Page 20 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

Em is already half asleep against his chest, one fist in his jacket, her dark hair against his shoulder, twenty-three minutes of timing her father and four minutes of standing on the empty ice and a full game of screaming Daddy at the top of her lungs having finally caught up with her.

He adjusts her weight without breaking stride, the particular, careful adjustment of a man who has learned this specific weight over three years and knows exactly how to carry it.

I watch him do it.

I watch his face in profile, unguarded in the way he only gets when he thinks I'm not looking, which he should know by now that I always am.

He was terrified the day she was born.

Not of the game, not of the rink, not of the years of things that came before her. Terrified of her. Of loving something that completely. Of the specific vulnerability of it, that a person who weighs almost nothing and sleeps with her fist against her cheek has more power over him than anything he has built, held or protected in his entire life.

He’s still terrified.

He just doesn't run from it anymore.

He runs a hand over Em's hair, very gently, checking that she is comfortable, and he does it without looking down, his eyes are on the exit, scanning the corridor the way he scans every corridor, old habits and new habits running simultaneously and she murmurs something against his chest and he adjusts his arm again.

I reach over and rest my hand against his back, just for a moment.

He doesn't say anything.

He doesn't have to.

We walk out of the arena into the Colorado night, the three of us, and the door swings shut behind us on the noise and the lights and the game. Outside it is quiet and cold and Em is asleep against her father's chest. Xaden Devlin is holding my hand in a parking lot in the dark and for a man who is famously, constitutionally, congenitally unable to be soft about anything, he is doing a terrible job of not being soft about us.

I love him for it.

I love him for all of it.

He would never say that first. He would find seven other ways to say it before he said it plainly, and I have learned them all. The jacket with better insulation, the twenty-three minutes, the hand that closes around mine in corridors and I speak them fluently, and that is enough. On the nights when it is more than enough he says the words too, quietly, in the dark, when the weight of not saying them gets too heavy even for him.

Tonight will be one of those nights.

I already know.

He opens the car door.

Em stirs against his chest and says, without opening her eyes, “Four-two.”

“Four-two,” he confirms.

“I knew,” she says, and goes back to sleep.

He looks at me over the roof of the car.

The gray of his eyes in the dark.

“You knew too,” he says. Not a question.

“I always know,” I say.

The corner of his mouth.

We get in the car.

We go home.

To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.