Page 9 of Locked & Loaded

The only other time I felt it was in Boston, years ago, in a stupid Egyptian pyramid escape room my friends had talked me into. The first room had been about the size of this compartment, maybe smaller, built with enough sand and stone to make it feel less like a game and more like an actual tomb. So while my friends were laughing and digging for clues, I stood in the middle of it with my hands jammed into my pockets so they wouldn’t see them shake.

I knew it was a game. My body didn’t care. By the time they got us out of that room, I was weak, barely breathing, and close enough to passing out that I had to sit on the floor while everyone else crowded around the next clue. That was how I learned something about myself I would’ve been perfectly happy never knowing.

I’m claustrophobic.

Since then, I’ve been careful. Avoid small spaces when I can. Sit near exits. Keep track of doors. I haven’t had another episode, but that’s probably because I’ve made sure I never got trapped anywhere.

Until now.

Now the compartment feels smaller with every breath, and that long-forgotten fear is waking up again, crawling cold beneath my skin.

And because apparently the universe is committed to the bit, I’m stuck here with Mads Holm.

The one guy on the team who hates my guts.

Also, unfortunately, the one guy I’ve been crushing on for three straight months.

I know how it sounds. Pathetic doesn’t cover it. Mads Holm, of all people—the Danish goalie who glares at me across the ice like I personally spat on his ancestors’ graves, who shouts at me during games until his face goes red, who spent tonight looking at me as if I was the sole architect of our fucking nightmare of a loss.

Which, fine. Maybe I helped with the blueprint. Partly.

So, yes. Perfect timing for my claustrophobia to stage a comeback while I’m trapped in here with him. He already hates my guts, and letting him watch me go into full-blown panic would be an excellent way to improve my position.

I force my face back into something neutral and look up, only to find Mads already watching me.

I hold his gaze, because looking away too fast would make it obvious he caught me thinking something I shouldn’t.

“You want to say something?” he asks.

“No,” I say quickly, instantly paranoid that he somehow knows exactly where my mind went.

God, falling for this guy is ridiculous even as a hypothetical. But it’s not like I had any say in it. It just happened.

It started at the resort less than a year ago, when we all got stuck working the same remote rescue station after one cabin-trashing disaster my former teammates apparently considered a prank. They started it, the Saints retaliated, and once the whole thing came out, Toledo and Harris decided the best punishment for a bunch of grown men acting like unsupervised teenagers was forced cooperation. Which is how the Saints and the Wraiths ended up freezing their asses off together in the middle of nowhere.

My attraction to him started there, in Scandinavian nowhere, while we were melting snow for water. Don’t ask. Back then, it was easier to ignore. It was a simple sexual pull. Annoying, inconvenient, but not exactly life-ruining. I noticed it, filed it away under terrible ideas, and moved on.

Then I declined an extension with the Wraiths, joined his team in September, and started seeing him every day.

That’s when it got worse.

At first, I could still pretend it was mostly physical. Which was already a problem, because Mads is built like someone designed the perfect hockey player and then made him six foot three for no good reason except to personally inconvenience me. Broad shoulders, thick arms, the kind of chest that makes T-shirts look like they’re fighting for their lives. His face is all hard angles and that permanent dead stare, like he’s constantly annoyed. His eyes are this pale, almost gray-blue color that cuts right through you when he’s pissed, which is most of the time when he’s looking at me.

So, yes, the physical part was bad enough on its own. I’d look at him, and my brain would turn into this useless, lagging thing that wanted exactly one thing: for him to fuck me hard enough that the itch under my skin finally shut up. Like some stupid part of me had decided Mads Holm was a problem only sex could solve and refused to accept further evidence.

I thought it would go away if I ignored it.

It didn’t.

For a while, that was the worst of it.

That, at least, made some kind of sense. Inconvenient sense, but sense.

Then recently, because apparently my brain looked at the situation and decided it wasn’t humiliating enough, it found a new way to fuck me over.

I started dreaming about him.

And not even sex dreams. Wet dreams would be embarrassing, sure, but at least they’d fit the original problem. Instead, my brain keeps handing me these insane little domestic hypotheticals where Mads and I live together like some disgustingly cute gay hockey couple with cats, a backyard, and matching mugs in the kitchen cabinet.