Page 193 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Harper is screaming beside me. “That's my best friend's man!” she yells at nobody in particular.

“Harp—”

“That is my best friend's man!”

The final buzzer sounds.

They win.

Of course they win, they were always going to win. This team with its two players who grew up fighting for everything they had and never once considered the alternative won. The ice erupts in the usual chaos, helmets, sticks, the particular joy of people, who have been wound up tight for sixty minutes, are finally allowed to release it.

I'm expecting the usual post-game sequence. Celebration on the ice. Locker room. The long wait that I have learned to bring a book for.

I don't get the usual sequence.

I get Xaden breaking away from the pile of his celebrating teammates and skating directly toward the boards.

Toward me.

Harper makes a sound beside me that I will generously describe as a noise.

From my other side, Carnage says nothing at all. I don't look at him. I don't need to.

He stops at the boards, right in front of where I'm standing, still in full gear, helmet pushed back on his head, breathing hard from sixty minutes of everything he has. He looks at me from the other side of the glass, at the jersey, at the pendant, at the hand I have pressed over my stomach and the look on his face is the one I keep in the back of my chest for the days when things are hard. The one that is entirely unguarded and entirely his and entirely for me.

He takes his glove off.

Presses his bare hand flat against the glass.

I press mine against it on my side. Our hands, separated by the glass, and the whole rink carrying on around us, while neither of us pay the slightest attention to any of it.

Then he moves toward the benches, I follow. He leans around the glass.

And kisses me.

In front of the scouts. In front of the crowd. In front of however many people are in this building who have no idea who Xaden Devlin is, or what it costs a man like him to do something like this without the privacy of a dark room or the cover of there being no audience.

It's not a short kiss either. It's the kind of kiss that makes Harper scream, makes someone nearby wolf-whistle and makes me completely forget that we are in a public place and I am the approximate size and shape of a harvest moon and I have at least two of the scouts' assistants filming this on their phones.

When he pulls back, he looks at me with those gray eyes and says, quietly enough that it's only for me, “That's for everyone who ever doubted you meant something.”

I stare at him.

“You're going to make me cry in the middle of a hockey rink,” I say.

“You're already crying.”

“I'm not⁠—”

“Tink.” He touches my face briefly through the gap in the glass, thumb grazing my cheek. “You're crying.”

I press my lips together. I am absolutely crying. I have been crying at completely unreasonable things for two months and a hockey rink in Colorado in front of several hundred people is apparently not beneath my threshold.

“Go celebrate,” I manage. “Your teammates are watching.”

He glances back at the ice. Cas is standing ten feet away with his stick held loosely at his side and the expression of a man watching something he has been waiting a long time to see. He gives Xaden a look that says exactly what it says.

“Go,” I say again. Softer. “I'll be here.”