Page 34 of Slashed Bonds

I stand in a painted rectangle for sixty minutes while grown men fire vulcanized rubber at my head at ninety miles an hour, and the only thing standing between me and a concussion is whether I read a release correctly.

You’d invent rituals too.

Control is a fiction. I’m aware. But a man who believes in nothing at all in that crease starts flinching, and a goalie who flinches is a goalie who’s finished.

So I tap the doorframe. Twice. Every time.

Then the jewelry goes back in.

Septum first. The gauges. Rings up the cartilage on both ears.

The lip last, always — I clip it in and check it twice, and the man in the mirror stops looking like a hospital exhibit and starts looking like himself.

I take it all out for her.

Every session. Every time. It’s a security protocol, not a preference: a mask hides a face, but jewelry hides nothing. Enough hardware and a stranger could pick me out of a crowd of thousands, mask or no mask.

Malice hasn’t figured that out.

She forgets hers.

Not always. But often enough that I’ve catalogued them — the bar through her left brow, the ring at her lip, the ladder up her right ear that she misses every time because she can’t see it without a second mirror.

If we ever cross paths in daylight, it’s over.

One look. One flash of silver in the wrong bar, the wrong street, the wrong arena concourse, and I’d know her in a heartbeat, and there’d be no version of me that walked away from that.

I smirk at my reflection.

As if you’d want to.

My phone goes off on the counter.

I answer it on the way to the closet.

“What?”

“Hello to you, too, fucker.”

Killian.

And there’s the second-best part of my day.

“Why are you in a good mood?” he says. “You get a good fucking from your masked sweetheart?”

“She’s truly a doll,” I hum. “And how the hell do you know I got any dessert?”

“You don’t answer when I call unless you’re sexually appeased.” A pause. Clove smoke, audible in the shape of his breathing. “Don’t say I don’t monitor habits.”

“Factual bullshit,” I counter, grinning at the closet door.

Killian talks about nine words a day to anyone else.

To me, he’ll manage a hundred and be furious about it after.

“Seriously, what? I’m busy.”

“Busy staring at your wall of photos,” he huffs.