"Shut up," I said, and I grabbed the front of his chest protector with both hands and kissed him.
Not carefully. Not tentatively. Not the way you kissed someone when you were testing whether they still wanted you. I kissed him the way I'd wanted to since the night he'd pressed his cold mouth to my spine and whisperedI'm counting now. I kissed him like I was drowning and he was the surface. I kissed him with four days of silence and grief and kitchen floors and cold tea and the sound of his name in an empty apartment behind it.
He made a sound against my mouth. Low, wrecked, almost pained. His bare hands came up and gripped my face, fingers freezing against my jaw, and the cold bloomed through me like ahomecoming. Not sharp. Not painful. Just his. The clean, bright, living cold that had bent around me the first time I'd touched him and never stopped recognizing me since.
He kissed me back like a man who'd been holding his breath for days and had finally been given permission to exhale. His thumbs traced my cheekbones. His forehead pressed against mine. I could feel him shaking, fine tremors running through his hands and his arms and the massive frame still encased in goaltending pads, and I realized he was crying. Not sobbing. Not falling apart. Just leaking, silently, the way ice melted when warmth finally reached it.
The locker room had gone quiet.
I didn't care. I kissed him harder, pulling him closer, my fingers twisting in the straps of his chest protector because I needed something to hold onto and he was the only solid thing left in my world.
When we finally broke apart, breathing hard, foreheads still touching, the silence lasted exactly two and a half seconds.
Then Ember said, very clearly, "FINALLY."
The room exploded. Not with shock. Not with discomfort. With the particular, raucous, overwhelming joy of a team that had apparently been waiting for this moment with considerably less patience than either of us had given them credit for.
Max whooped. Actually whooped, like a teenager at a concert, and started clapping with a rhythm that the rest of the room picked up. Cole was laughing, his head tipped back against his stall, the sound warm and genuine and relieved. Ash nodded once from across the room, which from Ash was the equivalent of a standing ovation. Declan punched the air. Sorin whistled.
Ember vaulted over a bench, skidded to a stop beside us, and threw his arms around both of us simultaneously, which was impressive given that Taz was still in full goaltending gear and roughly the size of a refrigerator. "I knew it," he announced tono one in particular. "I called it three months ago. Ask Max. I literally called it."
"He did," Max confirmed, still filming. "He was insufferable about it."
"I was RIGHT about it," Ember corrected. "There's a difference."
Taz hadn't let go of my face. His thumbs were still moving, slow arcs across my cheekbones, and his eyes were locked on mine with an intensity that made my chest feel like it was being rebuilt from the inside out.
"I'm sorry," he said. Quiet enough that it was just for me, even in the noise. "I'm so sorry, Cinder. I was wrong. About all of it."
"I know," I said. My voice cracked, and I didn't try to fix it. "We're going to talk about it. All of it. Every single thing you've been hiding. But not now."
"Not now," he agreed.
"Now you're going to let your team celebrate. And you're going to let me sit next to you. And you're not going to create any more distance, not an inch, not for any reason, because I swear to God, Taz, if you pull away from me one more time, I will document it in your medical file as a psychiatric event."
The laugh that burst out of him was raw and startled and real, the kind of laugh I'd only heard from him a handful of times, the kind that meant I'd gotten past every wall he'd built and found the actual person underneath.
"Understood," he said.
"Good." I kissed him again, softer this time, just a press of warmth against his cold mouth. "Now take off your pads. You smell horrific."
Max's camera caught the whole thing. I found out later he'd posted it to the team group chat with the caption:our goalie scored a goal and got a boyfriend in the same night.
I didn't even mind.
Taz sat on the edge of the hotel room mattress in sweats and a worn t-shirt, hair still damp from the shower, and he looked smaller without the pads. Not physically—he was still enormous, broad-shouldered and built like something designed to stop things—but stripped of the armor, the mask, the goaltender's composure, he looked like a man who'd been carrying something too heavy for too long and had only just set it down.
I sat across from him, cross-legged on the other bed, close enough that our knees almost touched. The flight was at six-thirty in the morning. We had maybe five hours before the alarm went off, and neither of us was going to waste them sleeping.
"Talk," I said.
He exhaled through his nose. Rubbed his palms against his thighs, a gesture I'd seen him make exactly twice before, both times when he was working up to something he didn't want to say.
"After the playoff clinch," he started. "At the bar. I went to the restroom."
I waited.
"There was a man in the hallway when I came out. Blocking the corridor. No name. No identification. The kind of face you forget while you're still looking at it." He paused, and the temperature in the room dropped by a degree. Not enough to seeyour breath, but enough to feel it settle against exposed skin like a warning. "He had your notes, Cinder."