Page 42 of Cross Check
"I'm aware."
Bishop studied me for a long moment. Then he extended his fist, the massive, scarred fist of a man who'd been in more fights than he could count and had won most of them.
"Don't fuck it up," he said.
I bumped his fist with my bandaged one. The contact was light and careful, his knuckles against my gauze. But the weight of it was enormous.
"I'll do my best," I said.
Bishop stood up, clapped me on the shoulder with a force that would have knocked a smaller man sideways, and walked back to his stall.
Luca appeared beside me next. The captain was calmer than the room around him, the measured stillness of a man who'd learned to be the eye of every storm.
"Training room," he said. "Kieran's getting his hand looked at."
I stood up. My lower back screamed, but I ignored it.
The training room was empty except for Kieran and the team doctor. Kieran sat on the treatment table, shirtless, an ice pack on his ribs and his right hand being examined.
The doctor glanced at me when I walked in. He looked at Kieran. He looked back at me.
"I'll get an x-ray tray," he said, and left.
The door closed. We were alone.
Kieran looked at me. His hair was matted with sweat. A bruise was darkening along his jawline where Thompson's punch had caught him. His ribs were wrapped with a compression bandage. Thompson's hook had found its mark. His right hand was the worst—swollen, the knuckles split across the first two fingers, blood dried in the creases of his palm. The hands of a goalie, the most valuable hands in hockey, worth millions in contract value, trained for precision over seventeen years, damaged because he'd used them to defend me.
"You left your crease," I said.
"Yes."
"You fought an enforcer. You're a goalie. Goalies don't fight."
"This one does."
"You got ejected from a playoff-clinching game. You could have cost us the season."
"We won."
"That's not the—" I stopped. My voice was cracking at the seams, the words losing their shape. I crossed the room and stood in front of him. The treatment table put us at the same height. His eyes met mine.
"You left your crease," I said again, quieter now. Not an accusation—a wonder.
"He hurt you." The words were simple. The logic behind them was simpler—a closed system, a single equation.He hurt you, so I left.No variables. No calculations. Just the irreducible truth of a man who'd spent seventeen years in a six-by-four rectangle and had walked out of it because the person he loved was on the ice.
I took his injured hand carefully, the way he'd held mine the night I punched his guest room wall— the same tenderness, the same first aid that disguised care as medical attention. I turned his hand over, examining the damage. The knuckles were hot and swollen, the skin peeled back from the bone. He'd need x-rays. He might need stitches. These hands that caught pucks at ninety miles an hour were split open because they'd hit a man's face for me.
"This is going to need more than ice," I said.
"Nico."
I looked up. His uninjured hand cupped the back of my neck and pulled me in. My forehead pressed against his. We breathed the same air, heavy with sweat and ice and the copper taste of the night's violence.
"I'd do it again," he said. "For you. Every time."
I kissed him. In the training room of the Storm facility, with the door closed and the celebration thirty feet away and every camera in the building having already broadcast the reason across the country. The kiss tasted like blood and salt. I was done hiding. His hand was warm on the back of my neck.
The door opened.
