Page 39 of Gap Control

"TJ."

"Yeah?"

For a second, I thought he would say something that would change everything. Something real.

"See you inside."

The way he said it—like he was saying something else entirely—made me think maybe I wasn't the only one who didn't know how to answer Walsh's question.

Chapter eight

Mason

Practice ran long, as it always did when Coach sensed we were on the edge of something—either a breakthrough or a breakdown. By the time I stepped through the arena's steel doors, snow was falling in that tentative, early-season way.

Fat, lazy flakes drifted down like afterthoughts, melting the instant they kissed asphalt but clinging desperately to anything softer: the wool of coat sleeves, curve of shoulders, and vulnerable hollow at the base of someone's neck.

TJ stood on the sidewalk outside the Colisée, his back to me, a study in perpetual motion even when standing still. He was shaking out his hoodie, the shimmery one, with quick, efficient movements.

Despite the bite in the air, he wasn't wearing gloves—typical TJ, as if winter were just another teammate he could charm into submission. I approached, but he didn't notice.

Snowflakes caught in the folds near his collar. He was saying something as I approached, talking to the air about the ridiculous choices available in the arena's vending machines.

His words dissolved under the thump of my own thundering pulse. I wasn't listening anyway. I was too busy examining how his hands moved while he spoke: quick, fluid, and impossibly warm.

A line of snowflakes gathered on his right shoulder. It caught the amber glow of a parking lot light.

My hand moved before my brain could intervene. It was two careful swipes across the hoodie's fabric.

He stopped talking mid-sentence. TJ slowly turned his head to face me.

We were close. Closer than we'd ever been without the protective barrier of helmets, crowd noise, and the beautiful chaos of the game. Close enough that I saw how his pupils dilated slightly in the dim light. It would have been possible to count the individual snowflakes clinging to his dark lashes like tiny stars.

He didn't step back. His breath caught the frigid air and hung between us in little puffy clouds. We stood together on the knife's edge of something irreversible.

A few more snowflakes settled on his cheekbones. His mouth—that mouth I'd been trying not to think about for weeks—curved into something that wasn't quite a smile, more like a question he couldn't quite turn into words.

My hand stopped, suspended in the air after brushing his shoulder. My instincts screamed at me to retreat to safer ground, to control the gap between us.

I didn't. The truth hit fast and hard. Being near TJ had stopped feeling like a mistake somewhere between that first hug and laying eyes on that ridiculous hoodie in the snow. Being close to him made sense.

It just hadn't felt safe to admit it to myself. For one reckless, impossible breath, I let myself lean in.

He saw me, and his lips parted slightly. The faint scruff along his jaw looked soft, touchable. His mouth—damn, his mouth. I kissed him.

It was slow and deliberate, utterly without pretense. Not an overly confident claiming of territory or pretentious declaration of intent. Just quietly confident about closing the distance that was slowly killing me.

He froze. Then—miracle of miracles—he melted into me.

TJ's lips answered mine with soft hunger, as if he'd been holding his breath and waiting for this moment. His left hand rested on my chest, the warmth of his palm slowly burning through my coat.

He didn't pull me closer. He was just present, real.

When our tongues brushed, I tasted winter with a sweet undertone. He kissed me back, and he knew how.

Then, so quietly I almost missed it, he breathed my name against my lips. "Mason."

Not planned. Not performed. It was an unconscious exhale of want that slipped out before he could stop it.

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