Page 50 of Cross Checked
I stood near the grill with Daniel, holding a plate I had no intention of eating from, and watched Luke lean toward her.
He said something too low for me to hear. Bliss laughed a forced wrong laugh.
Not the lower real one that hit me every time like impact. Not even her quick defensive laugh. This one was thin and bright and made my teeth ache.
Her right hand went under the table and Luke’s followed. My entire body went still. I didn’t see what he did but I saw her reaction.
The fork slipped from her left hand and hit the plate with a sharp little clatter.
Lyon’s head turned. “You okay?”
Bliss smiled instantly. “Yeah. Sorry. Slippery fork.”
I went quiet, the kind of quiet that came before impact.
Bliss’s fingers curled around the edge of the table so tightly her knuckles paled. Her smile stayed fixed. Her eyes didn’t lift to mine, which told me she knew I was watching and couldn’t risk looking.
I set my plate down before my grip cracked it. Ryker’s gaze flicked to me from across the deck. He saw something in my face and straightened slightly, but one of the kids yelled for him before he could follow the line of my attention.
Luke removed his hand from under the table and Bliss inhaled. Tiny. Silent. Devastating.
I had taken hits hard enough to make arenas blur. I had been cross-checked into boards, had my ribs bruised, my jaw split, my shoulder nearly dislocated. I knew pain. I knew anger. I knew the clean, sanctioned violence of men putting their bodies through each other because the rules allowed it.
This was different, and it reached into a place in me that hockey had never touched. This was not a clean hit or a bad call or some idiot running his mouth across the ice where violence had rules, witnesses, penalties, and a clock. This was quieter. Uglier. A man putting his hands on a woman under her father’s table while everyone who loved her laughed around them, andevery instinct in my body wanted to become something with no rules at all.
I stayed where I was by force alone, my jaw tight enough to ache and my hands curled loose at my sides because I did not know enough yet. More than that, because some part of me already understood the thing Bliss had never said out loud. If I moved wrong, if I made this obvious, if I turned the entire backyard toward what had just happened before she was ready, she would be the one who paid for it.
That thought did not come from nowhere. It came from four Sundays of watching her check exits without thinking, from the phone she flipped over too fast, from the way her hand kept finding her pocket, from the way her fear around Luke never looked surprised. Only tired.
Dinner dragged on after that, or maybe time moved normally and I was the thing that had changed.
Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe time moved normally and I was the thing that had changed. Luke kept performing. Former hockey stories. Old Bennett memories. Easy laughter. He tried to pull me in twice, asking about the Fury, about scouts, about whether the freshman class had any fighters worth watching.
I answered with the fewest words possible. Bliss noticed. Luke noticed her noticing. The air between them kept tightening in tiny increments no one else seemed to feel.
When Bliss stood to clear plates, I stood too.
Luke moved first. “I got it, Bug.”
“No, I’m good,” she said too quickly.
“I said I got it.”
Her hand froze on the plate. I stepped around the table and took the stack from her before Luke reached it. “I’ve got them.”
Luke and Bliss both looked at me. I kept my expression easy. “I’m earning my side dishes.”
Daniel laughed from the grill. “Good man, Mercer.”
Bliss let go of the plates and her fingers brushed mine once.
Thank you.
She didn’t say it, she didn’t have to.
7
Cade
