Chapter 3

CAL

The anger in the locker room barely registers.

I hear my name in half-whispers, sense the fury in the set of my teammates' shoulders. But since I don't turn around or make eye contact, nobody actually speaks to me directly.

I don’t shower, I don’t cool down; I just shove my legs into faded jeans, pull on my boots, grab my t-shirt, leave my gear strewn across the floor for someone else to deal with. The air-conditioning against my bare chest is a shock, but it doesn’t help. It just sharpens everything.

The hallway outside the locker rooms is narrow and utilitarian, concrete walls sweating in the June humidity, fluorescent lights flickering. My skin is still sticky with sweat and disappointment, chest bare and flushed. My body hasn’t caught up to the fact that the season is over, and my pulse is still looking for something to hit.

That’s when I see him.

Ethan Locke stands alone at the far end of the corridor, freshly showered, hair damp and curling, in an impeccable suit that isn't even slightly wrinkled in the summer heat. He looks untouched by the violence of the game, like he stepped out of a different version of it altogether.

He’s watching me, and the hallway tightens around that fact.

It occurs to me now that we've spent ten years on the ice, and we’ve never once been alone like this. There have always been buffers – crowds, team members, noise, motion. Now there’s nothing between us but heat and whatever this pressure is that's started to coil dark and strong in my gut.

His eyes move over me slowly. Not scanning, not judging.

Taking me apart.

I feel it everywhere at once, the way his gaze tracks the rise and fall of my muscular chest, the way it lingers on the tattoos curling over my entire massive upper body, the veins standing out dark and thick along my neck and forearms like my body is advertising how close I am to losing control. He sees the bruises, the rawness, the fact that I haven’t cooled down, that I’m still vibrating with something unresolved.

I become acutely aware of myself. Not weak, not exposed in a way I know how to name.

Just open.

“You lost control tonight,” he says evenly. "You lost everything."

The words land slow and deliberate, like fingers closing around my throat.

I laugh because all this fucking tension has to go somewhere. “That your expert analysis?”

His mouth curves just enough to suggest he already knows how this will end. “It’s an observation.”

I step closer without deciding to, and the distance between us collapses until I can feel the heat coming off him, steady and contained, a sharp contrast to the riot still tearing through my body. He doesn’t retreat, doesn’t even brace. He just looks up at me.  

“You don’t get to—” I start, then stop, because the truth lands all at once, unwelcome and unmistakable: he isn’t provoking me, he isn’t escalating. He’s just standing there, calm as a held breath, waiting to see what I’ll do with all this force. Waiting to see if I’ll break.

My hands curl into fists. The urge comes over me, hard and familiar... to hit him, to shove him, to put my hands on him and make all this pressure go somewhere. It’s instinct, reflex, muscle memory.

And then something slips inside me.

Because when I imagine it – when I imagine striking him, closing that last foot of air between us with force – I realize with absolute, incandescent clarity that it isn’t the impact I want.

It’s the contact.

The realization detonates in my chest:

I want to hit him because it’s the only way my body knows how to justify touching him, and the thought fucking enrages me.

“That’s your real problem,” Ethan says quietly, noticing everything. “You always think force is the answer.”

Something ugly tears up through me at the certainty of it, at the way he says it like he’s been watching me for years, like he knows exactly where I fray.

“Don’t pretend you’re fucking better than me,” I snarl.

He steps closer.

Not enough to touch.

Enough to ruin me.

His shoulder nearly brushes my bare chest, the restraint of it deliberate, and my breath hitches hard enough that there’s no hiding it. I can feel the heat of him now, solid and real, and my hands ache with the effort of keeping them at my sides.

He knows. He has to.

“But I am better,” he answers calmly. “Because when I tell myself to stop, I do.”

The words slide under my skin and stay there, poisonous and intimate.

We stand there, locked – my body massive and exposed, his body suited and still – and the tension between us feels like something alive, something crawling up my spine, something that has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the fact that he hasn’t looked away, that I can’t seem to take a single step back.

The hallway feels hotter. Smaller. Like it’s closing in around us.

I’m aware of my breathing now, rough and uneven, the rise and fall of my chest inches from him. His eyes track every hitch without apology. He smells clean – of soap and restraint – and the contrast between that and the sweat on my skin makes my head spin.

I want to shove him. I want to grab him. I want to do something that will let my hands touch his body without admitting why.

Neither of us moves.

The moment stretches, tight and vibrating, and the effort it takes not to act burns worse than any hit I took on the ice.

The heat keeps building.

And the worst part – the part that makes my jaw lock and my hands shake – is the growing, infuriating certainty that if he told me to stand still, to stay right here –

I would.