Page 14 of Triplets for the Pucking Playboys
He tilts his head, still not buying it. “You don’t even know her.”
I grin, go for levity. “That’s why I was doing the icebreaker. It’s called team building, Sorensen. Very big in Sweden, or so I hear.”
He doesn’t blink. “It’s not funny, Beau.”
We stand in the sterile silence, neither willing to blink first.
I think about all the times Finn’s body has been between me and a goon on the ice, how he’s never once let me down in a rush, and I wonder if he’d take a hit for me if the stakes were something worse than a broken rib.
He finally sighs, all the fight gone. “Just…don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
I nod, but he can see right through it.
He turns and walks off, shoulders hunched, muttering something that sounds a lot like, “I miss when staff used to be boring.”
That effectively leaves me alone with the buzz of the building and the tick in my jaw.
I lean against the cold tile and replay the scene, the way Sage’s hand fit in mine, the half second where she almost leaned in, the look she gave me as she left.
Finn’s right: I don’t know her.
But I know the way she makes me want to stop pretending for five minutes that I have everything under control.
3
FINN
Ipost up at the blue line with my shoulder blades chewing through my shirt and the whole left side of my jaw stiff from clenching.
The rink is empty except for Sage and whichever rookie winger drew the short straw for early morning assessment.
She has him stretched out on a mat, testing ankle flexion and talking to him in her soft, sweet voice—she never raises it, never lets the volume get out of her hands.
I watch the way she moves her fingers along the edge of his shin, pressure exact, clinical, no hesitation.
The breeze tastes like old sweat and the ammonia blast from the Zamboni bay.
That’s the real smell of hockey, not the corporate wax or whatever citrus spray the PR guys use on media days.
I don’t remember deciding to watch her work, but I’m here every morning before team skate, running laps, shooting pucks, killing time until the day demands something of me.
Today I watch her because I need to know—need to see with my own eyes—if yesterday was anything but a fluke.
Yesterday was Beau.
I found them in the treatment suite, alone, the spaces between them buzzing with what they weren’t saying.
His hands, too close.
Her face, not angry.
I let the door slam just to see if he’d flinch.
He didn’t.
She only turned away, like it was me interrupting something private.
Now, from the opposite side of the glass, I see the rookie get up, rotate his ankle.
