Page 25 of The Beautiful Collision
“Bullshit.” Rook materializes from his bay. “Two-twenty tops.”
“—why I’ve got the best save percentage in college hockey?” He grins, already teeing up. “Stick to scoring, Hamilton. Leave the geometry to me.”
I shake my head. Fucking goalies. Every last one of them operates on a frequency only dogs and crazy people can hear, but Rook also operates at a volume that rivals anyone. And, if I’m being honest, I love it, because the emergence of his confidence has given me someone on the team to bounce off.
I grin. “You have a shot then, if yourdepth perceptionis so damn good…”
He shrugs, walks up to the tee, and swings.
And the ball disappears into orbit.
Fuck.
“Two-fifty,” he announces, examining his nails. “Minimum.”
And we’re on.
We trade shots with increasing gusto. Each impact rattles up through titanium into my bones, but I need this. Need the simple binary of further/not further, the mindless competition where the only thing that matters is winning. Something simple and fun.
The peanut gallery forms around us—Schmidt commenting on our technique, Cooper suddenly producing a flask from thin air, and Martinez silent but somehow communicating volumeswith slight nods and headshakes. And Mike, with a big shit-eating grin on his face the whole time.
“You’re gripping like you’re trying to strangle your dick,” Mike observes, gesturing at my grip with his chin.
I smirk. “That’s called technique, Altman. Some of us need more than two inches of contact.”
The howls fuel me.
This is my element.
Not the apartment, with Maya’s constantpresence.
I line up my next shot, weight balanced, arms straight—textbook form—but my brain’s not on the ball waiting three feet away. It’s twenty minutes across town, in my apartment, where even the brief thought of Maya has me considering what she’s doing at home while I’m here.
Plotting my next humiliation.
The passive-aggressive war has continued simply enough. After I fucked with her study materials, she reorganized my gaming setup while I was at practice, wrapping my PS5 cords in these neat little spirals with actual fucking labels.HDMI to TV. Power. Controller 1.
So I responded by “helpfully” changing the lids on her nail polish collection—making sure no lid with the little color indicator would match the actual color in the bottle. The shriek she’d let out when she’d realized had been worth the death glare at breakfast.
Back and forth it had gone. Minor passive-aggressive acts, which turned into pranks, which turned into… something else. And soon, instead of merely responding with pranks, I’d started anticipating her moves and wondering what I’d come home to.
And in the last few days, I’ve started noticing how she bites her lower lip when she’s planning something devious, and how her eyes narrow just before she strikes. Started looking forwardto whatever fresh hell she’s devised, because at least it means she was thinking about me.
We’re two alphas on a collision course, and in twenty-six days of living together, I’ve already memorized the exact shade of pink her cheeks turn when she’s pissed, which is a different shade than when she’s embarrassed. But then… well… she escalated.
Staked her claim.
Asserted her dominance.
She’d started doing yoga in the living room every morning.
No problem, right? We all work out, right?
But she does it in impossibly tiny shorts that ride up when she bends into downward dog, giving me a front-row view of an ass that belongs on a Nike billboard. Pure psychological warfare, a hot new front in our ongoing cold war, and we both know it.
A week ago, I’d walked past, trying not to stare while she held poses that made her thighs shake. As those tiny shorts hugged that ass, and her top rode up, giving me a glimpse of her sports bra, she’d completely ignored my existence except for the tiny smirk when I tripped over my gear bag.
So I’d started working out shirtless. Push-ups in the living room followed by an entire ab workout on the living room floor while she tried to FaceTime with Sophie. Every crunch had made her lose her train of thought, stammering while her eyes tracked the movement of my muscles.
