Page 112 of Top Shelf

“I like falling asleep with you like this,” I murmur, already half-asleep.

Behind me, Viktor shifts slowly, then his mouth touches my ear with a featherlight kiss.

“God natt, min fru.”

Chapter sixteen

Viktor

By the third week of May, half the league is still trying to bleed itself into winning the Cup, but we are packing equipment bags, signing jerseys for season-ticket holders, and pretending it doesn’t itch under the skin to watch other men keep playing.

The arena feels strange when it’s not alive. Today, there’s only music over the speakers, children wobbling across the ice in tiny jerseys, and fans lined up along the glass with phones raised while we skate slow circles and thank them for coming. The Storm lost the season earlier than any of us wanted, and the building wears it like a bruise beneath all the bright lights and cheerful sponsor banners.

Next week, the ice comes out. It will disappear beneath covered floors for summer events and sports, with people running where we usually skate and spit blood into towels. I hate this part of the year. I hate the quiet after.

But Heidi is near the benches with Lulu and Zoe, laughing at something one of the kids says to her. She is not wearing my jersey today, and the fact that I notice annoys me only because I want it too much. Instead, she is wearing fitted black pants, a cream sweater, and a pink scarf tucked around her neck. Her hair falls loose over a shoulder, and my ring flashes on her hand when she lifts it to tuck a strand behind her ear.

The cameras notice her too, and this also annoys me. A reporter from one of the local sports stations stands near the tunnel doing soft season-ending coverage, and every time Heidi smiles, the camera drifts. I recognize the small shift of attention, the hungry little tilt toward a new story.

Our marriage was supposed to be paperwork, but paperwork doesn’t wear pink scarves and laugh by the glass and make my chest feel tight. Paperwork doesn’t make half the fans in section one whisper and look between us.

“Your wife is popular today,” Chase says, gliding up beside me with a little girl clinging to each of his hands.

The girl looks up at me. “Are you Viktor?”

“Yes.”

“You’re big.”

“Yes.”

“Can you do a trick?”

“No,” I say, at the same time Chase says, “He absolutely can.”

The child stares at me with the kind of disappointment only small children can manage. Heidi sees it from the bench and presses her lips together, so I sigh, take a puck from the stack near the boards, and skate backward just enough to give myself space.

It is a stupid trick, a soft little flip up on my blade, a catch, a turn, a quick shot into the empty net with no force behind it. But the child gasps as if I have split the moon in half, and Heidi claps like I’ve done something worthy. A ridiculous warmth moves through my chest, and I look away before my face tells everyone in the arena that I would do the trick again if Heidi asked.

That has become a problem lately. Heidi has her morning break at nine-thirty, I remember. Heidi goes quiet after too much noise, I notice. Heidi says she likes pistachio, and now my brain cannot pass any bakery in Denver without looking for green. Heidi comes apart with her hands in my hair and her voice husking my name, and for days afterward, I feel the echo of it in my bones.

Sex is simple until it is not. I know this. Heidi does too. We have both had enough of it without promises or expectations to understand the difference. And we are having plenty of it now, too. In bed before sleep and in the shower before work. Against the kitchen counter because she smiled at me while I was making coffee and neither of us bothered pretending we would reach the bedroom.

And every time I have her, I want more of her afterward. I fuck her and wake up wanting her again, then leave the apartment and find myself thinking about what she’ll tell me when I get home. I know which silence means she is tired and which means the world has become too loud. I hear something funny and reach for my phone before I remember I have never been a man who texts people simply because I want to tell them something.

With Heidi, the simple things keep opening into deeper things. And I keep wanting more than she ever agreed to give me.

After the fan skate, we stand near the tunnel for media. Chase charms two cameras and a child in a shark hat. I answer questions about the season, training, the young defensive core, and what we need to do better next season—all the ordinary topics men talk about when their year ends too soon.

Then the reporter smiles like she has been polite for long enough. “And off the ice, congratulations are in order. Married life treating you well, Viktor?”

The microphone lifts, and behind it the camera waits.

I know how to answer media. Keep it clean and short. Give them enough to make the segment useful and nothing exciting enough to cut with. I know all of this. Still, my eyes find Heidi over the reporter’s shoulder. She has a little kid’s hockey stick in her hands now, demonstrating something to them. She’s talking with her whole face, and the kid is watching her like Heidi invented oxygen.

I think she did.

“Yes,” I reply.