Page 69 of The Grumpy Defenseman

I held on because he needed me to.

Afterward, we stayed tangled together on the narrow desk that was absolutely not designed for this purpose, our breathing slowly finding a shared rhythm. The office hummed around us. The stripe of hallway light had moved farther across the floor. Time had passed. The world was still turning outside this room even though it felt like it had stopped.

His hand rested on my hip, thumb tracing absent circles he did not seem aware of. His breathing had finally steadied.

“I don’t know what happens now,” he said quietly.

“Me neither.”

He pulled back just enough to look at me. In the low light, his expression was stripped of every defense I had ever seen him wear. No walls. No calculated blankness. Just a man who had let someone past every barrier he had spent a lifetime constructing and was now standing in the open, terrified and unwilling to go back inside.

I touched his face. His cheek was warm under my palm.

“We don’t have to figure it out tonight,” I said.

“Okay.”

“But you should know, I’m not going to pretend this didn’t happen.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. Not a smile. The architecture of one. The closest thing he had to a promise.

“Good,” he said. “Neither am I.”

Chapter twenty-seven

Samantha

Three nights later, an hour after the home game ended, Evan showed up at my condo with takeout and the over-edited normalcy of a man trying to pass as fine through bad lighting.

He did not look hurt.

Evan would rather throw himself into active traffic than look hurt on purpose. But I had been photographing his body for weeks, and bodies told the truth faster than mouths did.

Normal Evan dropped his keys in the bowl by the door and rolled his neck like a man coming down from a game.

This Evan used the counter edge to brace himself when he bent for the takeout bag.

Normal Evan moved like his body belonged to him.

This Evan moved like his right side had filed a formal complaint.

I stood in the kitchen doorway with two plates in my hands and watched him pretend not to know I had noticed.

“What happened?”

He did not turn. “Nothing.”

I set the plates down. “That answer should have embarrassed you before it reached daylight.”

He exhaled through his nose. Not a laugh. More like his body had considered one and rejected it for being inefficient.

“Blocked a shot.”

“When?”

“Second period.”

“It is currently ten-thirty.”