Page 19 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

She holds his gaze for a long moment, the way she does when she is deciding whether the evidence supports the conclusion. Then she nods.

“Okay,” she says, and tucks herself back against his chest. “Can we have pasta?”

Something in his face, the thing that only she does, the opening, the particular undoing, shifts back into the dry composure he uses with the rest of the world.

“Whatever you want,” he says.

He looks up at me over the top of her head.

The gray of his eyes in the corridor light. Everything behind them that he still mostly shows me in the dark, in the specific hours of the night when there is no performance required, but that leaks out at the edges in moments like this one.

This is the look I crave, in the dark of the night when he’s inside me, this is the look he gives me.

He extends his free hand.

I take it.

His fingers close around mine, not the white-knuckled grip from the car on the way to the hospital three years ago, not the tight controlled hold of a man trying to manage something he cannot manage. Just this. Steady and certain and exactly what it is.

“Good game,” I tell him.

“Average game,” he says.

“You scored twice.”

“I was off in the second.”

“You got a power play and closed it out.”

“Took too long.” But his hand tightens around mine, just slightly, the specific pressure that means he has heard me even when he is disagreeing. “You staying warm enough? It was cold in the third.”

“We're fine.”

“You should have worn the other jacket.”

“I'm wearing three layers, Xaden.”

“The other jacket has better insulation.”

“I know you know that,” Em says, into his shoulder, with eyes still closed. “You told her before we left.”

“And she chose the wrong jacket,” he says.

“She's warm,” Em says. “I checked.”

I look at the side of his face.

He looks at me.

The corner of his mouth.

Not quite a smile. He doesn't do that in corridors, in public, where people are still filing out of the arena and scouts and staff are moving around us. He doesn’t give things away for free and he never has.

But that corner. That very specific corner of his mouth that belongs entirely to us and to no one else.

“Pasta,” he says, and steers us toward the exit.

I let him steer.