Chapter 8:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

The locker room smelled like rubber and cold air and the particular staleness of gear left too long in a bag. Not unpleasant. Just honest.

Beckham set his helmet on the bench. Then the gloves. Then the jersey — which snagged briefly on the cage lining and required a moment of focused attention to free. He handled it without ceremony, no frustration performed for an audience. Just fixed it and moved on.

The undershirt. The shoulder pads, which had more straps than I had anticipated.

“It is a lot of equipment,” I said.

“That is hockey,” he said.

“Figure skaters wear a leotard and hope for the best.”

𝘋𝘰𝗐𝗻𝗹o𝖺𝘥 𝖯𝖣𝘍s fre𝘦 оո 𝗀𝘢l𝗇𝘰𝘃е𝗹ѕ.𝘤𝗼m

“I have noticed,” he said, and looked at me in a way that ended that particular line of conversation.

He reached for my bra clasp without asking but with a half-second pause — giving me room, not requesting permission. I didn’t move. He unhooked it and kissed my shoulder, and his mouth crossed my back slowly. I put my hands flat against the locker in front of me.

His fingers hooked into the lace at my hips and pulled — not carefully. The fabric gave with a sound that was either a tear or a surrender, and I did not stop him long enough to determine which.

He was unhurrying about all of it, which was not what I had modeled. I had expected forward momentum, the same relentlessness he had on the ice. Instead he seemed to find it worth taking time, which was a stranger and more unsettling quality to discover in someone you had spent weeks writing off.

I stopped thinking about it.

Then the corridor door opened. Voices — plural, loud, returning in the specific register of people who had just won something. His teammates.

Beckham grabbed my hand.

He moved fast and quietly to the back of the room, pulling me into the shower area and closing the door. He reached past me to turn on the water.

It came out scalding and I pulled back sharply.

“Sorry.” He adjusted the knob, arm brushing mine. The steam built quickly. Through the fog I could make out the shape of him — the line of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw — but the detail had gone soft.

“I can barely see you,” I said.

“You do not need to see me,” he told me. “You only need to feel me.”

He took my hands and guided them to him. I learned what I could find by touch. His hands did the same, moving without hurry from my waist upward and then down again.

Outside, one of his teammates was reconstructing the final goal at full volume, including what appeared to be a dramatic reenactment of the goalie’s expression. Someone else was laughing hard enough that it came through the wall in waves.

Neither of us was listening.

He moved down in front of me, and I put one hand on the shower wall and the other in his hair, and the noise outside receded entirely.

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