“Probably fucking,” I grumble.