Page 26 of Cross Check
"Good."
He headed for the shower. I waited for the usual panic to set in, the one I'd trained myself to expect.Good thing happens, bad thing follows.That was my law, the pattern my life had confirmed so many times it had graduated from suspicion to certainty. I'd kissed Kieran Walsh. I'd let him see me. The universe owed me a catastrophe.
But as the water hissed behind the bathroom door, the panic didn't come.
The team bus to Columbus was where the panic finally arrived, just not the kind I'd expected.
Kieran sat three rows ahead of me. Standard arrangement, goalies with goalies, forwards with forwards. Abbott was beside him, their conversation a low murmur about save percentages and rebound control. This was exactly the distance that was supposed to exist between us during daylight hours.
He didn't look at me. Not once.
Not when I boarded the bus. Not during the two-hour drive. Not when we stopped for gas and everyone filed into a rest stop. I stood six feet behind him in line at the coffee counter. He ordered his drink and walked past me like I was wallpaper.
By the time we reached Columbus, I'd constructed a narrative so thorough it could have won a Pulitzer. He regretted it. The kiss had been a mistake, the adrenaline of a win, the vulnerability of the conversation about Finland. He'd woken up, seen the morning light, and realized that kissing the player he was supposed to be monitoring was the stupidest thing he'd ever done. The silence wasn't professionalism. It was retreat.
I'd lived this story before. The people who got close always found a reason to pull back. The distance they created was always proportional to how much they'd let themselves feel.
The Columbus hotel was a Hilton with the same anonymous rooms. Same two queen beds, same view of nothing. Kieran dropped his bag on the far bed and immediately opened his laptop.
"Film session at three," he said, not looking up. "Reeves wants the forwards in the auxiliary room."
"Got it."
I stood in the doorway with my bag on my shoulder and felt the distance between us like a chasm, invisible and absolute.
"Kieran."
"Yeah?"
"Are we going to talk about it?"
He stopped typing. His hands hovered over the keyboard. He didn't look up for a long time.
"Not here," he said.
"Then when?"
"Home."
That word again. The same one he'd used last night when he'd pulled away from kissing me. It was starting to feel less like a promise and more like a deferral, an elegant way of sayingnot now, not yet, not where it counts.
I went to the auxiliary film room and tried to focus on breakout patterns.
Theo found me after the Columbus game, a 3-1 win that felt mechanical—the kind of victory you grind out when everyone's tired and the bus schedule is more enemy than the opponent. I was sitting in an empty equipment room, my skates still on, my helmet in my lap. The door opened and Theo slipped in, closing it behind him.
"You look terrible," he said cheerfully.
"Thanks."
"Not your game. Your game was fine. Two points, good defensive effort." He dropped onto the bench across from me. "You look like someone stole your dog."
"I don't have a dog."
"It's a figure of speech." Theo cocked his head, studying me with a disarming directness that made him impossible to deflect. "What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Nico."
