Page 370 of Face Off

Charm is still four hundred miles away.

Trust remains unfinished. Anger remains alive. Loving her still scares the fuck out of me, and wanting the life she described doesn’t mean I am ready to give it to either of us.

For the first time, she hasn’t asked me to choose between believing in her and protecting myself.

She has shown me exactly what returning could cost and trusted me to decide whether I am willing to pay it.

I seal the envelope while the future takes shape around all the things neither of us can promise.

Somewhere inside it, Charm is laughing in a kitchen with pizza on the counter, wearing my ring without a ballroom full of strangers watching her carry its weight.

The image hurts.

I let myself keep it anyway.

30

Ryan

Six days after Charm’s letter arrives, it remains folded inside the pocket of my team jacket.

The paper has softened along the creases from being opened too many times. I know every sentence, including the ones that still piss me off and the one about my mother that I can’t read inside a room containing other people.

Briggs crosses the ice while an assistant coach shouts his name from the bench.

The Inferno’s training facility holds the cold differently than an arena. There are no bodies in the stands to warm it, no music filling the empty seats, and no crowd reacting when Briggs drops into a butterfly position and catches a shot everyone else expected to hit the net.

“Again,” Coach Martin calls.

Eastman circles behind the line with another puck. Briggs rises, resets, and tracks him across the ice.

The shot comes high toward his glove.

Briggs catches it without giving the puck enough room to argue.

Martin slaps his stick against the boards. “That’s what I want. Lawson, you keep reading the release that clean, and nobody in this division is getting shit past you.”

Briggs lowers his mask, but I see the smile before it disappears.

He needs to hear how good he is more often.

Lyric spent too long teaching him that talent was another thing he had to earn the right to believe in. She made praise conditional, turned his worst games into evidence that he wasn’t who everyone thought, and treated every victory like another opportunity to remind him he could lose it.

The Inferno knows what they have in him.

Every coach, trainer, and man sharing this ice sees it. Briggs is one of the most instinctive goalies I have ever played beside, and the bastard works hard enough to make talent look like something he built one punishing repetition at a time.

I love watching someone tell him.

Briggs glances toward me while Martin continues praising the save. I tap my stick twice against the ice.

His smile returns.

Eastman skates beside me. “You two going to kiss, or can we finish the drill?”

“Jealousy is ugly on you,” Briggs calls through his mask.

“I’m jealous of Decker. You have delicate hands.”